Meanwhile, Gaines was reporting to his colleagues at the Aleph Project. As an EMC fixer with a satisfyingly broad remit, Gaines occupied various different kinds of space, most of them electronic; although, as he said, some things he did went a little too fast for normal channels. There were actions he could do, assets he had access to, which didn’t seem very physics. But when he reported to the project, it was in the ordinary way, as a holographic fetch, via a system of private FTL routers.

‘She’s not in touch with it,’ he concluded his report. ‘And if it’s in touch with her, it’s using some part of its personality we haven’t explored yet.’

He listened for a moment, staring into the air, then laughed. ‘She lives in this room,’ he said. ‘You should see it. No, she has no idea what she is – come to think of it, nor do I. She has ten-year-old datableed technology running probability estimates down the inside of her arm. What? Yes, some kind of cheap local police thing. What do you say? Welcome to the Halo, man.’ He laughed again and then his voice went flat.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s too early to bring them together.’

But the next morning he appeared in the assistant’s room again, carrying two plastic cups of coffee – one mocha, one Americano – and some pastries. This time he was wearing a light shortie raincoat, spotted with rain, over twill cargo pants. His bare chest was grizzled, and the skin had slackened around the nipples, over stringy but powerful-looking pectoral muscles. If he was younger than he appeared, some odd things had happened to him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we sit on the bed here?’

That was hard for her to understand. She slept on the bed, she sat in the chair. She didn’t sit on the bed.

When he had got her to understand, he gave her some quite complicated co-ordinates, which even to the assistant implied an object travelling towards the Kefahuchi Tract. ‘If anything strange happens to you,’ he said, while they were eating the pastries. ‘If anything at all odd happens, why don’t you dial me up? Better still,’ he said, ‘why not use this?’ From his raincoat pocket he took out a thing like a cheap pressed-tin box with a skull in it. The box had a glass front. The skull was small, like a child’s. Sometimes it seemed to have a body, like a baby’s, a partial homunculus hanging part way through the back wall of the box; sometimes it didn’t. ‘Skull radio,’ he said to the assistant. ‘It brings down most of the major vibes. Like sucking on the universe through a wide-bore straw. If anything at all odd happens, you give me a call on this.’

‘What for?’ she asked.