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TWENTY-SEVEN The Alcubiere Break

Ed's fishtank movie showed him his sister leaving again.

'But will you come back?' the father begged her. There was no answer to that. 'But will you?'

Ed wrenched his head around on his neck as far as it would go, stared at anything-the flower tubs, the white cumulus clouds, the tabby cat -so as not to look at either of them. He wouldn't have a kiss from her. He wouldn't wave goodbye. She bit her bottom lip and turned away. Ed knew this was a memory. He wished he could piece it together with the other stuff he remembered, make sense of the shitty retrospective project of his life. But her face wavered as if behind water, decoherent and strange, and suddenly he was right through it and out the other side.

Everything lurched as hewent through, and there was nothing but blackness and a sense of enormous speed. A few dim points of light. A chaotic attractor churning and boiling in the cheap iridescent colours of 400-year-old computer art. Like a wound in the firmament.

'You believe this shit?' Ed said.

His voice echoed. Then he was out the other side of that too, and toppling in empty space forever, where he could hear the precise roaring surf of the songs of the universe, nested inside each other like fractal dimensions-and then woke and found he was still on stage. It was unusual for that to happen, and maybe what had wakened him was this unlooked-for noise he had heard, swelling up to penetrate his prophetic coma like the sound of the waves as they fall on Monster Beach. He opened his eyes. The audience, still on its feet, was applauding him for the third solid minute. Of them all, Sandra Shen was the only one still seated. Eyeing him from the front row with an ironic smile, she tapped her little oriental paws slowly together. Ed leaned forward to try and hear the sound they made. Fainted.

Next he woke with the smell of salt in his nostrils. The great bulk of the dunes was black over him. Above that, the neck of the night with its cheap ornaments strung round it. Both of those were more comforting than the silhouette of the circus owner, the red ember of her bat-shit cigarette. She seemed pleased.

'Ed, you did so well!'

'What did I say? What happened?'

'What happened, they loved you Ed,' she answered. 'You shot right through. I'd say you were their boy.' She laughed. 'I'd say you were my boy too.'

Ed tried to sit up.

'Where's Annie?'

'Annie had to be somewhere else, Ed. But I'm here.'

Ed stared up at her. She was kneeling behind his head, bent over so she could look in his face. Her face was upside down to him, faint, sallow with clues. A few lively motes spilled from her eyes, blew away on the sea wind. She smiled and stroked his forehead.

'Still bored, Ed? No need to be. The circus is yours. You can name your price. We can start selling futures. Oh, and Ed?'

'What?'

'We leave in a fortnight.'

He felt relieved. He felt doomed. He didn't know how to tell Annie. He drank all day in the bars of the coastal strip; or- which was not like him-practised voluntarily with the fishtank in the afternoons. He would have played the Ship Game, but the old men were long gone from the Dunes Motel. He would have twinked out but he was afraid to go downtown. Annie, meanwhile, absented herself from his life. She worked all night, and came in quietly after she thought Ed had gone to sleep. When they did meet, she was preoccupied, quiet, withdrawn. Had she guessed? She looked away from him when he smiled. This made him wretched enough to say:

'We have to talk.'

'Do we, Ed?'

'While we still remember each other.'

A week after he hit the jackpot, she didn't come home at all.

She was away three days. During that time, Madame Shen prepared to leave New Venusport. The exhibits were folded. The attractions were packed. The big tent was struck. Her ship, The Perfect Low, came down from the parking lot one bright blue morning. It turned out to be a tubby brass-coloured little dynaflow HS-SE freighter, forty or fifty years old, built cheap and cheerful with a pointed nose and long curved fins at the back. 'Well, Ed, what do you think of the rocket?' Sandra Shen asked. Ed stared up at the ripe-avocado geometry of its hull, blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core.

'It's a dog,' he told her. 'You want my opinion.'

'You'd prefer a hyperdip,' she said. 'You'd prefer to be back on France Chance IV, going dive for dive with Liv Hula in a smart carbon hull. She couldn't have done it without you, Ed. She went on record later, "I only pushed so hard because I was afraid Ed Chianese would get there first".'

Ed shrugged.

