The column of men went by, and a clumsy-looking field gun pulled by six more of the giant dogs. Then Raj Whitehall pulled up his… well, his giant hound. A woman rode beside him, not in uniform. Her face was dusty and streaked with sweat, and beautiful. Slanted green eyes glowed out of it.

The vision faded, back to the absolutely perfect mirror. John looked back to Raj. "Where was that?" he said. Then, slowly: "When was that?"

Raj nodded, leaning his hips back against the table and crossing his arms. "That was Bellevue, the planet where I was born. About a hundred and fifty years ago."

"You're… a ghost?"

"A ghost in a machine. A recording that thinks it's a man. It's a convincing illusion, even to me."

John sat silently for what felt like a minute. "Why are you talking to me?"

"Good lad," Raj said. John felt an obscure jolt of pride at the praise. Raj went on. "Now, listen carefully. You know how the Federation collapsed?"

John nodded. Visager had preserved the records; he'd seen them in school. Expansion from Earth, then rivalries and civil war. Civil war that continued until the Tanaki Nets were destroyed and interstellar travel cut off, and then on Visager itself until civilization was thoroughly sjnashed. After that a long process of rebirth, slow and painful.

"That happened all over the human-settled galaxy. On Bellevue, the collapse was even worse than here. Center was left in the rubble underneath the planetary governor's mansion. Center waited a long, long time for die time to be right. More than a thousand years; then it found me. Bellevue's problem was internal division. We were set to slag ourselves down again, this time right back to stone hatchets, all the more surely because we were doing it with rifles and not nukes. I was a soldier, an officer. With Center's help-and some very brave men-I reunited the planet. Bellevue's the capital of the Second Federation, now."