Nova Swing

8 Boundary Waves

By the time the cats began to pour back into the event site, up Straint Street and past the yellow window of Liv Hula's Black Cat White Cat bar, it was raining again. Five in the morning. A few people would be out once the street had cleared, workers who used Straint as a short cut through to the ion works. A few shop assistants and clerks with rooms nearby, making their way down into the city proper; a few fighters making their way back from Preter Coeur. But generally Straint was unfrequented, and every morning at that time, the light seemed less to be coming back into things than leaving them for good. Liv Hula's window was the only lively thing in that part of Saudade. It illuminated the sidewalk. Seen from outside, two or three all-night drinkers, isolated by its rectangularity so that they seemed to have nothing to do with one another, could look like a warm crowd. They looked like people you might enjoy to know.

Liv, watching the cats go past and wondering why her life seemed like a lot of separate pieces of reasonable worth which hadn't yet added up to anything, would include herself in that picture: she was someone you thought you might like to know when you were walking up Straint, when the colour was bleached out of everything else, the kerbstones, the cats, the two-storey buildings with their chipped, greying storefronts. That was the sum of her.

"The cats never get wet," she said. "You notice that? Whatever the weather is, they never get wet."

Vic Serotonin, who had come in about ten minutes previously, now stood with his elbows on the zinc bar, staring hard at his hands as if it was an effort for him to remain alive. His client had walked in five minutes before him, and was sitting at a table on her own. Vic had a small bag with him, and he was wearing a dark-coloured watch cap. Mrs Kielar had on a short belted leatherette jacket over fitted black slacks; she looked tired. They were drinking coffee with rum and pretending, for the nanocameras, not to know each other. It wouldn't have fooled a dog.

When Vic didn't answer, Liv poured him more coffee, adding milk from the covered jug, and said, "You're in early, Vic. It a jump-off day? You're always in early on a jump-off day."

No answer to that either. She shrugged and went behind the counter, which she wiped carelessly with a rag. She looked over at Mrs Kielar and raised her voice. "Don't say anything, then, Vic," she said. "I don't want to hear what you say about yourself. I heard enough about that." She switched the lights off, then on again, then off. Without them, the air in the bar reverted to a sepia colour-although the objects it picked out often seemed without colour themselves and as if they were lighted in some way from inside. "Is that bright enough for you, Vic? Can you see well enough in this light?"

When Vic refused to take the bait, Liv moved away and stood in the shadows at the back of the bar.

The travel agent and his client continued to ignore one another in their obvious way. They were there about fifteen minutes more, then Mrs Kielar pushed her chair back, turned up the grey fur collar of her jacket and left, and Vic threw some money on the zinc counter and he left too. As soon as he'd gone, Liv Hula stepped out of the shadows and counted the money. Her hand went to her mouth. She rushed to the door and called, "Vic, it's your whole tab. There's no need to pay your whole tab!" But they were already too far up Straint to hear her, following the black and white cats into the aureole of the event site.

"Good luck, Vic!" Liv Hula called. "Good luck!" But neither of them looked back.

If it was cats on Straint, it was dogs across the city at Suicide Point: Lens Aschemann woke just before dawn, with the confused impression that he had heard them barking as they lollopped through the surf. A trip down the hall and into the kitchen, which had the best seaward view, showed him the tide was on the turn under fast grey clouds, while rain blew suddenly this way and that across an empty beach. He stood for a minute or two listening for the loose sound of the swash; he could still hear the dogs, but they were moving away. It occurred to him that he wasn't entirely sure he was awake. This idea made him smile faintly and dial up his assistant.

"Do you hear dogs?" he asked her.

"What?"

Sand, blown in under the kitchen door during the night, had stuck to the soles of Aschemann's bare feet. He brushed at them ineffectually, first one then the other, with the palm of his hand. "Every part of the year," he told her, "is filled with unacknowledged acts of memory, cued by the smell of the air, the seasonal fall of the light. Do you follow?" Silence in the pipe. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn't. "There are dogs in everything. They aren't real, but neither are they only a metaphor. We're dogged by the things we've forgotten."

"I'm not sure I-"

"Do you see what I'm saying? The investigator must always allow for this. The older we grow, the louder their voices, the more inarticulate they are." She made no further attempt to reply, so he said, "At least I don't hear them in this datapipe, that's a blessing," and then asked her to run the nanosurveillance from Straint Street, which she seemed relieved to do. After a few minutes following the life of the bar, he shook his head.

"Is this all that happened overnight?"

"Three or four a.m., the system went down again. There's some footage but it's not informative."

"I can believe that," Aschemann said.

"We should have put people in."

"Who would we use? This woman knows everyone who drinks at her bar. She's no fool, even if Vic is." Liv Hula stood motionless at the zinc counter; she leaned her elbows on the zinc counter. The footage jumped, and she leaned on the zinc counter again. She stared emptily ahead. She looked tired. "Switch this off, for God's sake."

Aschemann brushed at the sandy soles of his feet as if this action might clarify his life, or at least connect him to it. Two hours' sleep in an armchair had given him kidney pain, but it couldn't explain the feeling that something was approaching him, racing towards him from what part of his past he couldn't even guess. It couldn't explain why his hands were so stiff, as if he'd been clenching them tightly in his sleep. Only the dogs could explain that. "At least we know where they're going," he said. "We have an embarrassment of confirmation on that." Just before he closed the dial-up, so that the assistant would have no time to reply, he said, "By the way, did you enjoy that sleep of yours you had in the twink-tank?"

"Watch out for the dogs you hear."

Aschemann took his kidneys to the toilet, chuckling. "One day I'll give that tank a try," he promised himself.

"How will we know we're in there?"

Vic Serotonin stopped to allow his client to catch up. "Sometimes you don't," he said carelessly.

