Light

18 The Circus of Pathet Lao

Some hours after he shot Evie Cray, Ed Chianese found himself on the waste ground behind the New Men warren.

It was pitch black out there, lit with oddly angled flashes of white light from the docks. Occasionally a K-ship left its slip on a vertical line of fusion product, and for perhaps two or three seconds Ed could see low hummocks, pits, ponds, piles of broken engineering objects. The whole place had a smell of metal and chemicals. Vapour drifted out the yards like a ground mist. Ed was throwing up again, and the tank voices were back in his head. He dumped the guns in the first pool he came to. A life like his, and finally he had killed someone. He remembered boasting to Tig Vesicle:

“Once you’ve done all the things worth doing, you begin on the things that aren’t.”

A little smoke came up from the pool, as if there was more in it than water. Shortly after he got rid of the guns, he came across an abandoned rickshaw. It loomed up in front of him suddenly—out of context, one wheel in a flooded hole—tilted at an odd angle against the sky. Detecting his approach, advertisements crawled across the sides of its hood, coalesced as soft lights in the air above it. Music started up. A voice echoed across the waste ground:

“Sandra Shen’s Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao.”

“No thanks,” Ed said. “I’ll walk.”

In the light of the next flare from the rocket yards, he discovered the rickshaw girl. She was on her knees, bowed down between the shafts, breathing in with a kind of hoarse whistle, letting it out as a grunt. Every so often her whole body tensed up as tight as a fist and began to tremble. Then she seemed to relax again. Once or twice she laughed to herself and said, “Hey, man.” She was occupied with dying the way she had been occupied with life, to the exclusion of everything else. Ed knelt down beside her. It was like kneeling next to a foundered horse.

“Hold on,” he said. “Don’t die. You can make it.”

There was a painful laugh.

“The fuck you know about it,” the girl said thickly.

He could feel the heat pouring off her. He had the feeling it would rush away like that, full tilt, and then stop and never be replaced. He tried to put his arms round her to hold it in. But she was too big, so he just held one of her hands.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“What’s it to you?”

“You tell me your name, you can’t die,” Ed explained. “It’s like somehow, you know, we made contact. So you owe me something, and all that.” He thought. “I need you not to die,” he said.

“Shit,” she said. “Other people go out in peace. I get a twink.”

Ed was surprised she could guess that.

“How do you know?” he said. “You can’t know that.”

She drew her breath in raggedly.

“Look at yourself,” she advised. “You’re as dead as me, only it’s on the inside.” She narrowed her eyes. “You got blood all on you, man,” she told him. “You’re all over blood. At least I haven’t got blood on me.” This seemed to cheer her up in some way. She nodded to herself, settled back.

“I’m Annie Glyph,” she said. “Or I was.”

“Visit today!” boomed the rickshaw’s advertising chip suddenly. “Sandra Shen’s Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao. Also: the future descried. Prophecy. Fortune Telling. Atheromancy.”

“I worked this city five years, on café électrique and sheer fucking guts,” Annie Glyph said. “That’s two years more than most.”

“What’s atheromancy?” Ed asked her.

“I got no idea.”

He stared at the rickshaw. Cheap spoked wheels and orange plastic, totally Pierpoint Street. The rickshaw girls ran eighteen hours a day for speed money, and opium money to take the edge off the speed; then they blew up. Café électrique and guts: that was their boast. All they had in the end was a myth of themselves. They were indestructible: this destroyed them. Ed shook his head.

“How can you live with it?” he said.

But Annie Glyph wasn’t living with it anymore. Her eyes were empty, and she had slumped to one side, tipping the rickshaw over with her. He couldn’t quite believe something as alive as her could die. Her huge body still had the sheen of sweat on it. Her rawboned face, dwarfed by the muscles of her neck and shoulders, masculised by the inboard testosterone patch the tailor had specified as part of the cheap conversion kit, had a kind of etched beauty. Ed studied it a moment or two then leaned forward to close her eyes. “Hey, Annie,” he said. “Sleep at last.” At this, something weird happened. Her cheekbones rippled and shifted uneasily. He put it down to the unsteady illumination of the rickshaw ads. But then her whole head blurred, and seemed to break up into lights.

“Shit!” Ed said. He jumped to his feet and fell over backwards.

It lasted a minute, maybe two. The lights seemed to flutter up into the softly glowing region where the rickshaw ads blossomed out of the air. Then lights and ads together poured back down into her face, which received them like a dry sponge soaking up tears. Her left leg contracted, then kicked out galvanically. “The fuck,” she said. She cleared her throat and spat. Pushing into the mud with her feet and hands, she got herself and the rickshaw upright. She shook herself and stared down at Ed. Steam was already coming up off the small of her back into the cold night. “Nothing like that ever happened to me before,” she complained.

