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“I knew that. So?”

“So next time I see you,” the fetch promised, “I’ll let the machine speak.”

“Jerk,” said Seria Mau.

By this time she had the cargo bay open. Billy Anker, dressed in a vintage EV suit, was shuffling head down towards it with all the grim patience of the physically unfit. He fell. He picked himself up. He fell again. He wiped his faceplate. Up in the stratosphere, the
Krishna Moire
pod shifted and turned in hungry disarray; while high above it in the parking lot, the hybrid ship awaited what would happen, its ambivalent signature flickering like a description of the events unfolding below. Who was up there, Seria Mau wondered, along with the commander of
Touching the Void
? Who was presiding over this fumbled op? Down in the cargo bay, Mona the clone called Billy’s name. She leaned out, caught his hand, pulled him inside. The cargo ramp slammed shut. As if this was a signal, long vapour trails emerged from the cloudbase at steep angles. Billy Anker’s ship burst open. Its engines went up in a sigh of gamma and visible light.

“Go,” Seria Mau told the mathematics. The
White Cat
torched out in a low fast arc over the South Pole, transmitting ghost signatures, firing off decoys and particle-dogs.

“Look!” cried Billy Anker. “Look down!”

The South Polar Artefact flashed beneath them. Seria Mau caught a fleeting glimpse of it—a featureless gunmetal ziggurat a million years old and five miles on a side at the base—before it vanished astern. “It’s opening!” cried Billy Anker. Then, in an awed whisper: “I can see. I can see inside—” The sky lit up white behind them, and his voice turned to a despairing wail. The pod, growing frustrated, had hit the ziggurat with something from the bottom shelf of its arsenal, something big. Something EMC.

“What did you see?” Seria Mau asked three minutes later, as they skulked at Redline L2 while the
White Cat
’s mathematics tried to guess them a way out under the noses of their pursuers.

Billy Anker wouldn’t say.

“How could they do that?” he railed. “That was a unique historical item, and a working one. It was still receiving data from somewhere in the Tract. We could have
learned
something from that thing.” He sat white-faced in the human quarters, panting and wiping the adrenaline sweat off his face with his do-rag, the top half of the muddy EV suit peeled back. The shadow operators were cooing and fluttering round him, trying to fix his dislocated finger, but he kept batting them away with his other hand. “This old stuff,” he said, “it’s all we have. It’s our only resource!”

“Where you look, you find,” she told him. “There will always be more, Billy Anker. There will always be more after that.”

“Nevertheless, everything I learned, I learned from that thing.”

“And what did you learn, Billy Anker?”

He tapped the side of his nose.

“You’d like to know,” he said, laughing as if this assertion showed how sharp and clean his intuition was. “But I won’t tell.” He was a beachcomber, with all the tidal scouring of the personality that implies. His big discovery shored him up. He had to believe she would be interested in whatever tacky insight into the nature of things he thought it gave him. “I can tell you what EMC want, though,” he offered instead.

“I know that already. They want you. They followed me all the way from Motel Splendido to find you. And here’s another thing to think about: the
Moire
pod wanted to try me out. They think they’re good enough. But whoever’s in that other ship wouldn’t let them, in case you were caught in the crossfire. That’s why Krishna Moire bumped your artefact, Billy. He’s pissed at his superiors.”

Billy Anker grinned his sly grin.

“And are they good enough?” he said. “To try you out?”

“What do you think?”

Billy Anker contemplated this answer with approval. Then he said, “EMC don’t want me. They want what I found.”

Seria Mau felt cold in her tank.

“Is it on board my ship?” she said.

“In a manner of speaking,” he acknowledged. He made a gesture meant to take in all of Radio Bay, maybe even the vast sweep of the Beach itself. “It’s out there too.”

Some hours after he
shot Evie Cray, Ed Chianese found himself on the waste ground behind the New Men warren.

It was pitch black out there, lit with oddly angled flashes of white light from the docks. Occasionally a K-ship left its slip on a vertical line of fusion product, and for perhaps two or three seconds Ed could see low hummocks, pits, ponds, piles of broken engineering objects. The whole place had a smell of metal and chemicals. Vapour drifted out the yards like a ground mist. Ed was throwing up again, and the tank voices were back in his head. He dumped the guns in the first pool he came to. A life like his, and finally he had killed someone. He remembered boasting to Tig Vesicle:

“Once you’ve done all the things worth doing, you begin on the things that aren’t.”

