‘No – we can’t rush this. Your brain is adjusting to the skull, just as the skull’s coming to terms with you. Tomorrow we go again. You too, Arafura. If your sister’s able to tune in this quickly, you may not be far behind.’

I checked on that world, too. Looked it up in one of the Book of Worlds, the same edition we had back home. I turned to the page where Daxian should have been, had it existed.

Dastrogar

Daxperil

Dazazoth

But no Daxian. I slid the book back, certain now that my sister couldn’t have picked up on the name from that edition. I ran my finger along the spines of the other editions until I got to Rackamore’s most recent copy, and fumbled my way to the entry for Daxian. There it was:

Wheelworld in the third processional. Settled less than a century ago by venture-expansionists from the Conjugate Worlds of Thrisp and Trenniger. Diameter: sixty-six leagues. Spin-generated gravity at inner surface: nine tenths of a gee. Population one million, three hundred thousand at last census . . .

Later, when we were alone, I asked her what it had been like.

‘It wasn’t like a voice,’ she said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. ‘I know I said it was, but that was the best I could come up with. It was something different. If a voice is raised lettering, something that stands out, this was the opposite. Like a word pushed into silence, the way you can make a word into clay. Silence shouldn’t be able to do that.’ She paused – I knew she was trying to do her best to put into language something not easily explicable in anything but its own alien terms. ‘There was a mind behind that word. A monkey mind, someone like you and me, in a bone room somewhere, plugged into an alien skull. But do you remember what Cazaray said about carrier signals – that all we’re doing is imprinting our own messages on something else? There was another mind underneath the transmission. Something dead, cold and very, very alien. And yet still thinking, or still trying to think.’

‘There’s no thought going on,’ I said. ‘No neural material. Cazaray said it!’

‘He lied.’ She gave a yawn and a shrug at the same time. ‘Or he doesn’t really understand it, or he doesn’t think we’d understand it. But there’s something there, and I got a little glimpse of it, just for one fierce moment. I lied as well.’

‘About the word?’

‘No. About wanting to go back and listen again. I didn’t, Fura. It was as if someone opened a cold window at the bottom of my skull, in a room I didn’t know about, and it let something in, and whatever it is is still whistling around in the basement of my brain.’

‘But you will go back,’ I said.