The clanging thud of the shuttle door’s closing was still reverberating through the craft when there was the briefest of high, piercing whines and then an almighty clap of sound as though an angry god had taken a good run-up and kicked the vessel just as hard as he, she or it could.

Cossont blacked out.

On the raft, the mists rose like departing dreams.

She had never seen skies so big: pile after soft pile of pink and yellow, red and pale blue cloud, towering on into the lost depths of the green, shading-to-violet atmosphere, producing great hazy slanted spans and troughs of shade and enormous shafts of prismed light that lay strewn across this vault, seemingly balanced between the masses of cloud or resting one end on those ponderous, puffed, so slowly changing billows while their bases stood rooted within the utter vastness of the sea, the single great everywhere ocean with its planet-crossing swells, sky-spanning, light-defeating storms and forever restless waves. The ocean could be many colours, but to her – on a world that was all ocean with no beaches at all – it looked the colour of beach-washed jade.

Birds and airfish, singly and in vast flocks that dimmed the sun, filled the spaces between the ocean and the clouds, lazily trailing one long wing across the brief smooth curvings between the waves before disappearing amongst the long rolling troughs again, or weaving columnar patterns like grey, fractal shadows against the soaring architecture of cloud.

Higher – glimpsed sometimes between the clouds – the slow dark shapes of storeyblimps and torpedons sailed stately and serene, the storeys drifting with the winds, rising and lowering to find those likely to take them in whatever direction they wanted to go, while the slimmer lengths of the torpedons went tacking across the currents in the air.

“You’re still young. You suffer from the … sweet delusion that anything … really matters.”

“Were you this full of stool before you were a fish?”

Isserem/QiRia laughed. “Probably.” He seemed to think about it. “Definitely.”

“If nothing matters,” she asked him, “why are you even bothering to talk to me?”

“Well, quite,” he said, and nodded. He dipped his head beneath the surface of the water in the long tank, then resurfaced, wiping his face. He looked at her, blinking. “How … brave you are,” he told her. “For ever setting up … chances for me to dismiss … you.”

“Don’t,” she said. “I’m enjoying talking to you. Unless I’m tiring you. Wouldn’t want to tire you.”

He laughed again. “Now you appeal to … my desire not … to appear frail in front of … a youngster.”

“Do you ever think you might over-analyse trivial things, like conversations?”

“All … the time.”

He was resting in a long shallow tank open to the sea at one end, on a side-raft which was joined to the main structure by an articulated gantry. She lay almost naked on a lounger, a glass of water to hand.