Light

17 The Lost Entradas

Human beings, hooked by the mystery of the Kefahuchi Tract, arrived on its doorstep two hundred years after they got into space.

They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.

Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was in a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. If your theory gave you a foamy space to work with—if you had to catch a wave—that didn’t preclude some other engine, running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing the same tranche of empty space. It was even possible to build drives on the basis of superstring-style theories, which, despite their promise four hundred years ago, had never really worked at all.

It was affronting to discover that. So when they fetched up on the edge of the Tract, looked it in the eye, and began to despatch their doomed entradas, the Earthlings were hoping to find, among other things, some answers. They wondered why the universe, which seemed so harsh on top, was underneath so pliable. Anything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. They were hoping to find out why. And while the entradistas were dying in ways no one could imagine, crushed, fried, expanded or reduced to mists of particles by the Tract itself, lesser hearts took with enthusiasm to the Beach, where they found Radio Bay. They found new technologies. They found the remains of ancient races, which they ragged about like bull terrier pups with an old bone.

They found artificial suns.

There had been, some time in the deep past, such a premium on the space closest to the Tract that there were more artificial suns in the Radio Bay cluster than natural ones. Some had been towed in from other locations; others had been built from scratch, in situ. Planets had been steered into place around them, and inserted into unnatural orbits designed to keep the Tract in maximum view. Ferociously goosed magnetic fields and ramped-up atmospheres protected them from radiation. Between the planets, under the sleets of raging light, rogue moons wove their way, in fantastically complex orbits.

These were less star systems than beacons, less beacons than laboratories, and less laboratories than experiments in themselves: enormous detectors designed to react to the unimaginable forces pouring out of the uncontained singularity hypothetically present at the centre of the Tract.

This object was massively energetic. It was surrounded by gas clouds heated to 50,000 degrees Kelvin. It was pumping out jets and spumes of stuff both baryonic and non-baryonic. Its gravitational effects could be detected, if faintly, at the Core. It was, as one commentator put it: “a place that had already been old by the time the first great quasars began to burn across the early universe in the unimaginable dark.” Whatever it was, it had turned the Tract around it into a region of black holes, huge natural accelerators and junk matter—a broth of space, time, and heaving event horizons; an unpredictable ocean of radiant energy, of deep light. Anything could happen there, where natural law, if there had ever been such a thing, was held in suspension.

None of the ancient races managed to penetrate the Tract and bring back the news; but they all had their try. They had their try at finding out. By the time human beings arrived, there were objects and artefacts up to sixty-five million years old hanging off the edge, some clearly left by cultures many orders stranger or more intelligent than anything you saw around today. They all came prepared with a theory. They brought a new geometry, a new ship, a new method. Every day they launched themselves into the fire, and turned to cinders.

They launched themselves from places like Redline.

Whoever built Redline, whoever built its actinic, enraged-looking sun, wasn’t even broadly human. Added to which a peculiar orbital motion, designed to keep the artefact at its south pole presented to a location deep inside the central area of the Kefahuchi Tract, gave it nauseous, undependable rhythms. On Redline, spring arrived twice in five years, then for a whole year in the next twenty; then every other day. When it came it was the colour and quality of cheap neon. Steaming radio-jungles and blue-lit, UV-scoured deserts precluded much in the way of direct dealing by human beings. (Though, in a broad metaphor of the exploration of the Bay itself, the brave, the unlucky and the morally dyslexic still despatched themselves on hasty half-planned entradas. In search of what? Who knew. They were quickly lost in the mists among the foetid ruins. Those that returned, having cracked their faceplates better to examine what they found, would brag around the Motel Splendido spaceport bars for a week or two on their return, then die in the tradition of the entrada, from indescribable diseases.)

Seria Mau consulted her fakebooks. “The South Polar Artefact,” they informed her, “resists analysis, though it appears to be a receiver rather than a transmitter.” And later: “While ‘ day’ and ‘ night’ can be said to occur on Redline, their occurrence does not seem to be determined simply.” This was the place that lay below her, so pure and unambiguous it was a joy to behold. Also, her fate, at least in a sense. She opened a line.

“Billy Anker,” she said. “I’m here to see you.”

After some time a voice replied, patched and faint, bracketed by static. “You want to come down?” it said. Immediately she was nervous.

“I’ll send a fetch,” she temporised.