The event-the fall to earth, whatever you described it as-had taken place a generation or more ago, in the city's old industrial quarter, the warren of factories, warehouses, docks and ship canals which at that time connected Saudade to the ocean. Commerce had ended instantly, but its characteristic architecture remained as a fringe about half a kilometre deep, a maze of empty buildings with collapsing corrugated roofs and broken drainpipes, their iron window frames bashed in and emptied of glass. A mile or two past Liv Hula's bar, Straint narrowed to a lane; the cobbled cross-streets became little more than industrial alleys, pitted and rutted, littered with lengths of discarded cable and balks of timber. Everything smelled of rust and precursor chemicals. The blue enamelled signs on the street corners had long since corroded into unintelligibility. Elizabeth Kielar studied them and shivered.

"I'll know," she said.

"Then why ask me?"

"I'll feel it."

"All that happened last time," he reminded her patiently, "is you lost your nerve." The only reply she offered was an angry look; as if he were the unpredictable one, the one both of them had to be careful not to trust.

Over the years, Vic had given the question more thought than his tone implied. You knew you had entered the aureole when the weather changed, that was his view. Turn a corner between two factory yards in winter: sunlight would be falling into the well of the street while insects described fast, wavering trajectories from the brassy light into the darkness of the buildings. If it was sunny in Saudade, patches of fog drifted through the aureole. Or the wind would, as now, pile up a few cold, soft short-lived flakes of snow in the gutters. Whatever else happened, the shadows struck at absurd angles for the time of year, as if geography was remembering something else. "The lines of distinction aren't sharp," Vic concluded. You had to use your intuition as to when something like that became important.

"When the Kefahuchi Tract first fell to earth, they tried to build permanent controls. Walls, ditches, concrete blocks. But that stuff would be absorbed overnight." Something went wrong with the air, and next morning your border post had gone and you were looking across a fifty-yard waste lot covered in cheat weed and cracked concrete, at what appeared to be a huge, motionless, empty fairground in the rain. "Now they have a more relaxed attitude. Take the wire up every so often, put it down somewhere else: they call it 'soft containment.' " Still trying to explain himself, and thinking of the complexities of his relationship with Emil Bonaventure too, Vic added, "Even in the aureole you need luck. I'm not one of those people who believe they'll have street light in there by next Wednesday."

"Do any of you understand anything at all?" she said angrily. "Why do you all act as if you know something when you don't?"

"This area's thick with police. So try to keep up."

Twenty minutes later it was full dawn, and the first patrol of the day had caught up with them. Vic hurried Elizabeth through the nearest door and into a derelict warehouse-puddles, ripped-up concrete and foul earth, holes that gaped down into cellars and sewers, everything of worth stripped out long ago-where he pushed her to the floor and put his hand across her mouth. Elizabeth stared up at him in a kind of puzzled supplication, as if she didn't understand why humiliation should be part of this search for her own nature, while matt-grey Site Crime vehicles forced themselves down the narrow accessway outside, repeatedly occluding the light then allowing it to splash in again rich with steam cooked out of the standing water by the waste heat of the nuclear engines. The air shuddered with the din of it; above that, you could hear the faint realtime shouts of the foot police coordinating their sweep through the buildings.

"They're not looking for us!" Vic shouted into Elizabeth Kielar's ear. Nevertheless he made her lie there, listening, until long after the engines and the shouts had passed. Then they left, Elizabeth brushing irritably at her clothes. After that it was more of the same, rusting tracks, flooded rocket-docks with vast discarded machinery visible just beneath the surface of water stinking of the sea but so glamorised by exotic radiochemicals it would glow faintly in the dark. They made good time, and Vic Serotonin was pleased by the professional way things were falling out for once. But as they passed, everything-each alley and abandoned wharf, each collapsed or melted gantry, even the Site Crime patrols-seemed to settle, shift and morph indiscernibly into something else. The aureole was all around, like a wave propagated through everything. Everything was up for grabs. Half an hour later, when rain caught them at the edge of the site itself-a shower which slanted in, mercurial against the direction of the light, to pass within minutes-you couldn't, as Vic said, be sure where it came from, or how. Though on the face of it things looked simple enough.

Independent of the patrols, Lens Aschemann's pink Cadillac nosed its way down the pot-holed alleys, waited at each junction, then, accelerating briefly but wildly, left the road and bumped its way through the tall weeds of a concrete lot as if its driver had lost control of the clutch. With the detective himself at the wheel, the car's character changed. It became like a big, blunt animal, some species adapted neither for stealth nor pursuit but which, despite Darwinian constraints, had decided to learn them both.

Aschemann drove as if he couldn't see well, gripping the wheel tightly and thrusting his face close to the windshield, while his assistant suffered in the passenger seat, steadying herself with both hands and offering him an expression of open hostility.

"I don't understand why you're insisting on this," she said.

"Now you think you're the only driver in the world?"

"No!"

"Everyone drives. We all like to drive."

"This is because of yesterday."

"I won't dignify that with an answer. Sometimes we have to drive, sometimes we have to ride. Don't spoil a beautiful day."

Aschemann's face looked more than ever like the older Einstein's, the eyelids even more drawn-down, the cheeks pouchier, with a greyish tinge from lack of sleep. His eyes were veined and watery. They gave him a look of confused enthusiasm. The Cadillac's front wheels left the ground briefly, then banged back down so hard the suspension bottomed out. She clutched the windshield edge reflex-ively: this stimulated a response from her forearm dataflow. "Are you familiar with the term 'lost'?" she said. Satellite navigation signals were still available, but her software could no longer distinguish between several possible sources, ghost emissions, particle dogs, accidents of atmospheric lensing. They might be real, they might not. At least one of them seemed to be in the site itself. "As of now we don't know where we are."

Aschemann smiled.

"Welcome to the aureole," he said.

"This is about yesterday," she accused him.

He leaned over and patted her shoulder. "After all, can we ever say we know where we are?"

There was more orbital traffic than usual that morning: military traffic, alien traffic, surveillance traffic. If you just knew how to look, you found EMC up there in numbers. High-end assets in hair-trigger orbits, calculated to keep an eye on some dubious investment of middle management's. She had her own investment in play. She followed the data as it bled endlessly down her arm, pausing only to say:

"Please keep both hands on the wheel."

