Eudoxia glided through the darkness like a speck of glass, quietly and precisely, in the shadow of a stray planet that no one had ever named except herself. Lidia Karo had christened it Kairos in her mind - a time that coincides with an occasion - and now, as she saw through the porthole in the observation section the arc of black ice enveloping its orbit, she had no doubt that the word would stick to this expedition forever. Behind the ice ring shimmered a pulsar, sharp as a needle. A narrow needle of light that regularly stabbed the cosmic night. - 'Phase drift minus two milliseconds,' reported Orpheus, the ship's artificial intelligence, whose voice modulated softly, as if it didn't want to introduce anxiety into the already tense silence. - The signal from Lighthouse-6 remains correlated with the pulsar emission. Suggestion: correct approach vector three degrees to the left. - Correct,' Lidia replied, without taking her eyes off the charts. There was something hidden in the radio sine wave, in the tiny wobbles at the tip of the wave, that she could not ignore. An arrangement of ones and zeros, in painstakingly arranged packets, spat out her name. Not a character code, not a random correspondence. The pulsar pattern was prompting "Lidia" at the speed of a lullaby she remembered from her childhood. Yes, that lullaby. That "There goes the sky in the dark night" that her grandmother used to sing, pointing her finger at the windows where the yellow squares of light burned. Today those squares were screens and the light was the temperature of laboratory white, but the rhythm relentlessly persisted. - 'I don't like it when the cosmos knows your name,' muttered Maks Iwaszkiewicz, the pilot, sitting half-turned in his chair and pretending to study chart updates. In reality, he was following Lidia's profile - hair pinned up, hands trembling by a fraction of a millimetre, an internal rhythm that could not find an external one. - It reminds me of all stories that end badly. - From the stories I am, from the helm you are," she cut off softly. - Orpheus, thermal readings. - Lighthouse-6 is showing anomalies. The outer structure has a temperature three degrees above absolute zero. The interior... - the AI hesitated, which in his case meant one colour change and two short pauses - ...the interior maintains nineteen degrees Celsius. Pressure: six hundred hectopascals. Presumed composition: nitrogen 68%, oxygen 28%, the rest trace. - Does the lighthouse have an atmosphere? - Żaneta Wróbel, the ship's engineer, slid out from under the instrument panel, from which she had just extracted a small cable chip, and looked at the screen. - Who is feeding her? Who is keeping her warm? - 'According to Agency records, no one for seventy years,' Orpheus replied. - Lantern-6 was decommissioned after a series of failures. Last log: 'Transfer to parking orbit and deactivated'. Eudoxia stretched the armour to micrometre deviations, preparing for approach. Flakes of black ice floated behind the portholes - not literally black, but so cold that they swallowed the light and gave it back late, in bruised flashes of stimulated fluorescence. Lidia watched as one of the crystals, the size of an entire Eudoxia, rotated lazily and revealed a bubble of gas within it, a trapped ball of mist. She thought of the snowballs with a dummy city inside that she used to shake as a child. Someone shook the lantern too, made it shine back. - 'I remind you of the procedure,' she said, tightening the buckle at the collar of her suit. - 'We swim up, anchor to the service segment, transfer to the airlock. Me and Maks go in, Zaneta stays and keeps us on a short leash. We retrieve the logs, check the source of the emissions, get out. Zero archaeology, zero bravado. - What if Latarnia-6 sings you a lullaby again, more emphatically? - Zaneta bared her teeth in a smile that, in her delivery, meant as much as concern. - I'll tape the audio channel to you and play jazz. You'll thank me. - Record anything for me, as long as it doesn't involve a saxophone,' Lidia replied with a shadow of a smile, then looked into the camera. - 'Orpheus, if anything on board the lighthouse tries to identify us by voice, cut it off immediately. - Command confirmed. I am setting the filters. The docking connectors squeaked as Eudoxia hugged the cold metal skin of Lighthouse-6. The small structure, resembling a combination of an old lighthouse and a coffee can - a cylinder with a wreath of sensors and antennae, some broken, some rusted from micro-impacts of dust - rotated very slowly. On its side, where ship names used to be painted, someone had once carved a number. Now what was left of the number were a few deeply scratched lines and a shadow of paint that the cosmic winds had evaporated, leaving only symmetrical patches on the surface. And yet, in the pulsar's light, the contours of something else were drawn: marks on the sides that resembled those of river pilots from old Earth - crosses, arrows, simple griffins. Who in the void marks the way with the alphabet of the lowlands? The lock hissed and opened reluctantly. Lidia raised the peephole and froze for a moment. The air - she really felt it. Faint, with a sweet hint of ageing filters, slightly humid. The sensors on her wrist registered the composition, Orpheus confirmed - within human tolerance, though not ideal. Maks tilted his head and looked around the cramped service corridor, which felt like someone had cleaned it yesterday. The edges of the panels scuffed, no dust on the handrails. On the floor - something that looked like a shoe print, or maybe