Billy Anker had a thin stubbly face, from which the dark hair swept back into a brutal little ponytail freighted with grey. His age was uncertain, his skin darkened by the light of a thousand suns. His eyes were greeny-grey, set in deep sockets: if he liked you they considered you for some time, often becoming warmly amused; if he didn’t, they slid away. They delivered nothing. Billy Anker had an enthusiasm to be out there in the Bay (some said he was born there, but what did they know? They were junkie entradistas and particle-jockeys whose soft voices, wrecked by Carmody bourbon laced with the ribosomes of local bats, told only their own romantic inner legend) always searching for something. He had no patience with anyone who didn’t feel the same. Or who at least didn’t feel something.

“We’re here to look,” he’d say, “and be amazed. We’re not here long. Look at this. See that? Look!”

He was a thin, active, seeking little man, skin and tendons, who at all times wore the bottom half of an ancient air-pilot’s G-suit, two leather coats, a red and green do-rag tied in a fanciful knot. He lost two fingers of one hand in a bad landing on Sigma End, on the edge of the accretion disc of the notorious black hole they called Radio RX-1 (nearby was the entrance to an artificial wormhole which, he believed at the time, had its eye on the same target as the Redline South Polar Artefact). These he never had replaced.

When Seria Mau fetched up at his feet, he studied her a moment.

“What do you look like, the real you?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” said Seria Mau. “I’m a K-ship.”

“So you are,” said Billy Anker, consulting his systems. “I see that now. How has that worked out for you?”

“None of your business, Billy Anker.”

“You shouldn’t be so defensive,” was how he replied. And then, after a moment or two: “So what’s new in the universe? What have you seen that I haven’t?”

Seria Mau was amused. “You ask me that when you stay in this piece-of-shit old heap,” she said, looking round the inside of Billy Anker’s quarters, “wearing a glove on one hand?” She laughed. “Plenty of things, though I was never down in the Core.” She told him some of the things she had seen.

“I’m impressed,” he admitted.

He rocked back in his chair. Then he said:

“That K-ship of yours. It’ll go deep. You know what I mean, ’go deep?’ I heard one of those will go almost anywhere. You ever think of the Tract? You ever think of taking it there?”

“The day I get tired of this life.”

They both laughed, then Billy Anker said:

“We’ve got to leave the Beach some day. All of us. Grow up. Leave the Beach, dive in the sea—”

“—because why else be alive, right?” said Seria Mau. “Isn’t that what you’re going to say? I heard a thousand men like you say that. And you know what, Billy Anker?”

“What?”

“They all had better coats than you.”

He stared at her.

“You aren’t just a K-ship, you’re the White Cat,” he said. “You’re the girl who stole the White Cat.” She was surprised he worked that out so fast. He smiled at her surprise. “So what can I do for you?”

Seria Mau looked away from him. She didn’t like to be worked out so quickly, on some junk planet in Radio Bay in the back passage of nowhere. Also, even in a fetch she couldn’t manage those eyes of his. She knew bodies, whatever the shadow operators said. That was part of the problem. And when she saw Billy Anker’s eyes she was glad she didn’t have one now, which would find them irresistible.

“The tailor sent me here,” she said.

Billy Anker got a dawning expression on his thin face.

“You bought the Dr. Haends package,” he said. “I see that now. You’re the one bought it, from Uncle Zip. Shit.”

Seria Mau cut the connection.

“Well, he’s cute,” the clone said.

“That was a private transmission,” Seria Mau told her. “Do you want to get put out into empty space again?”

“Did you see his hand? Wow.”

“Because I can do that if you want,” said Seria Mau. “He’s too quick, this Billy Anker guy,” she told herself, and then out loud added: “Did you really like that hand? I thought it was overdone.”

The clone laughed sarcastically.

“What does someone who lives in a tank know?”

Since her change of mind on Perkins’ Rent, the clone—whose name was Mona or Moehne or something similar—had fallen into a kind of short-swing bipolar disorder. When she was up, she felt her whole life was going to change. Her skirts got pinker and shorter. She sang to herself all day, saltwater dub like “Ion Die” and “Touch-out Hustle”; or the fantastic old outcaste beats which were chic in the Core. When she was down she hung about the human quarters biting her nails or watching hologram pornography and masturbating. The shadow operators, who adored her, took care of her in the exaggerated way Seria Mau had never allowed. She let them dress her in the kind of outfits Uncle Zip’s daughters might wear to a wedding; or fit her quarters out with mirrors to optical-astronomy standard. Also, it was important to them to see she ate properly. She was sharp enough to understand their needs and play to them. When the mood compass pointed north, that was when she had them wrapped round her little finger. She had them make her Elvis food and lurex halter tops that showed off her nipples. She got them to change the width of her pelvis by quick fix cosmetic surgery. “If that’s what you want, dear,” they said. “If you think it will help.” They would do anything to cheer her up. They would do anything to keep her out of the housecoat with the food stains on the front, including encourage her to smoke tobacco, which was even illegal in the FTZs since twenty-seven years ago.

