“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.”
(..)
The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on.
(..)
When immernauts first breached the meniscus of everyday space, among the many phenomena that had astounded them was the fact that, even on their crude instruments, they had received signals from somewhere in the ur-space. Regular and resonant, clear evidence of sentience. They had tried to go to the sources. For a long time they’d thought it was lack of skill, neophyte immersion, that kept bringing their ships to disaster on those searches. Again and again they wrecked, bursting ruinously half-out of the immer into the corporeal manchmal. The Pionier was a casualty of that time, before explorers had understood that the pulses were put out by lighthouses. They were not invitations. What the ships had striven toward were warnings to stay away.

//China Miéville, Embassytown