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It was breathtaking. And gigantic, like a floating city of light it hung there in the void, shimmering and scintillating. They slowed as they approached. The mountain city filled half their vision. But was it a city? It looked . . . Louise struggled to work out exactly what it did look like. It looked like an artwork, sculpted out of a mountain of variegated crystals. It didn't look natural and it didn't look functional. But . . . did people live there? Well, not people obviously but . . . did someone live there? She couldn't see any signs of life: no vehicles, no space ships, no movement—except from the city itself which looked in a constant state of flux. Was it growing? Was it alive? Its edges wouldn't stand still. They grew; they twisted; they changed shape, colour and texture. It was . . . it was as close to indescribable as anything she'd ever seen in her life.

Home, said a voice in her head.

"Your home?" she asked.

Home, came the reply.

A dolphin appeared from nowhere and started to swim towards the island city, undulating its body through a waterless black void.

"I think we're meant to follow," said Nick.

"I think I feel safer out here," said Louise.

He shared her misgivings. Up to a point. But another part of him was drawn to that incredible structure. How could anyone not want to take a closer look? It was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen. It was the most amazing thing any human had ever seen. And it was there—right in front of him.

Okay, so there was an element of danger but was that danger any less outside the island city? If the dolphin aliens meant them harm then a few miles wasn't going to provide much protection.

"If they meant to harm us, Lou, why spend so much time making us feel better?"

"To make sure we didn't try to escape."

"So why didn't they restrain us or knock us out?"

"Maybe that comes next."

"Suit yourself. But I'm going in. They're our only chance of getting back home."

He focussed on the dolphin and pulled himself towards it. Louise followed. The city loomed above them, huge towers projecting into the void like feral skyscrapers of crystal and silk—they shone, they shimmered, they rippled in both colour and form. It was breathtaking. So much to look at, so much to comprehend.

The dolphin led them to a chasm—or was it a street?—between two massive iridescent towers. Nick scanned ahead, looking for doors or openings—markings, anything—some clue as to their nature. Were they buildings or crystals, alive or inert? Maybe it wasn't a city, maybe it was the higher dimensional equivalent of a coral reef.

But where was everybody? Were they waiting inside or was everyone invisible. Had Nick and Louise strayed into a part of the universe that evolution hadn't equipped them to comprehend? An infra-red, ultra-violet, ultra-anything-they'd-ever sensed-before realm cloaked from their sight?

But if so, how could they see the city? Or were they only seeing a subset of the city? Was it even more magnificent for those with full-spectrum sight?

The dolphin turned at an intersection. Another empty street cum chasm. This one appearing to narrow towards the top, the two sides of the street almost touching—hundreds, maybe thousands of metres above them.

Nick drifted to one side. He had to look closer, reach out and touch. Were the chasm walls solid? Could he pass straight through?

"Nick? What are you doing?" hissed Louise. She sounded like a worried parent who'd just noticed her six year-old reaching towards the most expensive vase in the shop.

"Investigating," he said. "Do you think these are buildings? I can't see any doors but maybe you just float straight through."

The wall changed as he approached. The previously flat, shiny surface suddenly incised with . . . a pattern? A triangle within a circle. Except the shape changed as he moved closer. The three sides of the triangle didn't quite meet and the circle was more like a spiral stretching impossibly back into the structure of the building. He reached out to touch it, ready to draw back at the slightest hint of danger. He . . . made contact. It was solid. He pushed harder. The wall didn't give.

"Come on, Nick. The dolphin's turning again."

He reluctantly left the structure. The whole city had to be made of higher dimensional matter. If only he had an imager!

He chased after Louise, reached the intersection where she'd last seen the dolphin, turned and . . . found an empty street.

"Where did it go?"

"I don't know," said Louise.

There was a black horizontal line halfway down the far chasm wall. Could it have gone in there?

