“You pick yourself up, Ed. You try to carry on. We were missing something, we had to admit. But that in itself gave us our big idea. We couldn’t know the Tract; but we decided to build something that could. I’m the last of my kind, Ed, you’re right. They left me here to make the project work.”

The Shrander fell silent.

After a while she said tiredly, “I’m a long way out of date, Ed.”

Ed felt the weight of that. He felt the loneliness of it. What do you do for an alien entity? Do you put your arm around it? What do you say: “I’m sorry you’re old?” The Shrander must have gathered some of this, because she reassured him, “Hey, Ed. Don’t sweat it”; then, after a moment, gathered up her resources and gestured in a way that took in the low ruins, the inexplicable artefacts in the dust, the K-ship squatting there like an evil demon of engineering, its systems cooking with radiation, its armaments extruding senselessly as it detected possibly threatening events a hundred lights up and down the Beach.

“I lived in these ruins, these objects and others, all across the halo. There was a part of me in all of them, and every part of me was all of me. After EMC discovered K-tech, I lived in the navigational space of this ship. I stole it. From inside its maths, and across the bridge into its wetware, I had the run of fourteen dimensions, including four temporal. I was halo-wide, I was backwards and forwards in time like a yo-yo. I could intervene.”

“Why?”

“Because we built you, Ed. We built you from the amino acids up. We made a guess at what we didn’t have, and we built your ancestors to evolve into what we couldn’t be. It was a long-term project, as long-term as anything here on the Beach. OK, maybe not so visible as some of this solar engineering stuff. But, you know, did any of that actually work? Look around you; I’d say it didn’t. We thought our investment had a chance, Ed. It was low-end and elegant both at the same time; even more interesting, we gave the universe a hand in it and left some things to chance. All this time I was watching over it.”

The Kefahuchi Tract.

A singularity without an event horizon. A place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out, like cheap conjuror’s stuff, magic that might work or it might not, undependable stuff in a retro-shop window. You couldn’t make anything of an idea like that, but you couldn’t stop trying. You couldn’t stop trying to engage it.