“You were dead,” Ed whispered.

She shrugged. “Too much speed. I can fix that with more speed. You wanna go somewhere?”

Ed got up and backed away.

“No thanks.”

“Hey, climb in, man. It’s free. You got a ride.” She looked up at the stars, then slowly around at the waste ground, as if she wasn’t sure how she came to be there. “I owe you, I can’t remember why.”

It was the weirdest ride Ed ever had.

2.30 a.m.: the streets were deserted, silent but for the steady soft slap of Annie Glyph’s feet. The shafts moved up and down as she ran, but the cab had a chip to damp the effect of that. To Ed it was like gliding and being motionless, both at once. All he could see of the rickshaw girl was her massive lats and buttocks, painted with electric-blue Lycra. Her gait was an energy-saving shuffle. She was designed to run forever. Every so often she shook her head, and an aerosol of sweat sprayed up into the cab’s soft corona of advertising light. The heat of her streamed around him, so that he was insulated against the night. He felt insulated from everything else too, as if being Annie’s passenger allowed him to withdraw from the world: take a rest from its mysteries.

When he admitted this, she laughed.

“Twinks!” she said. “Rest is all you fuckers ever do.”

“I had a life once.”

“They all say that,” Annie advised him. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t you know not to talk to the rickshaw girl? She’s got work to do if you ain’t.”

The night ran past, the garment district flowing into Union Square and then East Garden. EMC adprop was everywhere. “War!” announced the hologram hoardings: “Are you ready?” Annie turned briefly on to downtown Pierpoint, which was as deserted as if the war had already happened. The tank parlours and chopshops were all closed. Here and there some loser drank Roses whisky in an empty bar while a cultivar in an apron wiped the bartop with his dirty rag and pondered the difference between life and the semblance of it. They would be like that ’til dawn then go home, still wondering.

“So what did you do, this other life you had?” Annie asked Ed suddenly. “This, ’I wasn’t always a twink’ life of yours?”

Ed shrugged.

“One thing I did,” he began, “I flew dipships—”

“They all say that.”

“Hey,” Ed said. “We don’t have to talk.”

Annie laughed to herself. She hung a left off Pierpoint on to Impreza, then another at the corner of Impreza and Skyline. There, she had to pull hard into a half-mile grade, but her breathing barely altered. Hills, her body language implied, were the small change of life to a rickshaw girl. After a while, Ed said:

“One thing I remember, I had a cat. That was when I was a kid.”

“Yeah? What colour was that?”

“It was black,” Ed said. “It was a black cat.”

He could make a clear mental picture of the cat, juggling with a coloured feather in the hall. For twenty minutes it would put its whole heart into whatever you offered—paper, a feather, a painted cork—then lose interest and fall asleep. It was black and thin, with nervous, fluid movements, a pointed little face and yellow eyes. It was always hungry. Ed could make a clear mental picture of the cat, but he couldn’t remember anything about the family house. Instead he had a lot of tank memories, which he knew weren’t real because of their shiny completeness, their perfection of structure. “Maybe there was another cat too,” he said: “A sister.” But on reflection he knew that wasn’t true.

“We’re here,” Annie said suddenly.

The rickshaw stopped with a jerk. Ed, thrown back out into the world, stared cluelessly around. Fences and gates, dripping with condensation, rattled in the onshore wind. Behind that, a chilly strip of concrete stretched away into saltmarsh and sand dunes, where an encrustation of cheap, sea-soured wooden hotels and bars could be seen.

“Where’s this?” he said. “Shit.”

“The customer doesn’t give a destination, I bring them here,” Annie Glyph explained. “Don’t you like it? I’m on a percentage from the circus. See? Over there.” She drew his attention to a distant cluster of lights, then, when he seemed unimpressed, gave him an anxious look. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “They got hotels and stuff here too. It’s the noncorporate spaceport.”

Ed stared over the fence.

“Shit,” he said again.

“I get a percentage to bring in trade,” Annie said. “I can take you in if you like.” She shrugged. “Or I could take you on somewhere. But you have to pay for that.”

“I’ll walk,” Ed said. “No money.”

“No money?”

He shrugged.

“Not much of anything,” he said.

She stared at him with an expression he couldn’t interpret.

“I was dying out there,” she said. “But you took time over me. So I’ll run you back to the city.”

