“We can’t live! We can’t live in this!”

But Dr. Haends didn’t seem to care. Out there on the surface, among the strange low mounds and buried artefacts, he prepared for surgery. On went his white gloves. Up went his sleeves. While out of his eyes and mouth poured the white foam of the K-code, to assemble from the dust itself the necessary instruments. Dr. Haends looked up. He held out one hand, palm up, like someone testing for rain. “No need for extra light!” he decided.

Seria Mau wept.

“I’m dying! How can you give me a new body here?”

“Forget your body.”

They had to shout to hear themselves across the silent roar of the Tract. Particle winds blew back the tails of his coat. He laughed. “Isn’t it amazing, just to be alive?” Behind him, the shadow operators poured out of the ship like shoals of excited fish, flickering and dancing.

“She’ll be well again,” they called to one another. “She’ll be well.”

Dr. Haends raised his instruments.

“Forget yourself,” he commanded. “Now you can be what you are.”

“Will you hurt me?”

“Yes. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

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!”