On her first day, after the meeting, she lay on her back in her tent, listening to the rain, the sound of a man breaking up wooden pallets with a billhook, the yells of boys as they ran about kicking a ball through other people’s living space. She closed her eyes and tried to doze, while the family next door built a wall of straw bales between her and them, working slowly and with care, talking constantly and patiently to their three-year-old daughter who, though she seemed ill, did her best to help.

It was a determined statement – language addressed less, perhaps, to Alyssia than to the situation itself. A response to the unstructuredness of the world in which they now all found themselves.

‘I’m cooking now!’ the woman called as it got dark.

Alyssia walked about the site, trying to meet people and get news. Then she tried to leave, only to be turned back at the perimeter. A week later she was still there, among the litter, the flapping, badly-pegged tents, the acrid fires just after sunset, the sudden savage cries and ugly half-musical noises of the adolescent gangs.

By then, her body, or her clothes, or perhaps simply the whole site, had begun to smell of composting toilets. There were rumours that no one was to be repatriated but the whole camp would be moved somewhere else. She pushed a hole in the wall of bales and asked the woman next door if she could help with the child. Over the following months she often thought about Rig and wondered if he was all right. She knew he would be. He was Rig, after all.

Out near the Kefahuchi Tract itself, the news was not the war.

Daily Deals & Huge Savings’s encounter with Panamax IV made excellent media. Syndicated to a thousand planets, with a variety of commentaries and factoid enhancements, it enjoyed a well-deserved three minutes in the sun. The initial collision had generated perhaps 200 trillion trillion ergs of energy, equivalent to the explosion of five or six gigatons of conventional explosives. As Daily Deals & Huge Savings burst out of the iron core, blowback to the tune of a further five thousand gigatons had cut a channel like a beam of light through the super-heated atmospheric gases and crustal debris. While in no way incalculable, the final release of energy, as the core itself exploded into local space, was in human terms almost meaninglessly large. But meaninglessly large energy events are the daily context of the Tract, where eruptions from the central unshielded singularity – if that is what it is – are so powerful they generate in the surrounding gas clouds pressure waves that manifest themselves as sound.