“The fact is,” Ed admitted, “I got nowhere to be, either. No money. Nowhere to be. No reason to be there.” He could see her trying to process this. Her lips moved a little as she looked at him. He understood suddenly that she had a good heart, and that made him feel anxious on her behalf. It made him feel depressed. “Hey,” he said. “So what? You don’t owe me anything, I enjoyed the ride.” He looked her immense body up and down. “Your action is good.”

She stared at him puzzledly; then down at herself; and then, across the chain-link fence and the rattling gate in the wind, at the circus by the shore. “I keep a room over there,” she said. “See those lights? I bring in custom, they let me have a room. That’s the deal I have with them. You want to stay there?”

The gate rattled, the sea air got a little colder. Ed thought about Tig and Neena, what happened to them.

“OK,” he said.

“In the morning you could ask for a job.”

“I always wanted to work in a circus.”

Opening the gate, she looked at him sidelong.

“Kids do,” she said.

The room was hardly bigger than she was, with cheap fibreboard walls that creaked and gave in the sea wind. The walls were off-white, with a couple of loose shelves. There was a toilet and shower in a translucent plastic cubicle in one corner; an induction-oven and a couple of pots and pans in another. She had a futon rolled up against the wall. It was as bleak and transitional a space as you liked, smelling of oil-fried rice and sweat. Café électrique sweat. Rickshaw-girl sweat. But she had some things of her own on the shelves, which was more than most of them could say. She had two spare Lycra outfits, three old books, and some tissue-paper flowers.

“It’s nice,” Ed said.

“Why lie?” she said. “It’s shite.” She indicated the futon. “I could make us something to eat,” she said, “or maybe you’d just like to lie down?”

Ed must have looked reluctant.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m gentle. I never hurt anyone yet.”

She was right. She enfolded him with care. Her olive skin, with its faint down of hair, had a strange strong smell, like cloves and ice. She touched him softly, protected him from her convulsions by coming somewhere deep down inside herself, and gently encouraged him to batter against her as hard as he wanted. When he woke in the night, he found she had curved round him with awkward consideration, as if she was not used to someone being there. The tide was in. Ed lay and listened to the sea roll the stones about in the undertow. The wind hissed. It was soon bluish dawn. He felt the circus begin to wake up around him, though he didn’t yet know what that might mean for him. Annie Glyph’s tranquil downer breath, the rise and fall of her huge ribcage, soon sent him to sleep again.

In a time like that, who needed a circus? The halo was a circus in itself. Circus was in the streets. It was inside people’s heads. Eat fire? Everyone was a fire-eater. Everyone had geek genes and a story to tell. Sentient tattoos made everyone the Illustrated Man. Everyone was high on some flying trapeze issue of their own. It was the flight into the grotesque. The tusked cultivar on Electric Avenue, the twink curled foetally in the twink-tank: whether they knew it or not, they had asked and answered all the questions the universe could support for now. They were their own audience, too.

The only thing you couldn’t be was an alien, so Sandra Shen kept a few of those. And prophecy was still popular, because no one could quite do it yet. But in the face of the uniform grotesque, the Circus of Pathet Lao had been forced to look elsewhere for the cheap thrill at the heart of performance, and—through a series of breathtaking acts of the imagination devised and sometimes acted in by Sandra Shen herself—present the vanished normal.

As a result, Ed Chianese’s age was able to define itself as the cultural opposite of “Having Breakfast, 1950.” It could thrill to “Buying an Underwired Bra at Dorothy Perkins, 1972,” or “Novel Reading, early 1980s,” and snigger over the perverse “A New Baby,” and “Toyota Previa with West London School Children,” both 2002. Most extraordinary of all—perched as it was so exactly on the historical cusp—was the astonishing “Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Computer Monitor, 1999.” These gemlike tableaux—acted out behind glass under powerful lights by the clones of fat men about to have heart attacks on a Zurich metro platform, anorexic women dressed in the Angeleno sport-fuck wear of 1982—brought to life the whole bizarre comfortingness of Old Earth. Such desperate fantasies were the real earners. Like fairy godmothers they had blessed the Circus at its inception, funded its early whirlwind travels across the halo, and now supported its declining years in the twilight zone of New Venusport.

