Kearney shook his head. He held her there quietly in the night until she buried her face in the pillow and stopped trying to control herself. He fetched the bottle of wine and gave her half a glassful and they lay on the bed and watched the television. First Anna on the beach, then Anna undressing, while the camera moved slowly down one side of her body and up the other; then, as she grew bored, a CNN news segment. Kearney turned the sound up just in time to hear the words “. . . Kefahuchi Tract, named after its discoverer.” Flaring across the screen in colours that couldn’t be natural appeared some cosmic object no one could understand. It looked like nothing much. A film of rosy gas with a pinch of brighter light at its centre.

“It’s beautiful,” Anna said, in a shocked voice.

Kearney, sweating suddenly, turned the sound down.

“Sometimes I think this is all such bollocks,” he said.

“It is beautiful, though,” she objected.

“It doesn’t look like that,” Kearney told her. “It doesn’t look like anything. It’s just data from some X-ray telescope. Just some numbers, massaged to make an image. Look around,” he told her more quietly. “That’s all anything is. Nothing but statistics.” He tried to explain quantum theory to her, but she just looked bemused. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s just that there isn’t really anything there. Something called decoherence holds the world into place the way we see it: but people like Brian Tate are going to find maths that will go round the end of that. Any day now we’ll just go round decoherence on the back of the maths, and all this—” he gestured at the TV, the shadows in the room “—will mean as much to us as it does to a photon.”

“How much is that?”

“Not much.”

“It sounds awful. It sounds undependable. It sounds as if everything will just—” she made a vague gesture “—boil around. Spray about.”

Kearney looked at her.

“It already does,” he said. He raised himself on one elbow and drank some wine. “Down there it’s just disorder,” he was forced to admit. “Space doesn’t seem to mean anything, and that means that time doesn’t mean anything.” He laughed. “In a way that’s the beauty of it.”

She said in a small voice, “Will you fuck me again?”

The next day he managed to get Brian Tate on the phone and ask him, “Have you seen that crap on TV?”

“Sorry?”

“This X-ray object, whatever it is. I heard someone from Cambridge talking about Penrose and the idea of a singularity without an event horizon, some bollocks like that—”

Tate seemed distracted. “I haven’t heard about any object,” he said. “Look Michael, I need to talk to you—”