She indicated the walls of the room, still imbricated and flickering with hallucinations, hard sweats, failed or partial communications from other planets. ‘How could there be?’ she said. ‘Anything fixed? In this physics universe?’

He came away from the window then and stood close in to her, calculating and looking her up and down with a new interest. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I know there is because I’ve seen it.’

He laughed. ‘And now it wants to see you,’ he said.

He was one of those men you don’t know if they’re older than they look or younger than they look. He had good skin and a smile which seemed satisfied with all the deficiencies of the world as they had revealed themselves to him. He possessed a deep, withering bitterness he thought he was hiding. Longish grey hair curling into the nape of his neck, maybe a little gelled to stay in place. Chinos and a polo shirt, light canvas shoes whitened with pipeclay – an outfit that meant something, she could see; an outfit that made references the assistant couldn’t follow. He had a carefully trimmed grey beard which thrust the lower part of his face forward into the room. He had a good nose, too. But in the gloom and fading inflorescence of the launch, that was the important part of him, his jaw and his quiet blue eyes.

‘You’re from EMC,’ she guessed.

‘Think that if you like.’

‘I wonder if you’re here at all.’

At that, he smiled again. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ his voice said, from the empty air.

After he’d gone, she went to the window and looked into the street and tried to see what he had seen. Earlier that day there had been an escape of mathematics from the ram-head control loops of one of the visiting cruise ships, a big Creda Starliner. Daughter code, running on a substrate of nanotech and human proteins, had swum into some unlucky rocket-jockey’s vestibular lymph during the night. He had made it through port gate security before it began to change him, then rolled around Saudade sneezing and buying drinks in bars. There would be outbreaks of new behaviour by dawn. The port was shut, and the uniform branch was touring its northern peripheries with sound equipment, advising people to stay in the house.

‘You are all right if you have only touched yourself. You are OK if you have only touched yourself.’

They were giving out a help centre number to call if you thought you were infected: no one would dream of going there, because in the middle term it meant only the quarantine orbit.