Success is often its own downfall. People weren’t coming to watch any more. They were coming to get their own ideas. They weren’t content to spectate the vanished past; they wanted to be it. The retro lifestyles emerging from the corporate enclaves had less historical accuracy than a Shen tableau but a softer, more buyable feel. The look was “Dress Down Friday.” It was the Ericsson phone and an Italian wool sweater worn across the shoulders with its arms knotted loosely in front. Meanwhile, at the radical edge, a gene tailor and ex-entradista from Motel Splendido was reputed to have made himself over as the exact replica of a Victorian music hall star, using actual DNA.

In the face of competition like that, Madame Shen was thinking of moving on. But there were other reasons for that, too.

You go too deep, you expect to get burned. There isn’t any way around that. Ed dreamed of a dipship breaking up in slow motion in the photosphere of a G-type star. The dipship was Ed. Then he dreamed he was back in the twink-tank but the tank world had come apart and he could already hear voices from every cupboard, every corner, every pretty girl’s petticoat. Then he woke with a start and it was full day, and he could hear the sea one side of the dunes and the circus on the other. He found two vegetable samosas wrapped in a slip of greaseproof paper, also some money, together with a note which read: Go see the receptionist about work. Annie Glyph’s handwriting was as careful and literate as her way of having sex. Ed ate the samosas, looking comfortably around the little room, with the marine light falling into it and the sea air filling it. Then he crumpled the paper, took a shower to get the blood off him, and went out.

Sandra Shen’s Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao, occupied a two-acre concrete site on the boundary of the noncorporate spaceport.

The Observatorium, housed in a series of bizarre pressure tanks and magnetic vessels, took up less than a quarter of this; while the Circus itself was contained in a single building the curves and volutes of whose composite construction had been designed to resemble a carnival tent. The rest of the compound was living quarters. All exactly what you would expect—weeds, salt-streaked alloy siding, blistered paint, old carnie holograms with no memory of themselves as human, which, faded but energetic, woke into life as you passed, pursuing, hectoring, cajoling. Everyone who worked here would be like that—lively but disconnected. Ed felt like that too. He had to walk across the whole site to find the front office, which was in another clapped-out wooden building, greyish white under a faulty neon sign.

The receptionist wore a blonde wig.

It was big hair, platinum hair, piled high and sold cheap. In front of her she had a holographic terminal of a type with which Ed was unfamiliar. This resembled an old-fashioned fishtank, in which he thought he discerned now and then a stream of bubbles, a fake clamshell open on a miniature mermaid. The receptionist was like a mermaid herself. Older than she looked, she sat demurely beneath her hair, a small woman with a personal sense of humour and an accent he could not place.

When Ed explained his purpose the whole thing took on a curiously formal air. She asked him for his details, which except for his name he made up. She asked him what he could do. That was easier.

“Fly any kind of ship,” he boasted.

The receptionist pretended to look out the window.

“We don’t need a pilot momentarily,” she said. “As you can see, we’re on the ground.”

“Sunjammers, deep freighters, star ships, dipships. I’ve been there,” Ed went on, “and flown it.” He was surprised how close to the truth this was. “Fusion engines to dynaflow drivers. Some stuff I never knew what it was, Earth controls bolted on to alien equipment.”

“I’m sympathetic,” the receptionist said. “But is there anything else you can do?”

Ed thought.

“I rode navigator on Alcubiere ships,” he said. “You know, the big ones that bunch reality up in front of them as they go? It’s like a ruckle in cloth.” He shook his head, trying to visualise the Alcubiere warp. “Or maybe not like that at all. Anyway, space gets wrenched, matter gets wrenched, time goes out the window with everything else. Close into the ship you can just about survive it. The navigators surf that part of the wave. They go out in EVA pods and park in the warp, trying to see what’s next. One thing they can see from there, it’s their lives flushing away in front of them.”

He felt bleak now when he talked about it. “They call it the bow wave,” he explained.

“The kind of jobs we have—” the receptionist began.

“You see some weird shit as a navigator. It looks like all these silvery eels, under the sea. Migrating. It’s some kind of radiation, that was how it was explained to me, but you don’t see it as that. Your life kind of leaks away as eels under the sea, and you watch it go. Afterwards,” Ed said, “you can’t work out why you’d do a job like that.” He looked at his hands. “I surfed that wave and a few others too. Anyway, I can fly any kind of rocket. Except K-ships of course.”

The receptionist shook her head.

“I meant,” she said, “can you do anything like stack crates, clean up after animals. That kind of work.” She consulted the terminal again and added: “Or prophecy.”

Ed laughed. “Pardon?”

She regarded him evenly.

“Telling the future,” she explained, as if to someone who didn’t know the word but was bright enough to learn it.

Ed leaned forward and looked into the terminal.