Along with the agency, its goodwill, and his South End walk-up, Vic Serotonin had inherited from Emil Bonaventure the use of a bolt-hole on the top floor of the old Baltic Exchange building, which faced the event site across a bare expanse of concrete called "the Lots." This comprised a room twelve feet by fifteen, once an office with frosted glass dividers. Over time Vic had been obliged to defend it against other travel agents: in reprisal, two or three of them, led by a woman born Jenni Lemonade but known in Saudade as Memphis Mist, had used a hand-held thermobaric device to rip a hole in the middle of the floor, through which you could, if you felt like it, contemplate a thirty-foot drop into standing water. Despite this it remained a serious professional location, offering views of the Lots where they rose gently towards the faint thickening of rain-wet air which marked the interface. It offered a place to wait while you assessed the situation. Vic had slept there once; the dreams he experienced convinced him not to do it again. Now he stood at the window, which possessed neither frame nor glass, and was puzzled to hear Elizabeth Kielar say:

"Did you ever want children?"

The view frightened her. She had averted her head as soon as he brought her in and, careful to keep facing the hole in the floor, inched her way round the walls to the corner in which she now squatted, her arms wrapped round her knees. When Vic spoke, she smiled at him confidingly, as if he'd caught her in some even less dignified position. What little oblique, dirty light fell on the side of her face served to occlude rather than disclose. Close to the site something was always wrong with the light anyway; it struck as if refracted through heavy but volatile liquids, aromatics on the edge of evaporation.

"I had children," she said, "but I left them."

She laughed at his expression. "To be honest, they were more grown up than me from the start. They were often impatient." She fidgeted. Looked down at her hands. "I left them," she said, "because I saw they'd be all right." Vic didn't know what to make of this, so he didn't reply. After a moment, she asked:

"When do we go?"

"Soon." A certain amount of waiting was required. The wise thing was always to remember the client and not be too hard on her in that way: but, as everyone remarked, Vic stayed well through the exercise of caution. Some adjective from the complex vocabulary of the place, a change in the light or the density of the sounds you could hear, would sooner or later reassure him. He wasn't anxious, because he wouldn't commit until he had that reassurance. It was the professional course. "It's not like waiting for a door to open," Emil Bonaventure had once advised him. More something you could interpret as permission.

"Come and look," he invited Elizabeth Kielar.

"I don't know," she said.

Vic shrugged as if it didn't matter. Then he said, framing the experience for her in the voice he reserved for clients:

"This is what you came to see. This is it."

After a moment she stepped primly round the hole in the floor and joined him, and they stared across at the event site. You were never sure what you were looking at. Beyond the wire, beyond the remains of the original wall, with its fallen observation towers, prismatic light struck off the edges of things. There was a constant sense of upheaval. Loud tolling noises, as of enormous girders falling, or the screech of overdriven machinery, competed with the sudden hum of an ordinary wasp, amplified a million times. It was like a parody of the original function of the place. But also there were snatches of popular songs, running into one another like a radio being tuned through some simple rheostat. You smelled oil, ice cream, garbage, birchwoods in winter. You heard a baby crying, or something clatter at the end of a street-it was like a memory, but not quite. Sudden eruptions of light; dense, artificial-looking pink and purple bars and wheels of light; birds flying home against sunsets and other sweet momentary transitions between states of light. Then you saw things being tossed into the air, what looked like a hundred miles away. Scale and perspective were impossible to achieve because these objects, toppling over and over in a kind of slow motion-or so the eye assumed-were domestic items a hundred times too large and from another age, ironing boards, milk bottles, plastic cups and saucers. They were too large, and too graphic, drawn in flat pastel colours with minimal indication of shape, capable of liquid transformation while you watched. Or they were too small, and had a hyper-real photographic quality, as if they had been clipped from one of the lifestyle-porn magazines of Ancient Earth: individual buildings, bridges, white multi-hull sailing ships, then a complete city skyline toppling across as if it had been tossed up among flocks of green parrots, iron artillery wheels, tallboys, a colander and a toy train running around a toy track. Everything in a different style of mediation. Everything generating a brief norm, reframing everything else. At that time, in that instant of watching and listening, in a moment savagely and perfectly incapable of interpretation, they were all the things that fly up out of a life, maybe your own, maybe someone else's you were watching. Day to day, you might have more or less of a sense that the things you saw were describable as "real." In fact, that wasn't a distinction you needed to make until you crossed inside.

Vic Serotonin felt nothing but relief each time he arrived at the Lots. At this point you weren't committed, you could always turn around and go home. But it was another chance to engage, and as a result a kind of peace went through you. You felt stabilised again. You felt both excited and relaxed.

"It's quiet today," he said.

Elizabeth smiled uncertainly. "This is awful," she whispered. "I can't bear this."

"Will you be able to do it this time?"

"I can't bear not to."

"Well then," he said, "we should start."

He went to the door calm and happy, but when he looked back she was still at the window. "This is the right time to go," Vic encouraged her. When he took her by the shoulders, though, there was that tautness so permanent, so designed-in, so far down in her it was like touching some stretched internal membrane and pausing to wonder what you would do next. Elizabeth seemed to understand this. Caught between Vic and the window, she twisted into him; pulled his face towards hers and bit him sharply. "Fuck," Vic said. He let her go and put his hand to his cheek. She knelt down, worrying inefficiently at his clothes, then her own. "Yes," she said, "fuck. Fuck. Get in me, Vic," she said. "I want something to take in with me."

He stared at her.

"Christ, Vic, don't you see? Fuck me while I look at it."

That was how the man who resembled Albert Einstein found them. He arrived in the doorway-excited from driving his Cadillac, a little out of breath from the stairs-and remarked to his assistant, who was standing next to him giving Vic her flat smile:

"They're hot, these two. I never saw two this hot."

"We're always getting lots of Vic on Elizabeth action," she agreed. "Lots of girl on girl."

