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THIRTY-THREE Ed Chianese's Last Throw

The Perfect Low emerged from her journey down the wormhole. Her engine wound itself down then broke up into its component parts. She seemed to consider her options for a minute or two, then made off busily through local space, to arrive a little later above an asteroid in full view of the Kefahuchi Tract.

Ed Chianese sprawled in the pilot seat with his mouth open, breathing heavily. Except that one hand rested on his genitals, he resembled The Death of Chatterton; and if he was dreaming it didn't show. Looking down at him with an expression in her eyes both maternal and ironic, stood a small oriental woman in a gold cheongsam split to the thigh. She lit a cigarette, smoked it between shakes of the head. Her eyes never left him. You would have said, if she had been a real woman, that she was trying to work him out.

'Well, Ed. Time to get on,' she said eventually.

A few whitish motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. 'You know, we should have music for this,' she said. 'Something measured.' She raised her hand. Ed was lifted gently out of his seat by the gesture and propelled at a walking pace to The Perfect Low's nearest hatch; which, when opened, evacuated the atmosphere from the entire ship. Ed, too. He seemed unaware of this event, which was perhaps to the good. A little later he lay in the air-perfectly horizontal, legs together, hands folded on his chest as if for burial-two or three feet off the surface of the asteroid.

'Nice,' said Sandra Shen. 'You look nice, Ed.'

She tilted her face to the glare of the Tract, against which could dimly be seen the shape of The Perfect Low.

'I shan't need you any more,' she told it.

The ship manoeuvred for a second or two, the aliens in their mortsafes visible briefly in intermittent bursts of torchlight. Then they fired up the Purple Cloud again and were gone.

Sandra Shen stared after them. For a moment or two she seemed regretful, and reluctant to make decisions. 'Do I want another cigarette?' she asked Ed. 'No, I don't think I do.' She was restless, edgy: not quite herself. Her shadow became briefly restless too. Her hands were busy about her clothes. Or were they? Perhaps it was more than that. For a moment, sparks seemed to pour out of everything. She sighed exasperatedly, then seemed to relax.

'Do wake up, Ed,' she said.

Ed woke standing, on the curve of a small world under the desperate illumination of the Kefahuchi Tract.

Pillars of fire rose and fell above him-colours in suites, colours which had no business together, stained-glass colours. A little way off to one side, illuminated in a way he couldn't describe, lay a K-ship, its drive in park, its hull shimmering with the effort of repressing its weaponry; also, he noticed, the complete skeleton of a human being, brownish in colour, with bits of cloth and tarry cartilage still adhering to the bones. At his shoulder-odd and uncertain-looking in that raging, intransigent light, yet somehow less threatening than it first appeared-stood the entity sometimes known as 'Sandra Shen', sometimes 'Dr Haends', but most often down the years, and to most of its brief associates, 'the Shrander'. Ed eyed her sidelong. He took in the tubby figure, the maroon wool coat with its missing buttons; the head like a horse's skull, the eyes like pomegranate halves.

'Whoa!' he said. 'Are you real?'

He felt at himself with his hands. First things first.

'Am I real?' he said. Then: 'I've met you before.' Receiving no answer, he massaged his face. 'I know I've met you before.' He made a vague gesture. 'All this… ' he said.

'Amazing, isn't it?' said the Shrander. 'And it's like this all over.'

Ed didn't mean that. He meant he had come further than he wanted to.

'I'm not sure where I am.'

'Do you know,' the Shrander said, with an air of delight, 'I'm not, either! There's so much of it, isn't there?'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'You're Sandra Shen.'

'Her too. Yes.'

Ed gave up. For a moment, he thought, it would be enough just to be kind to himself. Take it in. But the Shrander seemed companionable and considerate, and he soon felt more secure than he had when he woke up. That in its turn made him feel as if he ought to make some further effort: so after a little thought he said, 'You're from the K-culture, aren't you? You didn't die, you guys. That's what this has been all about.'

He looked at her in a kind of sidelong awe.

'What kind of thing are you?'

'Ah,' said the Shrander. 'I'm not sure you'd understand the answer to that. Whatever kind, I'm the last of them: that's for sure.' She sighed. 'All good things must come to an end, Ed.'

Ed was unsure how to respond to this.

'How are you with that?' he said eventually. 'I mean, in yourself?'

'Oh fine. I'm fine with it.'

'You don't feel alone? Let down?'

'Oh, of course. Alone. A bit sidelined. Anyone would. But you know, we had our day, Ed, and it was a good one!' She looked up at him animatedly. 'I wish you could have seen us. We looked just like this, only if anything we had more ribbons.' She laughed. 'I won't show you what's under the coat.'

'Hey,' Ed said, 'I bet you look fine.'

'I'm not exactly Neena Vesicle down there.' She thought about this, perhaps for longer than she had intended. 'What was I saying?' she asked Ed.

'That you had your day,' Ed reminded her.

