He went over and drew her gently to her feet. He kissed her. “We like you to do it because we love you,” he said. “We all love you.” He took one of her hands and examined her fingernails. “That’s very historical,” he said. The hologram blinked, expanded until it measured four or five feet on a side, and was suddenly showing the clone’s face in the throes of sexual arousal. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide with pain or pleasure, Seria Mau couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see what was being done to her. They all sat down and watched, giving the hologram their full consideration as if it were still showing images of Radio Bay, old alien artefacts, big secrets, the things they most wanted. Soon they were fucking again.

Seria Mau, who had begun to wonder if she knew their real motives for being aboard, watched them suspiciously for some minutes more. Then she disconnected.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami, a space accordion-folded to contain more than seemed possible or advisable, as full of invisible matter as the halo itself. Was this how human beings dreamed of themselves? She had no idea.

Ten days into the voyage, she dreamed of a boat-ride on a river. It was called the New Pearl River and was wider, the mother told them, than a mile. From each bank, benign but exotically tailored vegetation hung down into the water, the surface ripples of which looked firm and nacreous and gave off smells of almonds and vanilla. The mother loved it as much as the children. She trailed her bare feet in the cool pearly water, laughing. “Aren’t we lucky!” she kept saying. “Aren’t we lucky!” The children loved her brown eyes. They loved her enthusiasm for everything in the world.

“Aren’t we lucky!”

These words echoed across a change of scene, first to blackness, then to the garden again, with its dark laurels.

It was afternoon. It was raining. The old man—he was the father, and you could see how puzzled that responsibility made him, how much of an effort it was—had built a bonfire. The two children stood and watched him throw things onto it. Boxes, papers, photographs, clothes. Smoke lay about the garden in long flat layers, trapped by the inversions of early winter. They watched the hot core of the fire. Its smell, which was like any other bonfire, excited them despite themselves. They stood dressed up in coats and scarves and gloves, sad and guilty in the cold declining afternoon, watching the flames and coughing in the grey smoke.

He was too old to be a father, he seemed to be pleading. Too old.