‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption,’ his site controller, a man called Case, told him. ‘It assigns values where you might not want them.’ Case had started out as a serious physicist, then, after a temporal convulsion in the maze aged him sixty years in a day, switched to management. He lived for his work, had written a fictional account of Galt & Cole called ‘These Dirty Stars’, and though unimaginative did well with multidisciplinary  teams. ‘To me she’s less like a person than a problem.’

‘How did this happen?’ Gaines said. ‘How can this have happened?’

No one was willing to make a guess.

‘Never mind the Aleph,’ Case said. ‘The labyrinth itself is a million years old. We never knew what it was supposed to do; we never even knew which of them we were talking to.’

Nanoscale  footage  presented  the  field-collapse as a  kind  of topological suicide. Picoseconds in, the Aleph resembled less a teardrop than a perished rubber ball, first folding to make a comic mouth, then rushing away towards a point beyond representation. ‘You aren’t looking at the event itself,’ Case warned Gaines. ‘Only the stuff we could pick up.’ In the aftermath  of the deflation, a full nanosecond  later, the containment  apparatus  itself could be seen softening, flowing – this was visible on cameras run realtime outside the containment  facility – and then evaporating into light. Out of the light the artefact emerged, but could not be observed emerging: Case thought this important. ‘No matter what timescale we look at these recordings – no matter how slow we run them – no smooth process can be detected.’ First the Aleph was there, then the woman was there instead. Her struggle had already begun. ‘For all we know, she could be an artefact in the other sense,’ Case said: ‘An illusion of our data-gathering methods.’

‘She looks so alive.’

‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl,’ Case said, to show he could understand  that.

‘What does this mean for the field weapon?’

‘The field weapon?’ Case looked at Gaines as if he was mad. ‘It’s fucked. That whole line of research is fucked. I don’t think there ever was a field weapon, Rig.’ He stared around him, into the dark of the old control room. ‘I think the labyrinth had its own agenda all along.’

‘Don’t let upper management know about this.’

16 Carshalton Shangri-La

SIXTEEN

Carshalton Shangri-La

‘I’m having some strange dreams,’ Anna Waterman  said, a few days after her brush with dogs. She had arrived late for Dr Alpert due to a missed connection, but seemed pleased with herself. She sat down immediately and without  any indication  that  she was changing the subject, went on: ‘Do you know where I’d live, if I had the chance?’

‘I don’t know. Where?’

‘I’d live in the covered bridge that goes over the platforms at Clapham station.’

‘Mightn’t it be a bit draughty?’