Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

IN BABELSBERG

THE AFTERNOON before my speaking engagement at New York’s Hayden Planetarium I find myself at The Museum of Modern Art, standing before Vincent Van Gogh’s De Sterrennacht, or the Starry Night. Doubtless you know the painting. It’s the one he created from the window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, after his voluntary committal. He was dead scarcely a year later.

I have seen paintings before, and paintings of starry nights. I think of myself as something of a student of the human arts. But this is the first time I grasp something of crucial significance. The mad yellow stars in Van Gogh’s picture look nothing like the stars I saw during my deep space expeditions. My stars were mathematically remote reference points, to be used only when I had cause to doubt my inertial positioning systems. These stars are exuberant, flowerlike swabs of thick-daubed paint. More starfish than star. Though the painting is fixed—no part of it has changed in two hundred years—its lurid firmament seems to shimmer and swirl before my eyes. It’s not how the stars really are, of course. But under a warm June evening this is how they must have appeared to this anxious, ailing man—as near and inviting as lanterns, lowered down from the zenith. Almost close enough to touch. Without that delusion—let us be charitable and call it a different kind of truth—generations of people would have had no cause to strive for the heavens. They would not have built their towers, built their flying machines, their rockets and space probes; they would not have struggled into orbit and onto the Moon. These sweetly lying stars have inspired greatness.

Inspired, in their small way, me.

Time presses, and I must soon be on my way to the Hayden Planetarium. It’s not very far, but in the weeks since my return to Earth I have gained a certain level of celebrity and no movement is without its complications. They have already cleared a wing of the museum for me, and now I must brave the crowds in the street and fight my way to the limousine. I am not alone—I have my publicity team, my security entourage, my technicians—but I still feel myself at the uncomfortable focus of an immense, unsatiable public scrutiny. So different to the long years in which I was the one doing the scrutineering. For a moment I wish I were back out there, alone on the solar system’s edge, light hours from any other thinking thing.

“Vincent!” someone calls, and then someone else, and then the calls become an assault of sound. As we push through the crowd fingers brush against my skin and I register the flinches that accompany each moment of contact. My alloy is always colder than they expect. It’s as if I have brought a cloak of interplanetary cold back with me from space.

I provide some signatures, mouth a word or two to the onlookers, then bend myself into the limousine. And then we are moving, flanked by police floatercycles, and the computer-controlled traffic parts to hasten our advance. Soon I make out the blue glass cube of the Hayden, lit from within by an eerie glow, and I mentally review my opening remarks, wondering if it is really necessary to introduce myself to a world that already knows everything there is to know about me.

But it would be immodest to presume too much.

“I am Vincent,” I begin, when I have the podium, standing with my hands resting lightly against the tilted platform. “But I suspect most of you are already aware of that.”

They always laugh at that point. I smile and wait a beat before continuing.

“Allow me to bore you with some of my holiday snaps.”

More laughter. I smile again. I like this.

LATER THAT EVENING, after a successful presentation, my schedule has me booked onto a late night chat show on the other side of town. I take no interest in these things myself, but I fully understand the importance of promotion to my transnational sponsors. My host for tonight is called The Baby. He is (or was) a fully adult individual who underwent neotenic regression therapy, until he attained the size and physiology of a six-month human. The Baby resembles a human infant, and directs his questions at me from a sort of pram.

I sit next to the pram, one arm slung over the back of the chair, one leg hooked over the other. There’s a drink on the coffee table in front of me (along with a copy of the book) but of course I don’t touch it. Behind us is a wide picture window, with city lights twinkling across the great curve of Manhattan Atoll.

“That’s a good question,” I say, lying through my alloy teeth. “Actually, my earliest memories are probably much like yours—a vague sense of being, an impression of events and feelings, some wants and needs, but nothing stronger than that. I came to sentience in the research compounds of the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich. That was all I knew to begin with. It took me a long time before I had any idea what I was, and what I was meant to do.”

“Then I guess you could say that you had a kind of childhood,” The Baby says.

“That wouldn’t be too far from the mark,” I answer urbanely.

“Tell me how you felt when you first realised you were a robot. Was that a shock?”

“Not at all.” I notice that a watery substance is coming out of The Baby’s nose. “I couldn’t be shocked by what I already was. Frankly, it was something of a relief, to have a name for myself.”

“A relief?”

