‘I remember VF14,’ Gaines said, who had come through there with Emil Bonaventure’s group in, he thought, 2422 or 23. ‘Emil believed it was focused on the Tract.’ Not that they had had time to think anything much. The tunnels were fifty feet in diameter, tiled, dank as a disused subway, curving in directions that made no sense. In some places the stuff was like water. Others it ate into their excursion suits, or floated through them, or slushed around like warm saliva from someone else’s mouth. All he remembered was Johnnie Izzet vomiting blood into the headpiece of his suit, and someone else shouting, ‘Fucking shit!’ Johnnie’s blood coagulated instantly it touched the visor, as if it had come out in some transition state. Then the whole tube was alive with ionising radiation, along with something that sounded like music but couldn’t have been. Every direction was the wrong direction. Things were moving behind them where they couldn’t see. Emil and Rig and two other men tried to drag Johnnie away but he was dead before they made a hundred yards. ‘He thought it might be for measuring time in there.’

‘Not measuring, it turns out,’ Case said. ‘Manipulating. The Aleph sits here for half a million years. It has interesting physics, very different to ours—’

‘What’s new?’

‘—but it does nothing with them until it brings Pearl here. We’re not sure if it was waiting for her, or went looking for her, or if it found her by accident.’ He gestured at the superposition state wrestling with its own deep refusal of identity in front of them. ‘Did it intend this to happen? We suspect not. What you see now isn’t the Aleph. It isn’t the woman, either. The two of them are giving rise to some third kind of thing.’

Gaines, still seeing Johnnie Izzet’s blackened faceplate and hearing the music of non-Abelian states at room temperature, made himself say:

‘Where does the cat fit in?’

For a moment, Case looked puzzled.

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Our best guess is that it isn’t really a cat. Any more than she’s really a woman. You know?’

‘I didn’t think physics did metaphors.’

‘Here’s the problem. This thing, whatever it is, has all the hallmarks of an emergent property. It isn’t complete, but it’s already self-determining. It’s already loose. It’s in the labyrinth again, operating the VF14/2b anomalies as a machine. It’s off on some downward causation adventure, separating itself from what you or I would think of as time.’

‘Why?’ Gaines said.

‘Because there’s something it doesn’t like about its own past.’

‘Reinvention never looked so hard,’ was Gaines’ opinion. He suspected you would have to have fairly low esteem to put yourself through this. ‘What if we brought the policewoman here,’ he suggested.

Case shook his head to indicate disbelief.