The guards all knew Agata by sight, but she still had to sign a patch to enter the workshop. When she reached the Surveyor, Verano and half a dozen of his team were conducting inspections – shining serious-looking instruments on the polished grey stone around the edges of the rebounder panels – but he motioned to her to go inside anyway.

The airlock’s safety mechanisms had been disengaged to allow people to crawl through the entry hatch unimpeded. Agata emerged in the front of the upturned cabin and slid down the tarpaulin that had been spread protectively across the long, curved clearstone window that presently faced the workshop’s floor.

As she rose to her feet she heard a rustle of paper from one of the rooms above her. ‘Hello?’ she called up.

‘It’s only us!’ Azelio replied. The first two faces that appeared staring down at her belonged to Azelio’s niece and nephew, Luisa and Lorenzo. ‘Come and join us,’ Azelio suggested, squatting down to shoo the children away from the opening.

Agata climbed the rope ladder up to the doorway and clambered into the cabin. After going through the turnaround it was easy to adjust her perceptions to make everything look normal; all the vertical shelves running along the wall in front of her served as a perfect cue to define the ultimate, functional orientation of the room.

The children had a thick sheaf of pictures with them that they were in the process of pinning to the soft wooden board on which they knelt. ‘This is just the start,’ Luisa explained. ‘There’s a new one for every stint.’

‘Every stint of your uncle’s journey?’

‘Yes.’

Agata was impressed. ‘That’s a lot of pictures.’ All the ones she could see looked like impressions from the children’s own skin – there were no photographs or artificial images. Some were obviously meant as portraits of family members, but there were more fanciful works as well: scenes with strange animals surrounded by giant flowers; Esilio suspended in the void, sprouting improbably huge mountains, the black disc of its sun covering the star trails. ‘You’re good at keeping the colours aligned,’ she said. ‘I could never do that.’ It was quite a skill to raise exactly the right shapes for each dye, with enough precision that the combined result of three or four separate impressions was as sharp as this.

‘I can teach you,’ Luisa offered.

‘I won’t have time.’

‘I’ll teach you when you get back.’ Luisa smoothed the paper beneath her hands but turned her rear gaze to Agata. ‘It’s not so long that I’ll have forgotten how. I’ll only be seven.’

‘Is this the Surveyor?’ Agata asked, pointing to a grey lenticular shape with a beam of yellow light emerging from the middle.

Lorenzo said, ‘Yes. I did that one.’

‘Is it going to Esilio, or coming back?’