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He began to laugh. “Oh fuck,” he said.

It was Billy Anker’s wormhole.

“Come on, Billy,” Ed said, as if Billy was sitting next to him, rather than dead from this exact same adventure more than a decade ago: “What do I do next?”

Something had entered the ship’s mathematics. It was inside the Tate-Kearney transformations themselves, fractally folded between the algorithms. It was huge. When Ed tried to talk to it, everything shut down. The screens went dark, the shadow operators, who had sensed it there days before, streaked about in panic, brushing Ed’s face like very old muslin rags. “We didn’t want this,” they told him. “We didn’t want you in here!” Ed battered at them with his hands. Then the screens fired up again, and the wormhole leapt suddenly into view, very clear and close, a spindle of nothing against the exposed grimace of RX-1.

The whole of the local space of
The Perfect Low
had, meanwhile, turned into a kind of agitated purple cloud, through which the alien mortsafes could be seen weaving their chaotic orbits, faster and faster like the shuttles of a loom. You could feel the ship shake to her frame with the approach of some catastrophic event, the phase change, the leap to the next stable state.

“Fucking hell,” Ed said. “What’s going on out there?”

There was a soft laugh. A woman’s voice said: “They’re the engine, Ed. What did you think they were?”

In the calm that followed this announcement, Ed hallucinated a white cat at his feet: tricked thus into looking down, saw instead a spill of light emerging like bright foam from Sandra Shen’s fishtank and licking out towards him.

“Hey!” he shouted.

He jumped out of the pilot seat. The shadow operators spread their arms and streamed away from him into the dark and empty ship, rustling in terror. Light continued to pour out of the fishtank, a million points of light which shoaled round Ed’s feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into a shape he almost recognised. Each point, he knew (and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that), would also make the same shape.

“Always more,” he heard someone say. “Always more after that.”

He threw up suddenly. The entity calling itself Sandra Shen had begun to assemble itself in front of him.

Whatever she was, she had energy. First she presented as Tig Vesicle, with his shock of red hair, eating a Muranese fish curry off the end of a throwaway plastic fork. “Hi, Ed,” he said. “The fuck we are! You know?” But that didn’t satisfy her, so she got rid of it and presented as Tig’s wife, half-naked in the gloom of the warren. Ed was so surprised he said, “Neena, I—” Neena got whipped away immediately and was replaced by the Cray sisters. “Dipshit,” they said. They laughed. Between each version of herself, Sandra Shen filled up the control room with sparkling motes of light, like one of her own tableaux, “Detergent Foam in a Plastic Bowl, 1958.” Finally she firmed up as the Sandra Ed first met, walking briskly along Yulgrave towards him in the blowing snow—a small, plump, oriental-looking woman, her gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh, her perfect oval face shifting constantly as she exchanged youth and yellow old age, her eyes sexy and fathomless with the charisma of something never human.

“Hello, Ed,” she said.

Ed stared at her. “You were all of them,” he said. “None of that was real. You were everyone in that part of my life.”

“ ’Fraid so, Ed.”

“You’re not just a shadow operator,” he guessed.

“No, Ed, I’m not.”

“There was no Tig.”

“No Tig.”

“There were no Cray sisters.”

“Theatre, Ed, every moment of it.”

“There was no Neena . . .”

“Hey, Neena was fun. Wasn’t Neena fun?”

Ed couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt more used and manipulated—more self-disgusted—than at any point in his life before. He shook his head and turned away.

“Painful, isn’t it?” said Sandra Shen.

Ed told her: “Fuck off.”

“That’s a disappointing attitude, Ed, even for a twink. Don’t you want to know the rest of it? Don’t you want to know
why
?”

“No,” Ed said. “I don’t.”

“It got your head in the fishtank, Ed.”

“Another thing,” he said. “What was all that about? What was happening to me in there? What was that stuff I had to put my head in? Because, you know, it’s disgusting to do that, day after day.”

