Gaines bent over her and she saw him smile.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

‘Are you going to strangle me?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

After that she never seemed to be properly conscious again. She could tell what was happening, but it didn’t involve her. ‘Did you know you’ve got a 27 to 40 gHz radar option?’ Gaines said. His voice came from inside her now, with a clear echo, as if they were back in the tunnels. ‘Short range local surveillance medium. Not bad. Would you like it switched on?’ He switched it on and she saw everything in the control room filmy grey. Case’s people rolled the table over into the middle of the space, under the brightest light, where they left it. She lay in a comfortable haze, lighted internally by the 27 to 40 gHz radar, which Gaines had left switched on. She could detect people coming and going but not move her head. Eventually they swung the inspection table on its axis and did something to the probes so that her unforced sensory systems came back on. The assistant saw what was under the lights and why she had been brought here.

Two or three days earlier, after a minor convulsion ripped up the containment area, the object known to Case’s team as ‘Pearl’ or ‘the Pearl’ had begun to fall again. This process – less motion than an attempt to express motion in a static medium – seemed as wilful as it was stylised. Her body language, Gaines thought, was that of a sustained struggle against circumstances no one else could be allowed to understand. Case had a different view.

‘Fuck that,’ he said. It would be wise to remember that the falling woman was neither falling nor a woman. It was a monster, heavily misrepresented from the data. It was the nearest guess the instruments could make about what was actually going on. ‘Much like the universe itself, it’s a useless analogy for an unrepresentable state,’ he said, and laughed. This led to an argument between the two men about the original nature of the Aleph. Case believed they had been wrong about that, too.

‘It never contained a fragment of the Tract,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘It contained the whole of it. It still does.’

Once they had the policewoman disabled and in position, the Aleph team brought up their final item of equipment. Shiny one moment, indistinct the next, it was still assembling itself from a nervous slurry of materials – carbon nanofibres, non-Abelian superconductors held at ambient temperatures, fast-evolving AI swarms running on picotech. Next an operator was introduced. It took the form of a young girl, thin and tan, perhaps eight years old, dressed in the dark blue shorts and short-sleeved Aertex shirt of an endless summer holiday in St Steven’s Withy or Burnam Agnate, who reminded Gaines of his daughter at that age. The operator was quick to sense this.