Vic reached for his Chambers pistol: the assistant's tailoring, which had reactions down in the millisecond range, turned itself on in response: there was a blur of motion from her, during which she seemed to be in several places at once, and then an actinic flash, in the aftermath of which nothing much could be seen at all except Aschemann by the door looking old, white-faced, perplexed; and Elizabeth Kielar, who jumped neatly into the hole in the floor and vanished, only to reappear a little later sprinting and weaving across the Lots towards the site boundary. Aschemann's assistant strode calmly to the window and began to shoot at her. Chambers bolts curved slowly down through the rain, making a noise like defective neon and setting fire to the thin vegetation.

"Stop that," Aschemann said. His voice tones shut down the assistant's tailoring and she stared at him angrily.

"You see?" he appealed to Vic.

"Yes," Vic said. Something had happened to his arm; it was tnumb to the shoulder and he hadn't even seen her move. "Vic, I told you she could drink you with a glass of water!" Vic rested on the floor. He stared out the window. He'd been arrested before, but he had no dependable sense of what would happen next. Meanwhile Elizabeth Kielar was nowhere to be seen. Fuck me while I look at it. In the end that was what most of his clients wanted. They never got any further than the Lots. They had sex with you in open view of the thing out there-as if that was how they understood it; not as a state of affairs but as a live thing, perhaps even a conscious thing, they wanted it to be watching when they came-and then didn't speak on the way back. It was just a choice that made life more interesting. Vic wouldn't say he made his living from that impulse, or that he had any opinion about it; but the risk was lessened for everyone when that was what the client wanted. Though her resources were in disarray, he didn't think it was like that with Elizabeth Kielar; and he was beginning to regret how little he had discovered about her sense of herself.

They took Vic out on to the Lots and put him in the back of the pink '52 Cadillac repro while Aschemann sat in the front and lit his pipe. At the same time the detective got a dial-up to the police bureau. "It's no problem," he said, shaking out a match, pulling open the dashboard ashtray, smiling and nodding at Vic. "The weather's more of a problem this morning. He's here, he's fine, we kept him in one piece. No, that's other business." While Aschemann was talking, the assistant walked impatiently up and down outside the car. Every so often she stopped and peered across at the event site, as if she had seen something no one else could. The outline of her body rippled a little as her tailoring, pumped and excitable from its encounter with Vic, cut in and out; the data-bleed ran red and green pictographs interspersed with jet-black oriental-looking characters in rows down her forearm. She leaned into the car and smiled amiably in Vic's face, as if she would like to start a conversation.

"Vic," she said, "what I've got switches offwhat you've got. Do you follow? That's why your arm hurts so."

"Go and look for his client," Aschemann ordered.

Vic said, "Her name's Elizabeth. She's nervous; it might make her difficult. Please try not to shoot her for that." The assistant glared at him, then down at her datableed. Then she jogged off through the rain.

"Don't go in the site," Aschemann called after her.

He examined the bowl of his pipe, then-as if they were of equal value in a wider context-turned his attention to the event site. Something vast and orange-coloured flew up into the air, but you could barely see it through the rain. It hung there for a moment then folded itself sectionally until it disappeared. The whole incident was over in forty seconds, and there was no way of describing the accompanying noise. Aschemann watched with a kind of calm approval. "A slow day today," he said. "A few hours ago, it was quite different. Down by the Cafe Surf, it bowled me over." He seemed delighted by the memory. "Literally, physically. Our friend Antoyne too. Today, I think a wave is coming, nothing happens."

Vic Serotonin shrugged. "You wouldn't find it so quiet inside," he predicted. He wanted to make it clear that while the detective was perfectly entitled to an opinion, of the two of them Vic had the bulk of the experience. "How was Fat Antoyne?"

"A little upset."

"Antoyne feels things more than he'll admit."

"I still want to go in, Vic."

"Why?"

"Because my wife's in there. What we're seeing is the life-cycle of a new species of artefact, and I think my wife was one of them."

Vic made so little of this he didn't know how to respond. "What species?" he said eventually.

"Walk round the centre of Saudade any night, visit the clubs, the shooting galleries, the music venues. That species. Or come and see them in the holding cells, fresh from the Cafe Surf and still gazing around like idiots, wondering how they came to be on our side of things. They love it-who wouldn't? Who doesn't love sex, fried food, hard drugs? The tough ones do what anyone would, get a room, go to ground, wait out their appetites, pupate; they look wounded but that's because they're just not us. They try to make contact, they try to strike up a conversation with our world, or someone in it. They're here for a change of state, but we're too much who we are to have any idea what that might consist of. While you think they're human you see them as having interesting qualities, but they're only confused. They're like insects, Vic: after a few years, whatever instinct drove them out of the site takes over and drives them back in again."

It was a two-way traffic, he said, one which, as a result of their own anxieties, people like himself had overlooked from the outset. "Ever since the Tract fell to earth, we thought we knew what an escape looked like. It didn't look human. It looked like a catastrophe. We were clear on that, we could make rules for that. You've seen them in the quarantine centres, Vic: half-flesh, half-artefact, falling to pieces, speaking in tongues while the daughter code pours out of their mouths like light to infect a whole city block. We weren't prepared for anything more subtle."

"Your wife's dead," Vic said. "Everyone knows that."

Aschemann stopped talking immediately. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Vic said.

They stared at one another in discomfort.

"This rain," Aschemann said, holding one palm out flat. "Do you ever wish you were on some other planet?" He wiped the rain off his face, which looked tired and unkempt. He fiddled with the dashboard ashtray. Then he had a brief exchange with his assistant by dial-up, which he concluded by telling her, "Come back now. You're wasting everyone's time. Vic wants to get his arrest over with, and be put in a nice cell." A minute or two later she appeared quietly out of the Lots, her face, hands and gun beaded with water. "You can sit in the car," Aschemann said, patting the bench seat beside him. "Come and sit here in the driver's seat, the way you like. Put the convertible roof up if you're wet."

"We're all wet," Vic said.

"Shut up, Vic."

They watched appreciatively as the convertible roof, which was the same shade of white as the upholstery, closed slowly over their heads. Then Aschemann said, "Vic, this woman here had a fire-team set up to bring you in." He chuckled. "That's how determined she is. They're still up there in the fog somewhere, trying to find their way home. Visibility's down to ten yards and the site is cooking their communications. She expected more trouble from you. To be honest, so did I. How's your arm? That numbness will wear off.".

