Because he was no fool either, he considered that if they were able to repair the walls of the world, they might all end up stuck on the wrong side. Perhaps they would be marooned on this dying, poisonous world. Or they’d squeak their way back to the Cousins’ carefully manicured pastoral idyll, but get no further. He, Julian Sabreur, would have sacrificed himself to the greater good. His own minute contribution towards getting the relevant intelligentsia to this point might result in his never returning home. And he could genuinely live with that, he found. Not his preferred outcome, but he’d trade his own future for a restoration of normality.

The waiting was the problem, though. If there was a switch, then the boffins were still fumbling in the dark for it. It had been three days of being cooped up. Cam was proving to be a good host, under the circumstances. There was a chamber for necessary biological functions—which was a horrible thought given they were inside a living creature. Cam had also opened orifices in one of the walls that could dispense food. Moreover, as a side effect of talking shop with Khan, it had apparently picked up something about cuisine. People were still experimenting with asking for particular dishes. The hit rate, in palatability, was about fifty per cent. However, Julian grudgingly admitted that wasn’t a bad outcome and tried to forget it was created inside the organs of a bug. All in all, though, if he was going to be swallowed by a monster, he’d rather it had all mod cons. Jonah, as Alison said, never had it so good.

At least she was with him. Often, she was distant, and he could feel the temperature drop when he approached her as she worked her contacts with the “Fishnet.” That was also reassuring, in a strange way. The tools were different, but she was still doing what she did best—analysing data. He wondered if that was why the icy artificial mind found her so conducive. Maybe Charen Volkovska, the stock market systems admin, had thought in the same way.

Right now, they were sitting in Cam’s forward chamber, trying to ignore the dangling marionette at their back for the sake of the view below. The trilobite was still cruising through the deep ocean, its luminescence picking out the great folded carpet of the Ediacaran. He gathered that it was a composite creature, simultaneously many and one. Auruthmer had done her best to explain, adding to and modifying her earlier account of parallel worlds to include a new first chapter. But she was guessing, as much as anything, simplifying for children.

He stared moodily at the undulating sea floor below them. This was another dead section, he’d been told.

“How can it die, though?” he said out loud. “Why now?”