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“What is it?” she said.

“I think it’s a ship.”

Seria Mau studied the image again. She ran comparison studies. “It isn’t any kind of ship I know. Is it old? What is it doing out there?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why?”

“I’m not yet entirely certain where ‘ out there’ is.”

“Spare me,” said Seria Mau. “Do you know anything useful at all?”

“It’s keeping pace with us.”

Seria Mau stared at the trace. “That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s nothing like a K-ship. What shall we do?”

“Keep sorting quanta,” said the mathematics.

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters of the ship.

There, one of the men had launched a holographic display and was clearly making some kind of presentation to the rest of them, while the female clone sat in a corner painting her fingernails, laughing with a kind of weak maliciousness at everything he said, and making inappropriate comments.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why
she
never has to do that.
I
have to do it.”

The display was like a big smoky cube, showing fly-by images from the Radio Bay cluster, which contained among others Suntory IV and 3-alpha-Ferris VII. Low-temperature gas clouds roiled and swirled, failed old brown dwarf stars blinking through them like drunks crossing a highway in fog. A planet jumped into resolution, mushroom-coloured, with creamy sulphurous-looking bands. Then there were images from the surface: clouds, chaotic streaming rain, less weather than chemistry. A scatter of non-human buildings abandoned two hundred thousand years before: something that looked like a maze. They often left mazes. “What we’ve got here is old,” the man concluded. “It could be really old.” Suddenly the camera jumped to an asteroid in full view of the Tract, which blazed out of the display like costume jewellery on black velvet.

“I think we’ll leave that for a later trip,” he said.

Everyone laughed except the clone, who spread her hands in front of her. “Why do you all hate me so,” she said, looking at him over her bright red nails, “that you make
me
do it and not her?”

He went over and drew her gently to her feet. He kissed her. “We like you to do it because we love you,” he said. “We all love you.” He took one of her hands and examined her fingernails. “That’s very historical,” he said. The hologram blinked, expanded until it measured four or five feet on a side, and was suddenly showing the clone’s face in the throes of sexual arousal. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide with pain or pleasure, Seria Mau couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see what was being done to her. They all sat down and watched, giving the hologram their full consideration as if it were still showing images of Radio Bay, old alien artefacts, big secrets, the things they most wanted. Soon they were fucking again.

Seria Mau, who had begun to wonder if she knew their real motives for being aboard, watched them suspiciously for some minutes more. Then she disconnected.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami, a space accordion-folded to contain more than seemed possible or advisable, as full of invisible matter as the halo itself. Was this how human beings dreamed of themselves? She had no idea.

Ten days into the voyage, she dreamed of a boat-ride on a river. It was called the New Pearl River and was wider, the mother told them, than a mile. From each bank, benign but exotically tailored vegetation hung down into the water, the surface ripples of which looked firm and nacreous and gave off smells of almonds and vanilla. The mother loved it as much as the children. She trailed her bare feet in the cool pearly water, laughing. “Aren’t we lucky!” she kept saying. “Aren’t we lucky!” The children loved her brown eyes. They loved her enthusiasm for everything in the world.

“Aren’t we lucky!”

These words echoed across a change of scene, first to blackness, then to the garden again, with its dark laurels.

It was afternoon. It was raining. The old man—he was the father, and you could see how puzzled that responsibility made him, how much of an effort it was—had built a bonfire. The two children stood and watched him throw things onto it. Boxes, papers, photographs, clothes. Smoke lay about the garden in long flat layers, trapped by the inversions of early winter. They watched the hot core of the fire. Its smell, which was like any other bonfire, excited them despite themselves. They stood dressed up in coats and scarves and gloves, sad and guilty in the cold declining afternoon, watching the flames and coughing in the grey smoke.

He was too old to be a father, he seemed to be pleading. Too old.

