The White Cat cartwheeled silently out of the other end of the wormhole like a ghost ship. Her engines were off. Her coms were silent. Nothing was moving inside her hull; outside, a single blue riding light, normally used only in the parking orbit, winked, redundant and steady into nowhere. The hull itself—scarred and scraped, ablated through contact with some indescribable medium, as if wormhole travel meant a thousand years in a coffee-grinder, motion as Newtonian as a ride on a runaway train—cooled quickly down through red to plum-coloured to its normal thuggish grey. A lot of the exterior work was missing. The wormhole exit, a filmy twist of whitish light, fell behind. For two or three hours, the ship toppled out of control through empty space. Then her fusion torch flared briefly, and in obedience to some unspoken command, she shook herself and fell into orbit around the nearest large object.

Seria Mau Genlicher woke up shortly afterwards.

She was back in her tank. Everything was dark. She was cold. She was puzzled.

“Displays,” she ordered.

Nothing happened.

“Am I on my own here?” she said. “Or what?”

Silence. She moved uneasily in the dark. The tank proteome felt lifeless and stagnant.

“Displays!” she said.

This time a coms feed came up, two or three visual images, garbled, intermittent, imbricated, speckled with interference.

A large white object could be seen sprawled across the floor in the human quarters of a K-ship, resolving, as the cameras moved carefully around it, into a partly dismembered human being. Its clothes, torn off by gravitational forces, were compacted into the corners of the room like wet washing, along with one of its arms. The walls above it were daubed and reddened. The second image was of Uncle Zip, playing the accordion as his ship tumbled endlessly down the wormhole. Over the music, his pilot could be heard shouting, “Shit. Oh Jesus shit.” In the third, Uncle Zip’s mouth was seen in close-up, repeating the words: “We can get out of this if we keep our heads.”

“Why are you showing me this?” said Seria Mau.

The ship remained silent around her. Then it said suddenly:

“All these things are happening at once. This is a realtime feed. Whatever happened to him in there is still happening. It will always be happening.”

Uncle Zip stared out of the display at Seria Mau.

“Help,” he said.

He threw up.

“Actually, this is quite interesting,” the mathematics said.

Seria Mau watched one moment more. Then she said: “Get me out of here.”

“Where do you want to go?”