“I’ve been here and seen this,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

He felt the vacuum empty him out.

Oh Anna, I’ve seen it.

32
Everywhere and No Place

What had happened inside the White Cat was this:

Seria Mau had gone up into the mathematical space, where the K-code ran without substrate in a region of its own. Everything else in the universe seemed to recede to a great distance. Things speeded up and slowed down at the same time. An actinic white light—sourceless yet directional—sprayed round the edges of every moving body. It was a space as lucid and intense and meaningless as one of Seria Mau’s dreams.

“Why are you dressed like that?” the mathematics asked her in a puzzled voice.

“I want to know about this box.”

“It’s so very dangerous to us all,” the mathematics said, “for you to be here like this.”

“. . . so very dangerous,” echoed the shadow operators.

“I don’t care,” said Seria Mau. “Look.”

She raised her arms and offered up the box.

“It’s very dangerous dear,” the shadow operators said. They picked nervously at their fingernails and handkerchiefs.

The code rushed out of Uncle Zip’s box and merged with the code from the White Cat. Everything—box, giftwrap, and all—dissolved into pixels, streamers, dark lights like non-baryonic matter, and blew past Seria Mau’s upturned face at near-relativistic speeds. In the same instant, she felt the wedding dress catch fire. Her train melted. Her loving cherubs flashed to powder. The shadow operators covered their eyes with their hands and flung themselves about like dried leaves on a cold wind, their voices stretched and garbled by unknown space-time dilation effects. Suddenly everything was out of the box: every idea anyone had ever had about the universe was available, operating and present. The wires were crossed. The descriptive systems had collapsed into some regime prior to them all. The information supersubstance had broken loose. It was a moment of reinvention. It was the moment of maximum vertigo. Mathematics itself was loose, like a magician in a funny hat, and nothing could be the same again.

Soft chimes rang.

“Dr. Haends, please,” said a woman’s gentle, capable voice.

Out he came, emerging from the universal substrate with his white gloves and gold-topped ebony cane. His tailcoat had a velvet collar and five-button cuffs, and down the outside leg of his narrow black pants ran a black satin stripe. His hat was on his head. His shoes, which Seria Mau had never seen, were chisel-toe patent leather dancing pumps. Hat, shoes, suit, gloves and cane, she saw now, were made of numbers, crawling so thick and fast across one another they looked like a solid surface. Was the whole world like that? Or was it only Dr. Haends?

“Seria Mau!” he cried. He held out his hand. “Will you dance?”