“Dr. Haends. Dr. Haends to surgery, please.”

Meanwhile, though dead by his own definitions since the collision with Uncle Zip’s K-ship, the commander of the Nastic vessel Touching the Void flickered in and out of view in one of the darkened corners of the room. He looked like a cage made of leaky insect legs, but while his ship remained, so did the burden of his responsibilities. Among these he included Seria Mau Genlicher. She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired. It was a Nastic quality. Because of it, he had been surprised to discover, he felt he owed her a duty of care; and he had been trying to discharge it since he died. He had done what he could to protect her from the Krishna Moire. More importantly, he had been trying to tell her what he knew.

He wasn’t sure he could remember all of it. He had no clear idea, for instance, why he had been co-operating with Uncle Zip in the first place: though he guessed perhaps that Uncle Zip had promised to share Billy Anker’s discovery with him. An entire planet of unmined K-tech! On the eve of another war with human beings, this certainly would have seemed an attractive offer. It must, however, have begun to seem less attractive after the attempt to retailor the Dr. Haends package. Uncle Zip had met with little success. All he had done was wake up something which already lived inside it. What that was, neither he nor the Nastic tailors had any idea. It was something much more intelligent than any of its predecessors. It was self-aware in a way that might take years to comprehend. If it had once been what Uncle Zip claimed it to be—a package of measures powerful enough to undo safely the bridge between the operator and the code: a kind of reverse signing-up—it was no longer anything like that.

It was alive, and it was looking for other K-code to talk to.

“If it’s faulty,” Seria Mau said, “there’s one way to find out.”

Still kneeling, she leaned forward and extended her arms, palms up. The shadow operators lifted the red and green box until it lay across her arms, then streamed away from her like fish in an aquarium, flickering agitatedly this way and that.

“Don’t ask me if I know what I’m doing,” she warned them. “Because I don’t.”

She got to her feet, and with her train spilling out behind her, walked slowly towards the nearest wall.

Foam poured from the box.

“Dr. Haends—” it said.

“Take us up,” said Seria Mau to the wall.