“What is going on in there?” he said.

Her eyes were a confusing colour. Sometimes it was jade, sometimes the green of a salt wave; sometimes, somehow, both at once. There were dots of silver in her pupils which seemed ready to break up, drift away. Suddenly, she switched off the terminal and stood up as if she had to be somewhere else and had no more time to talk to Ed. Standing up, she seemed taller and younger, though some of it was shoes and she still had to look up to make eye contact. She wore a pale denim jacket with cowboy pockets and patterns of rhinestones, and a black patent-leather tube skirt. She smoothed the skirt across the front of her thighs and said: “We’re always on the lookout for a prophet.”

Ed shrugged. “I was never interested in that,” he said. “With me it was more a question of not knowing the future. You know?”

She gave him a sudden warm smile.

“I imagine it was,” she said. “Well, talk to her. You never know.”

“Talk to who?”

The receptionist finished smoothing her skirt then went to the door. Her back swayed, balancing the big hair. This gave her an interesting gait, Ed thought, for an older person. Curiously enough, he seemed to remember that walk. He followed her out and stood at the top of the steps, shading his eyes. It was full morning now. Maritime light was spraying up off the naked concrete, maritime light and heat to daze and irritate the unwary.

“Talk to who?” he repeated.

“Madam Sandra,” she said, not turning round.

For some reason this name made him shiver. He watched the receptionist walk away across the site towards the Circus of Pathet Lao in its blinding white carnival tent.

“Hey! So where do I find her?” he called.

The receptionist kept walking.

“Madam Sandra finds you, Ed. She finds you.”

Later that morning he stood on the dunes looking out to sea. The light was harsh and violet. Little red-throat lizards scuttled through the marram at his feet. He could hear saltwater dub basslines, bumping away in some cocktail lounge further down the access road. In front of him a faded sign on a tilted wooden post in the sand announced “Monster Beach.” You couldn’t tell which direction it was pointing, but Ed thought it was straight up. He grinned. Beats me, he told himself; but he was thinking less of the beach sign than of the elusive Sandra Shen. He was hungry again. On his way back to Annie Glyph’s room, he heard some sounds he recognised issuing from the bar of the deserted Dunes Motel, a clapboard box in a weedy oyster-shell lot a little apart from the motel itself.

Ed stuck his head round the open door, out of the frying light and into the cool gloom inside, where he found three skinny old men in white caps and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers too big for them, throwing dice onto a blanket on the floor.

“Hey,” said Ed. “The Ship Game.”

They looked up at him without interest, down again immediately. Their eyes were like dark brown studs, the whites curded with age. Neat stained moustaches. Skin coffeed by sunlight. Thin big-veined hands which looked fragile but weren’t. Lives lived out slower and slower, steeped in the preservative of Black Heart Rum. Eventually one of them said in a soft, distant voice:

“You to pay to play.”

“It’s the narrative of capital,” Ed agreed, and reached in his pocket.

The Ship Game—

Also known as Entreflex or Gobetween, this full-on collision of jacks and craps—with its hair-trigger jargon, its bone pieces like dead men’s knuckles, its twelve coloured characters nobody really knew the meaning of anymore—was endemic. It was galaxy-wide. Some said it arrived with the New Men, aboard their flagship the Remove All Packaging. Some said it originated on the ancient trundling sublight ships of the Icenia Credit. It was a pastime which had seen many forms. In the present one, an ironic subtext to everything that happened in empty space, the characters, and the names the players gave them, were supposed to represent the notorious N = 1000 Engagement, an early human/Nastic encounter during which, faced by the sheer number of events and conditions in fight-space—so many ships, so many dimensions to misappropriate, so much different physics to hide behind, so many nanosecond strategies in operation at once—the EMC admiral Stuart Kauffman abandoned the Tate-Kearney transformations and simply threw dice to decide his moves. Ed, who saw it less as a subtext than a source of income, had played the game all his adult life, the first ship he stowed away on to the last ship he jumped. The soft voices of the old men filled the bar.

“Give me an overend.”

“You don’t want no overend. You fucked.”

“So tell me now, what you think to that?”

“I think you double-fucked.”

Ed laid down his money. He smiled across the blanket and bid Vegan Snake Eyes.

“That get you in the water,” acknowledged the old men.

