‘What would you be,’ he said, ‘if you could be one other thing?’

‘One thing?’

‘One other thing.’

She turned restlessly in the vacuum. Her shadow fell across him, elegant, high aspect ratio, one thousand metres tip to tip. Sometimes she presented like this, as feathers. Others it would be plasma, superconductors, a tangle of magnetic fields around which raced particles of all energies. Every so often she chose a thick cold slab of flesh instead, it rippled like a manta ray. As if to acknowledge the problems of such diversity, and of the question itself, she answered:

‘I never knew what I was anyway.’

‘You don’t know what you were?’

‘I was something but I didn’t know what, even then.’

She thought about it. ‘Even then I was on a journey back to something. It was a long time ago,’ she said eventually. ‘If I knew what I was then, that’s what I’d choose to be.’

‘You’ve already been something else?’

‘I can’t explain.’

‘I was never anything but myself. I was always locked in.’

But she wouldn’t help him with that, not this time. In the end she whispered bleakly: ‘We all make bad decisions.’

Just then a random pulse of energy shuddered across the face of the K-Tract. A tenuous shell of something – less than gas, more than nothing, dark matter like a kind of ghost velvet – expanded into the local universe. ‘Oh look!’ she called. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ She manoeuvred herself to face it, her hundred-metre tip feathers curling and separating. Meanwhile the wavefront penetrated the hull of van Sant’s tub, giving rise to events of such subtlety they couldn’t be detected. It touched his face light as lovers’ fingers, and left the wiring confused.

‘Someone went in there,’ he heard her whisper.

‘So they say.’

‘It wasn’t so long ago. I wondered if I should go too.’

Exotic radiation bathed them both, to different ends, for twenty minutes. By the time van Sant emerged from its trailing edge, she had resumed her restless patrol of empty space, and he was alone again.

Don’t go! Imps wanted to shout.

He always failed to ask her so many things.

Who are you? What are you? Why are we out here, the two of us? What’s the nature of your dialogue with the universe? What happens next? Is it possible for species as different as us to fuck?

All of these questions but one were in fact asked of himself, and might have been rephrased: Will I ever go home?