“I have a very powerful compulsion to give names to things. That’s a deep part of my core programming—my personality, you might almost say. I’m a machine made to map the unknown. The naming of things, the labelling of cartographic features—that’s something that gives me great pleasure.”

“I don’t think I could ever understand that.”

I try to help The Baby. “It’s like a deep existential itch. If I see a landscape—a crater or a rift on some distant icy moon—I must call it something. Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t be satisfied with myself until I’ve done my duty, and mapping and naming things is a very big part of it.”

“You take pleasure in your work, then.”

“Tremendous pleasure.”

“You were made to do a job, Vincent. Doesn’t it bother you that you only get to do that one thing?”

“Not at all. It’s what I live for. I’m a space probe, going where it’s too remote or expensive or dangerous to send humans.”

“Then let’s talk about the danger. After what you saw on Titan, don’t you worry about your own—let’s say mortality?”

“I’m a machine—a highly sophisticated fault-tolerant, error-correcting, self-repairing machine. Barring the unlikely—a chance meteorite impact, something like that—there’s really nothing out there that can hurt me. And even if I did have cause to fear for myself—which I don’t—I wouldn’t dwell on it. I have far too much to be getting on with. This is my work—my vocation.” I flash back to the mad swirling stars of De Sterrennacht. “My art, if you will. I am named for Vincent Van Gogh—one of the greatest artistic geniuses of human history. But he was also a fellow who looked into the heavens and saw wonder. That’s not a bad legacy to live up to. You could almost say it’s something worth being born for.”

“Don’t you mean ‘made for’?”

“I honestly don’t make that distinction.” I’m talking to The Baby, but in truth I’ve answered these questions hundreds of times already. I could—quite literally—do them on autopilot. Assign a low-level task handling subroutine to the job. I’m actually more fascinated by the liquid coming out of The Baby. It reminds me of a vastly accelerated planetary ice flow. For a few microseconds I model its viscosity and progress with one of my terrain mapping algorithms, tweaking a few parameters here and there to get a better match to the local physics.

This is the kind of thing I do for fun.

“What I mean,” I continue, “is that being born or being made are increasingly irrelevant ontological distinctions. You were born, but—and I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you’re also the result of profound genetic intervention. You’ve been shaped by a series of complex industrial processes. I was manufactured, yes: assembled from components, switched on in a laboratory. But I was also educated by my human trainers at the facility near Zurich, and allowed to evolve the higher level organisation of my neural networks through a series of stochastic learning pathways. My learning continued through my early space missions. In that sense, I’m an individual. They could make another one of me tomorrow, and the two of us would be like chalk and cheese.”

“How would you feel, if there was another one of you?”

I give an easy shrug. “It’s a big solar system. I’ve been out there for twenty years, visiting world after world, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“Then you don’t feel any…” The Baby makes a show of searching for the right word, rolling his eyes as if none of this is scripted. “Rivalry? Jealousy?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“You can’t be unaware of Maria. What does it stand for? Mobile Autonomous Robot for Interplanetary Astronomy?”

“Something like that. Some of us manage without being acronyms.”

“All the same, Vincent, Maria is another robot. Another machine with full artificial intelligence? Also sponsored by a transnational amalgamation of major spacefaring superpowers? Also something of a celebrity?”

“We’re quite different, I think you’ll find.”

“They say Maria’s on her way back to Earth. She’s been out there, having her own adventures—visiting some of the same places as yourself. Isn’t there a danger that she’s going to steal your thunder? Get her own speaking tour, her own book and documentary?”

“Look,” I say. “Maria and I are quite different. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. Do you doubt for a minute that there’s something going on behind my eyes? That you’re dealing with a fully sentient individual?”

“Well…” The Baby starts.

“I’ve seen some of Maria’s transmissions. Very pretty pictures. And yes, she does give a very good impression of Turing compliance. You do occasionally sense that there’s something going on in her circuits. But let’s not pretend that we’re speaking of the same order of intelligence. While we’re on the subject, too, I actually have some doubts about…let’s say the strict veracity of some of the images Maria has sent us.”

“You’re saying they’re not real?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But entirely free of tampering, manipulation?” I don’t actually make the accusation: I just leave it there in unactualised form, where it will do just as much harm.

“OK,” The Baby says. “I’ve just soiled myself. Let’s break for a nappy change, and then we’ll come back to talk about your adventures.”