Just as it became unbearable, someone snatched this dream away. Seria Mau found herself staring into a lighted shop window. It was a retro window, full of retro things. They were from Earth, conjuror’s things, children’s things made of bad plastic, feathers, cheap rubber, objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine heart which lit itself up by means of the loving diodes within. There were “X-Ray Specs” and elevator shoes. There was a dark red japanned box, in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom which turned out not to be your own. There were the trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn’t take off. As she watched, the man in the black top hat and tails bent his upper body slowly into the window. His hat was on his head. He had removed his white kid gloves which he now held in the same hand as his beautiful ebony cane. His smile was unchanged, warm yet full of a glittering irony. He was a man who knew too much. Slowly and with a wide, generous gesture he used his free hand to take off his hat and sweep it across the contents of the window, as if to offer Seria Mau the items within. At the same time, she recognised, he was offering her himself. He was, in some way, these objects. His smile never changed. He replaced his hat slowly, unbent himself in polite silence, and disappeared.

A voice said: “Every day, the life of the body must usurp and disinherit the dream.” Then it said: “Though you never grew up, this is the last thing you saw as a child.”

Seria Mau woke shaking.

She shook and shook until the ship’s mathematics took pity on her, flushing the tank so that specific areas of her proteome could be flooded with complex artificial proteins.

“Listen,” it said. “We are having a problem here.”

“Show me,” said Seria Mau.

Up came the signature diagram again.

At its centre—if ten dimensions mediated as four can be said to have a centre—the lines of possibility wrote themselves so close to each other they became a solid: an inert object with the contours of a walnut, which was no longer changing much. Too many guesses had been made, was Seria Mau’s first thought. The original signal, complicating itself towards infinity, had collapsed into this stochastic nugget and was now even more unreadable.

“This is useless,” she complained.

“It seems that way,” the mathematics said equably. “But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this . . .”

There was a sudden jump. Randomness resolved to order. The signal simplified itself and split in two, with the fainter component—coloured deep violet—blinking rapidly in and out of view.

“What am I looking at?” demanded Seria Mau.

“Two vessels,” the mathematics told her. “The steady trace is a K-ship. Phase-locked to its mathematics is some kind of Nastic heavy asset: maybe a cruiser. One clear benefit is that no one can interpret their signature, but that’s a sideshow. The real issue is this: they’re using the K-ship as a navigational tool. I’ve never seen that done before. Whoever wrote the code is almost as good as me.”

Seria Mau stared at the display.

“What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Oh, they’re following us,” the mathematics said.

Tig Vesicle, stunned into
a kind of strained passivity as his adrenaline high wore off, was lost but refused to accept it. Ed Chianese, his ears full of the faint far voices of demons, continued to follow Vesicle because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He was hungry, and faintly embarrassed by himself. After their escape from the Cray sisters, they had wandered about the streets east of Pierpoint until they found themselves on some high ground near the corner of Yulgrave and Demesne. From there they could see the whole sweep of the city, falling away, clotted with light at major intersections, to the docks. With an air of renewed confidence, Vesicle had thrown his arms wide.

“The warren!”

Plunging downhill into the maze of light and dark, they were soon nowhere again, wandering aimlessly round corners into the sudden teeth of the wind until they found themselves back on Yulgrave—the black, echoing, completely deserted perspective of which stretched away between warehouses and goods yards, apparently forever. There, they were witness to an event so strange that Chianese put it out of his mind until much later. Too much later, as it turned out. At the time all he thought was:

This isn’t happening.

Then he thought, it’s happening but I’m still in the tank.

“Am I still in the tank?” he said out loud.

No reply. He thought: maybe I’m someone else.

Snow was still coming down, but warm air from Clinker Bay, tainted with the smell of the inshore rigs and cracking plants, had dissolved it to sleet, falling through the mercury vapour lamps like sheaves of sparks from some invisible anvil. Walking through the sparks towards them came a small, plump, oriental-looking woman in a gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh. Her gait had the quick irritability lent by high heels in bad weather. One minute, Chianese was sure, she wasn’t there: the next she was. He blinked. He rubbed his hand over his face. Flashbacks, hallucinations, all the bad dreams of a twink.

