“Who are you?” Ed whispered. “And where are you taking me?”

“You’ll know soon, Ed. Look!”

A filmy twist of light, a faint vertical smile seven hundred kilometres high, hung above them. The Perfect Low shuddered and rang as the forces that kept the wormhole open engaged with elements of Sandra Shen’s ad hoc engine. “There are more kinds of physics in play here,” she informed Ed, “than you people dream of in your philosophy.” Outside the hull, the aliens redoubled their efforts, shuttling faster and in more complex patterns. Suddenly Madam Shen’s eyes were full of excitement. “Not many people have done this achievement, Ed,” she reminded him. “You’re out in front here, you’ve got to admit that.”

Ed grinned despite himself.

“Just look at it,” he marvelled. “How d’you think they made it?”

Then he shook his head. “As to achievements,” he said, “Billy Anker picked this peach. I watched him pick it ten, twelve years ago. If I remember anything, I remember that.” He shrugged. “Of course, Billy never came back. You don’t get the tick unless you come back.”

Something about this mindless philosophy made Sandra Shen smile to herself. She stared up at the image on the screens for a moment or two. Then she said softly: “Hey, Ed.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t Annie. Annie was real.”

“I’m glad,” Ed said.

The wormhole opened to receive him.

During the transit, he fell asleep. He didn’t understand why, though even in his sleep he suspected that Madam Shen had organised it. He slumped in the pilot seat with his head on one side, couch-potatoed and breathing heavily through his mouth. Behind closed lids, his eyes flickered in REM manoeuvres, a simple but urgent code.

What he dreamed was this:

He was back in the family house. It was autumn—heavy, felted airs and rain. His sister came down from the father’s study carrying the lunch tray. Ed skulked about in the shadows on the landing, then jumped out on her. “Haraaar!” he said. “Oops.” Too late. The lunch tray slipped out of her hands in the wet light from the window. A hard-boiled egg rolled about in dipping, eccentric arcs, then bounced away down the stairs. Ed ran after it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy!” His sister was upset. After that she didn’t speak to him. He knew it was because of what he had seen before he jumped out. She was already holding the lunch tray in one hand. With the other, she was pulling her clothes about as if they didn’t fit properly. Her hands were already relaxing, soft and strengthless. She was already crying.

“I don’t want to be the mother,” she was telling herself.

That was the point everything went wrong in Ed’s life. Nothing after that was as bad, even when his father stood on the black kitten; and anyone who claimed it had gone wrong before that, they didn’t know anything.

A voice said: “Time to forgive yourself these things.”