“I wasn’t listening deliberately,” she said.

“Keep off this band from now on,” Seria Mau warned her. “And do something with that hair.” Ten minutes later she sent her fetch back down to Billy Anker.

“We get a lot of interference here,” he said wisely. “Maybe that was why I lost you.”

“Maybe it was.”

Whatever Billy Anker had done, whatever he was famous for, he wasn’t doing much of it now. He lived in his ship, the Karaoke Sword, which Seria Mau suspected would never leave Redline again. The neon vegetation, bluish, pale and strong, grew over its half-mile length like radioactive ivy over a fluted stone column. The Karaoke Sword was made of alien metals, pocked from twenty thousand years of use and ten of Redline rain. You could only guess at its history before Billy found it. Inside, ordinary Earth stuff was hot-wired into its original controls. Bundles of conduit, nests of wires, things like TV screens four hundred years old and full of dust. This was not K-tech. It was as old-fashioned as nuts and bolts, though nothing like as kitschy and desirable. Also, there were no shadow operators on board the Karaoke Sword. If you wanted something doing, it was do it yourself. Billy Anker mistrusted the shadow operators though he never would say why. Instead he sat in what looked like an ancient fighter-pilot’s chair, with tubes of coloured fluid and wires going into him, and a helmet he could put on if he felt like it.

He watched Seria Mau’s fetch sniffing around in the rubbish at his feet and said:

“In its day this shit took me some weird places.”

“I can imagine that,” said Seria Mau.

“Hey, if it’s good enough it’s good enough.”

“Billy Anker, I’m here to tell you the Dr. Haends package doesn’t work.”

Billy looked surprised; then unsurprised.

A sly expression came to his face. “You want your money back,” he guessed. “Well, I’m not known—”

“—as a refund guy. I know. But look, that’s not—”

“It’s policy, babe,” said Billy Anker. He shrugged sadly, but his look above that was comfortable. “What can I say?”

“You can say nothing and listen for once. Is that why you’re alone here with all this historical stuff, because you never listen to anyone? I didn’t come here for a refund. If I wanted that I could have it from Uncle Zip. Only I don’t trust him.”

“Fair point,” admitted Billy Anker. “So what do you want?”

“I want you to tell me where you got it from. The package.”

Billy Anker pondered this.

“That isn’t usual,” was his reply.

“All the same it’s what I want.”

They regarded one another evenly. Billy Anker tapped the fingers of his good hand on the arm of his acceleration chair. In response the screens in front of him cleared, then began showing planets. They were big. They came in fast towards the viewer, swelling and blooming like something live then diving left and right in the moment they disappeared. They were layered with swirling bands of cloud, magenta, green, dirty brown and yellow.

“This is footage I took,” said Billy Anker, “on a sweep through here just after they discovered it. See how complex this shit is? And the people who built it didn’t even have a sun to work with. They towed a brown dwarf into place and torched it up. They knew how to do that so it became a kind of star doesn’t fit on any sequence we’re aware of. Then they brought in these eight gas giants, along with sixty smaller planetary objects, and injected Redline into the most complex artificial gravitation alley anyone ever saw. Some kind of resonance libration did the rest.” He considered this. “These guys weren’t hobbyists. That operation alone must have taken them a million years. Why do you start a project like that, never finish it?”

“Billy Anker, I don’t care.”

“Maybe you just get bored and drift away. There’s another thing, though, and it’s this: if you can do all that, if you can muster the psychic energy to do all that just to build some kind of scientific instrument, how fucking serious is what you’re looking for? You ever think of that? Why these people bothered to spend their time like this?”

“Billy—”

“Anyway: as a result of that and other important aspects of its history, this system is a particle-jockey’s nightmare. Interference, as the fakebooks say, is common. So that’s probably why our previous connection broke down. Do you think? Which I regretted because I was enjoying it so much.”

He killed the screens and looked down at Seria Mau’s fetch.

“Tell me how you stole the White Cat,” he invited her.

