“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.”

The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway. Then, staring up at the collapsing, constantly replaced towers of light, he changed his mind and began to wonder what he could offer in return. Everything he thought of was inappropriate. Suddenly he remembered the dice. He still had them. He extracted them carefully from their leather bag and offered them to the Shrander.

“I don’t know why I took these,” he said.

“I wondered too.”

“Well anyway. Here they are.”

“They’re only dice,” the Shrander said. “People play some kind of game with them,” it added vaguely. “But look, I did have a use for them. Why don’t you just put them down?”

Kearney looked around. The surface they were standing on curved away, salted with dust, too bright to look at for long.

“On the ground?”

“Yes, why not? Just put them on the ground.”

“Here?”

“Oh, anywhere,” said the Shrander, making an offhand, liberal gesture. “Anywhere they can be seen.”

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” said Kearney. “Dreaming or dead.”

He placed the dice carefully on the dusty rock. After a moment, smiling at the fears of his vanished self, he arranged them so that the emblem he knew as “the High Dragon” faced upwards. Then he walked a little way away from them and stood on his own and turned up his face to the sky, where he imagined he could see among the clouds of stars and incandescent gas, the shapes of everything that had been in his life. He knew those things weren’t there: but it wasn’t wrong to imagine them. He saw pebbles on a beach. (He was three years old. “Run here!” his mother called. “Run here!” There was water in a bucket, cloudy with moving sand.) He saw a pool in winter, brown reeds emerging from the cat-ice at its margins. “Your cousins are coming!” (He saw them run laughing towards him across the lawn of an ordinary house.) He even saw Valentine Sprake, looking almost human, in a railway carriage. In all of that he never saw Gorselands once: but over it all he thought he saw Anna Kearney’s strong, determined face, guiding him to self-knowledge through the shoals of both their lives.

“You understand?” said the Shrander, which, having remained courteously silent through this process, now came to his side again and stared up in a companionable way. “There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that.”

Then it admitted: “I can’t keep you alive for much longer, you know. Not here.”

Kearney smiled.

“I guessed,” he said. “You mustn’t worry. Oh look! Look!”

He saw the raging glory of the light. He felt himself slipping away into it, here in this fabulous place. He was so amazed. He wanted the Shrander to know. He wanted it to be certain he had understood.