A little smoke came up from the pool, as if there was more in it than water. Shortly after he got rid of the guns, he came across an abandoned rickshaw. It loomed up in front of him suddenly—out of context, one wheel in a flooded hole—tilted at an odd angle against the sky. Detecting his approach, advertisements crawled across the sides of its hood, coalesced as soft lights in the air above it. Music started up. A voice echoed across the waste ground:

“Sandra Shen’s Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao.”

“No thanks,” Ed said. “I’ll walk.”

In the light of the next flare from the rocket yards, he discovered the rickshaw girl. She was on her knees, bowed down between the shafts, breathing in with a kind of hoarse whistle, letting it out as a grunt. Every so often her whole body tensed up as tight as a fist and began to tremble. Then she seemed to relax again. Once or twice she laughed to herself and said, “Hey, man.” She was occupied with dying the way she had been occupied with life, to the exclusion of everything else. Ed knelt down beside her. It was like kneeling next to a foundered horse.

“Hold on,” he said. “Don’t die. You can make it.”

There was a painful laugh.

“The fuck you know about it,” the girl said thickly.

He could feel the heat pouring off her. He had the feeling it would rush away like that, full tilt, and then stop and never be replaced. He tried to put his arms round her to hold it in. But she was too big, so he just held one of her hands.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“What’s it to you?”

“You tell me your name, you can’t die,” Ed explained. “It’s like somehow, you know, we made contact. So you owe me something, and all that.” He thought. “I need you not to die,” he said.

“Shit,” she said. “Other people go out in peace. I get a twink.”

Ed was surprised she could guess that.

“How do you know?” he said. “You can’t know that.”

She drew her breath in raggedly.

“Look at yourself,” she advised. “You’re as dead as me, only it’s on the inside.” She narrowed her eyes. “You got blood all on you, man,” she told him. “You’re all over blood. At least I haven’t got blood on me.” This seemed to cheer her up in some way. She nodded to herself, settled back.

“I’m Annie Glyph,” she said. “Or I was.”

“Visit today!” boomed the rickshaw’s advertising chip suddenly. “Sandra Shen’s Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao. Also: the future descried. Prophecy. Fortune Telling. Atheromancy.”

“I worked this city five years, on
café électrique
and sheer fucking guts,” Annie Glyph said. “That’s two years more than most.”

“What’s atheromancy?” Ed asked her.

“I got no idea.”

He stared at the rickshaw. Cheap spoked wheels and orange plastic, totally Pierpoint Street. The rickshaw girls ran eighteen hours a day for speed money, and opium money to take the edge off the speed; then they blew up.
Café électrique
and guts: that was their boast. All they had in the end was a myth of themselves. They were indestructible: this destroyed them. Ed shook his head.

“How can you live with it?” he said.

But Annie Glyph wasn’t living with it anymore. Her eyes were empty, and she had slumped to one side, tipping the rickshaw over with her. He couldn’t quite believe something as alive as her could die. Her huge body still had the sheen of sweat on it. Her rawboned face, dwarfed by the muscles of her neck and shoulders, masculised by the inboard testosterone patch the tailor had specified as part of the cheap conversion kit, had a kind of etched beauty. Ed studied it a moment or two then leaned forward to close her eyes. “Hey, Annie,” he said. “Sleep at last.” At this, something weird happened. Her cheekbones rippled and shifted uneasily. He put it down to the unsteady illumination of the rickshaw ads. But then her whole head blurred, and seemed to break up into lights.

“Shit!” Ed said. He jumped to his feet and fell over backwards.

It lasted a minute, maybe two. The lights seemed to flutter up into the softly glowing region where the rickshaw ads blossomed out of the air. Then lights and ads together poured back down into her face, which received them like a dry sponge soaking up tears. Her left leg contracted, then kicked out galvanically. “The fuck,” she said. She cleared her throat and spat. Pushing into the mud with her feet and hands, she got herself and the rickshaw upright. She shook herself and stared down at Ed. Steam was already coming up off the small of her back into the cold night. “Nothing like that ever happened to me before,” she complained.

