“‘A slab of black stone, and it speaks, but in a language that corrupts,’ she said. She made no sense. She was noded but she had unplugged herself completely, the stubs of her attachments and the empty sockets of her plugs gave me nightmares for weeks after. ‘It came from beyond the Oort,’ she said. It was nakaimas, black magic. Some sort of communication device but using foreign protocols, I think: they ruined her systems and the rain she made fall poisoned the ground. We asked her where she’d found this cargo but she refused to say. The jackals avoided her cave now, or so she told us. She took our supplies and gave us back a single item, a smooth pebble of black stone. It was from the ship, she said, but was inactive, she had disabled it somehow. Mathias didn’t want it, but I was fascinated. I carried it with me for a while. I tried to listen to it but the old Webster was right. It was inactive. Or maybe it was only ever just a piece of rock. I traded it in Neom for a bag of tomato seeds. And that was it. You should never believe a Webster, they live too long inside their own heads. But it’s a good story, right, Saleh?”

“Right,” Saleh said.

It was cool in the shade. They drank water and sat with their backs to the ancient hull and split a pomegranate between them. Saleh was aware of Elias’s closeness, the heat of his body under the robe.

Saleh said, “Do you think . . . ?”

Elias said, “We could go inside.”

They went hand in hand. The old spaceship was cool and cavernous. A spider had made its web on the high ceiling near the breach in the hull. Dust whispered in the still air. They went from room to room, past silent alarm systems and disused service doors until they found sleeping quarters, long abandoned, and there they stayed a while.

Later, when they came out, the sun was lower in the sky and the moon was up. Saleh felt very peaceful then, at ease, and he thought he would remember that day at the fallen ship in time to come, and he found comfort in that thought. There were many unpleasant memories in his mind already; it was good to have one that was not.

The Compassionate Heaven stayed behind as they left it. The ship’s shadow fell mournfully on the sand. It was a strange thing, Saleh thought. A piece of night torn from the sky and cast to Earth.

In future, he thought, he would go up to the place where the world stopped and the universe began, and he would know other ships like it, and wander in and out of halls and rooms much as he’d done, and see moons that weren’t Earth’s.

In future, and in time.