He blew on the dice—they were heavy and cool to the touch, some smart alien bone that would leach the heat of your hand, the energy of motion, to change the characters as they fell. They scattered and tumbled. They jumped like grasshoppers. Symbols fluoresced briefly—interference patterns, ancient holographies blue, green and red—as they passed through a slanting bar of light. Ed thought he saw the Horse, the Tract, a clipper ship in a tower of cloud like smoke. Then the Twins, which gave him a sudden shiver. One of the old men coughed and reached for his rum. A few minutes later, when money began to change hands, there was a brusque but reverent air to each transaction.

Ed was at the circus for several days before anything happened. Annie Glyph came and went in her shy, calm way. She seemed pleased to see him at the end of her shift. She always had something for him. Always seemed a little surprised to find him still there. He grew used to her huge body moving behind the plastic shower curtain. She was so careful! Only at night, when she sweated out the café électrique, did he have to move away in case he got hurt.

“Do you like someone as big as me?” she would ask him. “Everyone you’ve fucked, they were small and nice.”

This made him angry, but he didn’t know how to tell her.

“You’re OK,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

She laughed and looked away.

“I have to keep the room empty,” she said, “in case I break things.”

She was always gone in the morning. Ed woke late, ate breakfast at the Café Surf on the maritime strip, where he also got the news. War came closer every day. The Nastic were killing women and children off civilian ships. Who knew why? Space wrecks filled the holograms. Somewhere out near Eridani IV, children’s clothes and domestic artefacts drifted slowly around in the vacuum as if they had been stirred. Some meaningless ambush, three freighters and an armed yawl, La Vie Féerique, destroyed. Crews and passengers, gas in eighty nanoseconds. You couldn’t make anything of it. After he’d eaten, Ed combed the circus for work. He talked to a lot of people. They were well disposed, but none of them could help.

“It’s important you meet Madam Shen first,” they said.

Looking for her became a game with him. Every day he picked someone new to represent her, some figure seen at a distance, sexually ambiguous, half-visible in the violent uplight from the concrete. In the evening he would pressure Annie Glyph with “Is she here today?” and Annie Glyph would only laugh.

“Ed, she’s always busy.”

“But is she here today?”

“She has things to do. She’s working on behalf of others. You’ll meet her soon.”

“So, OK, look: is that her, over there?”

Annie was delighted.

“That’s a man!”

“Well, is that her?”

“Ed, that’s a dog!”

Ed enjoyed the bustle of the circus, but he couldn’t understand the exhibits. He stood in front of “Brian Tate and Michael Kearney” and felt only confused by the manic gleam in Kearney’s eye as he stared at the monitor over his friend’s shoulder, the oddness of Tate’s gesture as he looked up and back, the beginnings of understanding dawning on his harassed features. Their clothes were interesting.

He did little better with the aliens. The huge bronze pressure tanks or mortsafes floating three or four feet off the ground with a kind of oily resilience—so that if you touched one of them, however lightly, you could feel it respond in a simple, massively Newtonian fashion—filled him with a kind of anxiety. He was afraid of their circuitry inlays, and the baroque ribs that might as easily have been decoration as machinery. He was afraid of the way they followed their keepers across the site in the distance in the deceptive sea-light at noon. In the end, he could rarely bring himself to look in the tiny armoured-glass window that enabled you to see the MicroHotep or Azul or Hysperon they were supposed to contain. They hummed silently, or gave off barely visible flashes of ionising radiation. He imagined that looking into them was like looking into some kind of telescope. They reminded him of the twink-tank. He was afraid of seeing himself.

When he admitted this to Annie Glyph, she laughed.

“You twinks are always afraid of seeing yourselves,” she said.

“Hey, I looked once,” he said. “Once was enough. It was like there was a kitten in there, some kind of black kitten.”

Annie smiled ahead of herself at something invisible.

“You looked at yourself and saw a kitten?” she said.

He stared at her. “What I mean,” he explained patiently, “I looked into one of those brass things.”

“Still: a kitten, Ed. That’s real cute.”

He shrugged.

“You could barely see anything at all,” he said. “It could have been anything.”

Madam Shen was a daily no-show. Nevertheless Ed believed he could sense her out there: she would come in her own good time, and he would have employment. In the meantime he rose late, drank Black Heart from the bottle, and crouched with the old men on the floor of the bar at the Dunes Motel, listening to them talk their desultory talk as the dice tumbled and fell. Ed won more than he lost. Since he left home he was lucky that way. But he kept throwing the Twins and the Horse and in consequence his dreams became as unsettled as Annie’s. The two of them sweated, thrashed, woke, took the only route they could out of there. “Fuck me, Ed. Fuck me as hard as you like.” Ed was hooked on Annie by then. She was his bulwark against the world.

