Marnie at six years old. Anna tidying up for Tim. Anna, alone with her life at last, staring out across the field in the June twilight, drinking her fourth glass of Pinot Noir. She called the cat home, ‘James, you old fool. What have you found now?’ She saw herself undress beneath the willows, hide her shoes, wade into the river in the moonlight. But, as bright and precise as if she was viewing them through optical glass, these scenes only reminded her of her present predicament. As she watched herself go up and down the garden – a neat, doll-like, slightly speeded-up figure seen day after day under mixed lighting conditions, moving inevitably towards its own fall – she began to think how the situation might be retrieved. She could connect with any of those moments. She could have a voice in her own past.

Everything that was wrong stemmed from the summerhouse.

What if Anna didn’t fall?

. . . She is always trying to say her name, how she fell out of love with her parents quite early in life, ‘They humiliated me in some way before I was five.’ She was a small, friendly, nervous girl who liked being up early and late. Too anxious on her own, too anxious in company. I was happiest with one other person. I’ve seen things here you would not believe: men with cocks two feet long . . .

All over the Halo, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with an expenditure of energy amounting almost to fanfare, the Quarantine orbits had begun to empty themselves out. Reports conflicted. The situation was confused.

Two hundred miles above Mas d’Elies, showers of shortlived exotic vacuum events were detected, nesting inside the usual quantum froth like pearls in a handful of black lace. Such subtle fireworks, originating deep in the graininess of the universe itself, were normally associated with only the most alien of engines—

Twenty-five fuck-tourists from Keks-Varley III claimed to have seen ‘a wheel of fire’ crossing the nightside sky of Funene. Visible to the naked eye for three hours, it broke up into a series of aurora-like pulses then fell below the horizon. During this period no activity was observed in the quarantine orbit; though shortly afterwards it became invisible to instruments—

Laid out under stark light like dirty ice rings round a methane giant, the vast orbit at Mycenae had been for years a destination in itself, drawing tourists from as far away as Bell Laboratories and Anais Anais. The biggest collection of dead people in the universe, it broke up across a day, only to reassemble not long afterwards just outside the system’s heliosheath; flowing away from there into interstellar space, a broad slow river. The K-ships, darting in and out of it like kingfishers, caught nothing: what they saw was not what they got—