“Ah,” said Sandra Shen. “That was me. I was always in there with you, Ed. You weren’t alone. I was the medium. You know? Like the proteome in the twink-tank? You swam to the future through me.” She smoked her cigarette meditatively. “That’s not quite true,” she admitted. “I misled you there. I was training you, but not so much to
see
the future as
be
it. How’d you like that idea, Ed? Be the future? Change it all. Change everything.” She shook her head, as if this was a bad day for explaining herself. “Put it another way,” she tried. “When you applied for this job, you said you flew every kind of ship but one. What’s the only kind of ship you never flew?”

“Who are you?” Ed whispered. “And where are you taking me?”

“You’ll know soon, Ed. Look!”

A filmy twist of light, a faint vertical smile seven hundred kilometres high, hung above them.
The Perfect Low
shuddered and rang as the forces that kept the wormhole open engaged with elements of Sandra Shen’s ad hoc engine. “There are more kinds of physics in play here,” she informed Ed, “than you people dream of in your philosophy.” Outside the hull, the aliens redoubled their efforts, shuttling faster and in more complex patterns. Suddenly Madam Shen’s eyes were full of excitement. “Not many people have done this achievement, Ed,” she reminded him. “You’re out in front here, you’ve got to admit that.”

Ed grinned despite himself.

“Just look at it,” he marvelled. “How d’you think they
made
it?”

Then he shook his head. “As to achievements,” he said, “Billy Anker picked this peach. I watched him pick it ten, twelve years ago. If I remember anything, I remember that.” He shrugged. “Of course, Billy never came back. You don’t get the tick unless you come back.”

Something about this mindless philosophy made Sandra Shen smile to herself. She stared up at the image on the screens for a moment or two. Then she said softly: “Hey, Ed.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t Annie. Annie was real.”

“I’m glad,” Ed said.

The wormhole opened to receive him.

During the transit, he fell asleep. He didn’t understand why, though even in his sleep he suspected that Madam Shen had organised it. He slumped in the pilot seat with his head on one side, couch-potatoed and breathing heavily through his mouth. Behind closed lids, his eyes flickered in REM manoeuvres, a simple but urgent code.

What he dreamed was this:

He was back in the family house. It was autumn—heavy, felted airs and rain. His sister came down from the father’s study carrying the lunch tray. Ed skulked about in the shadows on the landing, then jumped out on her. “Haraaar!” he said. “Oops.” Too late. The lunch tray slipped out of her hands in the wet light from the window. A hard-boiled egg rolled about in dipping, eccentric arcs, then bounced away down the stairs. Ed ran after it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy!” His sister was upset. After that she didn’t speak to him. He knew it was because of what he had seen before he jumped out. She was already holding the lunch tray in one hand. With the other, she was pulling her clothes about as if they didn’t fit properly. Her hands were already relaxing, soft and strengthless. She was already crying.

“I don’t want to be the mother,” she was telling herself.

That was the point everything went wrong in Ed’s life. Nothing after that was as bad, even when his father stood on the black kitten; and anyone who claimed it had gone wrong before that, they didn’t know anything.

A voice said: “Time to forgive yourself these things.”

Ed half-woke, felt the soft inside of the wormhole touch the ship, contract. He smiled loosely, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, slept once more, this time without dreams. Protected by the violent glow of alien engines, cocooned and cosseted by the ironic smile and unknowable motives of the entity at that time calling itself Sandra Shen, he was borne with grace and without incident down a birth canal a million years old. Or more. At the end of which, deep light would explode in upon him, in ways none of us can imagine.

After he ran out
of the cottage, Michael Kearney was thrown back for a last time into his own memory, where he saw himself, twenty years old, returning from his last innocent train journey to find a short, badly dressed woman walking up and down the taxi rank outside Charing Cross station, where the action of the Tarot cards had stranded him. She was holding up a letter in her right hand and shouting:

“You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper!”

