At the far end of the lounge were the gates to the runcibles, and near them was a vending machine. Freeman saw there were three people waiting before Gate Two: one catadapt and two human normals. The catadapt was using the coffee machine. He felt a horrible sinking sensation: half-catadapt. It was her; the orange and pink fur in a V down her back was very distinctive, as was the plait from her hair woven down the middle of it. Instead of going over to his gate, he halted by a pillar and studied the news-screen mounted there. The usual media pap, but at least he did not have to speak to it. From the corner of his eye he saw her drinking her coffee as if she really needed it, gulping it down. She then ran to the gate and through, discarding her cup on the floor. Was she suffering too? Wouldn’t it be the limit if she had been going to Samarkand? The other two people also went through. They must have been heading for the same place, or else resetting would have taken longer. He headed over to the gate, pausing for only a moment as the black horseshoe-crab of a cleaning robot hummed past trailing the acrid odour of strong carpet cleaner. He had a flash of memory. There had definitely been a carpet. He felt a further lifting of the cloud. There had been no carpets on the dance floor.

By the departure gate Freeman pressed his hand to a plate on the log-on column. His identity, credit rating and destination appeared on a screen to the left of his hand. He pressed again to confirm. The door before him opened and he stepped through onto a moving walkway. This took him through a long corridor, ribbed like the gullet of some reptile, then to a door leading to the runcible chamber.

The chamber was a thirty-metre sphere of mirrored glass floored with black glass. The runcible itself stood at the centre of this, mounted on a stepped pedestal. It might have been the altar to some cybernetic god of technology. Nacreous ten-metre-long incurving bull’s horns jutted up from the pedestal. Between them shimmered the cusp of a Skaidon warp, or the ‘spoon’ as it was now called, hence the weird nomenclature Skaidon technology had acquired. Five-dimennsional singularity mechanics. Skaidon warp. Skaidon technology . . .

Much as he hated to admit it, Freeman preferred the runcible spoons and quince of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem. He did not like the bit about quince being sliced, since quince was the collective noun for those who travelled using the runcibles. Most people knew the ancient poem now, and Freeman wondered what Lear would think of this novel use of his words. He walked up to the pedestal, mounted the steps to the cusp, stepped through, and was gone.