'Oh we did, Ed, we did! Life went as well for us as it does for you, maybe even better. One moment as dignified as a tea-dance in paradise; the next, fast, hallucinatory, last-chance, realtime. Oh, you know: absolute hell. We ate a few lunches. And you should have seen the achievements we did, Ed! We moved stuff about with the best of them. We had the code licked. We got all the answers you people want-'

She stopped. Indicated the sky.

'Then we came up against this. To tell you the absolute truth Ed, it stopped us as dead as the rest. It was old when we got here. The people who had been here before us, well they were old when we were nothing. We stole their ideas as fast as we could, the way you're doing now. We had our try at that thing- ' the Shrander seemed to shrug '-and it failed. Wow, Ed,' she said, 'but you should have seen us. By then we had some control of things. It was an exciting time. But it all comes to nothing, all the pushing and the shoving.' She tilted back her head a moment and pointed her great bone beak at the Tract. Then she looked back down at her own feet in the dust. 'Oh,' she said, 'I'm not complaining. Even that was fine. I mean, it was an adventure, it was our adventure. It was part of being what we were.

'And that's the thing, Ed. Being here. Being up to your neck in what you are.'

'You feel you lost that,' Ed said.

The Shrander sighed. 'I do,' she said.

She said: 'We got off-base with ourselves. That's what happens with this thing. You fall back from it. You break yourself on it. You lose heart. It beat us: it beat our intelligence, our capacity to understand. In the end, we didn't have the juice.' There was a pause in which they both contemplated the idea of limits, which was a comfortable one for Ed, since he had spent his life pushing them. When he felt it had gone on long enough, he said:

'So. What happened then?'

'You pick yourself up, Ed. You try to carry on. We were missing something, we had to admit. But that in itself gave us our big idea. We couldn't know the Tract; but we decided to build something that could. I'm the last of my kind, Ed, you're right. They left me here to make the project work.'

The Shrander fell silent.

After a while she said tiredly, 'I'm a long way out of date, Ed.'

Ed felt the weight of that. He felt the loneliness of it. What do you do for an alien entity? Do you put your arm around it? What do you say: 'I'm sorry you're old'? The Shrander must have gathered some of this, because she reassured him, 'Hey, Ed. Don't sweat it'; then, after a moment, gathered up her resources and gestured in a way that took in the low ruins, the inexplicable artifacts in the dust, the K-ship squatting there like an evil demon of engineering, its systems cooking with radiation, its armaments extruding senselessly as it detected possibly threatening events a hundred lights up and down the Beach.

'I lived in these ruins, these objects and others, all across the halo. There was a part of me in all of them, and every part of me was all of me. After EMC discovered K-tech, I lived in the navigational space of this ship. I stole it. From inside its maths, and across the bridge into its wetware, I had the run of fourteen dimensions, including four temporal. I was halo-wide, I was backwards and forwards in time like a yo-yo. I could intervene.'

'Why?'

'Because we built you, Ed. We built you from the amino acids up. We made a guess at what we didn't have, and we built your ancestors to evolve into what we couldn't be. It was a long-term project, as long-term as anything here on the Beach. OK, maybe not so visible as some of this solar engineering stuff. But, you know, did any of that actually work? Look around you; I'd say it didn't. We thought our investment had a chance, Ed. It was low-end and elegant both at the same time; even more interesting, we gave the universe a hand in it and left some things to chance. All this time I was watching over it.'

The Kefahuchi Tract.

A singularity without an event horizon. A place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out, like cheap conjuror's stuff, magic that might work or it might not, undependable stuff in a retro-shop window. You couldn't make anything of an idea like that, but you couldn't stop trying. You couldn't stop trying to engage it.

Ed's visual cortex, as excited as an ion-pair in a Tate-Kearney device, hallucinated dice emblems in that vast flicker of sky. He saw the Twins, a horse-head, a clipper ship in a tower of cloud like smoke. Beneath these emblems of chance/not-chance, the surface of the asteroid-if that was what it was-stretched away from him, mostly even, covered in a fine white dust. Here and there could be seen the remains of low rectangular structures, their foundations worn to a three-centimetre nub by unknown ablative forces originating in the Tract. Scattered around them in this entradista paradise were the shapes of smaller artifacts, their outlines burred by layers of dust, each one worth a small fortune in the chopshop laboratories of Motel Splendido.

He tried to think of himself as an artefact.

He bent down and put his ear to the surface. He could hear the K-code not far beneath, singing to itself like a choir.

'You're still down there,' he whispered.

'Down there and everywhere else. So what do you want to do, Ed?'

Ed got back to his feet.

'Do?'

The Shrander laughed. 'I didn't bring you here just to look at it,' she told him. 'If you knew what it was costing in thermodynamic terms just to keep you alive in this-' she paused as if lost for words ' — in this fabulous place, you'd blanch. Honestly. No, Ed, I'd have been delighted just to bring you here, but it wouldn't have been cost-effective just for that.'

'So,' Ed said. 'What?'