'I did all that,' he said. 'I'd prefer to be with Annie now.'

'Oh ho. Now he can go, he can't bring himself to leave. Annie's got things to do at the moment, Ed.'

'Things for you?'

It was Sandra Shen's turn to shrug. She continued to gaze wryly up at her ship. After a moment she said: 'Don't you want to know why they love your show? Don't you want to know why they changed their minds about you?'

Ed shivered. He wasn't sure he did.

'Because you stopped the war-talk, Ed, and all the stuff about eels. You gave them a future instead. You gave them the Tract, glittering in front of them like an affordable asset. You took them in there, you showed them what they might find, what it might make them. Everything's worn out down here, and they know it. You didn't offer them retro, Ed. You said it hadn't all been done. You said, "Go deep!" That's what they wanted to hear: one day soon they were going to get off the beach at last, and into the sea!'

She laughed. 'You were very persuasive. Then you were sick.'

'But I've never been there,' Ed said. 'No one has.'

Sandra Shen licked a flake of local tobacco from the corner of her lower lip.

'That's right,' she said. 'They haven't, have they?'

Ed waited for Annie, she didn't come. One day, then two. He cleaned the room. He washed out her spare Lycra. He stared at the wall. Suddenly, when he didn't want to go anywhere, or be reminded there was anywhere to go, the port was full of activity. Rocket flare lit the dunes all night. Rickshaws bustled in and out. The circus was shipped, except for the aliens in their decorated mortsafes which you saw in the distance just after dawn, following their handlers across the concrete on some unknown errand. The third day, Ed got out an aluminium folding chair and sat in the sun with a bottle of Black Heart. Half past ten in the morning, a Pierpoint Street rickshaw entered the port from the city side and came on at a good clip.

Ed jumped to his feet. 'Hey, Annie! Annie!' he called. The chair went over, but he saved the rum. 'Annie!'

'Ed!'

She was laughing. He heard her call his name all the way across the concrete. But when the rickshaw pulled up in front of him in a cloud of advertisements like coloured smoke and tissue paper, it wasn't Annie between the shafts, only some other girl with big legs who looked him up and down ironically.

'Hey,' he said. 'Who are you?'

'You ain't ready to know,' said the rickshaw girl. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. 'Your squeeze is in there.'

At that moment, Annie Glyph stepped down on to the concrete. Those missing three days she had put to use, and had herself made over- an investment unknowingly underpinned by the humiliated Bella Cray. The cut was radical. New clean flesh had flourished like magic in the tailor's soup. The old Annie was gone. What Ed saw was this: a girl not more than fifteen years old. She wore a calf-length pink satin skirt with a kick pleat at the back, and a bolero top in lime green angora wool that showed off her nipples. This she had accessorised with a little gold chain belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. Her hair, a blonde floss, was done up in bunches with matching ribbon. Even with the shoes she was less than five foot two and a half inches tall.

'Hi Ed,' she said. 'Like it? It's called Mona.'

She looked down at herself. Looked back up at him and laughed.

'You like it!' she said.

She said anxiously: 'You do like it, don't you?' She said, 'Oh Ed. I'm so happy.'

Ed didn't know what to say. 'Do I know you?'

'Ed!'

'It was a joke,' he said. 'I see the resemblance now. It's nice, but I don't know why you did this.'

He said: 'I liked you the way you were.'

Annie stopped smiling.

'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'It wasn't for you. It was for me.'

'I don't get this.'

'Ed, I wanted to be smaller.'

'This isn't smaller,' Ed said. 'It's Pierpoint Street.'

'Oh, great,' she said. 'Fuck off. It's what I am, Ed. Pierpoint Street.'

She got back in the rickshaw. To the rickshaw girl she said, 'Take me away from this fucker.' She got down out of the rickshaw again and stamped her foot. 'I love you Ed, but it has to be said you're a twink. What if I wanted to be fucked by someone bigger than me? What if that was what I needed to get off? You don't see that, that's why you're a twink.'

Ed stared at her. 'I'm having an argument with someone I don't even recognise,' he complained.

'Look at me then. You helped me when I was down, only I found out too late that being your mother was the price. Twinks always need a mother. What if I didn't want to be that any more?"

