Pearl had completed her long fall, dawn to dewy eve. She lay on her side on the allotropic carbon deck, one knee raised, the upper part of her body curved at the waist and propped up on her elbow. In the corner of her mouth appeared a humanising trace of what looked like dried toothpaste. Something had happened to her on the way down, as a result of which she now looked partly like a woman in a ruched metallic gown around five hundred years old, and partly like a cat. It was a different part every time Gaines blinked: sometimes the whole of the upper body was wrong, sometimes only one arm or leg. Limbs, skin, armature, nothing fitted together – the cat’s long-muzzled facial structure under the woman’s flesh, then the other way around. At the same time her eyes – when they were human eyes – had a film of hypnotic calm, even amusement, as if she was asking some unanswerable question, or as if you had caught her in some very sophisticated form of déshabillé you could both enjoy; while the cat’s fur collected the light at the edges of the image, leading your gaze out into tenuousness, turbulence and eventual transparency.

It was hard not to see the resulting chimera as a statement – a picture or statue, an out-take from one of the vanished religiocultural pantheons of Ancient Earth. Though it seemed immobile when you first saw it, the figure was slowly writhing and moving, struggling not to become one thing or the other but to retain both styles of presentation at once. Gaines found himself silenced by the sheer effort of will involved. He felt privy to something no one should be able to see, the hidden mayhem of events prior to the real, the effort to remain complex in the face of the decohering and literalising forces of the universe. Beyond the arena of this struggle – beyond the knots of observers with their insufficiently imaginative physics, their failed intuitions – the light thinned out quickly to grey; a darkness higher up gave the illusion of unlimited space against which events as consistently weird as this might unfold.

Gaines stood there shaking his head and Case asked him, ‘What do you think now?’

‘I don’t think anything,’ Gaines said.

‘Things we can tell you,’ Case offered: ‘this isn’t the Aleph, but the Aleph’s still present.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We had an operator go back over the data. What it found was this: fifty minutes before the original convulsion, the Aleph began connecting itself to the maze—’ Here, Case brought up hologram schematics supposed to represent the six-and-four-fifths-dimension topology of the maze – ‘specifically to Sector VF14/2b, a structure of tunnels flooded with highly tuned superconducting liquids.’