‘And not tomorrow, hopefully, since I still have some rather onerous debts to settle.’ He took the book from me – I’d done no more than leaf through the pages, unable to take any of it in – and moved me along the shelves. ‘Understand this library and you’re halfway to understanding me. Sunjammers don’t put the spur into me. Nor baubles, especially. But I am spurred by what baubles contain, especially if they offer us some illumination on the past.’ He snatched out a book and opened the covers. Instead of pages there was only a milky rectangle, like an opaque slab of crystal. ‘Whatever this was, it doesn’t work for us now. Sometimes something flickers across it. We were caught in a solar storm once, ghost-fire lighting the rigging, and half the mute books in this room lit up and started showing pictures and words. But none of them were in languages I knew, and before I had a chance to scribble down more than a few fragments, the storm abated.’

‘Are all the old books like that?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Some of them are in a written form, and occasionally the scholars have made some small headway with the languages. Only the monkey languages, though – never the alien ones.’

‘I saw a Crawly in Hadramaw,’ I felt obliged to say, remembering the alien shuffling along behind the spacesuited men in Neural Alley. ‘We know their language, don’t we?’

‘Only because it’s worth their while to share it. But I’ll say this: there’s nothing we know about the Crawlies that the Crawlies don’t want us to know.’

‘They help us, don’t they?’

‘In their fashion. They put mirrors in the high orbits, so we can use solar pressure more efficiently. They understand swallowers better than we do, and they can stop worlds crashing into each other when their orbits start drifting. I don’t say that they haven’t been of benefit to us. But of all the other places in the Swirly, what brings them here?’

‘Perhaps there’s no one else out there that they like being around as much as us.’

‘I suppose,’ Rackamore said.

‘It’s good of them to run the banks for us, isn’t it? We made a mess of it, my father said. The crash of 1566 proved that? Hundreds of worlds went bankrupt because people aren’t honest enough to handle money on that scale. People were starving, actually starving and dying, because of the greed and incompetence of bankers. But the aliens don’t need money for anything, not our money, anyway, so there’s no reason for them not to be trusted with it.’