This gigantic uproar, resonating through million-cubic-parsec cavities in the constituent gas, is the citizen journalism of the Tract; the loops and scribbles left by the shockfronts are its headlines. So for Imps van Sant’s instruments the news was not the destruction of Panamax IV. It was a series of discordant and complex groans 60 octaves below middle C.

‘Fuck,’ said Imps, who had never heard anything like it.

Sometimes your situation becomes too plain to you. Strange forces are at work. Imps tore off the headphones and beat them against the instrument panel until the bakelite cracked: the Tract seemed to keep on roaring at him anyway, like a huge face, its expression indescribable in human terms. Rage, elation, despair – even, he thought, some kind of vast weird parental love. It was all of those things and none of them. As for the physics: no one had ever had any idea of that. Some people said it was the physics of the early universe, still running in a leaky envelope, a cyst caught in a very long moment of bursting – the right physics but not in its right time. Imps didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. To him it was the physics of a face. He leaned back from the console and rubbed his eyes. He thought he might try and have a shower, then a beer. He was just lumbering up out of his chair when he heard a whisper from the broken headset. He grabbed it up.

‘Hello?’

George the gene tailor lay where the assistant had left him in her room in GlobeTown, the blankets pulled up lovingly to his chin. George was dead, but not alone in that. Spaceships lit the room’s warm air, psychic blowback from their weird science reinscribing on the walls – in layers of swirled colours like graffiti – the thoughts and feelings of everyone who had expired there before he arrived. Did dead George take comfort from these maps, butterflies, and other partially-depicted items from alien worlds? Was he aware of the street below, flowering like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night? Rokit Dub basslines spreading as waves across the city? The bars and nuevo tango joints opening slowly, their facades pulsing and sucking? Even if he was, these things are so much cultural babble. If they want anything, the dead want a rest from all of that.