When this didn't get a response, he shrugged. "The reason you're in custody is this: you didn't give me what I want. Never underestimate that as a cause for arrest."

"What about the tourist?" the policewoman wanted to know.

"We'll have to leave the tourist," Aschemann said, without much reluctance. "After all, they come here for the risk." He leaned over the back of his seat and said to Vic Serotonin, "You know, I could wish it was Emil sitting here instead of you. Emil would be more interested. He never saw the site as a career opportunity; it was always an adventure he couldn't extricate himself from. I respect that. Vic, how was Emil last time you saw him?"

"He wasn't good."

"He wasn't good the last time I saw him either. But Edith seemed fine." To his assistant Aschemann said, "Start the engine. Let's take Vic away."

This proved more difficult than he could have imagined. They were in the middle of one of the Cadillac's wallowing long-wheelbase turns when a rickshaw lurched round the corner at the other end of the Baltic Exchange and sped towards them, trailing a stream of ads in colours that crackled against the soft wet air, lighting up the puddles around the Annie's thudding feet. She pushed hard into her shafts, breathing like a horse. Vic could hear a voice calling from inside the rickshaw, but not what it was saying; nevertheless, it gave him the sense that things had become too complicated to control.

From the other end of the Exchange, two dozen figures emerged wearing the signature rainslickers and waterproof hats of gun-punk chic. As soon as she saw them, Aschemann's assistant knocked Aschemann off the seat beside her and pushed him down into the footwell so that the engine was between him and the danger. Then she shoved open the driver's door and rolled out into the rain, shouting commands into her dial-up. Her tailoring had cut in by now; she was visible only as a sort of fibrous blur. Aschemann, his neck bent at an odd angle, blinked at the carpeted transmission hump. "What's happening?" he asked Vic. "Can you see what's happening?" Meanwhile the Cadillac continued to swing through half a circle, slowing down as it went, until it halted side-on to the approaching rickshaw. The driver's door now hung open to its full extent, allowing Vic to recognise the little figure of Alice Nylon riding the rickshaw step.

"This is a fucking disaster," he said to Aschemann. "Warn that lunatic of yours not to shoot at anyone." He leaned forward and stuck his head out. "Alice," he shouted. "For fuck's sake, Alice, it's me. It's Vic."

"Hi, Vic," Alice called. "Look at me!"

"Call your kiddies off," Vic told her. "No one wants an incident. And don't ride the step like that," he added. "It's not clever and you'll only get hurt."

Before Alice could respond, the rickshaw pulled up.

"Three-up's two too many," the rickshaw girl said, "even for a pony my size." She leaned forward in the shafts, vomited with practised accuracy between her own feet and examined the result. "Nothing a dexamil won't cure," she decided. "I got plenty if anyone else wants it."

A thick yet curiously musical laugh came from the rickshaw's interior.

"Nice car, Vic," the occupant said.

"It is a nice car, Paulie," the rickshaw girl agreed. "1952 roadster. Pushrod V8, 330 ft lbs at 2700 rpm; I respect an engine can pull. You know?"

"Jesus," Paulie DeRaad said. "Everyone an expert here on Radio Retro. Open this thing up, Alice, so I can get a look at my old friend Vic."

"Paulie, don't have anyone shot," Vic said.

"Paulie me at your own risk," DeRaad promised him. "What are you fucking looking at?"

When Alice Nylon unlatched the hard apron of the rickshaw, a faecal smell rolled out and you saw immediately that Paulie was in a bad way. They had crammed him in with the remains of the Point kid and the two of them were embracing awkwardly, as if it was new to them despite all the practise they had. They were breathing gently into one another's eyes. Neither of them had much on, and their china-white bodies were covered in a thin, slick, resinous film which, though it looked liquid when you first saw it, was constantly hardening and cracking off, like something they exuded to protect them from the air. Paulie was still roughly the right shape, but the boy had begun to fatten, soften and blur. He had aged thirty or forty years since Vic first saw him in the building at Suicide Point. However you looked at him, he seemed to be out of focus. He had no idea where he was, or what was happening to him. Despite that, he came across as happy. Every so often, motes of light emerged from his mouth like very small moths, accompanied by a note or two of music.

Paulie, less satisfied with his condition, flailed one arm about. "Alice, it's fucking stuck to me again," he said.

Alice peeled them apart carefully so her employer could get out of the rickshaw. It made things difficult that Paulie couldn't bring himself to look at his own body. "You got to help me, Paulie," Alice begged; but he kept looking up and away from himself, and from Alice too. He didn't want to admit she was helping him. Eventually she manoeuvred him on to the concrete in front of Vic Serotonin, where he stood swaying and stinking and opening his arms. Part of his face went out of focus, then back in again.

"Do you see, Vic? Do you see what you did?"

Vic was saved from answering by Lens Aschemann, who clambered out of the Cadillac on the passenger side, buttoning his overcoat. "This rain," the detective complained, "will never stop. You should stay out of it, Paulie, because you don't look well." He gave Paulie a thin smile. "Better still, go to a Quarantine bureau, where I'll be able to find you."

Quarantine wasn't a realistic option for DeRaad because of what would happen to him there. Leaving him to contemplate that, Aschemann went over to the rickshaw and stared down with a kind of puzzled anger growing on his face. "Don't you want me?" the Point kid sang out in his three voices. It wasn't clear how, but he could feel the detective there. He laughed. "No one wants me."

Aschemann stayed bent over the rickshaw for some time, like an old man studying a baby. "What you've done here isn't good for anyone," he told Vic Serotonin without looking up.

Out on the Lots, a wary truce had developed.

