It was under two or three feet of water. The town sewers had backed up. Thigh-deep in putrid water, in which circled all kinds of waste from foecal matter to shattered packing crates, people had gathered to dance. Their clothes, stinking and soaked, clung to them. They were wading and chanting in groups, lifting their legs high, bending down to splash each other with diluted shit, as if this was an afternoon at the beach. Some of them were kneeling in it. Some were neither kneeling nor standing, but were leaning into one another, clasped together, obviously fucking. Gaines had his ideas about the world, but none of them covered this. He saw Alyssia right in there with them, laughing and beckoning to him. The children were tugging at his hands and grinning. Gaines pulled back as hard as he could and eventually broke free. As he ran off through the market, he thought he could hear a low booming sound somewhere deep under his feet.

It rained for eight hours more. Gaines didn’t want to sleep. He spent all night in the cloister, piped into an FTL router he had left in orbit; then, when the rain stopped and the sun came up, sat by the fountain until the morning heat began to dry him out. A little after ten, Alyssia Fignall arrived back. She looked tired, but clean and happy. She seemed full of energy. ‘Rig, you’ll burn up out here,’ she laughed, taking his arm. ‘Come in and have breakfast. I bought some bread in the market.’

Gaines shook his head.

‘What’s the matter?’

When he didn’t answer, she let go of his arm and said: ‘I knew it. I knew it! Rig, this is how they celebrate their contract with the world.’ She had been looking forward to seeing him, but he didn’t understand anything. The town was another kind of spiritual engine. How could she explain? Under the market lay a chain of limestone caves. It was typical karst country. Run-off from the nearby hills filled the system up within an hour of the rain starting, but as soon as the water reached a certain level some kind of airlock released itself. ‘The system drains as fast as it fills. The sewage runs away. The rain washes everyone clean, then they hold a wonderful party in the town, with fireworks and food, to celebrate. Everyone clean and fresh and in their best clothes. They’re dirty then they’re clean again, Rig, don’t you get it?’

She pulled at his arm again, but he wouldn’t move.

‘How is that different to what the original inhabitants did, up on the hilltop there, whoever they were, a hundred thousand years ago? How is it different to your fucking war?

‘Come on, Rig, how different is it?’