Ten per cent of it was still functioning.  Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the outset: to them, the Beach was an  interregnum,  a holiday  from  common  sense, an  exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, extraordinary,  panoramic  instant they congratulated  themselves on living in: the instant  in which everything that went before somehow met and became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.

It was, in short, a chance to make some money.

2410AD: two Motel Splendido entradistas  ran across an alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf, wobbling its way like a dirty balloon along some gravitational instability at the hot edge of the Tract. Their names were Galt & Cole. They made a single pass, looked things over and decided it could be done. Two days later their ride broke up in a Kelvin-Helmholtz eddy a bit further in. Cole, who couldn’t think for alarms going off, went down with the ship; Galt, temporarily stripped of ambition by a plume of gas elevated to eleven million degrees Kelvin and observable only in the extreme ultraviolet, made it back to the research tool by escape pod.  Five years later, his FTL beacon  drew the  attention  of a Macon 25 long-hauler inbound for Beta Hydrae with ten thousand tonnes of catatonic New Men stacked in the holds like the sacks of harvestable organs they were.

By then Galt was calcium under a weird light. A few shreds of fabric and a polished skull. Who knew where his partner could be said to be? Galt left an autobiography, or maybe a final statement, or maybe only the name they had decided to give the real estate, scrawled on a stone – PEARLANT. They died near their fortune, those two, like all losers: but the name stuck. Beneath the pocked and gouged surface, choked with God knew how many million years of dust, lay what came to be called the Pearlant Labyrinth.