The cavern stretched a hundred yards across and was four times as long, curving near the end down into a narrow hole. The walls consisted of countless concave hollows holding rounded pebbles encased in tough nodular masses of ice. Gas had bubbled through magma, then cooled, and the subsequent stresses had collapsed thin shells of rock into fragments. The cavern acted like a tumbling machine each time the sun thawed the comet, rounding the fragments eventually into pebbles. Millions of years of thaws and freezes, maybe billions had elapsed. That no pebbles floated free was probably due to them picking up enough frictional heat to stick to the ice as it cooled and supercooled. Orlandine pushed herself off from the hull, floated over to one side wall and grabbed an ice nodule to steady herself. Where her foot brushed accidentally against the wall, pebbles tumbled away like opaque bubbles. She would have to watch that. Careless movement in here could result in the open space being filled with a perpetual hail of them. Taking care to only grab clear ice nodules with no pebbles stuck to their surfaces, she made her way along the wall to the hole leading into another cavern. However, briefly peering in there confirmed just more of the same.

Orlandine spent less than an hour exploring before returning to the Heliotrope. How long could she tolerate waiting here? Back within her ship she decided to explore Jain technology in a virtuality. Perhaps that would keep boredom at bay.

Boredom did not get a chance to impinge.

Some in the cave were resting, others still meticulously checking weaponry. Blegg sat unnaturally motionless on a boulder, his head bowed. Cormac bowed his own head, and in his gridlink opened the memory package given to him by Jerusalem, and uploaded it directly to his mind. First, came the pain, then Cormac became himself, many months before:

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it as both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento became a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour . . .

…

This is memory, and I must not lose sight of that. The pain is not real. My mind is whole, I am whole . . .

…