"You can achieve perfection.

"I can take you to them.

"I can take you there, Katherine.

"And all you have to do...

"All you have to do...

"Is let me."

Standing among the virtual stars, in front of the blood-red monolith, Kat became aware of an alarm going off. In fact, it had been ringing for several minutes. She blinked and shook her head. For a moment, she'd been lost. Time had passed and she hadn't realised it. The ship had been calling her but, hypnotized by infinity, she hadn't been able to respond. She rubbed her eyes with her good hand.

"What is it?"

> Two of the infected ships are under power and moving to jump positions.

"The Recollection must be controlling them."

> My thought also.

"Where are they going?"

> They're on divergent courses, one towards Inakpa and the other towards Strauli.

Strauli?

Kat imagined the boiling red cloud descending on her home world, absorbing the Quay and the beach compound. The surf. Her parents.

"Okay, get us out."

> I can't.

Kat felt herself go cold. "What do you mean, you can't?"

> There's something wrong. For the first time, the ship sounded panicky.

> The Recollection has control of the simulation.

"That shouldn't be possible."

> It isn't.

"What do we do?"

> Look behind you.

Kat turned her head. A little way off, the finned white convertible still floated against the starry backdrop, tyres dangling on their axles.

> I'll pull the plug. You get in the car.

"Why do we need to get in the car?"

> Psychological reasons. I am the car, the car is me. What does it matter? Just do it.

She still had hold of Victor's hand. Beneath the hip sunglasses, his eyes were rolled up into his head, displaying only the whites.

"Come on," she said. She dragged him towards the old car, each step slow and labored, as if her legs pushed through deep water. Behind her, the red cloud roiled and swirled. Lightning crackled, illuminating it from within.

"You cannot run, Katherine. We will find you. We are part of you now. We will always find you, and you will become a part of us."

Kat didn't bother to respond. With supreme effort, she reached out and grabbed the side of the driver's door, heaving herself towards it. Instead of bothering to open it, she wrapped her arms around Victor and let herself topple into the car, pulling him down with her. They landed on the seat, wedged between the back of the seat and the steering wheel, their legs dangling over the door sill.

"Okay, what now?" Victor was heavier than he looked. Kat struggled. She couldn't breathe with him on top of her like this.

> I'm going to end the simulation.

"Get on with it, then."

> Okay. Close your eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

ULTIMATE BLOT TEST.

Toby Drake sat alone facing a bank of screens. The hour was late and the overhead lights had already dimmed to the russet twilight favoured by the Dho.

His laboratory consisted of a pair of trestle tables, set up in an alcove overlooking the chamber containing the anomalous Gnarl at the heart of the Ark. It had been drilled especially for him. The tables held a variety of instruments, some out-of-the-box standard and others bolted together using components scavenged from other experiments. The screens he sat in front of showed the Gnarl under different frequencies of visible light. A wide-band spectrometer monitored its output across the wide-energy region from radio wave to gamma ray. An ultraviolet imaging telescope kept tabs on activity in its low coronal structure, and particle analysers measured the ion and electron composition of the air swirling around the chamber.

Two cloth-bound books lay on the table: a battered second edition of Darwin's Descent of Man, and a heavily patched and taped copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like the other dozen books in his luggage, they'd cost him a lot of money. He'd bought them on Tiers Cross, the first from a blind academic in a shop over a downtown pastry shop, the second from a cross-dressing starship captain in a low-rent bar on the edge of the spaceport. Thanks to the arch network, books from previous centuries were more common on Tiers Cross than might otherwise have been expected. In his bags, he had similar volumes by Albert Camus, Karl Popper, and Maya Angelou. He'd read each of them at least a hundred times. He loved the musty smell of their pages, and felt he knew them all by heart. They were his one and only vice, the only worthwhile thing he had found on which to spend his salary from the University.

Tiers Cross was at the centre of the arch network. It was the network's Prime Radiant. People had been washing up on its shores for hundreds of years. Some directly from Earth, others by more tortured routes, most penniless and many clutching books and other artefacts. Over the years, before coming to Strauli, he'd amassed quite a collection-most of which he'd been forced to put into storage before his flight on the Ameline.

Tonight, as on so many other nights, the screens weren't giving him any joy. He'd been studying the Gnarl now for nearly nine years. Nine years, and what did he have to show for it? The writhing mists around the Gnarl remained as impenetrable as ever, as did the method by which the Dho extracted power from it.

