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“Why did you let me do it?” she said.

The mathematics gave its equivalent of a shrug. “You weren’t ready to listen.”

“Take us back there.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Take us back.”

The
White Cat
shut her torch down and fell as silently as a derelict between the gas giants. Course changes were made in increments, using tiny, ferocious pSi engines which worked by blowing oxygen onto porous silicon compounds. Meanwhile, the particle-detectors and massive arrays, extending like veinous systems in a leaf, sifted vacuum for the track of the
Krishna Moire
pod. “Power up,” the mathematics instructed quietly. “Power down.” What was left of Seria Mau’s body moved impatiently in its tank. She had a need to see Billy Anker that anyone else would have described as physical. If she had remembered how, she would have bitten her lip. “Why did I do this?” she asked herself. The shadow operators shook their heads: sooner or later something like it had been bound to happen, they inferred. In the end the
White Cat
got close enough to examine the planet itself. Something moved among the feathers. It might have been whatever lived down there; it might have been ancient calculations crumbling into dust.

“What’s that?” said the mathematics.

“Nothing,” said Seria Mau. “Go in,” she ordered. “I’ve had enough of this.”

She found Billy Anker and Mona the clone lying half out of the long cobalt shadows. Mona was already dead, her pretty blonde head resting on the upper part of Billy’s chest. He had one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he was still stroking her hair. As she died she had been looking intently into his face, and had placed one leg between both his, trying to get some final comfort out of life. Under the instructions of the old algorithm—which, provided so suddenly with raw material for its endless repetition, had sifted stealthily down onto them from the structures above—their cells were turning to feathers. Billy Anker’s legs looked like a peacock satyr’s. Mona was gone all the way to diaphragm, blue-black dusty feathers which seemed to shift and grow and do something odd to the light.

Seria Mau’s fetch—in these conditions little more than a shadow itself—wove nervously about in front of the lovers. How could I have done this? she thought, while she said aloud:

“Billy Anker, is there any way I can help?”

Billy Anker never stopped stroking the dead woman’s hair, or looking away from her.

“No,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

Billy Anker smiled to himself. “Kid,” he said, “it’s more comfortable than you’d think. Like a good downer.” He laughed suddenly. “Hey, the wormhole was the spectacle. You know? That’s what I keep remembering. That was how I expected to go.” Silent a moment, he contemplated that. “I could never even describe what it was like in there,” he said. Then he said, “I can hear this thing counting. Or is that some sort of illusion?”

Seria Mau came as close to him as she could.

“I can’t hear anything. Billy Anker, I’m sorry to have done this.” At that, he bit his lip and finally looked away from Mona the clone.

“Hey,” he said. “Forget it.”

He convulsed. Dust billowed up from the stealthily shifting surface of his body. The algorithm was reorganising him at all scales. For a moment his eyes filled with horror. He hadn’t expected this. “It’s eating me!” he shouted. He flailed with his arms, clutched at the dead woman as if she might help him. Forgetting she was only a fetch, he tried to clutch at Seria Mau too. Then he got control of himself again. “The more you deny the forces inside, kid, the more they control you,” he said. His hand went through her like a hand through smoke. He stared at it in surprise. “Is this happening?” he asked.

“Billy Anker, what am I to do?”

“That ship of yours. Take it deep. Take it to the Tract.”

“Billy, I—”

Above them, streaks of violet ionisation went across the face of the gas giant. There was a great whistling thud of displaced air; then another; then a vast emerald fireball somewhere in orbit, as the
White Cat
began to defend herself against what must be the attentions of the
Krishna Moire
pod. Suddenly, Seria Mau was half up there with her ship, half down here with Billy Anker. Alarms were going off everywhere along the continuum between these two states, and the mathematics was trying to disconnect her fetch.

“Leave me!” she cried. “I want to stay with him! Someone must stay with him!”

Billy Anker smiled and shook his head.

“Get out of here, kid. That’s Uncle Zip up there. Get out while you can.”

“Billy Anker, I brought them down on you!”

He looked tired. He closed his eyes.

“I brought them down on myself, kid. Get out of here. Take it deep.”

“Goodbye, Billy Anker.”

“Hey, kid—”

But when she turned to answer, he was dead.

I fell for it, she told herself in despair. All the fucking and the fighting. Despite everything I promised myself, I fell for it too.

Then she thought: Uncle Zip! Terror dissolved her, because she had so underestimated that fat man, how intelligent he was, how galaxywide. She had been in his hands from the moment she began to deal with him.

What would she do now?

