‘It may have been nothing more than a simple industrial accident,’ he said languidly. ‘There’s a story from before the Qax Extirpation, predating even the Second Expansion. It’s said that a human traveller once saved himself from a nova flare by huddling behind a scrap of construction material. The material soaked up the light, you see, and expanded dramatically . . . The rogue scrap would have grown and grown, easily encompassing a star like this, if the traveller hadn’t found the “Xeelee flower”, the off-switch. It’s probably just a romantic myth. Or this may alternatively be some kind of technology demonstrator.’

‘I suppose we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘And why the light lakes? Why not make the sphere perfectly efficient, closed, totally black?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps it’s a honey trap.’ She had never seen a bee, or tasted honey, and she didn’t understand the reference. ‘Sool was right that this immense sphere-world could host billions of humans - trillions. Perhaps the Xeelee hope that we’ll flock here, to this place with room to breed almost without limit, and die and grow old without achieving anything, just like Sool, and not bother them any more. But I think that’s unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the effective gravity rises away from the equator. So the sphere isn’t much of a honey trap, because we can’t inhabit most of it. Humans here are clearly incidental to the sphere’s true purpose.’ His Virtual voice was without inflection, and she couldn’t read his mood.

They passed the five-gravity latitude before they even glimpsed Bicansa’s car. It was just a speck in the high-magnification sensor displays, not visible to the naked eye, thousands of kilometres ahead on this tabletop landscape. It was clear that they weren’t going to catch Bicansa without going much deeper into the sphere’s effective gravity well.

‘Her technology is almost as good as ours,’ Pala gasped. ‘But not quite.’

‘Try not to talk,’ Dano murmured. ‘You know, there are soldiers, Navy tars, who could stand multiple gravity for days on end. You aren’t one of them.’

Pala was lying down, cushioned by her suit, kept horizontal by her couch despite the cabin’s apparent tilt upwards. But even so the pressure on her chest was immense. ‘I won’t turn back,’ she groaned.

‘I’m not suggesting you do. But you will have to accept that the suit knows best.’

When they passed six gravities, the suit flooded with a dense, crimson fluid that forced its way into her ears and eyes and mouth. The fluid, by filling her up, would enable her to endure the immense, unending pressure of the gravity. It was like drowning.