Alice Nylon's gun-punks patrolled restlessly, whispering to one another in a gluey-sounding battle language they had refined from the fight argots of Preter Coeur. Aschemann's assistant wasn't prepared to try them out, despite the superiority of her chops. Things couldn't change, she decided, while her fire-team remained trapped up there by a conjunction of bad weather and site-side interference. But the situation wouldn't last forever and then she would see what happened. In keeping with this decision she had switched herself off and now lounged against the offside rear-quarter scoop of the Cadillac, from where she could exchange sneers with Alice Nylon, or stare with a kind of amused distaste at what had happened to Paulie DeRaad. Things could only get worse for Paulie. If he survived another twelve hours, which seemed unlikely, Hygiene would sequester him in an orbital facility. There he would be intubated in every natural orifice, plus some extra. They would run a bunch of wires up through the roof of his mouth and into his brain, in the hope some heavy-duty operator might gain access and fry the code before it became a full-scale escape. Either way he was dead. Meanwhile he presented as a danger to everyone around him, and without Alice's support he would be running out of friends.

"Bad luck, Paulie," the assistant said.

"You should keep your eye on the prisoner," Aschemann advised her, "if you want something to do." He treated DeRaad to an apologetic look. "What's your interest in this, Paulie? You gave Vic up, that's the end of it."

Vic stared at Aschemann, then at Paulie, to whom he said, "You gave me up? Paulie, I'm hurt you did that."

DeRaad ignored him. "I appear like this in person, it's not in my best interests," he said to Aschemann, "plus the pain and humiliation I got to suffer. But Vic goes down for bringing out an artefact and selling it on. You're hurt?" he screamed suddenly at Vic. Spit came out of his mouth and Vic stepped back in case he got infected by whatever Paulie was incubating. "Fucking Jesus bastard, you brought me a daughter. Look at me!" Screaming only tired Paulie out. He shook his head disgustedly. "You fucked me, Vic, so I fucked you. So much for friends."

"You fucked yourself, Paulie," Vic said. "I was only the bearer of the bad news."

But Paulie was already making his way back to the rickshaw in the piss-wet rain, leaning heavily on Alice Nylon's shoulder. He left behind him a feeling that the edge had gone off the situation. Aschemann had Vic. Paulie had his revenge. Aschemann's people would talk to the people who took care of Paulie, and the additional problem he represented would be solved at some other, higher level. Even Paulie accepted that. EMC would send someone for him and he would not bolt, because it was important to him to protect his brand-he was, after all, the last man out of the wreck of the old El Rayo X, which you could watch a genuine holographic record of the incident any evening at the Club Semiramide. He had a myth to manage. As a result, the escape would be contained. Everyone on the Lots that morning could back down without loss of face.

So it would have remained, but the weather changed. Onshore winds peeled the cloudbase back in raw hundred-metre slabs.

Inside the cloud unpredictable gusts and eddies came and went, full of rain and daylight one minute, wet snow and night the next. Electromagnetically disoriented and still awaiting instruction, the Site Crime fire-team-comprising code jockeys, weapons specialists and a human pilot hardwired into the DBH delivery vehicle- found itself drifting sideways at a brisk seventy knots into the event site. No one wanted that. The pilot weighed things up, shrugged and side-slipped blind into the first gap that offered itself. She was out of there, she said, for a fact.

"Abort, abort," ordered Aschemann's assistant.

The DBH breached the cloudbase, clipped the southeast corner of the Baltic Exchange and, condensation swirling off its asymmetric weapons pods, shot low over Aschemann's Cadillac, ploughing shortly afterwards into the concrete.

Since there was no correct interpretation of this move, everyone used their initiative. Vic Serotonin got down behind the Cadillac. Alice Nylon's gun-kiddies engaged the remains of the fire-team with hand-held thermobarics and Chambers guns. The fire-team, unable to respond at that time, called for help. Alice Nylon got off a shot at Aschemann's assistant, but the assistant had tailored up and was already speeding across the concrete towards the wreckage of the DBH, shedding curious frozen images of herself where she had paused just long enough for your eye to retain some detail. Each of these pauses represented one of Alice's little troops taken up, damaged, and thrown down in a disjointed attitude.

"None of this was intentional," Aschemann told Paulie.

"You fucks are all dead for this," Paulie told Aschemann.

Inside the DBH, the situation was out of everyone's grasp. The hull had been breached. The code jockeys were dead. The pilot's roof-of-the-mouth implant, ripped out by G-forces, hung from the console, a mass of fine gold wires, each one tipped with fresh brain matter. In an attempt to save itself, the ship had disengaged. In an attempt to save the pilot it had pumped her full of epinephrine and SSRIs, but her eyes were looking in different directions and her smile was as unplugged as her hardware. Worst of all, code had begun to leak through the compromised navigational firewalls and crawl over the living personnel who, hampered by their impact injuries, were kicking and screaming and struggling to crawl away from it.

Aschemann's assistant paused in the breach and assessed all of this. They saw her through the drifting sparks of light, consulting her forearm datableed. They were begging and pleading with her. If you had asked right then what they made of her expression, they might have described it as "blank." But what did that mean? She was a policewoman, aiming her pistol from the approved stance. She was a policewoman, shooting the survivors before she used a high temperature incendiary to torch the wreckage. She had an aptitude for that practical kind of thing. She was a policewoman, who thought she would watch the thick white smoke rise a moment or two longer, just to be sure, before she let her tailoring take over again and guide her on to the next thing.

No one wanted another escape on their hands.

Annie the rickshaw girl stood around, filled with a kind of awkward dismay at the way things were going and wondering what her fare would want to do next. She couldn't catch his attention, so she got out of her shafts and went behind the Cadillac, which she recognised from all over the city, especially downtown, and tried to strike up a conversation with the guy Vic who was sitting on the wet ground with his legs stretched out in front of him unwrapping a gun from a bit of oily rag.

"Is this your car?" she asked him.

"No."

"Only you'd have thought it was, from what Paulie said. I seen it around. 1952. You got your V8 pushrod, 330 cubic inches, bore amp; stroke 3-13A x 3-%. Best engine they ever made. Nice body too." She trailed her fingers down the smooth candy-and-pearl blends of the rear quarter. "And you got your wide whites. Fact is," she said wistfully, "I'd rather be one than own one. So, are these here your friends?"

"Not really," Vic said.

