Although he wasn’t the mouthpiece Kay would have chosen for the human race, he was saying what they were all surely thinking.

There were no cities, not even a hamlet or a wattle-and-daub hut; no straight lines that might betoken roads, tracks or a sophisticated telecommunications network. There were no forests—no trees at all, in fact, nor bushes, hedgerows or anything resembling any biome Kay might recognize. No dinosaurs lumbered ponderously over the sward, nor could she see mammoths or cattle or any moving thing. Kay called for magnification, and a section of the membrane sharpened and twisted obligingly, throwing the ground below into exaggerated focus. Yet the close view was almost the same as the far, the same details at a different scale.

“What’re we looking at? Fractal Park?” Mal asked blankly.

Kay could see her point. There was something covering the visible land, and it came in a range of colours and textures. Adjusting her mental scale, she reckoned none of this ground cover would have come past her ankle, but it carpeted every available surface they could see like lichen or moss, or particularly meagre heather. It wasn’t like any plant Kay knew, though. In place of the dendritic branching she might have expected, everything was weirdly tessellated. She could make out assemblages of geometrical shapes cast in flat, leathery material, grey and brown and dull russet. As far as the eye could see, the world was like a patchwork quilt made from the corduroy offcuts of a geography teacher’s wardrobe.

“Atmospheric oxygen is low, beyond regret,” Ertil reported.

“Under two per cent,” Kay agreed. “No ozone layer either, so ultraviolet radiation would fry us, although…” She squinted at what Cam was showing her. “Our host can shield us, should anyone want to go hiking.”

Kay was about to ask if Cam itself was at risk, but the trilobite ship could endure the vacuum of space, so current conditions were probably balmy for it. She glanced at its avatar: no clues as to what its parent entity was thinking.

Then its “face” rippled around to look at her, and it said, “We have detected the shadow of a field that is distorting the Innerwards–Outerwards axis.”

Kay took a moment to translate that. What it chiefly suggested was that they had come to the right place. “A ‘shadow’…?” she prompted, because Cam was reaching for human expressions and she wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

“The force itself is not detectable to us, although we are refining our senses even now,” Cam reported. Kay realized that “we” was not just the royal self-designation of a godlike entity. It meant its fellows: the dozen other living ships that had accompanied them. “However, we can calculate hypothetical attributes of the force from its effect on those measurements we are able to take.”