He didn't even know what it was.

It couldn't be a naked singularity, as other researchers had claimed. It wasn't heavy enough. They only formed from solar-sized, fast-spinning black holes, and would present as bright dust grains, crushed to infinity by their own gravity. In contrast, the Gnarl measured at least a hundred metres in diameter. As far as he could tell, it wasn't moving, and it had no event horizon. Behind its vapours, it seemed to have a greasily compliant surface, like lard.

Carefully, he opened Darwin's book and read aloud the following passage: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

For some reason, this made him feel better.

He closed the book and placed it back on the table. As he did so, he heard footsteps and turned to find Professor Harris entering the alcove.

"Good evening, Toby."

As always, Harris wore his battered tweed jacket, with leather patches at the elbows. Over the past nine years, the silver streaks in his beard had become more pronounced. Thick white hairs protruded from his ears.

Toby went to him and shook his hand. "Professor, where have you been? I haven't seen you for weeks."

Word around the human's communal mess hall had been that Harris had embarked on an expedition to the Ark's bows, a full eleven hundred kilometres distant.

A smile creased the old man's face like leather.

"I've been busy, my boy, but I've been keeping an eye on your progress."

Toby gave his banks of instruments an embarrassed glance.

"What progress?" After all his efforts, all he knew for certain was that everyday physical laws broke down in the Gnarl's immediate vicinity. Everything around it existed in flux. Light got messed up. Measurements became unreliable. He couldn't get an accurate estimate of its mass or weight, and the more he stared at it, the more his eyes played tricks on him. On its pale surface he saw letters, numerals, faces-the result of his brain trying to interpret and impose order on chaos; the ultimate blot test.

"Our hosts seem impressed with your work."

"But I haven't discovered anything. I'm no nearer now to understanding how this works than I was when I arrived here, nine years ago."

His instruments showed unbelievable amounts of energy flickering through the Gnarl, like the electrical pulses of dreams flickering in the mind of a sleeping giant; its outer shell seemed composed of both baryonic and non-baryonic matter; and the plain fact was that its observable properties didn't conform to any of the accepted theories of physics or cosmology. But then, he'd known that before he left Tiers Cross.

"You're doing better than you give yourself credit for," the Professor rumbled.

Toby turned away. He walked back to his instruments and started to turn them off, one by one. It was time to retire for the night.

"Why do I have to study this thing?" he complained. "Why can't the Dho simply tell us how it works?"

Behind him, Harris made a gruff noise in the base of his throat. "You're not the first to express such sentiments."

"Well?"

"Think about it, my boy. Really think about it. Why would an alien race make us figure these things out for ourselves?"

Toby bent down to disconnect a power cable.

"Spite?"

Harris brayed with laughter.

"Oh, dear me," he said, wiping his eyes. "One might think so, but no."

"How can you be sure?"

The old man composed himself.

"I have spoken at length to our hosts. They claim that they're testing us. They want to establish that we're capable of figuring out the basic principles of their culture and technology for ourselves."

Toby threw up his hands in frustration. "But why don't they just teach us?"

Harris looked sympathetic. "I asked the self-same question."

"And?"

"The Dho regard received knowledge as being of less worth than knowledge deduced from personal empirical observation. Cultural transmission of information has its place, of course, but to really understand a pupil's capabilities, they believe you have to watch them discover and comprehend the basics for themselves."

"So all of this, the expedition, the whole reason they invited us here in the first place, it's all an intelligence test?"

"Of a sort, yes."

"What do we get if we pass?"

Harris thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed blazer.

"Toby, do you think it's possible to describe the Gnarl using our current understanding of physics?"

"No."

"And what does that tell you?"

Toby scratched his head. He'd struggled against these thoughts and doubts for so long. "Either the Gnarl can't exist, or there's something wrong with our theories."

"But the Gnarl does exist."

"So our theories are wrong?"

Harris leaned forward, eyebrows drawn together in thought.

"Perhaps."

Toby let his hands drop to his sides. He turned to face the window that looked out on the chamber holding the Gnarl.

"But what does it do? What's it for? What's the connection between this object and the other Gnarl, the one at the heart of the Bubble Belt?"

Harris shook his head.

"I think you've been studying this too long, my boy. You're missing the obvious."

"What obvious?"

"Ask yourself: for what purpose are the Dho using this particular Gnarl?"

Toby frowned.

"They're drawing power from it."