“That so doesn’t describe the experience,” he told her.

He really didn’t know what happened to him when his head was in the fishtank, but he knew it wasn’t anything as twitchy or aggressive as that. He thought that was her temperament showing. As a description it revealed more about her than it did about prophecy. “Anyway,” he told her, “direction was always the difficulty with me. Speed was never a problem.”

He added, for no reason he could see: “My dreams have been bad lately.”

“Things are tough all over, Ed.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Sandra Shen grinned at him. “Talk to Annie,” she advised. A few white motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. Unsure whether this was menace or a joke, he put his head back in the tank so he didn’t have to watch. After a moment he heard her say:

“I’m sick of selling the past, Ed. I want to start on the future.”

“Do I say anything when I’m in here?”

The more he worked with the fishtank, the worse Ed’s dreams became.

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.