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Uncle Zip laughed too. Then he let his face go expressionless.

“You waited too long for that free offer,” he informed her. “I changed my mind about that.”

He was sitting on a stool in his front room above the shop. He had on a short-sleeve sailor suit and hat. White canvas trousers clung tight to bursting over his spread thighs. On each thigh he had a daughter sitting, plump red-faced little girls with blue eyes, shiny cheeks and blonde ringlets, caught as if in a still picture, laughing and reaching for his hat. All the flesh in this picture was lively and varnished. All the colours were pushed and rich. Uncle Zip’s fat arms curved around his daughters, his hands placed in the small of each back as if they were the bellows-ends of his accordion. Behind him, the room was lacquered red and green, and there were shelves on which he had arranged his collections of polished motorcycle parts and other kitschy things from the history of Earth. Whatever you saw in Uncle Zip’s house, he never let you see his wife, or gave you one thin glimpse of the tools of his trade. “As to where the guy is,” he said, “this is where you go . . .”

He gave her the name of a system, and a planet.

“It surveys as 3-alpha-Ferris VII. The locals—which there aren’t many of them—call it Redline.”

“But that’s in—”

“—Radio Bay.” He shrugged. “Nothing comes easy in this world, kid. You got to decide how much you want what you want.”

Seria Mau cut him off.

“Goodbye, Uncle Zip,” she said, and left him there with his expensive family and his cheap rhetoric.

Two or three days later, the K-ship
White Cat,
registered as a freebooter out of Venusport, New Sol, quit the Motel Splendido parking orbit and slipped away into the long night of the halo. She had loaded fuel and ordnance. After port authority inspection she had accepted minor hull maintenance, and paid the scandalous tax upon it. She had paid her dues. At the last moment, for reasons her captain barely understood, she had taken on payload too: a team of corporate exogeologists and their equipment, headed towards Suntory IV. For the first time in a year, the lights were on in the human quarters of the ship. The shadow operators mopped and mowed. They hung in corners, whispering and clasping their hands in a kind of bony delight.

What were they? They were algorithms with a life of their own. You found them in vacuum ships like the
White Cat,
in cities, wherever people were. They did the work. Had they always been there in the galaxy, waiting for human beings to take residence? Aliens who had uploaded themselves into empty space? Ancient computer programmes dispossessed by their own hardware, to roam about, half lost, half useful, hoping for someone to look after? In just a few hundred years they had got inside the machinery of things. Nothing worked without them. They could even run on biological tissue, as shadow boys full of crime and beauty and inexplicable motives. They could, if they wanted, they sometimes whispered to Seria Mau, run on
valves
.

Tig Vesicle ran a
tank farm, but he didn’t do that stuff himself, any more than he would have filled his arm with AbH. How he looked at it was this: his life was crap, but it was a life. So the kind of porn he liked to watch was ordinary, cheap, unimmersive, holographic stuff. It was often advertised as intrusion-porn. The fantasy of it was: some woman’s room would get fitted with microcameras without her knowledge. You could watch her do anything, though things would usually end with some cultivar—all tusks, prick the size of a horse—finding her in the shower. Vesicle often turned that part off. The show he watched most was syndicated from out in the halo and featured a girl called Moaner, who was supposed to live in a corporate enclave somewhere on Motel Splendido. The story was, her husband was always away (though in fact he often arrived back unexpectedly with five of his business associates, who included another woman). Moaner wore short pink latex skirts with tube tops and little white socks. She had a little clean mat of pubic hair. She was bored, the narrative went; she was agile and spoilt. Vesicle preferred her to do ordinary things, like painting her toenails naked, or trying to look over her shoulder at herself in a mirror. One thing with Moaner was this: even though she was a clone, her body looked real. She wasn’t any kind of rebuild. They advertised her as “never been to the tailor” and he could believe that.

The other thing about her was that she was aware of you, even though she didn’t know you were there.

Could you get behind that paradox? Vesicle believed you could. If he once understood it, it would tell him something about the universe or, equally important, about human beings. He felt as if she knew he was there.
She isn’t a porn star!
he would tell himself.

He was dreaming this cheap, doomed, New Man dream—while Moaner herself yawned and tried on a pair of brand-new yellow Mickey Mouse shorts with big buttons and matching suspenders—when the door of the tank farm banged open, letting in a gust of cold grey wind from the street, along with six or seven tiny kids. They had short black hair and tight, furious Asian faces. Snow was melting on the shoulders of their black rainslickers. The oldest was maybe eight, with lightning flashes etched into the short hair above her ears and a Nagasaki Hi-Lite Autoloader clutched in both hands. They spread out and began going through the tank cubicles as if they were looking for something, shouting and gabbling in gluey voices and pulling out the power cables so the tanks went on to emergency wake-up call.

“Hey!” said Tig Vesicle.

They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them. They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles—where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height.
Café électrique
had already rotted her little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then said something like:

“Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?”

She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

This seemed to anger her unreasonably. “Fortie!” she shrieked.

Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:

“I’m so scared I don’t know whether to laugh or shit.”

Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the street door. The girl’s eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.

It was this:

One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing air. Even their shadows had tusks. Their huge arms were blue with cold, but they were too fucking hard-on to care about that. “Hey,” they told one another, “I wish I’d put less clothes on. You know?” The entry pattern was this: they rushed the door of the twink parlour in twos, and the kiddies inside shot them down from behind the coffins.