The control room of the Karaoke Sword smelled of hot dust. The monitors ticked and cooled, or switched themselves on suddenly in random patterns. (They showed the Redline surface, an eroded mesa here, a ruined structure there, nothing much to tell between the two; they always came back to the South Polar Artefact, dimly observable in its wastes of radio-snow.) A flickering light went across the control room walls, which had original hieroglyphs on them similar to ancient Earth civilisations. Billy Anker absently rubbed his right hand as if to alleviate the pain of his missing fingers. Seria Mau knew that she had to give something to get something, so she let the silence draw out, then said:

“I didn’t. The mathematics stole it.”

Billy Anker laughed in disbelief.

“The mathematics stole it? How does that come about?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “How do I know? It put me to sleep. It can do that. When I woke up we were a thousand lights from anywhere, looking down at the halo.” She had woken from the usual disturbing dreams—though in those days they did not yet feature the man in the top hat and tails—to find herself nowhere. In her tank, she shivered at the recollection. “It was empty space,” she said. “I had never been in empty space before. You have no idea. You just have no idea.” She remembered only dislocation, feelings of panic that really had nothing to do with her situation. “You know,” she said, “I think it was trying to show me something.”

Billy Anker smiled.

“So the ship stole you,” he said, more to himself than her.

“I suppose it did,” she admitted.

“Oh,” she said, “I was happy enough to be stolen. I was sick of EMC anyway. All those ‘ police’ actions in the Free Trade Zones! I was sick of Earth politics. Mostly I was sick of myself . . .” This made him look interestedly at her, so she stopped. “I was sick of a lot of things which aren’t your business.” She struggled to formulate something. “And yet if the ship stole me, you know, it had no agenda. It hung there. It just hung there in empty space for hours. After I had calmed down, I took it back into the halo. We were running flat out for months. That was when I really deserted. That was when I made my own plans.”

“You went rogue,” said Billy Anker.

“Is that what they say?”

“You play for anyone who pays.”

“Oh, and that makes me so different from all of you people! Everyone has to earn a living, Billy Anker.”

“EMC want you back. You’re just an asset to them.”

It was Seria Mau Genlicher’s turn to laugh.

“They’ll have to catch me first.”

“How close are they to that?” Billy Anker asked her. He waggled the fingers of his good hand. “This close. When you came in here, my systems had a look at your hull. You were in an exchange of top-end ordnance not long ago. You have particle scouring from some kind of high volume X-ray device.”

“It was no ‘ exchange,’ ” said Seria Mau. “I was the only one who fired.” She laughed grimly. “They were gas in eighty nanoseconds,” she claimed, hoping it was true.

He shrugged to show that though he was impressed he would not be deflected from the issue.

“But who were they? They’re on to you, kid.”

“What do you know?”

“It’s not what I know. It’s what you know, which you’re trying to deny. It’s all over you. It’s in the way you speak.”

“What do you know, Billy Anker?”

He shrugged.

“No one can catch the White Cat!” she screamed at him.

At that moment Mona the clone walked out from among the hieroglyphs on the wall of Billy Anker’s control room. Her fetch, a smaller and cheaper version of herself, flickered like bad neon. It was wearing red fuck-me pumps with five-inch heels, a calf-length latex tube—lime green—and a bolero top in pink angora wool. Its hair was done up in bunches with matching ribbon.

“Oh, hi, sorry,” she said. “I must have pressed the wrong thing.”

Billy Anker looked irritated.

“You want to be more careful, kid,” he advised her. She gave him a casual up-and-down, then ignored him.

“I was trying to find some music,” she said to Seria Mau.

“Get out of here,” said Seria Mau.

“I just can’t work this stuff,” the clone complained.

“If you don’t remember what happened to your friends,” Seria Mau reminded her, “I can show you the footage.”

The clone stood biting her lips for a moment, outrage struggling in her expression with despair, then tears ran down her face and she shrugged and faded slowly away into brown smoke. Though he must have wondered what was behind it all, Billy Anker watched this performance with a studied lack of interest. After a minute he said to Seria Mau:

“You changed the name of the ship. I’m interested why.”

She laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why do you do anything like that? We hung there in the dark, the ship, the mathematics and me. There was nothing to orient ourselves by except the Tract—faint, distant, winking like a bad eye. Suddenly I remembered the legend the original space-captains had, when they first used the Tate-Kearney transformations all those hundreds of years ago to find their way from star to star. How in the long watches of the night they would sometimes see, inside their navigational holograms, a ghostly vision of Brian Tate himself, toppling through the vacuum with his white cat on his shoulder. That’s when I chose the name.”

