“You’re one of Uncle Zip’s clones,” she said.

At first she thought this would shock him into saying something new. But he only grinned and shrugged it off. “The personality didn’t take,” he said. A complex expression crossed his face.

“He made you for this.”

“He wanted a replacement. His entradista days were over. He thought the child would follow the father. But I’m my own man,” Billy Anker said. He blinked. “I say that to everyone, but it’s true.”

“Billy—”

“Don’t you want to know what I found?”

“Of course I do,” she said. She didn’t care one way or another at that moment, she was so chilled by his fate. “Of course I do.”

He was silent for a time. Once or twice he started to speak, but language seemed to fail him. Finally he began:

“That place: it butts up against the Tract so tight you can practically hear the rush and roar of it. You fall out the wormhole, toppling end over end, all your control systems redlined, and there it is. Light. Deep light. Fountains, cascades, falling curtains of light. All the colours you can imagine and some you can’t. Shapes they used to see through optical telescopes, in the old days back on Earth. You know? Like gas clouds, and clouds of stars, but evolving there in human time in front of you. Building and falling like surf.” He was silent again, looking inside himself as if he’d forgotten she was there. Eventually he said: “And you know, it’s small, that place. Some used-up old moon they sent down the wormhole for their own purposes. No atmosphere. You can make out the curve of the horizon. And bare. Just white dust on a surface like a cement floor . . .

“A cement floor,” he whispered. “You hear the K-code resonating in it like the sound of a choir.” He raised his voice. “Oh, I didn’t stay,” he said. “I wasn’t up to it. I saw that at once. I was too scared to stay. I could feel the code, humming in the fabric, I could hear the light pour over me. I could feel the Tract at my back, like something watching. I couldn’t believe they would drive a wormhole through to somewhere so insane. I grabbed a few things—just like the old prospectors, the first few things I saw—and I got out of there as fast as I could.”

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Haends package.

“That was one of them,” he said. After a moment he shivered. “I got the Karaoke Sword off the moon, but it was a long time before I could go anywhere. We just hung there in the wash of light. Even the ship felt a kind of terror. I couldn’t make myself enter the wormhole again. A wormhole is a lottery. It’s a one-shot thing, even for a man like me. In the end I took absolute navigational fixes—fixes from the standing gravity wave, also fixes I was less certain of, from the anisotropy of the whole universe—to find out where I was. Then I came back the long way round, by dynaflow. I was broke, so I got together a few of the things I’d found, and sold them on. It was a mistake. After that I knew everyone in the galaxy would want to know what I knew. I hid up.”