Challenger had lain here, on the banks of the Calder, for so long that the war it was built to fight was scarcely a memory any more. We called it the Unfinished War, but we didn’t know what the quarrel was or who was fighting who. It was a fight like any other fight, I suppose, except that it went on for long enough that the world ended – not because of it, but all around it – and nobody got to claim that they had won.