They raced towards it. It was a letterbox opening about ten metres by one and getting smaller. Nick peered inside. It was a dark and narrowing—a tunnel—and was that a dolphin in the distance swimming away from them? He called out.

"Are we supposed to follow?"

No answer. The mouth was closing; two feet wide, eighteen inches. He had to act.

"No," said Louise. But it was too late. He'd already swept through.

The probing started almost immediately. One second he was blurring through the tunnel in pursuit of the alien, the next he was immobilised and reliving old memories. But there was no pain this time. And the speed had been toned down. Images no longer flashed stroboscopically.

"What do you want?" he asked, trying to push the images aside and shout the thought at his interrogators. "You can speak. I've heard you."

A rush of warm fuzziness swept over him. Endorphin time. Keep the patient happy and smiling.

More images flashed by, unexpected memories tumbling out—old embarrassments, triumphs, long-forgotten friends and acquaintances—all marching past in random order.

And then something even stranger happened. An art gallery appeared. One he had no memory of ever visiting. And yet there he was—Nick Stubbs—standing in front of one of the paintings. And there was Louise. She'd joined him and was pointing at a sculpture, something weird and exotic. And suddenly changing. All the exhibits were changing. And the gallery too, its walls and ceiling pushing back to double, treble its former size. A blue whale materialised, suspended from the ceiling, a dinosaur too. They were in a museum. He could see machines—cars, rockets, trains—mingled with stuffed animals and skeletons and . . .

Everything started to recede—the exhibits, the museum walls, the ceiling, everything racing into the distance. New buildings sprang up in their place; buildings he recognised, scale models of the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, Stonehenge, various chateaux and villas, bridges and towers. Avenues of Earth's architectural heritage stretched to the horizon.

And then vanished, replaced by an image of the island city. And then that too vanished and back came the museum. The two images alternating. Was that the message? The island city was a museum?

Everything went blank and then a new building appeared—half-timbered, leaded lights. It looked like an old London coffee house. He was standing outside. Louise was beside him. The door opened and sucked them inside.

Inside, it was crowded and noisy. People everywhere, bustling and talking . . . or were they talking? Their mouths moved but was that speech? It was more like a sampling of speech—random words and phrases that together made no sense. And was that Einstein over there? And Newton? Da Vinci? Nick spun from face to face. Some he recognised, some had sprouted name tags. It was like a themed fancy dress party for mankind's greatest minds. Every one of them debating with a neighbour, exchanging papers and strange objects that could have been gifts or scale models of their latest invention.

The coffee house faded and back came the museum, then the gallery, then the image of the triangle within the circle, then the island city. All five images cycling together. Were they one and the same? Was that the message? That the island city was this race's version of old London cafe society? A University cum museum cum art gallery, a place of learning and cultural exchange and it had a name—one that was represented not by spoken words but by an image—the triangle within the circle?

"Is that why you've brought us here? To become exhibits?"

Louise's voice. Was that really her? Or another projection within his mind?

"Louise?" he asked. "Is that you? Are you seeing this too?"

"Nick? What's . . ."

That's all he heard. A dozen other voices started shouting in his head. Strange voices, strange words. It sounded like a Tourrettes improv night, each word shouted out like an insult. Pig! Emblaze! Cotton! Kettle! Shingle! Other words he couldn't catch, there were so many of them, so many people talking at the same time—men, women, children.

Images appeared—heated conversations on the street, HV debates, pages from a dictionary, pages from a book—the words peeling off and being recited in a steady stream. Pain. The volume and confusion of sound was making his head ache. The images were flashing faster, the sounds louder.

"Stop!" he commanded. "Slow down!"

He was ignored. The pain increased. No friendly shot of calming endorphins this time. But something else. A sudden adrenaline-like rush of excitement. Had they pressed the wrong button? Or was he picking up their emotions?

Images flashed furiously, sounds merging into one long shrill whine. The pain was becoming unbearable, like a dentist's drill inside his head.

