Space, but not empty. A kind of inchoate darkness wrapped over itself like the bow wave of the Alcubiere warp but worse than any of that. The cold water of a meaningless unsalted sea, the information supersubstance, substrate of some universal algorithm. Lights which shivered and writhed away from him in shoals. This was the work Sandra Shen had given him, prophecy, or the failure of prophecy, nothing revealed, a journey that went on forever, then stopped quite suddenly to leave him looking down on things from above.

Bits and pieces of landscape, but notably a house. There would be some damp countryside, a pretty old railway station, hedges, a field tipped up at an angle, then this house, dour, four-faced, made of stone. There was a sense that these items had assembled themselves only a moment before. But that they were—or had been—in some sense real, he had no doubt. He always approached the house from above like that, and from an angle, as if arriving by plane: a tall house with a roof of purple grey slate, Flemish gables, extensive gloomy gardens in which the laurels and lawns were always wintered. White birch trees grew a little way away. It was often raining, or misty. It was dawn. It was late afternoon. After a moment or two, Ed found himself entering the house, and at that point he was woken up by the tail end of his own despairing cry.

“Hush,” said Annie Glyph. “Hush, Ed.”

“I remember things I haven’t seen,” Ed cried out.

He clung to her, listening to her heart, which beat thirty times a minute or less. It was always there to reclaim him, that huge dependable heart, to fetch him out of the standing wave of his own terror. On the down side, it soothed him almost instantly back into unconsciousness, where one night the dream moved on and he was the one place he didn’t want to be. Inside the house. He saw stairs. “Waraaa!” he shouted, ambushing his sister in the hall. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner. It was too late to help. He looked into his sister’s face, full of some rage he couldn’t name. He ran away, shouting.

“After she left, our father stood on the kitten,” he told Annie next morning. “It died. He didn’t mean that to happen. But that was when I made up my mind I’d leave too.”

She smiled. “Travel the galaxy,” she said.

“Fly the ships,” he said.

“Have all the pussy you could find.”

“That and more,” Ed said with a grin.

He sat for a minute after Annie had gone to work, thinking:

That was the black kitten I remembered, then: but there was more to it than that. Before the sister went away. He thought he saw a river, a woman’s face. Fingers trailed in water. A voice saying delightedly but far off: