A long while later—it might have been minutes, it might have been years—Dr. Haends wiped the numbers from his forehead like sweat and stepped back from the thing he had made. His evening suit was less than spruce. He was bloody to the cuffs of his linen shirt. His instruments, which to start with had been state of the art, now seemed to him dull and not entirely the right ones for the job. He shook his head. It had been an effort, he now admitted, even for him. Thermodynamically, it had been the most expensive thing he’d ever done. It had been a risk. But what do you gain without that?

“Now you can be what you are,” he repeated.

The thing he had made raised itself and flapped its wings uncertainly. “This is hard,” it said. “Am I meant to be this big?” It tried to look back at itself. “I can’t really see what I am,” it said. It flapped again. Collateral electromagnetic events lifted dust from the surface. The dust hung there, but nothing else happened.

“I think if you keep practising—” encouraged Dr. Haends.

“I feel terrified,” it said. “I feel such a fool.”

It laughed.

“What do I look like?” it said. “Am I still her?”

“You are and you aren’t,” Dr. Haends admitted. “Turn round, let me see you. There. You look beautiful. Just practise a bit more.”

Seria Mau turned and turned. She felt the light catch her wings.

“Are these feathers?” she said.

“Not entirely.”

She said: “I don’t know how it works!”

“It will maintain any shape you want,” Dr. Haends promised. “You can be this, or you can be something else. You can be a white cat again, and pounce among the stars. Or why not try something new? I’m quite pleased with it now,” he said. “Yes! Look! You see? That’s it!”

She rose up and circled about awkwardly above his head. “I don’t know how to do this!” she called down to him.

“Some turns! Do some more turns! You see?”

She did some more turns. “I’m quite good at it,” she said. “I think I could be quite good at it.” The shadow operators flew up to her. They flocked to her whispering delightedly and clasping their bony work-worn hands. “You took care of me so well,” she congratulated them. Then she made herself look down at the White Cat.

“All those years!” she marvelled. “Was I that?”

She shed something that might have been tears, if an organism so bizarre—so huge and yet so frail, so perpetually emergent from its own desires—could be said to weep. “Oh dear,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel.” Suddenly she laughed. Her laughter filled the vacuum. It was the laughter of particles. She was laughing in every regime. She tried out the different things she could be: there were always more; there were always more after that. “Do you like this?” she called down. “I think I preferred the last one.” Her wings lost their look of feathers, and the Kefahuchi-light ran along them from tip to tip like wild fire. Seria Mau Genlicher laughed and laughed and laughed.