Billy Anker stared at her.

“Jesus,” he said.

Seria Mau fetched up on the arm of his chair.

“Are you going to tell me where you got the Dr. Haends package?” she said, staring into his eyes.

Before he could answer, she was pulled away from the Karaoke Sword and back to the White Cat. Soft, persistent alarms filled the ship. Up in the corners, the shadow operators were wringing their hands.

“Something is happening here,” the mathematics said.

Seria Mau turned restively in the narrow volumes of her tank. What limbs she had left made vague, nervous motions.

“Why tell me?” she said.

The mathematics brought up the signature diagram of an event five or six hundred nanoseconds old. It presented as faint grey fingers knotting and unknotting against spectral light: “Why does this always look like sex?” complained Seria Mau. The mathematics, unsure how to answer, remained silent. “Choose a new regime,” she ordered irritably. The mathematics chose a new regime. Then another. Then a third. It was like trying on coloured spectacles until you saw what you wanted. The image flickered and changed like ancient holiday snaps in a slide projector. Eventually it began to toggle regularly between two states. If you knew exactly how to look into the gap between them you could detect, like weakly reacting matter, the ghost of an event. Two AUs distant, deep in a band of hot gas and asteroidal rubbish, something had moved and then become still again. The nanoseconds spooled away, and nothing further happened.

“You see?” said the mathematics. “Something is there.”

“This is a difficult system to see in. The fakebooks are clear on that. And Billy Anker says—”

“I appreciate that. But you do agree that something is there?”

“Something’s there,” admitted Seria Mau. “It can’t be them. That ordnance would have melted a planet.”

She thought for a moment.

“We’ll ignore it,” she said.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” the mathematics told her. “Something is happening here and we don’t know what it is. They slipped away, like us, just as the ordnance went off. We have to assume this is them.”

Seria Mau thrashed in her tank.

“How could you let this happen!” she shrieked. “They were gas in eighty nanoseconds!”

The mathematics sedated her while she was still speaking. She heard herself Dopplering away into silence like an illustration of some point in General Relativity. Then she dreamed she was back in the garden, one month before the first anniversary of her mother’s death. Damp spring now reigned, with Earth-daffodils in the beds beneath the laurel bushes, Earth-sky pale blue between towering white clouds. The house, opening its doors and shutters reluctantly after the long winter, had breathed the three of them forth like an old man’s breath. The brother found a slug. He bent down and poked it with a stick. Then he picked it up and ran about with it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy.” Seria Mau, nine years old, dressed carefully in her red woollen coat, wouldn’t look at him, or laugh. All winter she had dreamed of a horse, a white horse which would step so delicately! It would come from nowhere and after that follow her everywhere she went, touching her with its soft nose.

Smiling sadly, the father watched them play.

“What do you want?” he asked them.

“I want this slug!” cried the brother. He fell down and kicked his legs. “Yoiy yoiy.”

The father laughed.

“What about you, Seria Mau?” he said. “You can have anything you want!”

He had lived by himself all winter, playing chess in his cold room upstairs, with his hands in fingerless mitts. He cried every lunchtime when he saw Seria Mau bringing the food. He wouldn’t let her leave the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and made her look into his hurt eyes. She didn’t want that every day of her life. She didn’t want his tears; she didn’t want his garden, either, with its patch of ashes and its smell of loss among the birch trees. The moment she thought that, she did want him, after all! She loved him. She loved her brother. All the same, she wanted to run far away from them both and sail the New Pearl River.

She wanted to go right up into some space of her own, clutching the mane of a great white horse whose gentle breath would smell of almonds and vanilla.

“I want not to have to be the mother,” Seria Mau said.

Her father’s face fell. He turned away. She found herself standing in front of a retro-shop window in the rain.

Hundreds of small items were on display behind the steamy glass. Every one of them was false. False teeth, false noses, fake ruby lips, false hair, X-ray spectacles that never worked. Old, corrupt stuff made of tin or plastic, whose only purpose was to become something else the moment you picked it up. A kaleidoscope that blacked your eye. Puzzles which, taken apart, would never go back together. False-bottom boxes that laughed when they were touched. Musical instruments which farted when you blew in them. It was all false. It was a paradigm of undependability. In the middle of all the other objects, in pride of place, lay Uncle Zip’s gift-box with its green satin ribbon and its dozen long-stemmed roses. The rain stopped. The lid of the box lifted a little of its own accord. A nanotech substrate like white foam poured out and began to fill the shop window, while the soft bell chimed and the woman’s voice whispered:

“Dr. Haends? Dr. Haends please. Dr. Haends to surgery!”