Something had to have gone wrong. He had to tell them. He had to make them stop. He had to . . . communicate.

He summoned up an image—the Earth from orbit—concentrated, squeezing his mind shut to the pain, taking the image and projecting it with everything he had. If they liked pictures try this one for size. "Home!" he shouted and held on to that image, trying to force all the other pictures from his mind. "Home!" Listen, goddamn you. He took another image—Louise's cottage—thrust it at them. Home! Then Louise's lounge, a fire in the hearth, Nick and Louise sat around it, smiling. Home!

"Can't you understand that?" he shouted. "We want to go home!"

* * *

Everything went black. And silent. No sound, no pain. And then . . .

Louise's lounge materialised around them. Louise was in her favourite chair, Nick was on the sofa. A fire roared in the grate, her old clock ticking on the mantelpiece. It looked so real . . .

She squeezed the arm of her chair. It had substance. It was warm to the touch. Were they really back? Had Nick actually persuaded the alien to return them home?

Nick leapt to his feet, he was patting his body. "Is this real?" he asked, shouting the question at the ceiling. "Have you really sent us back?"

Louise ran a finger along the leg of her jeans—brushed cotton. She hadn't worn a pair of brushed cotton jeans for years. Not since . . .

Footsteps from the hallway made her turn her head. A woman appeared in the lounge doorway.

"Hello," said the newcomer, smiling.

Louise blanched. It was her mother.

"We thought this would make you feel more comfortable," said her mother, looking perplexed. "Were we wrong?"

"Who are you?" asked Louise, jumping to her feet. Deep down she already knew the answer. They were still in the island city.

"We are called . . ." The woman closed her eyes and immediately an image burned inside Louise's brain. A jumbled image of colour and squiggles that meant nothing to her. "You have no word for it," continued the woman. "Why do you choose this strange method of communication? Don't you find it limiting?"

Louise couldn't answer. She just stared at the woman. Her voice, the way she held her head, the smile. She was attracted and repelled in equal measures. She wanted to run over and touch her face, hold her close but . . . she wanted to slap that face too. How dare they use her mother like that!

"It's the only method of communication we have," said Nick, breaking the silence.

"Untrue," said the alien. "You can converse normally. But you choose this . . . this verbal communication which is inherently inefficient and error-prone. Why? Is it a game or, perhaps, etiquette that demands your thoughts be encoded before transmission?"

"No," said Nick. "It's a matter of necessity. Not everyone's telepathic."

"Interesting! You are telepathic but not all your people are. Does this not cause conflict? Is that why you were travelling the far reaches—in search of like minds to form a colony?"

"No, nothing at all like that," said Nick. "We were lost . . ."

Louise couldn't take any more of this. He'd be offering the alien drinks next. She cut across the conversation.

"When are you going to take us home?" she asked.

"Ah," said her mother, turning her head to face Louise. "That is the right expression is it not? To convey a mixture of regret and embarrassment?"

Louise closed her eyes. What the hell was going to happen now?

"What's the problem?" asked Nick. "I'm sure together we can find a solution."

"As indeed are we. But," the woman shrugged, extravagantly so. "We have other obligations as you must understand. Ours is but a small colony, to survive we must occasionally undertake work for other, larger colonies, in order to gain access to their greater pools of knowledge. We cannot afford to isolate ourselves totally from the outside world. Much as we would like to."

"Get to the point," said Louise, adding "please" as an afterthought.

"As you wish. Simply put, we were told where you would be and asked to bring you here. You were . . . expected."

Louise was back on her feet. "That's impossible!" she said. "How could anyone know where we were going to be? We arrived there by accident. We had no plans to enter the void."

"That is not for us to say. But clearly it cannot be impossible for it has happened. We were commissioned by what you would call an exploration/life science colony to monitor a particular area of space in our vicinity and bring back any life forms we encountered. Their representatives have been informed of your coming and will be arriving soon to collect you. We thought you would be pleased . . ."