"Only I work for Paulie most of the time."

"No one more generous than Paulie," Vic said, "when he's on the right side of himself." He said, "You should keep your head down now." He worked along the body of the Cadillac until he could stick his own head out past the front fender. That moment the fuel-cell of the Site Crime vehicle went up with a kind of damp crump and a lot of white smoke trails curving randomly into the sky. Bits and pieces began clattering to earth. Vic winced away, then made himself have another look. "Fuck," he said. "She's still alive." A little later he added, "In fact I think she's the only thing alive out there." When he said this, he appeared puzzled but also as if a small sluice of panic had opened inside him. He crawled back to the rickshaw girl. "If she comes this way," he advised, "you should make it a point to leave."

"I got no fare," the Annie said. "I don't leave without a fare."

"Suit yourself."

Weird mint-coloured light broke through the overcast, angling down on to the Lots where the policewoman, uncharacteristically still, continued to stare at the burning wreckage as if she was failing to understand something. This made Vic impatient as well as angry, so to divert him the Annie said, "Paulie has a good heart, but he's often a little too focused, you could say that of him. You know, I hate gunfire. I would leave, but for another thing they got this boy in my rig, no one seems sure what to do with him. I pulled him around a lot in the last couple days."

"So there's your fare," Vic pointed out.

"He ain't so much a fare as a liability," she said. "You smell him? Jesus." The fact was, she said, she felt sorry for him, he was nothing but a Point kid who did no harm to anyone-though she believed there were always two sides to that kind of passivity- and she wondered if he would get home all right. As a result, when Vic said that, it was like having permission. No one else was interested in her-they were just standing around in shock waiting to see what the policewoman would do next-so she went over to her rig, got between the shafts and wheeled it round to Vic's side of the Cadillac. Vic was back to sitting with his legs in front of him.

"I could take you too," she offered.

At that moment, Alice Nylon stepped round the trunk of the Cadillac. "Paulie wants you to know he's had it with you, Vic," she said formally. She thought for a moment. "We been good friends you and me, and I'm sorry I got to do this." Even with Vic sitting on the floor, she had to point her gun up at his face, gripping it hard in both hands and squinting one eye across the sights at him. "But I'm being as tuff about it as I can."

"For fuck's sake, Alice," they heard Paulie call out, "just kill him. I got a right to feel betrayed here."

"You can see his point," Vic told Alice. "Paulie should be on his way home to Beddington Gardens now, in the hope he can get baked enough to forget what's happening to him."

"Fuck you," DeRaad said. "I heard that."

During all of the foregoing, Paulie had walked about nervously, sweating and gesturing; or sat on the concrete for a minute or two with his hands between his knees and followed everything that was going on, his expression quiet and knowing. He stared up at the Baltic Exchange building, then down at his own skin, leaden and white at the same time, and as shiny as if it had a resin laminate, and, once, across at the site. He said, "I think it's in my legs. I can feel it in my legs somehow." Then he was up again and lurching around, thrusting his face into the face of Aschemann the police detective, to whom he spoke only when he needed a break from sneering at Vic Serotonin. "You and me, Lens, we're above this crap," he said. He examined the facade of the Baltic Exchange once more, as though puzzled by its iron pillars, its rows of windows in the blue-grey weather light. Then he added:

"We're at another level from crap like this."

Aschemann's arrival on the Lots had nothing to do with Paulie DeRaad; it had, especially, nothing to do with DeRaad's myth-odology. So when Paulie spoke to him like this, he couldn't think what to say in return, but stood with the rain in his white hair, feeling disarranged and contentless, while smoke from the wrecked vehicle caught in his throat and Paulie shouted in his ear. Nothing was happening for Aschemann's intelligence to get leverage on; it wasn't his kind of situation. In a moment everyone might be dead. "Paulie," he managed to say finally, "things here have tipped in the worst possible direction." But Paulie's attention had wavered and moved on. A level of ADHD was written into his cuts, as a professional requirement. He indicated the policewoman, locked in her inexplicable fugue out on the Lots; shook his head to illustrate that, despite his depth of experience, even he could be at a loss.

"Lens, those chops of hers aren't military," he guessed.

"She came to me from Sport Crime," Aschemann admitted, glad to find something they could talk about, "on a one-month trial. God knows what she had them do to her there."

At last Paulie looked worried. "Shit," he said.

"To be fair, she drives well and she's good at languages."

"I got connexions could switch her off," Paulie offered. "If that's the problem."

Aschemann had a clear little vision of DeRaad's connexions, floating in restless fragmentary orbits somewhere miles above, dipping down at random so their stochastic resonance software could slice through the electromagnetic clutter from the event site. Unlike him, they knew exactly where they were; where everything was. Miles away seemed too close. "Paulie, Paulie, you frighten me!" he said, although it wasn't Paulie he could see so well in his mind's eye. "I won't need that," he promised hastily. "It's generous of you to offer, but I won't need that." He dialled up the assistant again. "For God's sake, answer," he begged her. He was already opening a second pipe in case he needed more help. Meanwhile, he laid his hand on DeRaad's upper arm in what was intended to be a reassuring gesture.

Of late, Paulie's tailoring package had been preoccupied. Its dialogue with the daughter-code wasn't going well. Nanopatches bolted on to Paulie's adaptive immune system, back in the El Rayo X glory days, had not held up. Now the daughter was chewing its way through the system itself (slowed only by the discovery that in Paulie's case the military Zip had used, in place of the usual im-munoglobins, proteins with leucine-rich repeats generated from lamprey DNA). Nevertheless the package overall had been excellent in its day, and despite these difficulties remained aware enough of the world outside Paulie to misinterpret Aschemann's motives. Nerve impulse propagation speeds ramped up by factors of four; simple instructions were issued to the rags of Paulie's central nervous system. The conscious mind processes at forty bits a second, the CNS at millions. Disorder is infinitely deep. Before he even knew he what he was doing, Paulie DeRaad had kicked the detective twice in the upper torso and once each in the throat and left ear. He looked down. He looked surprised. He shrugged and said, "Fuck you, Lens."

