His imaging team produced a hologram display that rotated the woman smoothly around every axis so that she looked like virtual false-colour shots of a sculpture, spoiled by some sort of faint, in situ interference. Attempts to clean the interference out had only given her the lines of a Deco portrait, freezing the folds of her gown to create strong contentless curves suggestive of power and energy. Her eyes were rendered the same colour as her face, without pupil or lids. ‘After we took these I had them build a field tomography unit round her,’ Case said. ‘Forget it. It was like looking into nacre.’ As far as X-rays were concerned, she was solid all through. ‘Positron emission feels the same about her. We decided not to try neutrons, in case she bore some slight resemblance to a human being.’

‘She looks as if she’s falling,’ Gaines said. ‘Caught falling.’

Her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left of the ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee; they were as far apart as the skirt of the gown permitted. The feet were bare. The arms, outstretched either side of the head, curved towards the ceiling of the chamber; the hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. The gown fluttered stiffly, as if caught in strong air currents venting through the floor of the control room. The effect was of someone falling sideways from a great height.

‘How close can I get?’ Gaines asked.

‘Close as you like,’ Case said.

To Gaines she had that inner focus possessed by the very sick. When he whispered, ‘Hey, who are you? What is it you don’t like about yourself?’ she only looked through him, contorting herself slowly, trying to alter her position around the fall-line, her expression full of fear and rage. He stepped in and knelt down until eighteen inches of air separated their faces, but he couldn’t force himself any closer – he experienced the sensation of inappropriately invading someone’s personal space, but worse. And where he had expected to feel the air moving around her, fluttering her gown, it was just the opposite, very still.

‘I can feel heat radiating off her,’ he told Case.

‘Other people think they hear a voice,’ Case said, ‘ too far away to make out words. Or they smell something, maybe perfume. We think everyone’s trying to describe the same sensation, but so far no one’s got near enough to find out. You’ve done better than most.’

‘Before, there was some kind of paste coming out of her mouth?’

‘That’s on and off,’ Case said. As for the RF transmission, he added, it was very low power. It had a very local reach. ‘If she’s hooked up with anything, it’s already arrived. It’s in the maze.’