Then she laughed and the sun came out again. “Come along, you two!” And there, moments later it seemed, was the sea!

Here the dream ended. Seria Mau waited attentively for the reprise, or second act, in which the conjuror would appear, dressed in his beautiful top hat and tails. When nothing happened she was disappointed. As soon as she woke up she switched on all the lights in the human quarters. The shadow operators, caught bending solicitously over Billy Anker’s bed in the dark, fled right and left.

“Billy Anker,” Seria Mau called. “Wake up!”

A few minutes later he stood blinking and rubbing his eyes in front of the Dr. Haends package in its red gift box.

“This?” he said.

He looked puzzled. He poked about behind the box. He picked up one of Uncle Zip’s roses and sniffed it. He raised the lid of the box cautiously (a bell chimed, a soft spotlight seemed to shine down from above) and eyed the upwelling and slow purposive spill of white foam. The bell chimed again. A female voice whispered, “Dr. Haends. Dr. Haends, please.” Billy Anker scratched his head. He put the lid back on the box. He took it off again. He reached out to touch the white stuff with his finger.

“Don’t do that!” warned Seria Mau.

“Shh,” said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. “I look inside,” he said, “and I don’t see anything. Do you?”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“Dr. Haends to surgery, please,” insisted the quiet voice.

Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. “I never saw anything like this before,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know what Uncle Zip did to it.” He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. “It didn’t look like this when I found it,” he said. “It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.” He shrugged. “Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn’t have these theatrical values.” He smiled in a way she didn’t understand, looking off into the distance. “That’s Uncle Zip’s signature, if you like,” he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau’s fetch wove nervously around his ankles.

“Where did you find it?” she said.

Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch’s eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:

“You can’t outrun EMC forever.”

“It’s not me they’re after,” she reminded him.

“All the same,” he said, “they’ll catch you in the end.”

“Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It’s easy to lose yourself out here.”