At this there came a light but peremptory tap on the inside of the glass. The foam cleared, revealing the display to be empty but for a single item. Against a background of ruched oyster satin stood a piece of stiff white card, on which was reproduced the crude and lively drawing of a man in black top hat and tails, caught preparing to light an oval Turkish cigarette. He had shot his cuffs with a flourish. He had tamped the tobacco on the back of his long white hand. Frozen in that moment, he was full of elegant potential. His black eyebrows made ironic arcs. “Who knows what will happen next?” he seemed to be saying. The cigarette would vanish. Or the magician would vanish. He would tip back his hat with the end of his ebony cane and fade slowly into nothing while the Kefahuchi Tract slithered across the ruched satin void behind him like a cheap Victorian necklace and the streetlight flashed—ting!—off one of his white, even, incisor teeth. Everything would vanish.

Beneath this image, in bold art deco letters, someone had printed the words:

DR. HAENDS, PSYCHIC SURGEON.

Appears twice nightly.

Seria Mau woke puzzled, to find her tank flooded with benign hormones. The mathematics had changed its mind. “I believe after all that we’re alone,” it said, and left for its own space before she could comment. This compelled her to call up the relevant displays and give them her attention.

“Now I’m not so sure,” she said.

No reply.

Next, a line opened from the planet below.

“So what happened here?” Billy Anker wanted to know. “One minute you’re talking, the next you aren’t?”

“This interference!” said Seria Mau gaily.

“Hey, well, don’t do me any favours,” he grumbled. Then he said: “You want to know the history of that package, maybe I’ll help. But first you got to do something for me.”

Seria Mau laughed.

“No one can help you with your dress-sense, Billy Anker; I want to say that from the start.”

This time it was Billy Anker who broke the connection.

She sent down her fetch. “Hey, come on,” she said, “it was a joke. What do you want me to do?”

You could see him swallow his pride. You could see he had his own reasons to keep her attention. “I wanted you to come with me,” he said. “See some things on Redline, that’s all.” She was touched, until his voice got that note she already recognised. “Nothing special. Or only as special as everything else we know out here on the edge—”

“Let’s go,” she interrupted. “If we’re going.”

In the end, though, there wasn’t time to do that. Alarms chimed. The shadow operators flew about. The White Cat went up to full readiness. Her battle clocks, reset to zero, began to count off in femtoseconds, the last stop before the unknowable realtime of the universe. Meanwhile, she diverted fusion product into engines and ordnance and began, as a precautionary spoiling measure, to flicker in and out of the dynaflow at random. From this behaviour, Seria Mau judged they were in an emergency.

“What?” she demanded of the mathematics.

“Look,” it recommended, and began increasing the connections between her and the White Cat until, in important ways, Seria Mau became the ship. She was on ship-time. She had ship consciousness. Processing rates ramped up by several orders of magnitude from the paltry human forty bits a second. Her sensorium, analogued to represent fourteen dimensions, echoed with replicas of itself like a cathedral built in ’brane-space. Seria Mau was now alive in a way, in a place—and at a speed—which would burn her out if it lasted for more than a minute and half. As a precautionary measure the mathematics was already sluicing the tank proteome with endorphins, adrenaline inhibitors and warm-down hormones which, operating at biological speeds, would take effect only after any encounter was finished.

“I was wrong,” it said. “Do you see? There?”

“I see,” said Seria Mau. “I see the fuckers!”

It was EMC. There was no need for signature diagrams or fakebooks. She knew them. She knew their shapes. She even knew their names. A pod of K-ships—coms shrieking with fake traffic, decoys flaring off in several dimensions—flipped themselves down the Redline gravitational alley along a trajectory designed for maximum unpredictability. Second-guessed from instant to instant, this appeared in the White Cat’s sensorium as neon, scripted recursively against the halo night. The Krishna Moire pod, on long-distance ops out of New Venusport, comprised: the Norma Shirike, the Kris Rhamion, the Sharmon Kier and the Marino Shrike, and was led by the Krishna Moire itself. In they came, their crosslinked mathematics causing them to constantly exchange positions in a kind of randomised braid or plait. It was a classic K-ship ploy. But the centre thread of the plait (though “centre” was a meaningless term in these circumstances) presented as an object Seria Mau recognised: an object with a weird linked signature, half-Nastic, half-human.

