I wouldn’t stop there, though, because even then I wouldn’t have got you seeing it exactly the way it was. So I’d carry on and mention how the light stabbed at us, withdrew, stabbed again – each flare the moment a single world tricked the Old Sun’s light in exactly the right fashion to send it spearing into our eyes, before its orbit or angle bent the light elsewhere. You couldn’t point to a single glint and say that was a certain world, but in your head, knowing what you did, you knew each must have had its instant. Even your own little world.

It was a lovely thing, what people had made of the Congregation. We couldn’t take credit for the worlds, no. It wasn’t us who’d done the Sundering, or put all the pieces back together again. People, yes, but not us. But we could take credit for spreading back through the worlds, finding places to live again, and doing so in something close to peace and harmony for more than eighteen centuries.

And yet, moved as I was by all this – struck through by a powerful, wrenching homesickness – I couldn’t shake the words of Cap’n Rack in his library.

That all the Occupations end up being temporary, and ours wasn’t going to be any different.

‘Brabazul’s Ruin,’ he said. ‘And no, it won’t be our ruin – not if I’ve any say in it. Some of you will have heard of it – Loftling’s crew scored here pretty well, back in 1754. But they were late hauling in and they didn’t have time to go very deep before it was time to back out. Vaspery came out here again in ’81, but the bauble didn’t open. It’s held to a fairly predictable cycle since then, but in eighteen years no one’s chanced another expedition. Prozor – you can disregard the auguries in your book. Cazaray pulled updated numbers through the skull just before we reached Mazarile.’

‘Nice of him to say so,’ she said.

‘Nice of him to keep a commercial secret, you mean, so that we can all divide the quoins when it pays off?’ Rackamore didn’t wait for her answer. ‘If the auguries are righteous, by my reading she’ll open for us in two and a bit days, a whisker over fifty hours from now.’

It was the start of evening watch. Fifty hours would take us to just after midnight.