‘No,’ she said, ‘stop trying to rationalize this! I could see it in his face, the way he was looking at you. It’s not just that he knows about the Founders: he also knows who you are.’

They came to the door of their cabin, and Fowler put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Even if that turned out to be the case, it’s much too late to worry about it now. We already know what’s in our future.’

‘But how sure are you, really, that it’s set in stone?’

He hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Sure enough to believe that what I saw in that video is bound to come to pass, whatever else happens in the meantime.’

They were woken during the night by angry shouting, followed by gunfire. Fowler pressed his ear to the cabin door, unwilling to risk stepping out into the corridor and wishing he had thought to arm himself. When first light came, he summoned up the courage to venture out on his own and learned, from a member of the crew, that a few of the more belligerent passengers, who had apparently come on board armed with sports rifles, had demanded the ferry make a detour towards a pod of whales sighted several kilometres to the east. The captain’s blank refusal had led to an argument, and the argument – largely fuelled by alcohol – had led to a violent altercation, leaving two of the passengers dead and another seriously injured. Their sleep after that was restless, and Fowler dreamed of bone-white flowers growing from blood-red seas.

The Pacific growth – the first one of all to come into existence – became visible on the horizon the following afternoon. It looked to Fowler like something that Magritte might have imagined: a silver and gold behemoth resembling a flower only in the most abstract terms, and self-constructed on a scale that ded all logic. The senses rebelled at the sight of it when seen directly, and he felt the same tight knot of primitive terror deep in his chest that he’d experienced on first seeing the news footage of this same growth.

Once again they gathered by the rail with the rest of the passengers, steadying themselves cautiously as the ferry rose and dipped with the waves. The growth was still sufficiently distant for the lowest part of its base to be hidden below the curve of the horizon, and yet the complex structures sprouting from its massive stem, like tangled nests of leaves, were clearly visible even at so great a distance. So was a haze of barely discernible black dots and curious twists of light that clouded its upper half.

‘Do you think he was right?’ Fowler asked, tasting salt as waves broke against the hull. ‘That man last night, I mean – in what he said about the slate being wiped clean.’