Thanks to the skill of her crew, the Geest van Amsterdam had put down on the nearest habitable surface: the etched terrain of the Object known as the Brain. Already cratered and on fire in a dozen locations, this final, grinding collision had been enough to shatter her spine, snapping her all along her length, scattering flaming debris into the sculpture’s nested chasms and crevasses. Happily for me, the human sections—which were designed to withstand such abuse—fared better than the ship’s more utilitarian modules; and yet very few of the passengers and crew seemed to have survived. My particular segment, the cylindrical, donut-shaped fragment based around the deep airshaft at its centre, seemed to have become wedged between the walls of a ravine.

As I’d hoped, the infirmary had provided me with pain meds and clothing, in the form of an injection and a set of green surgeon’s scrubs. Now, as I scrambled through the downed ship, I passed a lot of dead bodies. Some had died from the initial impact, some from the resulting conflagrations and breakdowns, and the rest from the force of our landing. With the gravity off, they had been hurled against walls and furniture. They lay alone and in untidy heaps; some were little more than smashed and twisted splatters of blood and gore, while others remained almost miraculously untouched, their cause of death unknown.

At length, I came to a torn section of the external hull. Clambering through the narrow and jagged opening, I dropped a couple of metres to the smooth floor of the gorge. My damaged arm flared in protest and the colour drained from my vision. When it returned, I found myself on my back, looking up at an impossible weight suspended above my head. The accommodation section—roughly the size and weight of a medium-sized village—lay jammed between walls five hundred metres apart and at least four times that in height. It was only good fortune it had come to rest within a couple of metres of the bottom rather than a kilometre or two higher up. If it had, I would have found myself stranded up there, unable to jump to the ground.

Feeling no overwhelming need to hurry, I remained prone. Chunks of debris littered the floor around me, some the size of boulders and houses. Among—and crushed under—them lay the bodies of my fellow passengers. Some were obviously dead, others simply motionless. A few stirred; some were even mobile. None seemed to be questioning how or why they were able to breathe comfortably. Perhaps it simply didn’t occur to them to ask, or maybe they were afraid to. Most were probably still in shock from the crash.