‘About an hour ago we got uncontrolled  period doubling then some kind of convulsion in the major lattices. It’s jumped to another stable state.’

‘Is it still asking for the policewoman?’

‘Like never before.’

‘Anything else?’

An embarrassed pause, then: ‘It wants to know everything about domestic cats. Should we help it with that?’

Gaines laughed out loud ‘Tell it what you like.’ So many years in, and they didn’t even know what the Aleph was. They could be programming  a computer,  they could be talking to a god. They weren’t even sure who they were working for at EMC. But Gaines had the complex professional philosophy of any good fixer. ‘Keep going,’ he ordered. ‘In a situation  like this all the benefits are at the front end. Later we find a way out of the consequences.’ Most projects seem minor, irrelevant: big or small, cheap-and-cheerful or funded the planetary level, they always remain oblique to the real world. Others flower when you least expect it. They become your own. They lodge right in your heart.

‘Get me a K-ship,’ he said.

SiteCrime, fifth floor, Uniment  & Poe: a slow morning.  Bars of light from the slatted window blinds fell like weight across the policewoman’s shoulders.  Shadow operators  clustered viscously in the ceiling corners. (Once or twice a week, the ghost of her old employer could also be seen there. This apparition  had been less use to her than she hoped. It consisted only of a face – the face of the older Albert Einstein like a photograph  under  water, its eyes distended, its mouth opening and closing senselessly – which seemed to be warning her against something.) Her desk was heavy with reports.

In Saudade City, topology itself is the crime. While the rest of the planet can offer nothing  more bizarre than  rape or murder, SiteCrime – the frail human attempt to bring order to a zone which cannot  be understood  – must deal with boundary-shifts,  abrupt fogs of hallucination, a daily illegal traffic in and out of the event site – people, memes and artifacts no one can quite describe. The assistant busied herself with these puzzles. Bells rang faintly in the distance. At approximately eleven forty, shouting could be heard in the corridor outside and she was called to one of the basement interrogation  rooms.  Two or three  days ago, atrocities had occurred down there under cover of a nanocamera outage only now repaired. The fifth floor was alive with accounts, substantiated and otherwise. ‘It smells like fresh meat,’ someone reported; someone else said it was like war had broken out in their building.