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scope that worked on the immer like the flat bottom of a glass pushed down on water. I’d seen right into it then, up close, and that had changed me. Don’t ask me to describe that , I’d have said.
    The Wasp went in hard. I was inexperienced but I could easily grit through the nausea that, despite my training, I felt. Even cosseted in that manchmal-field I felt all the tugs of strange velocity, as we moved in what were not really directions, and the misleading gravity bubble we’d brought with us did its best. But I was much too anxious not to disgrace myself to give in to awe. That came only later, after our indulgence was ended, after we’d been put to initial frantic duties and then after those were finished, when we’d reached a cruising depth of immersion.
    What we do, what we can do—immersers—is not just keep ourselves stable, sentient and healthy in the immer, stay able to walk and think, eat, defecate, obey and give orders, make decisions, judge immerstuff, the paradata that approximate distances and conditions, without being crippled with always-sick. Though that’s not nothing. It isn’t only that we have, some say (and some refute), a certain flatness of imagination that keeps the immer from basilisking us out of usefulness. We’ve learnt its caprices, to travel it, but knowledge can always be learnt.
    Ships while still in the manchmal—Terre ones, I mean, I’ve never been on any exot vessels that abjure the immer and I know nothing about the ways they move—are heavy boxes full of people and stuff. Immerse, into the immer, where the translations of their ungainly lines have purpose, and they’re gestalts of which we’re part, each of us a function. Yes, we’re a crew working together like any crew, but more. The engines take us out of the sometimes, but it’s we who do the taking, too; it’s we who push the ship as well as it that pulls us. It’s us tacking and involuting through the ur-space, the shifts in it we call tides. Civilians, even those awake not puking or weeping, can’t do that. The fact is a lot of the bullshit we tell you about the immer is true. We’re still playing you, when we tell you: the story dramatises, even without lying.
    “This is the third universe,” I told Scile. “There’ve been two others before this. Right?” I didn’t know how much civilians knew: this stuff had become my common sense. “Each one was born different. It had its own laws—in the first one they reckon light was about twice as fast as it is here now. Each one was born and grew and got old and collapsed. Three different sometimes. But below all that, or around it, or whatever, there’s only ever been one immer, one always.”
    He did know all that, it turned out. But to be told these everyday facts by an immerser made them something new, and he listened like a boy.
    W E WERE in a bad hotel on the outskirts of Pellucias, a small city popular with tourists because of the gorgeous magmafalls it straddles. It’s the capital of a small country on a world the name of which I don’t remember. In the everyday, it’s not in our galaxy, it’s off somewhere light-aeons away, but it and Dagostin are close neighbours via the immer.
    By then I was seasoned enough. I’d been to many places. I was between commissions, when I met Scile, spending a couple of local weeks on self-granted shore leave before I went for another job. I was picking up rumours—of new immertech, exploration, dubious missions. The hotel bar was full of immersers and other port life, travellers recovering, and, this time, academics. I was pretty familiar with all but the last of these types. In the lobby was an ad for a course in The Healing Power of Story, at which I made rude noises. A trid of turning and altering words floated the corridors, welcoming guests to the inaugural meeting of the Gold and Silver Circuits Board; to a convocation of Shur’asi philosopher-bureaucrats; to CHEL, the Conference of Human Exoterre