She moved helplessly in her tank. “No, I want to get out of here,” she said. And then, when no answer was forthcoming: “It didn’t work, did it? Whatever happened back there before you put me to sleep? I thought I saw the conjuror, but it was another dream. I thought—” She was like a thirteen-year-old girl, trying to shrug. In response, the fluid in the tank swirled sluggishly about. She imagined it washing what was left of her body like warm spit. Like fifteen years of despair. “Oh well, what does it matter what I thought? I’m really tired now. I don’t care what I do. I’ve had enough. I want to go home and this never to have happened. I want my life back.”

“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.