As they roared down upon her, the White Cat flickered and fluttered, miming uncertainty and perhaps a broken wing. She vanished from her orbit. The pod took note. You could hear their sarcastic laughter. They assigned a fraction of their intelligence to finding her; bored on in. Seria Mau—her signature dissembled to mimic that of an abandoned satellite at the Redline L2—needed no further evidence. Her intuition was operating in fourteen dimensions too.

“I know where they’re going.”

“Who cares?” said the mathematics. “We’re out of here in twenty-eight nanoseconds.”

“No. It’s not us. It’s not us they want!”

There was a prickle of white light in the upper atmosphere of Redline as mid-range ordnance, despatched into the dynaflow before the raid began, popped out to engage Billy Anker’s nominal complement of minefields and satellites. Down on the surface in the streaming rain, the Karaoke Sword began to wake up to its situation, coms reluctant, engines slow to warm, countermeasures half-blind to the day: a rocket with a ten-year hangover, entering Seria Mau’s sensorium as a pained, lazy worm of light.

Too slow! she thought. Too old.

She opened a line. “Too slow, Billy Anker!” she called. No answer. The entradista, tapping in a panic at the arms of his acceleration couch, had dislocated his left index finger. “I’m coming down!”

“Is this wise?” the mathematics wanted to know.

“Disconnect me,” said Seria Mau.

The mathematics thought.

“No,” it said.

“Disconnect me. We’re a side-issue here. This isn’t a battle, it’s a police raid. They’ve come for Billy Anker, and he doesn’t have a clue how to help himself.”

The White Cat reappeared 200 kilometres above Redline. Ordnance burst around her. Someone had predicted she would come out there and then. “Oh yes,” said Seria Mau, “very clever. Fuck you too.” Tit for tat, she cooked off a high-end mine she had slipped into the path of the incoming pod. “Here’s one I prepared earlier,” she said. The pod broke up, temporarily blinded, and toppled away in several directions. “They won’t forgive us for that,” she told her mathematics. “They’re arrogant bastards, that team.” The mathematics, which was using the respite to normalise her relationship with the White Cat, had no comment to make. The ship’s sensorium collapsed around her. Everything slowed down. “In and out now,” she ordered. “Quick as we can.” The White Cat pitched over into entry attitude. Retrofire pulsed and flared. Outside, the colours of space gave way to weird smeary reds and greens. Seria Mau airbraked relentlessly in the thickening atmosphere, letting speed scrub off as heat and noise until her ship was a roaring yellow fireball across the night sky. It was a rough ride. The shadow operators streamed about, their lacy wings rippling out behind them, their long hands covering their faces. Mona the clone, who had looked out of a porthole as the ship stood on its nose, was throwing up energetically in the human quarters.

They breached the cloudbase at fifteen hundred feet, to find the Karaoke Sword immediately below them. “I don’t believe this,” said Seria Mau. The old ship had lifted itself a foot or two out of the mud and was turning hesitantly this way and that, shaking like a cheap compass needle. A fusion torch fired up at the rear, setting nearby vegetation alight and generating gouts of radioactive steam. After twenty seconds, its bows dropped suddenly and the whole thing slumped back to earth with a groan, breaking in two about a hundred yards forward of the engine. “Jesus Christ,” Seria Mau whispered. “Put us down.”

The mathematics said it was unwilling to commit.

“Put us down. I’m not leaving him here.”

“You aren’t leaving him here, are you?” Mona the clone called up anxiously from the human quarters.

“Are you deaf?” said Seria Mau.

“I wouldn’t put it past you, that’s all.”

“Shut up.”

The Krishna Moire pod, realising what had happened, swept in, fanned out into the parking orbit with a kind of idle bravado, the way shadow boys in one-shot cultivars occupy a doorway so they can spit, gamble and clean their nails with replicas of priceless antique flick-knives. They could afford to wait. Meanwhile, to move things along, Krishna Moire himself opened a line to the White Cat. He had signed on younger than Seria Mau, and his fetch, though it was six feet tall and presented itself in full Earth Military Contracts chic, including black boots, high-waist riding breeches and a dove-grey double-breasted tuxedo with epaulettes, had the demanding mouth of a boy.

“We want Billy Anker,” he said.

“Go through me,” Seria Mau invited.