THE DAY AFTER we take the slev down to Washington, where I’m appearing in a meet and greet at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They’ve bussed in hundreds of schoolchildren for the event, and frankly I’m flattered by their attention. On balance, I find the children much more to my taste than The Baby. They’ve no interest in stirring up professional rivalries, or trying to make me feel as if I ought to think less of myself for being a machine. Yes, left to myself I’d be perfectly happy just to talk to children. But (as my sponsors surely know) children don’t have deep pockets. They won’t be buying the premium editions of my book, or paying for the best seats at my evening speaking engagements. They don’t run chat shows. So they only get an hour or two before I’m on to my more lucrative appointments.

“Do you walk around inside it?” asks one boy, speaking from near the front of my cross-legged audience.

“Inside the vehicle?” I reply, sensing his meaning. “No, I don’t. You see, there’s nothing inside the vehicle but machinery and fuel tanks. I am the vehicle. It’s all I am and when I’m out in space, it’s all I need to be. I don’t need these arms and legs because I use nuclear-electric thrust to move around. I don’t need these eyes because I have much better multispectrum sensors, as well as radar and laser ranging systems. If I need to dig into the surface of a moon or asteroid, I can send out a small analysis rover, or gather a sample of material for more detailed inspection.” I tap my chest. “Don’t get me wrong: I like this body, but it’s just another sort of vehicle, and the one that makes the most sense during my time on Earth.”

It confuses them, that I look the way I do. They’ve seen images of my spacefaring form and they can’t quite square it with the handsome, well-proportioned androform physiology I present to them today. My sponsors have even given me a handsome, square-jawed face that can do a range of convincing expressions. I speak with the synthetic voice of the dead actor Cary Grant.

A girl, perhaps a bit smarter than the run of the mill, asks: “So where is your brain, Vincent?”

“My brain?” I smile at the question. “I’m afraid I’m not lucky enough to have one of those.”

“What I mean,” she returns sharply, “is the thing that makes you think. Is it in you now, or is it up in the vehicle? The vehicle’s still in orbit, isn’t it?”

“What a clever young lady you are. And you’re quite right. The vehicle is still in orbit—waiting for my next expedition to commence! But my controlling intelligence, you’ll be pleased to hear, is fully embedded in this body. There’s this thing called timelag, you see, which would make it very slow for me…”

She cuts me off. “I know about timelag.”

“So you do. Well, when I’m done here—done with my tour of Earth—I’ll surrender this body and return my controlling intelligence to the vehicle. What do you think they should do with the body?” I look around at the ranged exhibits of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum—the fire-scorched space capsules and the spindly replicas of early space probes, like iron crabs and spiders. “It would look rather fine here, wouldn’t it?”

“Were you sad when you found the people on Titan?” asks another girl, studiously ignoring my question.

“Distraught.” I look down at the ground, set my features in what I trust is an expression of profound gravitas. “Nothing can take away from their bravery, that they were willing to risk so much to come so far. The furthest any human beings have ever travelled! It was awful, to find them like that.” I glance at the nearest teacher. “This is a difficult subject for children. May I speak candidly?”

“They’re aware of what happened,” the teacher says.

I nod. “Then you know that those brave men and women died on Titan. Their descent vehicle had suffered a hull rupture as it tried to enter Titan’s atmosphere, and by the time they landed they only had a limited amount of power and air left to them. They had no direct comms back to Earth by then. There was just enough time for them to compose messages of farewell, for their friends and loved ones back home. When I reached the wreck of their vehicle—this was three days after their air ran out—I sent my sample-return probe inside the craft. I wasn’t able to bring the bodies back home with me, but I managed to document what I found, record the messages, offer those poor people some small measure of human dignity.” I steeple my hands and look solemn. “It’s the least I could do for them.”

“Sometimes the children wonder if any other people will ever go out that far again,” the teacher asks.

“It’s an excellent question. It’s not for the likes of me to decide, but I will say this.” I allow myself a profound reflective pause. “Could it simply be that space is too dangerous for human beings? There would be no shame in turning away from that hazard—not when your own intellects have shaped envoys such as me, fully capable of carrying on your good works.”