“If I’m predicting the
future, how come I always see the past?”

When Ed asked Sandra Shen that question, she was no more help than Annie Glyph. All she did was shrug lightly.

“I think we need practice, Ed,” she said. She lit a cigarette and gave her attention amusedly to something in the corner of the room. “I think we need to work harder.”

Ed never could decode that distant look of hers. If anything, she seemed pleased by the débâcle in the main tent. It filled her full of energy: her other projects languished, and she was around on a daily basis. She kicked the old men out of the bar of the Dunes Motel. He came in and found her fitting it out with equipment of her own, which she was bringing in at night in unmarked crates. This stuff was uniformly old. It featured cloth-covered electric cable, Bakelite casings, dials across which tiny needles rose and fell. There was some kind of amplifier that worked by valves.

“Jesus,” he said. “This is
real
.”

“Fun, isn’t it?” Sandra Shen said. “Four hundred and fifty years old, give or take. Ed, it’s time we began to work together on this. Put our heads together. What I need to do is fasten these straps round your wrists . . .”

The idea was that Ed sat with his arms and legs strapped to the arms and legs of a big raw-looking wooden chair that came with the rest of the equipment, while Sandra Shen connected herself to the valve amplifier. She then settled the fishtank on Ed’s head and asked him questions until she got an answer that suited her. Her voice came to him close and intimate, as if she was in there with him and the eels on their weird, tiring journey beneath the Alcubiere sea, forward towards some unwelcome revelation of his youth. The questions were meaningless to Ed.

“Is life a bitch or isn’t it, Ed?” she would say. Or: “Can you count to twelve?”

He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn’t hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of white sunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.

In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly décolleté emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren’t the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. “More practice, Ed. That’s all you need.” She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. “Well done, Ed. Well
done
.” Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.

“Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?” Annie asked him one night.

Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.

“It’s a living,” he said.

“Oh, very entradista,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.”

Ed shrugged.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do.”

Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.

“What do you know about her, Ed?” she called back in. “Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to
see
?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.”

“Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.”

Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.

“It’s a beautiful night out here. Let’s walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I’ll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!”

“I am a show,” Ed said.

Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn’t want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn’t want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. “Any time, man.”

When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.

“Is this wise?” was all she said.

“Everyone,” he said, “deserves a break.”

“And yet, Ed, there’s Bella Cray.”

“What do you know about Bella?” he demanded. When she shrugged, he shrugged too.

“If you’re not scared of her, I’m not either.”

“Be careful, Ed.”

“I’m careful,” he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.

He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.

Had he lost them? He couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.

He didn’t get much time to think. There was a characteristic wet-sounding thump. At the same time, everything seemed to brighten and fade simultaneously. Half the street went out right in front of his eyes, and it still missed him.

“Jesus,” whispered Ed, backing away into a crowd of prostitutes tailored to look and act like sixteen-year-old Japanese girls from late twentieth-century internet fuck sites. “There was no need for that.” He touched his face. It felt hot. The prostitutes staggered about giggling nervously, their clothes in tatters, their skin sunburned to bright red. As soon as he could think again, Ed went off at a run. He ran until he didn’t know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there . . . He stared up and thought long and hard about Annie Glyph. It was like this the night he met her, bad light flickering across waste lots. Somehow he had brought her back to life just by asking her name. Now he was responsible for her.

He went back to the circus and found her sleeping. The room was full of her slow, calm heat. Ed lay down beside her and buried his face where her neck and shoulder met. After a moment or two she half woke and made room for him inside the curve of her body. He put his hand on her and she gave a big guttural grunt of pleasure. He would have to leave New Venusport before something happened to her because of him. He would have to leave her here. How would he tell her? He didn’t know.

She must have read his thoughts, because she came home a few nights later and said:

“What’s the matter, Ed?”

“I don’t know,” Ed lied.

“If you don’t know, Ed, you should find out,” she said. They stared puzzledly at one another.

Ed liked to walk around in the cold bright morning through the circus itself, moving from the salt smell of the dunes to the smell of warm dusty concrete that filled the air around the tents and pavilions.

He wondered why Sandra Shen had chosen this site. If you landed here, it was because you had no corporate credentials. If you left from here, no one wished you good luck. It was a transit camp, where EMC processed refugee labour before moving it on to the mines. Paperwork could maroon you at the noncorporate port for a year, during which your own bad choices would take the opportunity to stretch it to ten. Your ship rusted, your life rusted. But you could always go to the circus. This in itself worried Ed. What did it mean for Madam Shen? Was she trapped here too?