“Shall I tell you something?” the mathematics said.

“What?”

“Display up,” said the mathematics, and the Kefahuchi Tract exploded into her head.

“This is the way things really look,” said the mathematics. “If you think ship-time is the way things look, you’re wrong. If you think ship-time is something, you’re wrong: it’s nothing. You see this? This isn’t just some ‘ exotic state.’ It’s light-years of blue and rose fire, roaring up out of nowhere, toppling away again in real, human time. That’s the way it is. That’s what it’s like inside you.”

Seria Mau laughed bitterly.

“Very poetic,” she said.

“Look into the fire,” the mathematics ordered.

She looked. The Tract roared and sighed above her.

“I can’t give you your body back,” the mathematics said. “You had this rage to live, but you were afraid of it. What you had them do to you was irreversible. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. There’s more.”

After a moment, the Tract seemed to frame itself in three tall arched windows, set into a wall covered in ruched grey satin. She was in the magic-shop window. At the same time she was in the tank-room aboard the White Cat.

Those locations, she saw now, had always been one and the same place. She could see her tank, EMC’s corporate idea of what a thirteen-year-old girl would want: a coffin decorated with gold mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons, all making heroic self-sacrifices over and over again, as if death wasn’t a permanent state and heartbreak could always be risen above. It had a thick hinged lid—impossible to open from inside, as if they had been frightened all along she might get out—and sheaves of inlet pipes. She was above it, inside it, and behind it too: she was in the tiny shipboard surveillance cameras which fell like dust through every ray of light. As she watched, the upper body of Dr. Haends bent itself slowly into the central window. His white shirt was freshly starched; his jet-black hair shone with brilliantine. After he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could, Dr. Haends winked at her. This time, instead of bowing himself out, he threw one long, elegant leg across the windowsill and clambered into the room.

“No,” said Seria Mau.

“Yes,” he said.

In two strides he had reached her tank and thrown open the lid.

“No!” she said.