Swimmer had a skeleton of something like cartilage, and ‘muscles’, pink and sinewy, adhered to it. But the cartilage itself was independently mobile. And now a ‘muscle’ detached itself from its anchor, swam to the surface of the slimy pool into which Swimmer had deliquesced, and opened a mouth to breathe the air.

Borno’s face contorted. ‘How gross.’

‘More gross than a Ghost?’ Hex asked.

He turned to her, his eyes stony. ‘Well, now, that’s the question, isn’t it? We know the Ghosts are some kind of colony creature too. And we know that this wriggling, dissolving thing speaks a kind of basic Ghost language. I think it’s time we asked him what is going on here - and what he has to do with the Ghosts.’

‘He may not know,’ Jul warned. ‘He is technological, but primitive. And we may turn him against us.’

Borno snapped, ‘So what?’

‘I think Borno’s right,’ Hella said. ‘We’re not getting anywhere sitting in here. We have to take a few risks.’

‘If he knows who’s shooting at him from the nightside,’ Borno said, ‘it would be a start.’

Hex considered. She had been trained by the Commissaries in alien psychology - or at least, how to manipulate it. ‘We humans are very self-centred,’ she said. ‘Everything revolves around us. But for Swimmer, we’re peripheral. He doesn’t care what we want, even where we came from. He’s helping us stay alive for his own reasons - and that’s our angle. Hella, try asking him why he’s helping us.’

Hella murmured into her translator unit.

He was helping them, Swimmer replied, because they were the enemies of his enemies.

Swimmer didn’t know that the ecology that had spawned him was the second to have arisen on this battered world.

His sun was dark and cold to human senses, but to the creatures that evolved in its ruddy light it was a warm steady hearth. ‘In fact,’ Hella said, smiling, ‘Swimmer doesn’t believe that life on a planet like Earth is possible. A dazzling sun, a daily cycle of light and dark, seasons, ice ages - how could any ecology evolve in such a chaotic environment?’

Life here, though, had taken a different route to Earth. The continued cooling of the sun had exerted a selective pressure to huddle, to share, to keep warm. Here large animals were rare, cooperative organisms the norm.

Hex had never seen another of Swimmer’s kind, but it seemed he joined with others in the depths of the sea. There the bits that made up the people danced in their own eager matings. And if you came out of the great merging with a slightly different set of subcomponents, so what? Hex suspected that ‘identity’ meant something rather different to these people than to her own.