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Transcendence itself? In her head she vaguely imagined something titanic, superhuman, beyond comprehension, perhaps like the muddled light of the Galaxy Core occluded by its interstellar clouds. Nobody talked about it much.
    But now, it seemed, the Transcendence had taken an interest in her own small life. And it had already brought her far from home.
    With Reath, agent of the Commonwealth, she had already traveled thousands of light-years. This water-world’s sun was on the fringe of a giant stellar nursery, a huge glowing cloud of roiling dust and ice that was spawning one hot young star after another. The nursery was on the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm, one of the Galactic disc’s principal star-birthing regions, and the water-world itself was a moon of a massive gas giant. So the sky here was crowded and spectacular—but right now, through those clouds, she couldn’t see a trace of it, not even the primary giant.
    “Ah—look at that.” Reath pointed to the horizon, where a column of darkness, writhing visibly, connected the ocean to the sky. “Do you know what that is?”
    “Is it
weather
?”
    “Alia, that is a hurricane. A kind of storm, a vortex of air. It is fueled by heat from the upper levels of the sea. It twists and moves, you see—chaotically, but not unpredictably.”
    “It is a phenomenon of a water-world.”
    “Not just world-oceans. Any planet with extensive seas and a respectable atmosphere can spawn such twisters. Even Earth! If there is land, of course, the storm can track away from the sea.”
    Alia had grown up in a bubble of air less than two kilometers wide, every molecule of which was climate-controlled and cleansed by the
Nord
’s antique, patient machines. She tried to imagine such a monstrous storm slamming into a town or a city on Earth. Her imagination was unformed, filled with images of catastrophic breakdowns of environment control systems. “How terrible,” she said.
    “Oh, humans mastered hurricanes long ago. All you have to do is cut off their energy supply before they do any damage. And of course by tracking on to land they detach themselves from the ocean that feeds them, and die of their own accord.”
    “But not here, for there is no land.”
    “Not here, no. Here a twister can live on and on, sucking up energy, spinning off daughters, tracking around the world. One twister system here—I’m not sure if it is
that
one—reaches right up to the top of the atmosphere. You can see it from space, like a glowering eye. And it has persisted for thousands of years.”
    This was terribly disturbing for a ship-born girl like Alia. She was relieved when the storm receded from sight behind the horizon.
             
    It was a month since she had agreed to follow Reath, to leave her home and begin the program of training that might, ultimately, remarkably, lead to her becoming that unknowable entity—a Transcendent, to become one of the host of godlike post-humans who governed mankind. A month since she had placed herself in the care of an agent of the Commonwealth.
    The Commonwealth! Before she had left the
Nord
it had been little more than a name to her, a shadowy authority that arched over human civilization, as lofty and remote and beautiful as an interstellar cloud, and as irrelevant. Now she was beginning to get a sense of the reality of it—and it was much more than she had ever imagined.
    The Commonwealth was based at the most logical place for a Galactic capital: on a cluster of worlds that drifted amid the millions of crowded suns of the Core, where mankind had always anchored its Galactic empires.
    The most visible sign of the Commonwealth’s presence was the Clock of Humanity. Lodged in the Core, this was a machine the size of the star. It used the decay of certain types of subatomic particles, called W and Z bosons, to produce pulses of neutrinos. These were the fastest known physical processes; no conceivable clock could be more precise. And as