'Don't be naive, Steady Eddy. You can't stay still in this life. You go on or you go down. What'll it be?'

Ed grinned. He had the measure of her now. 'You were in the twink-tank, too,' he said. He chuckled. 'Rita Robinson!' he remembered. 'I bet you were Rita Robinson too.' He wandered over to where the skeleton lay, knelt down in the dust and touched its brownish bones. He pulled off a strip of light-bleached rag that had adhered to its ribcage, let it fall, watched the slow gravity take it down.

'So, look,' he said. 'What's the story here?'

'Ah,' said the Shrander. 'Kearney.'

'Kearney?' Ed said. 'Jesus. Not the Kearney?'

'Now there was someone who fell back from himself,' the Shrander said, 'exactly what I'm talking about. He was so promising early on, and yet so frightened of it all. I watched him fire up from nothing, Ed, then go out suddenly, just like a light. Oh, I know what you're going to say. He and Brian Tate got you people out here. Without him you wouldn't have quantum machines. You wouldn't have massive parallel processing. And without that you'd never have found your way around. But in the end he was a disappointment, Ed, believe me: he was just too frightened of the things he knew. I shouldn't have brought him here, but I felt I owed him.'

She laughed. 'Even though he stole something of mine and ran away every time I tried to ask for it back.' She bent down and sought about in the dust with her little pudgy hands.

'Look.'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'The Ship Game.'

'These are the originals, Ed. Look at that workmanship. We never knew how old they were.' She stared at the dice on the palm of her stubby little hand. 'They were old when we found them.'

'So what do they do?'

'We never found that out either.' The Shrander sighed. 'I kept them for their sentimental value,' she said. 'Here. You have them.'

'It's just a game to me,' Ed said.

He took the dice and turned them so they caught the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. This was the way they were meant to be viewed, he thought. They were another device for trying to understand the place where the rules ran out. The familiar images flickered and yearned, as if they wanted to jump off the faces of the dice and cook in the light. He felt he owed her something for that understanding, so he said:

'What do I do?'

'Here's the deal: you take the K-ship. You go deep. It's the Kefahuchi Boogie, Ed: it's point and press. You go all the way.'

'Why me?'

'You're the first of them. You're what we hoped to make.'

'Kearney was the brains,' Ed pointed out. 'Not me.'

'I don't want you to understand it, Ed. I want you to surf it.'

Ed threw the dice thoughtfully.

He threw them again.

He said: 'I always wanted to fly one of those things. What will happen if I take it in there?'

'To you?'

Ed threw the dice.

'To it all,' he said, making a gesture which seemed to include the universe.

The alien shrugged.

'Who knows? Things will change forever.'

Ed threw the dice once more. The Kefahuchi Tract raged silently above him. War was breaking out in sympathy, up and down the Beach. He looked at the dice, lying in the irradiated dirt. Something he saw there-something about the way they had fallen-seemed to amuse him.

'Well, fuck all that,' he said, and came up grinning. 'Will it be fun?'

'Ed, it will.'

'Where do I sign up?'

A little later, paraplegic, catheterised and stuffed to the limits of his nervous system with brand new drugs, Ed Chianese, twink, felt the Einstein Cross light up his brain, and took control of his K-ship. Sandra Shen had trained him well. Navigation is an act of prophecy, a couple of guesses with your head in a tank of prophylactic jelly. You can leave the massive parallel processing to the algorithms: you can leave it to the quantumware. After signing him on, the mathematics had gone up into its own space, where Ed found it waiting for him.

'Hey,' Ed said.

'What's that?'

'One thing I wish. I had a sister, you know, and I did something stupid and walked away from her. I wish I'd see her again. Just once more. Sort that out.'

'That won't be possible, Ed.'

'Then I want to rename the ship. Can I do that?'

'Of course you can.'

Ed thought hard about his fucked-up life. 'We're the Black Cat,' he said. 'We're the Black Cat from now on.'

'Ed, it's a fine name.'

'So ramp me up.'

The mathematics was delighted to do that. Ed went on ship-time. Ten spatial dimensions spread themselves like legs for him; four of time. Dark matter boiled and flared. Out in the last place in the ordinary world, the Black Cat rose from the surface of the asteroid. She hunted like a compass needle, then turned herself slowly until she stood on her tail. For thirty nanoseconds, which is a million years down there where things are small, nothing happened. Then fusion product burst out of her stern. She leapt forward on a line of bright white light and shortly made a hole in nowhere.

'Well the engine's on. Let's just point the fucker.'

'Let's just do that, Ed.'

'Which of these switches is the music?'

The asteroid now stood empty, but for the bone dice and the dead physicist. The dice lay as they had fallen for Ed Chianese, and the dust sifted over them. Michael Kearney's bones browned a little further. Seria Mau Genlicher returned a number of times, sometimes happy, sometimes like a living winter, and looked down, and went away again. Years passed. Centuries passed. Then the sky began to change colour, subtly and slowly at first, then faster and wilder than anyone could dream.