Cormac snorted and shook his head. ‘It starts with the scream, doesn’t it?’ he said, then he looked up at the screen. ‘Hubris, you might as well record this. I don’t want to have to tell it again.’ He turned his attention back to Chaline. ‘They say you scream for a fraction of a second when you’re transmitted by runcible. I didn’t arrive on Aster Colora screaming. I arrived reciting a nonsense poem. I should think you know it. Don’t we all?’

And Cormac remembered, and he told her.

(Solstan 2407)

A scream, silent in underspace: a flicker of existence between the shadows of stars. It is known, the scream, but quince never remember. For Cormac there was merely a flash of black and red, a Dante glimpse, and he was completing his thought far from where he began it.

—on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon. Is that right?

Times change: terms change, and it was an ancient nonsense rhyme. He was well aware of that as he fought to overcome the disorientation of mitter-lag.

And the runcible spoon flicks them across the galaxy . . . Hah! Myths rewritten. I’m a knight in shining armour only my hardware’s on the inside.

Caught in the flaw of a jewel Cormac considered dragons. Ten seconds and 400 light-years later his mind caught up with his body. The scream was lost in a twilight place. Echoes. He stepped from the shimmer of the cusp. Down the steps from the pedestal, across the black-glass floor, then out of the containment sphere.

‘Ian Cormac?’

‘Yes.’

The sky was metallic red, the land pink rock with black striations. The horizon was more tightly curved than that viewed from the balcony of his 200th-floor apartment in New York. You noticed things like that, just as you noticed other immediacies. He sneezed, then breathed deeply. The air tasted of salt, and silica dust coated his tongue. After a moment of deliberation he turned his attention to the speaker.

‘I am Maria,’ said the girl, whose hair was red with no white light to show him different. Cormac held out his hand to silence her as his breath billowed in the chill air like lung-blood. He continued to survey the wasteland.

He gestured back at the runcible.

‘Only one. Quince and light cargo. Few people come here,’ he observed.

‘Yes, Dragon set a limit of twenty thousand visitors a year.’

‘Solstan year?’

‘No . . . Colora,’ she said, annoyed.

Cormac stared at her. ‘I require assistance, not impatience,’ he said, and waited.

‘Yes, Ambassador,’ she said grudgingly, rubbing her hand on a leather-sheathed hip. Cormac accessed his link and immediately had a report up in his visual cortex. Rather than download it into his memory, he speed-read it while he studied his surroundings.