under the chill red light of the fading sun, you crept from your grandfather's hut on the edge of the docks, toward that squat beige bunker on the edge of a canal. you made yourself small; you tried not to panic; you squeezed through an opening not much larger than your fist, wriggling in silence through a matrix of drainpipes until you dropped into a cistern deep underneath the inner city. and each night from then on, you explored further: into pumping stations long gone silent; coolant tanks for reactors abandoned before they were used; galleries and apartments built in the distant past for the xeno dignitaries now barred by the interdict, majestic painting by rembrandt