“Hey, concentrate. Or you playing catch-up now,” the old men told him gleefully.

If Annie worked late, he played that shift too. The old men never switched on the light in their empty bar. The neon glow of the Tract, seeping in through the open door, was light enough for them. Ed thought they were beyond most things younger people needed. He was shaking the dice one night about ten when a shadow fell across the game. He looked up. It was the receptionist. Tonight she wore a fringed, soft-washed denim skirt. Her hair was up, and she had that fishtank-looking terminal of hers clutched under one arm like some white-goods item she just that moment bought. She looked down at the money on the blanket.

“Call yourselves gamblers?” she challenged the old men.

“Yes, we do!” was their unison reply.

“Well I don’t,” she said. “Give me those dice, I’ll show you how to gamble.”

She took the bone in one small hand, flexed her wrist and threw it. Double Horses.

“You think that’s something?”

She threw again. And again. Two Horses, six in a row.

“Well now,” she admitted. “That’s on the way to being something.”

This trick, clearly familiar, made the old men more animated than Ed had ever seen them. They laughed and blew on their fingers to indicate scorching. They nudged each other, they grinned at Ed.

“You’ll see something now,” they promised.

But the receptionist shook her head. “I haven’t come to play,” she said. They were upset, she could see. “It’s just,” she explained, looking meaningfully at Ed, “I’ve got other things to do tonight.” They nodded their heads as if they understood, then looked at their feet to hide their disappointment. “But, hey,” she said, “it’s Black Heart rum at the Long Bar too, and you know how you like the girls down there. What do you say?”

The old men winked and grinned. They could be interested by that, they allowed, and filed out.

“Why you old goats!” the receptionist chided them.

“I’ll come too,” Ed said. He didn’t feel like being alone with her.

“You’ll stay,” she advised him quietly. “If you know what’s good for you.”

After the old men had gone the room seemed to get darker. Ed stared at the receptionist and she stared back at him. Faint glimmers in the fishtank under her arm. She patted her hair. “What sort of music do you like?” she said. Ed didn’t answer. “I listen to a lot of Oort Country,” she said, “as you can probably tell. I like its grown-up themes.” They stood in silence again. Ed looked away, pretended to study the broken old bar furniture, the slatted shutters. A breeze came up off the dunes outside, fingered the objects in the room as if trying to decide what to do with them. After a minute or two, the receptionist said softly:

“If you want to meet her, she’s here now.”

Ed felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He kept himself firmly facing away.

“I just need a job,” he said.

“And we have one for you,” said a different voice.

Tiny lights began to pour into the room from somewhere behind Ed. He knew where they must be coming from. Nothing would be gained by admitting it, though: an admission like that could fuck up everything. I’ve seen a lot, Ed told himself, but I don’t want the shadow operators in my life. The receptionist had put the fishtank down on the floor. White motes were pouring from her nostrils, from her mouth and eyes. Something pulled Ed’s head round so that like it or not he had to witness this event: give it form by recognising it. The lights were like foam and diamonds. They had some kind of music with them, like the sound of the algorithm itself. Soon enough there was no receptionist, only the operator that had been running her, now busily reassembling itself as the little oriental woman he had already shot on Yulgrave Street. The exchange was denim for slit cheongsam, Oort Country drawl for fiercely plucked eyebrows and the faintest delicate swallowing of consonants. After the transition was complete, her face shifted in and out of its own shadows, old then young, young then old. Strange then perfect. She had the charisma of some unreal alien thing, more powerful than sex though you felt it like that.

“Things here are truly fucked up,” Ed whispered. “Lucky I can just run away.”

Sandra Shen smiled up at him.

“I’m afraid not, Ed,” she said. “This isn’t a tank parlour. There are consequences out here. Do you want the job or don’t you?” Before he could answer this, she went on: “If not, Bella Cray would like a word.”

“Hey, that’s a threat.”

She shook her head fractionally. Ed looked down at her, trying to see what colour her eyes were. She smiled at his anxiety.

“Let me tell you something about yourself,” she suggested.

“Oh ho. Now we get to it. How you know all about me though you never saw me before?” He grinned. “What’s in the fishtank?” he said, trying to see past her to where it lay on the floor. “I’ve wondered about that.”

“First things first. Ed, I’ll tell you a secret about yourself. You’re easily bored.”

Ed blew on his fingers to indicate scorching.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s something I never once thought of.”

