This wasn’t an academic debate. If she could prove the planet harboured intelligence, it might be spared demolition, its human colonists allowed to continue their way of life. If not . . .

Kard stopped again, breathing hard. ‘Take a break.’ He dumped the stretcher and squatted down, took a handful of pea pods from his improvised backpack, and crammed them into his mouth, pods and all.

The spare suit had extracted some water from the vegetable matter. Xera took one of its sleeves and dribbled water into the mouth of Stub. His breathing was irregular, his face pasty. She opened the cloak a little at his neck, trying to make him easier.

Kard recoiled from the stink that came out of the cloak, an earthy melange of blood and shit, the smell of a wounded human. ‘Lethe, I hate this.’ He turned away. ‘You think the base is far?’

‘I don’t know. Not far, surely.’

He nodded, wordless, not looking at her.

Tomm sat quietly and watched them, bare feet tucked under his legs. He didn’t ask for food or drink. Of the three of them he was by far the freshest.

Xera glanced again at her data desk. It had been working on the observations she’d been able to make before the landing. Now the desk showed that Home and its two siblings were locked into a figure-of-eight orbital motion. It was an exotic but stable solution to the ancient problem of how three bodies would swarm together under gravity. More common solutions resembled planets conventionally orbiting a sun, or three worlds at the corners of a rotating equilateral triangle.

She tried to discuss this with Kard. He knew a lot more about orbital dynamics than she did. But he was definitively not interested.

Xera pulled the dreaming mould out of the tied-up suit. A little dehydrated, it was cold to the touch but not unpleasant. She could tell nothing by just looking at it.

Uncertainly she handed it to Tomm.

The boy pressed his hands against the mould. He looked vaguely disappointed. ‘This one’s too dry.’

‘Tomm, what happens when you touch the mould?’

‘Like if you’re sick.’ Tomm shrugged. ‘The mould helps you.’

‘How?’

He said some things the floating translator unit couldn’t handle. Then he said, ‘Time stops.’

Kard sat up. ‘Time stops? ’

‘Like that. The mould doesn’t see time—’ Tomm made chopping motions. ‘One bit after another. Step, step, step. It sees time all as a piece. All at once.’

Kard raised hairless eyebrows.

Xera felt like defying him. ‘We need to keep open minds, Admiral. We’re here to seek out the strange, the unfamiliar. That’s the whole point. We know that time is quantised. Instants are like grains of sand. We experience them linearly, like a bug hopping from one grain to another. But other perceptions of time are possible. Perhaps—’