Gaines gave her an alert look. ‘Have you invented  irony?’ he wondered  aloud.  In  her  room,  by contrast  with  the  mayhem over at the port, some fleeting piece of physics had washed and softened the light. He placed the suitcase carefully on the bed: its clasps being snapped, complex fields sprang to life, radar  green on a velvety black backdrop, unwinding in endless strings around a  strange  attractor.  Additionally,  the  case contained  generous lengths of scabby rubberised flex and a pair of bakelite headphones clearly included for show. ‘Look inside,’ Gaines said. ‘See this?’

‘Are you really here this time?’

‘First look in the suitcase,’ Gaines said, ‘then we can discuss that.’

She looked.

Immediately she felt herself transported  a thousand  light years from Saudade City, out somewhere in Radio Bay, inside an EMC outpost  so secret even R.I. Gaines had difficulty finding it. Her viewpoint toppled  about  at high speed. It was jerky and full of interference; once stabilised, it had a curiously assembled feel, as if it had been built up from three-dimensional layers. What the assistant saw was this: a trembling grey space with echoes and a sense of walls far back, and somehow suspended inside it a single perfect teardrop of light so bright she had to look away. It was the tiniest instant.  Even her tailoring couldn’t slow it down. A tear, immobile but constantly falling, so bright you couldn’t really see it. Then darkness came down, the viewpoint gave the impression of tilting violently, and the image of the tear repeated again. By the third or fourth repetition, ‘tear’ had somehow translated in her mind to ‘rip’: at that everything stopped, as if such understanding could be, in itself, a switch.

She felt elated. ‘I don’t know what that was!’ she said. ‘Do you?’

‘It’s a thing no one should admit to knowing about. Not you,’ here, Gaines gave a wry smile, ‘not even me.

‘We call it the Aleph. We believe it’s very old. When we found it, no one had been near it for a million years – perhaps more. When we ask it about itself, it asks for you.’ It was an artefact at least a million years old, he said, the deepest problem anyone had encountered  to date in Radio Bay: a built object as far as could be understood,  a machine constructed  at the nanometre  length, the purpose of which was to contain a piece of the Kefahuchi Tract itself. ‘You see it like that, as a series of repetitions,’ he said, ‘because we’re catching it in the Planck time. You can’t see it for longer because it’s already in its own future, already something different. The pause between images is lag, as the instrument  tracks it quantum to quantum.’