“No,” she said. “Not that boredom. Not the boredom you manage from a dipship or a twink-tank. You’ve been hiding the real boredom behind that your whole life.” Ed shrugged a little, tried to look away, but now her eyes held his somehow, and he couldn’t. “You have a bored soul, Ed; they handed it to you before you were born. Enjoy sex, Ed? It’s to fill that hole. Enjoy the tank? It fills the hole. Prefer things edgy? You aren’t whole, Ed: it’s to fill you up, that’s the story of it. Another thing anyone can see about you, even Annie Glyph: you have a piece missing.”

Ed had heard this more often than she thought, though usually in different circumstances he had to admit.

“So?” he said.

She stepped to one side.

“So now you can look in the fishtank.”

Ed opened his mouth. He closed it again. Suckered in some way he didn’t follow. He knew he would do it, out of that very boredom she mentioned. He looked sideways in the light leaking through the open door. Kefahuchi light, which made Sandra Shen harder, not easier, to see. He opened his mouth to say something, but she got there first. “The show needs a prophet, Ed.” She started to turn away. “That’s the opening. That’s the deal. And you know, Annie could do with a little more cash. There’s not much left after she scores the café électrique.”

Ed swallowed.

Sea shushing behind the dunes. An empty bar full of dust and Tract-light. A man kneels with his head inside some kind of fishtank, unable to pull himself free, as if whatever smoky yet gelid substance that fills it has clutched him and is already trying to digest him. His hands tug at the tank, his arm muscles bulge. Sweat pours off him in the shitty light, his feet kick and rattle against the floorboards, and—under the impression that he is screaming—he produces a faint, very high-pitched whining noise.

After some minutes this activity declines. The oriental woman lights an unfiltered cigarette, watching him intently. She smokes for a while, removes a shred of tobacco from her lip, then prompts him:

“What do you see?”

“Eels. Like eels swimming away from me.”

A pause. His feet drum the floor again. Then he says thickly: “Too many things can happen. You know?”

The woman blows out smoke, shakes her head.

“It won’t do for an audience, Ed. Try again.” She makes a complex gesture with her cigarette. “All the things it might be,” she reminds him, as if she has reminded him before: “the one thing it is.”

“But the pain.”

She doesn’t seem to care about the pain. “Go ahead.”

“Too many things can happen,” he repeats. “You know.”

“I do know,” she says, in a more sympathetic voice. She bends down to touch his knotted shoulders briefly and absentmindedly, like someone calming an animal. It’s a kind of animal she knows very well, one with which she has considerable experience. Her voice is full of the sexual charisma of old, alien, made-up things. “I do know, Ed, honestly. But try to see in more dimensions. Because this is circus, baby. Do you understand? It’s entertainment. We’ve got to give them something.”

When Ed Chianese came to, it was three in the morning. Sprawled facedown on the oceanside at the back of the Dunes Motel, he gently felt his face. It wasn’t as sticky as he had expected: though the skin seemed smoother than usual and slightly sore, as if he had used cheap exfoliant before a night out. He was tired, but everything—the dunes, the tidewrack, the surf—looked and smelled and sounded very sharp. At first he thought he was alone. But there was Madam Shen, standing over him, her little black shoes sinking into the soft sand, the Tract burning up the night sky behind her.

Ed groaned. He closed his eyes. Vertigo was on him instantly, an after-image of the Tract pinwheeling against the nothing blackness.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he whispered.

Sandra Shen seemed to shrug. “It’s the job,” she said.

Ed tried to laugh. “No wonder you can’t fill it.”

He rubbed his face again, felt in his hair. Nothing. At the same time knew he would never get rid of the sensation of that stuff, sucking at him. And this was the thing about it: it wasn’t actually in the tank. Or if it was it was somewhere else as well . . .

“What did I say? Did I say I’d seen anything?”

“You did well for your first lesson.”

“What is that stuff? Is it still on me? What’s it done to me?”

She knelt briefly beside him, stroking his hair back from his forehead. “Poor Ed,” she said. He felt her breath on his face. “Prophecy!” she said. “It’s a black art yet, and you’re at the forefront of it. But try and see it like this: everyone’s lost. Ordinary people, they walk down the street, they’ve all had bad directions: everyone has to find their way. It’s not so hard. They do it on a daily basis.”

For a moment it looked as if she might say something more. Then she patted him on the back, picked up the fishtank and trudged off with it under her arm, up over the dunes and back to the circus. Ed crawled away through the marram grass to where he could throw up quietly. He had bitten his tongue, he discovered, while he was trying to lever the fishtank off his head.

He had already made up his mind to try and forget the stuff he saw in there. That stuff made tank withdrawal seem like fun.