Moire looked less certain. “This is a wrong thing you are doing, resisting us,” he informed her. “To add to all those other wrongdoings you done. But, hey, we didn’t come for you, not this time.”

“I done?” said Seria Mau. “Wrongdoings I done?”

Outside, explosions marched steadily across the mud, flinging up rocks and vegetation. Elements of the pod, becoming impatient with the half-minute wait, had entered the atmosphere and begun to shell the surface at random. Seria Mau sighed.

“Fuck off, Moire, and take speaking lessons,” she said.

“You’re only alive because EMC don’t care about you one way or another,” he warned her as he faded to brown smoke. “They could change their minds. This operation is double red.” His fetch flickered, vanished, reformed suddenly in a kind of postscript. “Hey, Seria, I got my own pod now!” it said.

“I knew that. So?”

“So next time I see you,” the fetch promised, “I’ll let the machine speak.”

“Jerk,” said Seria Mau.

By this time she had the cargo bay open. Billy Anker, dressed in a vintage EV suit, was shuffling head down towards it with all the grim patience of the physically unfit. He fell. He picked himself up. He fell again. He wiped his faceplate. Up in the stratosphere, the Krishna Moire pod shifted and turned in hungry disarray; while high above it in the parking lot, the hybrid ship awaited what would happen, its ambivalent signature flickering like a description of the events unfolding below. Who was up there, Seria Mau wondered, along with the commander of Touching the Void? Who was presiding over this fumbled op? Down in the cargo bay, Mona the clone called Billy’s name. She leaned out, caught his hand, pulled him inside. The cargo ramp slammed shut. As if this was a signal, long vapour trails emerged from the cloudbase at steep angles. Billy Anker’s ship burst open. Its engines went up in a sigh of gamma and visible light.

“Go,” Seria Mau told the mathematics. The White Cat torched out in a low fast arc over the South Pole, transmitting ghost signatures, firing off decoys and particle-dogs.

“Look!” cried Billy Anker. “Look down!”

The South Polar Artefact flashed beneath them. Seria Mau caught a fleeting glimpse of it—a featureless gunmetal ziggurat a million years old and five miles on a side at the base—before it vanished astern. “It’s opening!” cried Billy Anker. Then, in an awed whisper: “I can see. I can see inside—” The sky lit up white behind them, and his voice turned to a despairing wail. The pod, growing frustrated, had hit the ziggurat with something from the bottom shelf of its arsenal, something big. Something EMC.

“What did you see?” Seria Mau asked three minutes later, as they skulked at Redline L2 while the White Cat’s mathematics tried to guess them a way out under the noses of their pursuers.

Billy Anker wouldn’t say.

“How could they do that?” he railed. “That was a unique historical item, and a working one. It was still receiving data from somewhere in the Tract. We could have learned something from that thing.” He sat white-faced in the human quarters, panting and wiping the adrenaline sweat off his face with his do-rag, the top half of the muddy EV suit peeled back. The shadow operators were cooing and fluttering round him, trying to fix his dislocated finger, but he kept batting them away with his other hand. “This old stuff,” he said, “it’s all we have. It’s our only resource!”

“Where you look, you find,” she told him. “There will always be more, Billy Anker. There will always be more after that.”

“Nevertheless, everything I learned, I learned from that thing.”

“And what did you learn, Billy Anker?”

He tapped the side of his nose.

“You’d like to know,” he said, laughing as if this assertion showed how sharp and clean his intuition was. “But I won’t tell.” He was a beachcomber, with all the tidal scouring of the personality that implies. His big discovery shored him up. He had to believe she would be interested in whatever tacky insight into the nature of things he thought it gave him. “I can tell you what EMC want, though,” he offered instead.

“I know that already. They want you. They followed me all the way from Motel Splendido to find you. And here’s another thing to think about: the Moire pod wanted to try me out. They think they’re good enough. But whoever’s in that other ship wouldn’t let them, in case you were caught in the crossfire. That’s why Krishna Moire bumped your artefact, Billy. He’s pissed at his superiors.”

Billy Anker grinned his sly grin.

“And are they good enough?” he said. “To try you out?”

“What do you think?”

Billy Anker contemplated this answer with approval. Then he said, “EMC don’t want me. They want what I found.”

Seria Mau felt cold in her tank.

“Is it on board my ship?” she said.

“In a manner of speaking,” he acknowledged. He made a gesture meant to take in all of Radio Bay, maybe even the vast sweep of the Beach itself. “It’s out there too.”