The mobile wireless network also gives clinicians a number of other tools, for example we have a virtual medical library on-line in partnership with Queen's University.

And we took that opportunity to build in other things, like wireless telephones.

We wanted to be able to link in some of the alerts that come off the equipment to the pagers for the nurses and other clinicians on the floor.

We needed the Bell expertise to make sure we got the coverage correct so the infrastructure would support all the things we wanted to do with it.

Pyotr said that all children were God’s children, even those whose minds had been overwritten by alien memes.“What about the Jackaroo and the !Cha?” Tony said.“Those also.”“And the Elder Cultures?”“Of course. The universe and everything in it is Her Kingdom.

There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.

Sometimes you hit the jackpot and sometimes the jackpot hits you, I guess.

Keeping the human race in check must require a lot of multitasking.

Where are we going?” Tony said. “Somewhere wonderful,” Unlikely Worlds said.

That’s where we are,” he said. “One star amongst four hundred billion.