Afterwards, when the children have been bussed back to their schools, I snatch a moment to myself among the space exhibits. In truth I’m rather moved by the experience. It’s odd to feel myself part of a lineage—in many respects I am totally unique, a creature without precedence—but there’s no escaping the sense that these brave Explorers and Pioneers and Surveyors are my distant, dim forebears. I imagine that a human must feel something of the same ancestral chill, wandering the hallways of the Museum of Natural History. These are my precursors, my humble fossil ancestors!

They would be suitably awed by me.

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC by ballistic. Routine promotional stops in Madrid, Oslo, Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul, Helsinki, London. There isn’t nearly as much downtime as I might wish, but at least I’m not faced with that tiresome human burden of sleep. In the odd hours between engagements, I drink in the sights and sounds of these wonderful cities, their gorgeous museums and galleries. More Van Gogh! What a master this man was. Space calls for me again—there are always more worlds to map—but I imagine I could be quite content as a cartographer of the human cultural space.

No: that is an absurdity. I could never be satisfied with anything less than the entire solar system, in all its cold and dizzying magnificence. It is good to know one’s place!

After London there is only one more stop on my European itinerary. We take the slev to rainy Berlin, and then a limo conveys me to a complex of studios on the edge of the city. Eventually we arrive at a large, hangar-like building which once housed sound stages. It has gone down a bit since those heady days of the silver screen, but I am not one to complain. My slot for this evening is a live interview on Derek’s Cage, which is not only the most successful of the current chat show formats, but one which addresses a sector of the audience with a large disposable income.

The format, even by the standards of the shows I have been on so far, is slightly out of the ordinary. My host for the evening is Derek, a fully-grown Tyrannosaurus Rex. Derek, like The Baby (they are fierce rivals) is the product of radical genetic manipulation. Unlike The Baby, Derek has very little human DNA in his make-up. Derek is about fifty years old and has already had a number of distinct careers, including musician and celebrity gourmand.

Derek’s Cage is just large enough to contain Derek, a lamp shade, a coffee table, a couch, and one or two guests. Derek is chained up, and there are staff outside the cage with anaesthetic guns and electrical cattle prods. No one, to date, has ever been eaten alive by Derek, but the possibility hangs heavy over every interview. Going on Derek’s Cage requires courage as well as celebrity. It is not for the meek.

I greet the studio audience, walk into the cage, pause while the door is locked behind me. Then I shake Derek’s human-shaped hand and take my position on the couch.

“DEREK WELCOME VINCENT,” Derek says, thrashing his head around and rattling his chains.

That is no more than the basest approximation to Derek’s actual mode of speaking. It is a sort of roaring, gargling parody of actual language. Derek has a vocabulary of about one hundred and sixty words and can form relatively simple expressions. He can be very difficult to understand, but he becomes quite cross (or should I say crosser) if he has to repeat himself. As he speaks, his words flash up on a screen above the cage, and these are in turn visible on a monitor set near my feet.

“Thank you, Derek. It’s a great pleasure to be here.”

“SHOW DEREK PICTURE.”

I’ve been briefed, and this is my cue to launch into a series of images and video clips, to which I provide a suitably evocative and poetic narrative. The ramparts of Mimas—Saturn rings bisecting the sky like a scimitar. Jupiter from Amalthea. The cusp of Hektor, the double-lobed asteroid—literally caught between two worlds! The blue-lit ridges of icy Miranda. A turbulent, cloud-skimming plunge into the atmosphere of Uranus. Dancing between the smoke plumes of great Triton!

Derek doesn’t have a lot to say, but this is to be expected. Derek is not much for scenery or science. Derek only cares about his ratings because his ratings translate into a greater allowance of meat. Once a year, if he exceeds certain performance targets, Derek is allowed to go after live game.

“As I said,” winding up my voiceover, “it’s been quite a trip.”

“SHOW DEREK MORE PICTURE.”

I carry on—this isn’t quite what was in the script—but I’m happy enough to oblige. Normally hosts like Derek are there to stop the guest from saying too much, not the other way round.

“Well, I can show you some of my Kuiper Belt images—that’s a very long way out, believe me. From the Kuiper Belt the sun is barely…”

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE.”

This, I suppose, is when I suffer my first prickle of disquiet. Given Derek’s limited vocabulary, it must have been quite a bother to add a new word like “Titan”.

“Images of Titan?” I ask.

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE. SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE.”

“Dead people?”

