And I love you.

Which was why she had taken the risk, not descending through air but transiting via mu-space, such a dangerous transition, perfectly executed, and smashing any matter in the way, say a human body, to misty oblivion.

It was not the icy wind that brought tears to Jed’s eyes.

Before he left Coolth for good, there was one last event to finish off a very odd day. After the all-clear had been sounded, and the research station modules crawled back together and reformed while Jed’s ship hovered overhead, all weapons powered up just in case, Jed had a final meeting with Shireen Singh. Her team had analysed both Corplane’s body and the evaporated remains of the unknown man – a man redolent with the scent of darkness, according to the Haxigoji witnesses – along with Corplane’s business systems.

‘We think Corplane was acting under some kind of compulsion,’ Shireen said. ‘Which is worrying, but not the most interesting thing. I want you to know this as added back-up to my own report, because the Admiralty need to find out.’

Jed looked into her steady faux-brown eyes.

‘Find out what? That I’ve killed again?’

‘It wasn’t exactly you this time. Plus’ – with a smile – ‘the person your ship wiped out was one Petra Helsen, responsible for the Anomaly coming into existence.’

‘That bitch.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But it was a man I—’

‘Autodoc,’ said Shireen, and shrugged. ‘Identity change.’

‘Of course. She did it before, on Molsin. Not to that extent.’

He should have thought of it earlier.

Clara was a boy until she was seventeen. You know that.

I know, I know. I’m glad one of us could think clearly in the moment.

Any time, my love.

Shireen raised an eyebrow, as if aware that he was in thought conjunction with his ship, although of course she could not eavesdrop: no one could.

‘You did good, Pilot Goran.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Give my love to your wife. And belated congratulations to both of you.’

‘Cheers. I’ll do that.’

His ship, who had been hovering high overhead once more, took her time descending, and after taking him on board rose slowly. The team of agents, with Shireen at their centre, watched from the ground. There was no hurry now.

Jed-and-ship could fly home in quiet triumph.

FORTY-ONE

EARTH, 1972 AD

It happened on the morning that, over breakfast, Rupert asked Gavriela where cosmic rays came from, and she told him they came from the cosmos – where did he expect? – then after some badinage she talked about radiation from nebulae where stars were born, and the magnetic bow wave thrown up by the galaxy as it hurtled towards Virgo, at which Rupert raised an ironic eyebrow.

She went in to Imperial late, as was fitting for a retired scientist, but young Geoffrey was equally late, and they entered his office together. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and featured a six-foot vertical strip of computer printout on the back of the door: Ursula Andress, bikini-clad, the shading rendered in alphanumeric characters. Or perhaps it was Raquel Welch, from One Million Years BC. Embarrassed, Geoffrey hung his overcoat from the door hook, obscuring Ursula or Raquel, whichever.

‘Sorry. I, er—’

A tap on the door was followed by Hannah, one of the administrators, poking her head inside and saying, ‘Alex really needs you, Geoffrey, to sort out that budget thing.’

‘It’s all right,’ Gavriela said. ‘If that’s the meson data over there, why I don’t I just poke through it by myself?’

‘Oh. Yes, why not?’

She was supposed to be good at this, making sense of columnar figures, allowing patterns to emerge in her mind’s eye as easily as a collection of printed characters might be perceived as a movie actress wearing a bikini. But the office was warm and perhaps she was feeling her age, because she jerked her eyes open and realised she had been dozing. At least Geoffrey had not discovered her that way: luckily, his bureaucratic task seemed to be dragging on.

On an A4 pad she wrote, in pencil, some fragments of Fortran code that might group the data in more useful ways, so that the patterns she was unable to see might grow apparent. Why she thought there were patterns, she could not say. Geoffrey could piece the subroutines into a program on the PDP11, and if he spotted nothing in the output, perhaps she might wander in again next week and have another try.

‘Er . . .’

‘Hello, Geoffrey. I thought you’d been sucked into a bureaucratic hell for ever.’

Geoffrey’s expression was the same as when he spotted Gavriela looking at the printout on the back of the door. ‘I, um, sort of was. The thing is, some people think we’re falling behind King’s College – London, I mean – because they’re working on new stuff, on black holes.’

‘Seriously?’ said Gavriela. ‘You can’t mean that.’

The phenomenon might be allowed by general relativity, yet that did not mean such objects existed, any more than quarks, which to her mind were mathematical figments reflecting the choice of equations in the model, having little to do with what was really there. A meson might be a paired quark-plus-anti-quark, but it seemed unlikely.

‘Anyway,’ said Geoffrey, ‘I kind of volunteered to investigate the field. But that means . . .’

‘Abandoning this line of research. I understand.’ She looked at the stack of printed numbers, and her scribbled lines of Fortran. ‘Archive this where I can find it, Geoffrey, and I’ll come pootling along to browse when I’m able. No doubt I’m verging on senility, but when I pick up my Nobel Prize, I’ll mention you in my speech.’

‘You think I’ll be working on a flawed theory?’

‘I do.’

‘And didn’t Bohr win the Nobel for his pre-quantum atomic model?’

It predicted the energy spectrum of helium, hence the prize, but his theory was wholly inadequate to a proper understanding of the atom, and in a real sense was incorrect.

‘Good point,’ said Gavriela. ‘When you make the speech, maybe you can mention me.’

Geoffrey grinned at her.

‘More importantly,’ he said, ‘I hear they’ve got fresh doughnuts in the tea-room.’

‘You mean we’re wasting time talking about the nature of the universe when we could be doing something useful. Was that plain doughnuts or jam?’

‘Jam, of course. We’re not barbarians.’

There were little pings of arthritis when she stood.

‘I’ll race you,’ she lied.

Outside the college, she stood looking at the redbrick grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, while music drifted from the Royal College of Music behind her, next to Imperial. She smiled and listened: it was the whimsical Bach piece that they used on the telly – dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum; da-da-da, da-dum, da-da-da, da-dum – as the countdown to educational programmes.

But some forty seconds in, the pleasantness was disturbed by a discordant intrusion – da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da – far off to her right. When she looked, a thin man might have just disappeared around the corner, or she might have imagined it. Her sense of being in the presence of darkness faded.

‘Are you all right, Dr Woods?’ It was Hannah from Admin, her hair freshly permed, with a silk headscarf to protect it. ‘You seem a little pale.’

‘Too many doughnuts,’ said Gavriela. ‘But I’m fine now, thank you.’

Nothing untoward happened on the journey home, and in the end she said nothing to Rupert about her possible brush with the darkness, because what could he have done about it?

That night, in her comfortable bedroom that felt so right, she knew as she was falling asleep that she was going to dream, vividly and in strong colours. Yet she encountered neither crystalline beings nor wolves and swords as she expected; instead, the world in which she found herself was constructed of mathematical metaphor, and in the middle of the dream she had the thought that Lewis Carroll would be proud.