Greying hair straggled down around a broad face reddened with effort. A maroon woollen coat, thick as carpet, compressed her fat breasts. “You
bloody
piece of paper!” she cried. As if trying for some final, indisputable delivery, she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. She had a duty of expression, you felt, to the forces inside her. It was work for her, work of the hardest sort, hawked up from somewhere deep. Kearney couldn’t repress a shudder. But no one else seemed bothered: instead, they regarded her with a cautious, even affectionate, amusement, especially when her back was to them. When Kearney’s turn came at the head of the queue, she stopped in front of him and caught his eye. She was short, stout. The smell that clung to her reminded him of empty houses, old clothes, mice. Her sense of drama, the intractable rawness of her emotion, left him unnerved.

“Piece of paper!” she shouted at him. He saw that the letter was old, shiny with use, falling apart at the folds. “You bloody piece!” She held it out to him. Kearney stared mutely away, aching with embarrassment. He tapped his foot.

“You bloody
written thing
!” she said.

He shook his head. He thought perhaps she wanted money. “No,” he said, “I—”

A taxi roared into the Charing Cross forecourt and pulled up next to him with a squeal of brakes. Dazzled briefly by the sunlight dancing in the raindrops on its bonnet, he seemed to lose sight of her. In a trice, she had reached in close and tucked the paper deftly into one of his jacket pockets. When he looked up, she was gone. On the paper he found not a letter but an address in Cambridge, written in blue ink as old as himself. He brought it close to his face. Reading it seemed to exhaust him. When the folds gave way, and it fell into lace in his hands, he redirected the taxi, caught another train and went home. There, depressed, worn out, unable to convince himself of the need to unpack his bag, he realised that he had memorised the address without wanting to. He tried to work. He sat dealing cards until it got dark, then—perhaps in a bid to remind himself of the triviality of all this—prowled from bar to bar, drinking restlessly, hoping to meet Inge Neumann and have her tell him with a laugh:

“It’s just a bit of fun.”

Next afternoon he stood in the rain where the paper had led him, across the street from a substantial old suburban house, detached, three or four storeys high, in gardens half-hidden behind a wall of attractively spalled red brick.

He had no idea why he had come.

He stood there until his clothes were soaked, but made no move to leave. Children ran up and down the street. At half past four there was a brief increase in traffic. As the rain cleared and the afternoon light shifted west, the brickwork took on a warm orange colour, and the garden wall seemed to recede a little, as if the street had widened; at the same time it seemed to stretch, becoming taller and longer. A little later, the woman in the wool coat waddled into view, breathing heavily and wiping her face. She crossed the road and, walking straight through the wall, disappeared.

“Wait!” gasped Kearney, and flung himself after her.

He had the sense of penetrating something membranous which clung elastically to his face. Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.

Odd items of furniture remained in the house, as if some tenant hadn’t quite abandoned it. It was cold in there. Kearney went from room to room, stopping to examine an old-fashioned brass fender, a wooden ironing board folded up like an insect in a corner. He thought he heard people whispering in the rooms above; a laugh cut off by a sudden intake of breath.

The Shrander was waiting for him in the master bedroom. He could see her clearly through the open door, standing at the bay window. Light poured round her thickened, monolithic silhouette, transfiguring the bare floor of the room, then spilled out onto the landing at Kearney’s feet, illuminating the rolls of dust beneath the cream-painted skirting board. Arranged on an inlaid table just inside the door he could see: books of matches; condoms in squares of foil; fans of Polaroid snapshots; a pair of oversized dice with symbols he didn’t recognise.

“You can come in,” the Shrander said. “You can step right in.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

At this a white bird flew past the three panes of the bay window, and the Shrander turned to face him.

Her head was no longer human. (Why had he ever thought it was? Why had anyone in the taxi queue thought it was?) It was the skull of a horse. Not a horse’s head, but a horse’s
skull,
an enormous curved bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, and which looks nothing like a horse at all. A wicked, intelligent, purposeless thing which cannot speak. It was the colour of tobacco. There was no neck. A few shreds of coloured rag—perhaps they had once been ribbons, red, white and blue, studded with coins and medallions—hung where the neck might have been, forming a kind of mantle. This object tilted itself intelligently, looking up and sideways at Michael Kearney like a bird. Breath could be heard inside it. The body beneath, wrapped in its maroon woollen coat, stained and smelly with food, raised its pudgy arms in a proprietary yet generous gesture.