Gaines stared at her. A year and a half ago, she had written to him, ‘The bird cries here grow stranger and stranger. I sit and count the pillars around the fountain, while the tourist rockets lug themselves into the air above me like suitcases full of cheap souvenirs. I love it so. Oh Rig, please come!’

‘I just need to deal with this call,’ he said.

Alyssia gave him a look of death, to which he replied with one of his vague smiles. ‘I can see that there’s a lot of difference between us on this,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re disappointed.’ Suddenly the dial-up had his full attention. ‘What? What do you mean, “changed again”?’ Just as he got rid of whoever it was, the Uptown Six, which had been skulking around the Panamax L2 point since it arrived, tapped its fusion drive briefly and dropped out of orbit, coming to a silent halt fifty feet above the house. Alyssia stared uncomprehendingly up at it, then at Gaines.

‘Get that foul thing out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it near me. Not today of all days.’

She walked into the house.

Gaines still kept a hologram of Alyssia aged fourteen, wearing the uniform of some EMC youth movement, always laughing out at him, always seeking to make contact. Twenty hours after she refused to leave Panamax IV, he stood in the PEARLANT control room at a loss. Activity had dropped off sharply. Since his previous visit, Case’s team, defeated by ancient labyrinthine physics, had abandoned the containment project: instead they’d pitched a tent of filmy blue halogen light at the centre of the space, around which knots of specialists gathered to stare thoughtfully at the figure which now occupied it.