just a shadow fantasy. - 'We don't take the helmets apart,' Lidia reminded her, although her hand was scabbing at the buckle. A recipe is a recipe. - Let's go. Simple lights led them through the narrow passageways, raised by motion detectors only as they passed - as if the lantern didn't want to waste energy on witnessless views. The walls were peeling paint the colour of long-vanished copper. Somewhere further on there was an echoing clatter, as if a hot water pipe groaned as it expanded. Time and again Maks cast glances over his shoulder. - Can you see the cracks? - He asked quietly, pointing to places where someone had once disturbed the sterile purity of the aluminium with a sharp tool. - Like an old map. Here - two dashes, here - a circle. Lidia did not answer immediately. Firstly, because the scratches were arranged in a sequence that she associated all too strongly with the windmills and lighthouses of the Baltic coasts, where she spent every summer before flying into the air and beyond. Secondly, because the lullaby theme came back in her headphones. This time softer, not from the outside, but as if from the metal seams around them. "There goes the sky in the dark night" - the sound had no words, yet syllables were forming in her head. - Orpheus? - she whispered. - The source of the signal: here. Inside. Vector: 34 degrees left, thirty metres ahead. Firing registration. Note: I detect a second modulation, correlated with biometry. This is the voice... - I know whose,' Lidia said before the AI could finish. Suddenly, sharply, came the smell of resin. So intense that it was sweet. Even through the filters she could smell it. - Give me a picture when we go in. The doors to the central chamber did not need to be opened manually. They slid open with a sound that was associated with a well-oiled rail. Lidia and Maks stood on the threshold at the same time - and both reflexively held onto the railing, even though gravity was stable. What they saw did not belong in any catalogue they had ever studied. At the heart of the lighthouse stretched a space no bigger than a school gymnasium - and yet within it lay a valley. A narrow basin of dark earth, overgrown with pine trees so thinned that the light decided on spots. They had metal underfoot, but their eyes knew better: needles drooped, the wind moved the branches, somewhere above stretched the sky. Not real, not cold. Artificial firmaments could do anything, but this sky... it vibrated to the rhythm of the pulsar, brightening slightly every few seconds, as if someone were devouring a bit of darkness from it and then giving it back. - What do you mean... - slipped out of Janet's mind in their channel. - I didn't put it together in any simulator. There's not enough energy here. - And yet - Maks grunted and with a compressed throat added: - Do you hear something? Lidia heard it. There was the rustling of rain, which was not there. Distant, steady, reminiscent of the sound of the drops on the roofs of the tin-roofed houses where she had spent her summers. And under that rain - notes. Someone was humming. Not as a programme, not as an impersonal background. Someone was humming live. "There goes the sky in the dark night..." - We have movement," reported Orpheus. - I locate the source of the acoustic emission at a lighthouse-like structure. Distance: fifty metres. Angle: thirty degrees right. At the end of the valley, where the artificial slope transitioned into a semi-circular wall, stood a tower. In miniature, a faithful reproduction of the lighthouse from Hel, which Lidia knew from photographs, although she had never been low enough to see it with her own eyes. Bricks, a trimmed gallery, a lamp dome of old glass that broke the light into honey-coloured strands. Around the tower swirled tiny butterflies of dust - no, not dust. Granules of light. At least, that's how a mind that hated emptiness would interpret it. - 'Air quality sensors updated,' muttered Orpheus. - Composition closer to earthly. Contents of volatile plant compounds: terpenes, phenols, aldehydes. Source: conifers, moss, resin. Respiration parameters: we are within standards. The decision to remove the helmets remains yours. - Not now," replied Lidia. They stepped off the metal threshold, taking the steps carefully. Where the metal met the ground, it was clear that the latter was only a thin layer, spread over the supporting structure. Yet threads of green were growing in the crevices. They had no right to be here, like so many things that day. They reached the foot of the tower. Among the pine needles lay an old tin plaque, a rectangle so scratched it could have been anything. Lidia ran her finger over it through her sleeve and immediately pulled it back - the tin was warm, as if someone had just laid it in the sun. They climbed the metal steps to the platform. The glass of the lamp was covered with a network of tiny cracks. When Lidia brought her hand closer, the spiders twitched as if alive. - 'Lidia, look,' Maks pointed to the edge of the lens. In the darkest part of the glass, where the interior was reflected, letters appeared. At first indistinct, as if soaked in water, then sharper and sharper. Her name. LIDIA KARO, written in a font as ordinary as can be - typewritten, schoolgirlish, without ornamentation. There was a noise in the headphones. Someone took a breath. Someone she knew from recordings, and day after day she weaned herself from the sound, because otherwise it would be impossible to function. And then a voice that was at once close and out of nowhere, Polish and transparent, said: - You're back.