I got to my feet. The side of my body I’d landed on felt like one long bruise, and I was wet and cold. I felt very foolish, a fifty-two-year-old man standing in somebody else’s lawn in the dawn light. I had to get on, get out of there.

I stepped forward and walked straight into a tree. I stumbled back and crashed into more foliage. The tree was a fern, no taller than I was, and the foliage around me was bamboo. English gardens aren’t what they were. I pushed away, not sure which way I was facing. I had been turned around in the fall. I stumbled forward again, but tripped on a skinny mound of moist earth sticking out of the lawn. It might have been a termite mound. I felt stupid, befuddled, surrounded by clinging obstacles, and every step I took, everything I tried to do to make progress, just threw up more problems.

Right.The wall had been on the right-hand side of the street, so I should keep the house to my right. I turned and pushed that way. The grass was long and clung to my shoes, and now my feet were soaked through. But I kept going, and I came to a gate that led me back to the road.

I had come far enough to have passed most of the pond in the road, but the water still lapped at my feet.

Ahead, the road rose to cross the river at a bridge. I could see somebody on the bridge, I thought, a pale face looking back at me. She was too far away; her face was just a blur, a coin at the bottom of a pond. I was sure it was her, though. I wanted to shout, but I was aware of the sleeping town all around me, and somehow I couldn’t. Anyhow it would do no good. I had to get to her; that was the thing.

The hell with it. I strode into the water. Soon I was wading. The water didn’t come much up my shins, but there was a lot of mud and garbage gathered in the bottom — maybe the road surface had collapsed here — and it sucked at my feet. Soon I was breathing hard, and my heart was hammering. At last I got out of the water. My feet and legs were soaked and muddy. I was exhausted.

I couldn’t have come more than half a kilometer from my hotel.

I could see the bridge, and the castle mound beyond with the tower on top, the relic of the old Norman castle, a gaunt silhouette against that blue sky. But she had gone from the bridge. Which way had she gone? Had she climbed the mound? If I could reach it maybe I could try to climb up after her.

The bridge was closed at its far end, for some reason. The rivers curled around both sides of the mound, and the water was high, frothing, blue-gray. The bank was eroded and lined with sandbags. Under the bridge itself the water reached almost to the top of the arches.

Maybe I should cross the bridge. Or maybe I should find some way around the other side of the mound. I couldn’t think my way through it.

I couldn’t see her anymore. I just stood there, bruised, my feet sodden, panting.

“Are you OK?”

The voice seemed loud. I turned. I was facing a young man, maybe twenty-five. He was walking his bicycle. Under a fleece jacket he wore some kind of blue uniform; maybe he was a hospital worker on shift.

He was composed as he looked me up and down. “You look as if you’ve had some trouble.” His accent was broad Yorkshire. I could see suspicion in his eyes. Not surprising; I must have looked strange.

I heard a crow calling. I looked up. I could see the bird wheeling over the tower on the mound. Suddenly the sky seemed brighter; high clouds were laced pink.

“Hey…”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re American?”

“Yes.” I looked down at myself, at the filthy water leaking from my shoes. I tried to think of something to say, something that would normalize the situation. “Jet lag plays hell with your sleep patterns, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied, doubtful. He turned away, continued walking his bicycle.

I looked up toward the mound. It just looked like a hill now, the castle a ruin, not the center of some kind of maze as it had seemed a moment ago. There was no sign of Morag, but I knew there wouldn’t be.

That young man was still looking back at me. If I didn’t want a police bot to be called out I should get out of there and clean myself up. I turned and faced that flood in the road. In the gathering light it didn’t look so daunting. I walked to the road’s centerline and just strode straight through the water. The road had given way; this pool must have been there a long time. But the water came no higher than my knees, and in a moment I was through it.

When I woke the sun was high. It was around noon local time. I didn’t remember how I had got there, got back into my hotel from the flooded road. The whole thing was like a dream.

But I was lying on my bed, not in it, and though I’d kicked off my shoes my trousers were muddy, my sweater smeared with green grass stains, and debris had rubbed off onto the bed’s top sheet. The management wouldn’t be pleased with me.

Something had happened, however.

A corner of the big wall softscreen was flashing. A message was waiting for me from John.

I showered first, made a coffee, ate a cookie from the minibar. Then I sat in my armchair, faced the wall, and called John. Towering over me on the wall, he was furious — two-dimensional, badly colored, but furious. “Lethe,” he said.

I was struck by his use of that word, but now wasn’t the time to talk about a stranger on a plane. “Lethe to you,” I snapped back. “What’s eating you?”

“You are.” It turned out Shelley Magwood had called him last night.

I felt cold, wondering how much she had told him. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why the hell not? She was concerned, asswipe, not that you deserve it. And wasn’t she right to be?”

He tapped a screen before him, out of my sight.

A corner of my wall filled up with an image, grainy, badly lit. But you could see the castle mound, the flooded street, a figure standing there in muddy water up to his ankles. John had used his contacts to hack into the town’s security cameras. He shouted now, “You call this a responsible way to behave? For this I paid a small fortune to send you to Europe? Are you crazy?”

“If you listened to what Shelley told you,” I said stonily, “you’ll understand that this is about me and Morag. It’s got nothing to do with you. You have to let me work this out my own way, John.”

“Oh, do I?”

I studied him, growing curious. I’d rarely seen him so angry. “What’s eating you? Why are you taking this so personally?”

“I’m not.”

Despite his denial, I could see something was going on here. If I had felt lobotomized last night, today I was sharp. Was he angry I just hadn’t told him about my haunting by Morag first? Or was there something more? “You’re hiding something. Is it to do with Morag? Damn it, John, she was my wife. If you know something you have to tell me.”

He faced me again. “I know I shouldn’t have made this fucking call. Off.” The screen turned to sky blue.

So John had had a connection to Morag I knew nothing about. Another unwelcome ghost from the past, I thought. I sat in my armchair, in my hotel dressing gown, and sipped coffee that quickly grew cold.

On Alia’s second day on the Rustball, Bale took her to the sea.

If they went overland it would take a whole quarter of a day to reach the ocean. Bale offered to Skim there with her if she preferred. But she wanted to see more of this world.

So she rode with him in a ground transport along a road that gleamed, metallic, running straight as an arrow across the gravity-flattened plain. The landscape was all but featureless, the towns they passed identical to the one where the Campocs lived. It was like passing through a sparsely sketched simulation.

Much of what she saw was dictated by geology. When the Rustball had formed it had been a rocky world, rather larger than Earth, with a massive iron core and a mantle of lighter rock. In the usual way of things it had suffered multiple impacts during its formation — including one final collision with a second monstrous proto-planet. Alia learned that Earth itself had suffered a similar collision, a great rocky splash that had resulted in the formation of its Moon. The Rustball had been stripped of most of its rocky mantle, and had been left as a lump of iron as big as the Earth, with a flock of moonlets made of its own mantle rock. But iron was more dense than rock, and so this world was more massive than Earth, its gravity strong.