“You were dead,” Ed whispered.

She shrugged. “Too much speed. I can fix that with more speed. You wanna go somewhere?”

Ed got up and backed away.

“No thanks.”

“Hey, climb in, man. It’s free. You got a ride.” She looked up at the stars, then slowly around at the waste ground, as if she wasn’t sure how she came to be there. “I owe you, I can’t remember why.”

It was the weirdest ride Ed ever had.

2.30 a.m.: the streets were deserted, silent but for the steady soft slap of Annie Glyph’s feet. The shafts moved up and down as she ran, but the cab had a chip to damp the effect of that. To Ed it was like gliding and being motionless, both at once. All he could see of the rickshaw girl was her massive lats and buttocks, painted with electric-blue Lycra. Her gait was an energy-saving shuffle. She was designed to run forever. Every so often she shook her head, and an aerosol of sweat sprayed up into the cab’s soft corona of advertising light. The heat of her streamed around him, so that he was insulated against the night. He felt insulated from everything else too, as if being Annie’s passenger allowed him to withdraw from the world: take a rest from its mysteries.

When he admitted this, she laughed.

“Twinks!” she said. “Rest is all you fuckers ever do.”

“I had a life once.”

“They all say that,” Annie advised him. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t you know not to talk to the rickshaw girl? She’s got work to do if you ain’t.”

The night ran past, the garment district flowing into Union Square and then East Garden. EMC adprop was everywhere. “War!” announced the hologram hoardings: “Are you ready?” Annie turned briefly on to downtown Pierpoint, which was as deserted as if the war had already happened. The tank parlours and chopshops were all closed. Here and there some loser drank Roses whisky in an empty bar while a cultivar in an apron wiped the bartop with his dirty rag and pondered the difference between life and the semblance of it. They would be like that ’til dawn then go home, still wondering.

“So what did you do, this other life you had?” Annie asked Ed suddenly. “This, ’I wasn’t always a twink’ life of yours?”

Ed shrugged.

“One thing I did,” he began, “I flew dipships—”

“They all say that.”

“Hey,” Ed said. “We don’t have to talk.”

Annie laughed to herself. She hung a left off Pierpoint on to Impreza, then another at the corner of Impreza and Skyline. There, she had to pull hard into a half-mile grade, but her breathing barely altered. Hills, her body language implied, were the small change of life to a rickshaw girl. After a while, Ed said:

“One thing I remember, I had a cat. That was when I was a kid.”

“Yeah? What colour was that?”

“It was black,” Ed said. “It was a black cat.”

He could make a clear mental picture of the cat, juggling with a coloured feather in the hall. For twenty minutes it would put its whole heart into whatever you offered—paper, a feather, a painted cork—then lose interest and fall asleep. It was black and thin, with nervous, fluid movements, a pointed little face and yellow eyes. It was always hungry. Ed could make a clear mental picture of the cat, but he couldn’t remember anything about the family house. Instead he had a lot of tank memories, which he knew weren’t real because of their shiny completeness, their perfection of structure. “Maybe there was another cat too,” he said: “A sister.” But on reflection he knew that wasn’t true.

“We’re here,” Annie said suddenly.

The rickshaw stopped with a jerk. Ed, thrown back out into the world, stared cluelessly around. Fences and gates, dripping with condensation, rattled in the onshore wind. Behind that, a chilly strip of concrete stretched away into saltmarsh and sand dunes, where an encrustation of cheap, sea-soured wooden hotels and bars could be seen.

“Where’s this?” he said. “Shit.”

“The customer doesn’t give a destination, I bring them here,” Annie Glyph explained. “Don’t you like it? I’m on a percentage from the circus. See? Over there.” She drew his attention to a distant cluster of lights, then, when he seemed unimpressed, gave him an anxious look. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “They got hotels and stuff here too. It’s the noncorporate spaceport.”

Ed stared over the fence.

“Shit,” he said again.

“I get a percentage to bring in trade,” Annie said. “I can take you in if you like.” She shrugged. “Or I could take you on somewhere. But you have to pay for that.”

“I’ll walk,” Ed said. “No money.”