“Do you see her too?” he asked Vesicle.

“I don’t know,” said Vesicle listlessly.

Ed Chianese looked down at the woman, and she looked up at him. There was something
so
wrong with her face. From one angle it looked beautiful in that oval, high-cheekboned oriental way. Then she turned it, or Ed altered his angle on her, and it seemed to blur and shift into a yellow and wrinkled old age. It was the same face. There was no doubt about that. But it was always moving, always blurred. Sometimes it was old and young at once. The effect was extreme.

“How are you doing that?” Ed whispered.

Without taking his eyes off her he extended a hand towards Tig Vesicle. “Give me the gun,” he said.

“Why?” Vesicle said. “It’s mine.”

Ed said carefully: “
Give me the gun.
”

The woman got out a little gold case, which she opened, and took from it an oval cigarette.

“Do you have light?” she said. “Ed Chianese?”

She stared up at him, her face blurring and shifting, blurring and shifting. A sudden flurry of sleet went round them both, hot orange sparks off the anvil of circumstance. Ed took the Hi-Lite Autoloader out of Tig Vesicle’s hands and fired it point-blank.

“Right between the eyes,” he would say later. “I shot her point-blank, right between the eyes.”

Nothing happened for a moment. She continued to stand there, looking up at him. Then she seemed to disassemble herself into a stream of tiny, energetic golden motes, which poured away from the point of impact to join the sparks of the rain. First her head dissolved, then her body. She burned away quite slowly, like a firework consuming itself to make light. There was no sound at all.

Then Ed heard her voice, an echoing whisper.

“Ed,” she said. “Ed Chianese.”

The street was empty again. Ed looked down at the gun in his hand, and up from the gun at Tig Vesicle, who was staring into the sky, his face tilted so that rain fell into his open mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” Ed said.

He put the gun away and they both began to run. After a minute or two, Ed stopped and leaned against a wall. “I’m not up to this,” he said. “Are you?” He wiped his mouth. “I hate the fucking dry heaves.” He looked dizzily up at the stars. They were like sparks, too, rushing and pinwheeling across the sky to coalesce, just above the warehouse roofs, into the roseate blur of the Tract. This reminded Ed of something he had been meaning to ask. “Hey,” he said. “What planet am I on?”

Vesicle stared at him.

“Come on,” Ed said. “Be fair. Anyone can have a problem with that.”

New Venusport, Earth’s original outpost in the halo:

The military cities sprawled across the southern hemisphere. They were less cities than EMC compounds, run as free-trade zones, pulling in migrant labour from across the halo the way a black hole rips gas out of an accretion disc. They drew the defeated races. They drew the enfeebled and stupid. They drew the New Men, like moths to a flame. You went to New Venusport because you had nowhere else to go.

South hemisphere New Venusport was essentially a maintenance operation. K-ships filled its skies, or shot vertically into orbit at Mach 50. Night and day they crouched in the service bays with arc-light slicking down their dark grey flanks. They were restless. They flickered in and out of visibility as their navigation systems trawled through ten spatial dimensions. They never disconnected their defences or target-acquisition systems, so the air around them was constantly cooking with everything from gamma to microwaves. Work near them, you were in a lead suit. Even the paint on their hulls was deadly. The maintenance bays weren’t all of it: elsewhere, EMC’s resource contractors had the south hemisphere regolith up in strip-mines as wide as nation-states, using machines powered and directed by the old alien technology. They switched on, stood back, stared at one another in delighted surmise.

“Hey, this thing could
peel a planet
!”

In the cities, air and food were foul, and you had no idea what came down in the rain. The New Men, packed into their warrens, preyed upon by the usual portfolio of gangsters, high-profile political zealots and EMC police, went off to work in the grey dawn, coughing and shivering and bemused, awkwardly hunching their shoulders. But it wasn’t all bad. New corporate workplace safety guidelines, self-imposed and self-policed, had brought the life expectancy of a male worker up a couple of points, to twenty-four years. Anyone could tell you that was an advance.