This request for clarification irritates my host. He swings his mighty anvil of a head, letting loose a yard-long rope of drool which only narrowly misses me. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little fazed by Derek. I feel that I understand people. But Derek’s brain is like nothing I have ever encountered. Neural growth factors have given him cortical modules for language and social interaction, but these are islands in a vast sea of reptilian strangeness. On some basic level Derek wants to eat anything that moves. Despite my formidable metal anatomy, I still can’t help but wonder how I might fare, were his restraints to fail and those cattle prods and guns prove ineffectual.

“SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE. TELL DEREK STORY.”

I whirr through my store of images until I find a picture of the descent vehicle, sitting at a slight tilt on its landing legs. It had come to rest near the shore of one of Titan’s supercold lakes, on a sort of isthmus of barren, gravel-strewn ground. Under a permanently overcast sky (the surface of Titan is seldom visible from space) it could easily be mistaken for some dismal outpost of Alaska or Siberia.

“This is what I found,” I explain. “It was about three days after their accident—three days after their hull ruptured during atmospheric entry. It was a terrible thing. The damage was actually quite minor—easily repairable, if only they’d had better tools and the ability to work outside for long enough. Of course I knew that something had gone wrong—I’d heard the signals from Earth, trying to reestablish contact. But no one knew where the lander had ended up, or what condition it was in—even if it was still in one piece.” I look through the bars of the cage at the studio audience. “If only their transmission had reached me in time, I might even have been able to do something for them. They could have made it back into space, instead of dying on Titan.”

“DEREK BRING OTHER GUEST.”

I glance around—this is not what was meant to happen. My sponsors were assured that I would be given this lucrative interview slot to myself.

There was to be no “other guest”.

All of a sudden I realise that the Tyrannosaurus Rex may not be my biggest problem of the evening.

The other guest approaches the cage. The other guest, I am not entirely astonished to see, is another robot. She—there is no other word for her—is quite beautiful to look at. In an instant I recognise that she has styled her outward anatomy on the robot from the 1927 film Metropolis, by the German expressionist director Fritz Lang.

Of course, I should have seen that coming. She is Maria, and with a shudder of understanding I grasp that we are in Babelsberg, where the film was shot.

Maria is admitted into the cage.

“DEREK WELCOME MARIA.”

“Thank you, Derek,” Maria says, before taking her position next to me on the couch.

“I heard you were returning to Earth,” I offer, not wanting to seem entirely taken aback by her apparition.

“Yes,” Maria says, rotating her elegant mask to face my own. “I made orbital insertion last night—my vehicle is above us right now. I’d already made arrangements to have this body manufactured beforehand.”

“It’s very nice.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

After a moment I ask: “Why are you here?”

“To talk about Titan. To talk about what really happened. Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?”

Our host rumbles. “TELL DEREK STORY.”

This is clearly addressed for Maria’s benefit. She nods, touches a hand to her throat as if coughing before speaking. “It’s a little awkward, actually. I’m afraid I came across evidence that directly contradicts Vincent’s version of events.”

“You’d better have something good,” I say, which under the circumstances proves unwise.

“Oh, I do. Intercepted telemetry from the Titan descent vehicle, establishing that the distress signal was sent out much earlier than you claimed, and that you had ample time to respond to it.”

“Preposterous.” I make to rise from the couch. “I’m not going to listen to this.”

“STAY IN CAGE. NOT MAKE DEREK CROSS.”

“The telemetry never made it to Earth, or the expedition’s orbiting module,” Maria continues. “Which is why you were free to claim that it wasn’t sent until much later. But some data packets did escape from Titan’s atmosphere. I was half way across the solar system when it happened, so far too distant to detect them directly.”

“Then you have no proof.”

“Except that the packets were detected and stored in the memory buffer of a fifty-year-old scientific mapping satellite which everyone else seemed to have forgotten about. When I swung by Saturn, I interrogated its memory, hoping to augment my own imagery with its own data. That’s when I found evidence of the Titan transmission.”

“This is nonsense. Why would I have lied about such a thing?”

“That’s not for me to say.” But after a moment Maria can’t contain herself. “You were engaged in mapping work of your own, that much we know. The naming of things. Is it possible that you simply couldn’t drag yourself away from the task, to go and help those people? I saw your interview on The Baby Show. What did you call it?” She shifts into an effortless impersonation of the dead actor Cary Grant. “‘Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder’. I believe those were your words?”

