Just as it became unbearable, someone snatched this dream away. Seria Mau found herself staring into a lighted shop window. It was a retro window, full of retro things. They were from Earth, conjuror’s things, children’s things made of bad plastic, feathers, cheap rubber, objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine heart which lit itself up by means of the loving diodes within. There were “X-Ray Specs” and elevator shoes. There was a dark red japanned box, in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom which turned out not to be your own. There were the trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn’t take off. As she watched, the man in the black top hat and tails bent his upper body slowly into the window. His hat was on his head. He had removed his white kid gloves which he now held in the same hand as his beautiful ebony cane. His smile was unchanged, warm yet full of a glittering irony. He was a man who knew too much. Slowly and with a wide, generous gesture he used his free hand to take off his hat and sweep it across the contents of the window, as if to offer Seria Mau the items within. At the same time, she recognised, he was offering her himself. He was, in some way, these objects. His smile never changed. He replaced his hat slowly, unbent himself in polite silence, and disappeared.

A voice said: “Every day, the life of the body must usurp and disinherit the dream.” Then it said: “Though you never grew up, this is the last thing you saw as a child.”

Seria Mau woke shaking.

She shook and shook until the ship’s mathematics took pity on her, flushing the tank so that specific areas of her proteome could be flooded with complex artificial proteins.

“Listen,” it said. “We are having a problem here.”

“Show me,” said Seria Mau.

Up came the signature diagram again.

At its centre—if ten dimensions mediated as four can be said to have a centre—the lines of possibility wrote themselves so close to each other they became a solid: an inert object with the contours of a walnut, which was no longer changing much. Too many guesses had been made, was Seria Mau’s first thought. The original signal, complicating itself towards infinity, had collapsed into this stochastic nugget and was now even more unreadable.

“This is useless,” she complained.

“It seems that way,” the mathematics said equably. “But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this . . .”