She sighed. She could see he didn't get it.

'Look,' she said. 'What's my life to you? You saved me, and I don't forget that. But I got my ideas about things. I got my ambitions, I always did. You're shipping out with Madam Shen anyway. Oh yes! You think I didn't know that? Ed, I was there before you. Only a twink would think I wasn't.

'We already saved each other, now it's time to save ourselves. You know I'm right.'

A long curved wave of bleakness raced towards Ed Chianese's shore: the Alcubiere break, which is the black surf gravity; which is the coiled swell of empty space that sucks into itself one significant event of your life after another and if you don't move on you're left there gazing out across nothing at nothing much again.

'I guess,' he said.

'Hey,' she said. 'Look at me.' She came close and made him look in her eyes. 'Ed, you'll be OK.'

Her tailored pheromones caused his head to spin. Her very voice gave him an erection. He kissed her. 'Mmmm,' she said. 'That's nice. You'll soon be out there again, flying those famous lady-pilots. Which I have to say I'm jealous of them.' Her eyes were the colour of speedwell in the water meadows of a New Venusport corporate village. Her hair smelled of peppermint shampoo. Despite all this, she had completely natural lines. It was art not artifice. You would never know she had been to the tailor. She was sex on a stick, Mona the clone, the porn in your pocket.

'I got what I wanted, Ed -'

'I'm glad,' Ed made himself say. 'I really am.'

' — and I hope you will too.'

He kissed the top of her head. 'You take care, Annie.'

She let him see her smile.

'I will,' she said.

'Bella Cray… '

Annie shrugged.

'You didn't know me, Ed. How will she?'

She detached herself from him gently and got back in the rickshaw. 'You certain about this?' the rickshaw girl was prompted to enquire. 'Because you been in and out of there before.'

'I'm certain,' Annie said. 'I'm sorry.'

'Hey,' said the rickshaw girl, 'don't apologise. You work the port you're on a diet of raw sentiment.'

Annie laughed. She sniffed and wiped her eyes.

'You take care too,' she told Ed.

With that she was gone. Ed watched the rickshaw grow smaller and smaller as it crossed the bare concrete to the spaceport gate, its advertisements streaming after it like a cloud of coloured scarves and butterflies in the sun. Annie's little hand appeared for a moment, to be waved back at Ed, forlorn and cheerful at the same time. He heard her call something which he worked out later was, 'Don't spend too much time in the future!' Then she turned the corner to the city, and he never saw her again in that life.

Ed went and got drunk the rest of the day at the Cafй Surf and was dragged home in the dark by his former gambling partners from the Dunes Motel. There, he found Sandra Shen waiting for him with the fishtank under her arm. The old men laughed and blew on their hands to indicate scorching. 'You in trouble now, my man!' they predicted. All that night, pale white motes flickered in the dark in Annie Glyph's old room; then, later, on the dunes outside. Next day he woke exhausted aboard The Perfect Low. He was alone, and the ship was warming for take-off He felt the hum of engines through her frame. He felt the tremble in the tips of her fins. The oily preflight roll of the dynaflow drivers came up to him from somewhere below and the hair rose on the back of his neck for the millionth time because he was alive in this place and this time, and leaving it all only to find something else out there.

Always more. Always more after that.

The little freighter shook with the excitement of it too. She balanced herself carefully on a column of flame and in her own tubby fashion hurled herself skyward.

'Hey Ed,' came Sandra Shen's dry voice a minute or two later. 'Look at this!'

The New Venusport parking orbit was full of K-ships. Pods and superpods stretched away as far as Ed could see, hundreds of them, in restlessly layered and shifting formations. They dipped in and out of local space, extruding w eapons, as suspicious of one another as animals, hulls simmering gently in a bouillabaisse of particles. They shimmered with navigational fields, defensive fields, fields for target acquisition and ordnance control, fields which shed everything from soft X-rays to hard light, Local space miraged and twisted around them. They were hunting without moving. He could almost hear the poisonous throb of their engines.

War! he thought.

The Perfect Low, receiving clearance, edged between them and out of the lot.