Futurity hurried to his cabin and returned with his data desk. It was the Ecclesia’s most up-to-date model. He pressed the desk to the observation lounge blister, and checked it over as data poured in.

‘I feel excited,’ he said.

‘You should,’ Poole said. ‘You might make some original discovery here. And, more important, you might figure out how to save all our skins, my Virtual hide included.’

‘I’m excited but worried,’ Futurity admitted.

‘That sounds like you.’

‘Michael Poole, how can a human child survive in a black hole?’

Poole glanced at him approvingly. ‘Good; that’s the right question to ask. You need to cultivate an open mind, acolyte. Let’s assume Mara’s serious, that she knows what she’s talking about.’

‘That she’s not crazy.’

‘Open mind! Mara has implied - I think - that we’re not talking about the child in her physical form but some kind of download, like a Virtual.’

Futurity asked, ‘But what information can be stored in a black hole? A hole is defined only by its mass, charge and spin. You need rather more than three numbers to define a Virtual. But no human science knows a way to store more data than that in a black hole - though it is believed others may have done so in the past.’

Poole eyed him. ‘Others? . . .’ He slapped his own cheek. ‘Never mind. Concentrate, Poole. Then let’s look away from the hole itself, the relativistic object. We’re looking for structure, somewhere you can write information. Every black hole is embedded in the wider universe, and every one of them comes with baggage. This satellite hole has its own accretion disc. Maybe there ...’

But Futurity’s scans of the disc revealed nothing. ‘Michael Poole, it’s basically a turbulence spectrum. Oh, there is some correlation of structure around a circumference, and over time tied into the orbital period around the black hole.’

‘But that’s just gravity, the inverse square law, defined by one number: the black hole’s mass. All right, what else have we got?’ Inexpertly Poole tapped at a Virtual clone of Futurity’s desk. He magnified an image of the hole itself. It was a flaring pinprick, even under heavy magnification. But Poole played with filters until he had reduced the central glare, and had brought up details of the background sky.

A textured glow appeared. A rough sphere of pearly gas surrounded the black hole and much of its accretion disc, and within the sphere a flattened ellipsoid of brighter mist coalesced closer to the hole.

‘Well, well,’ said Poole.

Futurity, entranced, leaned closer to see. ‘I never knew black holes had atmospheres! Look, Michael Poole, it is almost like an eye staring at us - see, with the white, and then this iris within, and the black hole itself the pupil.’