‘And look!’ she said. ‘After all these years!’

It was a toddler’s My First Experience skirt, in traditional neotony pink.

‘I had one just like this.’

Liv stared in disbelief then shook her head. ‘Irene,’ she wanted to know, ‘is this actually your old house?’

‘It could be,’ Irene said. ‘Yes, it easily could be.’

‘Because if it isn’t—’

‘They don’t want the stuff, Liv,’ Irene said. ‘You should see the condition they’re in. Really.’

Her mood, which had remained elevated on the way back to the ship, dipped as soon as the Kyshtym Cream wore off. Disposed about her quarters, the repro radio, false-colour hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract and collection of cast iron casserole-ware looked less fun than they had in situ. ‘Disaster chic,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’ Antoyne didn’t think anything. She sighed. ‘Antoyne, are we bored of each other at last?’ Unable to answer that either, he became alert but very still. Irene used her thumb to enlarge a split in the seams of a soft toy shaped like a cockroach, then asked him so suddenly and abjectly if he thought life was worth it that he could only hug her roughly and insist:

‘Your life is what you make it in this world.’

‘I think that’s what I mean, Antoyne.’

History, the boys from Earth believed, is bunk.

The Angel of History may look backwards, but that pose will make no difference to the storm that blows it into the future. No wonder it has such a surprised expression!

This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what ‘where’ meant.

It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archaeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them – AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine.

But though, as a whole, the human race soon knew how to find its way around, it still had no idea where it was: so that, in Irene the mona’s day, the paradigm for individual motion remained a blind if not quite random jump. Before she took the mona package and did so well with it, Irene touched down on fifty worlds.