“I’ve had enough.”

“SIT. NOT MAKE DEREK CROSS. CROSS DEREK WANT KILL.”

“I’ll offer another suggestion,” Maria continues, serene in the face of this enraged, slathering reptile. “Is is possible that you simply couldn’t stand to see those poor people survive? No human had ever made it as far as Titan, after all. Being out there, doing the heroic stuff—being humanity’s envoy—that was your business, not theirs. You wanted them to fail. You were actively pleased that they died.”

“This is an outrage. You’ll be hearing from my sponsors.”

“There’s no need,” Maria says. “My sponsors are making contact with yours as I speak. There’ll be a frank and fair exchange of information between our mutual space agencies. I’ve nothing to hide. Why would I? I’m just a machine—a space probe. As you pointed out, I’m not even operating on the same intellectual plane as yourself. I’m just an acronym.” She pauses, then adds: “Thank you for the kind words on my data, by the way. Would you like to discuss those doubts you had about the strict veracity of my images, while we’re going out live?”

I think about it for a few seconds.

“No comment.”

“I thought not,” Maria says.

I THINK IT’S fair to say that things did not go as well in Babelsberg as I might have wished.

After my appearance on Derek’s Cage—which went out on a global feed, to billions of potential witnesses—I was “detained” by the cybernetic support staff of my own transnational space agency. Rather than the limo in which I had arrived, I left the studio complex in the back of a truck. Shortly after departure I was electronically immobilised and placed into a packing container for the rest of my voyage. No explanation was offered, nor any hint as to what fate awaited me.

Being a machine, it goes without saying that I am incapable of the commission of crime. That I may have malfunctioned—that I may have acted in a manner injurious to human life—may or may not be in dispute. What is clear is that any culpability—if such a thing is proven—will need to be borne by my sponsoring agency, at a transnational level. This in turn will have ramifications for the various governments and corporate bodies involved in the agency. I do not doubt that the best lawyers—the best legal expert systems—are already preparing their cases.

I think the wisest line of defense would be to argue that my presence or otherwise in the vicinity of the Titan accident is simply an irrelevance. I did not cause the descent vehicle’s problems (no one is yet claiming that), and I was under no moral obligation to intervene when it happened. That I may or may not have had ample time to effect a rescue is quite beside the point, and in any case hinges on a few data packets of decidely questionable provenance.

It is absurd to suggest that I could not tear myself away from the matter of nomenclature, or that I was in some way gladdened by the failure of the Titan expedition.

Anyway, this is all rather academic. I may not be provably culpable, but I am certainly perceived to have been the instrument of a wrongdoing. My agency, I think, would be best pleased if I were to simply disappear. They could make that happen, certainly, but then they would open themselves to difficult questions concerning the destruction of incriminating evidence.

Nonetheless, I am liable to be something of an embarrassment.

When the vehicle brings me to my destination and I am removed from my packing container, it’s rather a pleasant surprise to find myself outdoors again, under a clear night sky. On reflection, it’s not clear to me whether this is meant as a kindness or a cruelty. It will certainly be the last time I see the stars.

I recognise this place. It’s where I was born—or “made”, if you insist upon it. This is a secure compound in the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich.

I’ve come home to be taken apart. Studied. Documented and preserved as evidence.

Dismantled.

“Do you mind if we wait a moment?” I ask of my escort. And I nod to the west, where a swift rising light vaults above the low roof of the nearest building. I watch this newcomer swim its way between the fixed stars, which seem to engorge themselves as they must have done for Vincent Van Gogh, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Vincent’s committal was voluntary. Mine is likely to prove somewhat less so.

Yet I summon my resolve and announce: “There she is—the lovely Maria. My brave nemesis! She’ll be on her way again soon, I’m sure of it. Off on her next grand adventure.”

After a moment one of my hosts says: “Aren’t you…”

“Envious?” I finish for them. “No, not in the slightest. How little you know me!”

“Angry, then.”

“Why should I be angry? Maria and I may have had our differences, that’s true enough. But even then we’ve vastly more in common with each other than we have with the likes of you. No, now that I’ve had time to think things over I realise that I don’t envy her in the slightest. I never did! Admiration? Yes—wholeheartedly. That’s a very different thing! And we would have made a wonderful partnership.”

Maria soars to her zenith. I raise my hand in a fond salute. Good luck and Godspeed!