It was bedlam in there in quite a short time after they killed the Hi-Lite girl, with the flat fizzing arcs of reaction bolts, the flicker of laser sights in the smoke, and a rich smell of human fluids. The front window was out. Big smoking holes were in the walls. Two of the tanks had fallen off their trestles; the rest, alive with shocking pink alarm graphics, were warming up fast. To Tig Vesicle it seemed that the whole issue revolved around Tank Seven. The kids had given up on getting it open: but they weren’t going to leave it for anyone else. Seeing this early on, Vesicle had crawled as far away from it as possible, and got in a corner with his hands over his eyes, while cultivars rushed through the smoke, shouting, “Hey, don’t bother to cover me!” and were picked off. The kids had a tactical advantage there: but down on firepower, down on their luck, and they were being pushed back. They shrieked in their gluey argot. They pulled new guns from beneath their rainslickers. Looking over their shoulders for another way out, they got shot in the legs, or the spine, and they were soon in a condition the tailor couldn’t cure. Things looked bad, then two things happened:

Somebody hit Tank Seven with a short reaction shell.

And the Cray sisters appeared in the tank farm doorway, shaking their heads and reaching for the pieces in their purses.

Chinese Ed and Rita Robinson were on the run somewhere in the weeds in back of the burning carwash. Hanson was dead, Ed guessed, and the DA too, so there would be no help from that quarter. Otto Rank had the high ground. He also had the 30.06 he had taken from Hogfat Wisconsin’s kitchen after he tortured and killed Hogfat’s teenage daughter. It was the way he laid her out that was the missing piece of the puzzle, Ed thought. I should have seen that, but I was too busy being the smart dick. Not seeing that was going to cost two more lives, but at least one of them was only his own.

Ed’s head got too far above the weeds. The flat crack-and-whip of the 30.06 cut across the drowsy afternoon air. Some birds flew up from the river bank a quarter of a mile away.

Sixteen shots, Ed thought. Maybe he’s low on ammo now.

Ed’s ramrod Dodge was where he had left it parked, on the service road the other side of the lot. They weren’t going to make it that far. Rita was shot. Ed was shot too, but not as bad. On the up side, he had a couple of shells left in one of the Colts. He ran harder, but this seemed to open Rita’s wound.

“Hey, Ed,” she said. “Put me down. Let’s do it here.”

She laughed, but her face was grey and defeated.

“Jesus, Rita,” Ed said.

“I know. You’re sorry. Well you shouldn’t be, Ed. I got shot with you, which is more than most girls get.” She tried to laugh again. “Don’t you want to make it with me in the weeds?”

“Rita . . .”

“I’m tired, Ed.”

She didn’t say any more, and her expression didn’t change. Eventually he put her down in the weeds and began to cry. After a minute or two he shouted:

“Otto, you fucker!”

“Yo!” said Rank.

“She’s dead.”

There was a silence. After a bit, Rank said:

“You want to come in?”

“She’s dead, Otto. You’re next.”

There was a laugh.

“If you come in—” Rank began, then seemed to be thinking. “What is it I do?” he called. “Hey, help me out here, Ed. Oh, wait, no, got it:
If you come in I see you get a fair trial.
” He put a shot where he estimated Ed’s skull had last been. “Guess what?” he said, when the echoes had died away. “I’m shot too, Ed. Rita shot me in the heart, long before she met you. These women! It was point-blank, Ed. You make anything of that?”

“I make suck my dick out of it,” Ed said.

He stood up as coolly as he could. He saw Otto Rank down at the edge of the carwash roof in the classic infantry kneel, the 30.06 up at aim, its sling tight round his elbow. Ed raised the Colt carefully in both hands. He had two shots left, and it was important he spoiled the first one. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and squeezed off carefully. The round went ten, twelve feet wide, and Ed dropped his pistol arm to his side. Otto, who had been surprised to see him pop up out of the weeds like that, gave a wild laugh of relief.

“You got the wrong gun, Ed!” he shouted.

He stood up. “Hey,” he said. “Take another pop. It’s free!”

He spread his arms wide. “Nobody shoots anybody at eighty yards with a Colt .45,” he said.

Ed raised the gun again and fired.

Rank was picked up from the head end and thrown backwards with his feet in the air. He fell off the roof and into the weeds. “Fuck you, Ed!” he screamed, but his face was half off and he was already dead. Chinese Ed looked down at his Colt. He made a gesture as if to throw it away. “I’m sorry, Rita,” he was beginning to say, when the sky behind the carwash turned a steely colour and ripped open like a page of cheap print. This time the duck was huge. Something was wrong with it. Its yellow feathers had a greasy look, and a human tongue hung laxly out of one side of its beak.

“There will be an interruption to service,” it said. “As a valued customer—”

At that, Chinese Ed’s consciousness was pulled apart and he was received into all the bleakness and pain of the universe. All the colours went out of his world, and all the beautiful simple ironies along with them, and then the world itself was folded away until through it, try as he might, he could see nothing but the cheesy fluorescent lights of Tig Vesicle’s tank farm. He erupted out of the wreckage of Tank Seven, half drowned, throwing up with disorientation and horror. He stared round at the drifting smoke, the dead kids and stunned-looking cultivars. Proteome poured sluggishly off him like the albumen of a bad egg. Poor, dead Rita was gone for good and he wasn’t even Chinese Ed the detective anymore. He was Ed Chianese, twink.