Then he said, "Hey, I honestly didn't mean to do that. Sorry."

Across the concrete, the policewoman woke up in a startled way and looked around her just in time to see Aschemann stumble backwards and fall over. She took a generous millisecond to assess the situation, then disappeared into the weather and reappeared quite suddenly in front of Alice Nylon.

"Uh oh," Alice said.

The assistant smiled and let her tailoring take over. After it had finished with Alice, it blurred its way over to Paulie DeRaad and put him down too. Then somehow she was back on Vic's side of things again, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with him, so close he could feel her skin on his, staring in the same direction as him- her body quivering, the air around her soupy with waste heat from her mitochondrial add-ons and exotic ATP transport upgrades- as if she wanted to see exactly what Vic was seeing. She smelled as sharp and sour as an animal cage. She had a look on her face he couldn't interpret. She was smiling. "Come on, Vic Testosterone," she whispered. "Try me out. Show me your special move." Vic shivered. He kept as still as he could. The minutes passed. He closed his eyes until he felt her chops shut down and she laughed and ran one finger lightly across the pulse in his neck and said, "Hey, Vic, you're safe now," and moved away. Next time he saw her she had dragged Aschemann into the back of the Cadillac, where she could work on him out of the weather. Except for the datableed running its perpetual Chinese Chequers down her forearm, she seemed so ordinary. She was some Sport Crime tailor's experiment or joke, laid like an ambush for people like Vic. She was something new.

Vic had a struggle to get to his feet.

He felt cold and stiff from sitting in the rain.

Alice Nylon lay in a shallow puddle, one arm flung out, her blue slicker ballooning up intermittently in the wind to reveal pink pedal-pushers. Her hat had fallen off. A single line of blood ran from the left corner of her mouth. Alice had bitten her tongue when she fell, but the damage was elsewhere. Vic found guarding in the muscles of the abdomen and lower back-she was as hard as a pear down there. The whites of her eyes were yellow. His diagnosis, the spleen had let go; there were ruptures to other organs too. Not a mark on her, but everything was pureed inside. Her eyes looked tired, her teeth were rotten from speed use, her spoiled, peaky, unlined little face looked very old.

"Shit, Alice," he said.

Her eyes opened. "I lost my gun, Vic," she whispered.

"Paulie will buy you a new one."

"You know what?" she said.

"What, Alice?"

"Me and Map Boy did it. We had a fuck, Vic!"

She chuckled. A small convulsion went through her.

"I'm that bit younger than him," she said, "so I wasn't so interested. But he's nice enough, and at least I got to do it before I died. Vic, you ever meet Map Boy?"

"I never did, no."

"He's cute. Vic?"

"What?"

No answer.

"Alice?"

Paulie DeRaad was kneeling on the concrete, muttering into a dial-up. Vic went up to him and said:

"Alice is dead, and to an extent, Paulie, I blame you." During his encounter with Aschemann's assistant, both of Paulie's shoulder joints had been popped. His arms didn't work, which, if nothing else, gave him some trouble maintaining position-each time his body threatened to fall forward, he left it to the last moment then writhed his torso in a curiously graceful motion to stay upright-but despite this he didn't seem upset or even interested. He let them dangle, like the sleeves of a coat. His face was grey, though patches of high colour sprang up where the old radiation burns had thinned the skin.

"I got a bad mouth ulcer, I know that," he said. "You want to just pull down my lower lip and look?"

"Jesus, Paulie."

"That police fucker won't leave me alone. Everywhere I go, he's there first. He's asking questions, he's taking names. You remember Cor Caroli, Vic? K-ships on fire across half the system? Wendy del Muerte tried to make planetfall in an Alcubiere ship with the drive still engaged? There won't be anyone like Wendy again."

"I wasn't there," Vic said.

"Yeah? I love it!" Paulie said, and laughed as if Vic had brought to the table some reminiscence of his own they could both enjoy. His eyes lit up, then almost immediately took on a perplexed cast. He had forgotten who he was. "I love all that stuff," he said. He leaned over, vomited weakly, and fell on his side. Vic made sure he was alive, then left him there.

"I want you to know I've had it with you, Paulie," he called back over his shoulder.

The job was fucked as far as Paulie was concerned; compared to him, Lens Aschemann, sprawled awkwardly across the rear seat of his car, head tipped back, mouth open, looked like a brand new morning. He was conscious, and dabbing at his ear with a wet cotton handkerchief. His eyes followed anything that crossed his field of vision, but his discomposure was as evident as his brown suit, and he seemed too tired to speak. Paulie's kicks had burst one of his eardrums and bruised some ribs. "It's good to see you, Vic," he said, "and know you got through this. Don't worry about me, I'm more shocked than anything. A little deaf perhaps. Vic, it's good you didn't run away."

At this, the assistant gave a little smile. "Vic won't be running away," she said.

Eighteen miles above their heads, one of DeRaad's connexions fired its /HAM engine for 7.02 milliseconds, flipped lazily onto its back and, with the first wisps of displaced atmosphere already flaring off its hull like an aurora, raced earthwards. That was how Paulie knew he was still a good investment. The sky opened. A flat concussion ripped the overcast apart. A single matt-grey wedge-shaped object, its outline broken up by intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the Lots at Mach 14 and halted inside its own length perhaps thirty feet above the Baltic Exchange. Parts of the roof blew off, but the structure held. The K-ship Poule de Luxe, on grey ops out of a base in Radio Bay, hung motionless for a moment, hull boiling with everything from gamma to microwaves, then pivoted neatly through 180 degrees to dip its snout attentively in the direction of Aschemann's Cadillac.

Paulie was on his feet, dancing about on the concrete, shouting and yelling and trying to wave his arms.

"Oh fuck," he shouted. "Just fucking look at this!"

With the care of a living thing, the K-ship lowered itself to earth in front of him. A cargo port opened. Paulie stumbled towards it, his arms swinging out haphazardly. "Hey, Vic," he called, "what do you think of her? It's the old Warm Chicken. Is she ugly, or what?" Tears ran down his face. He struggled up the cargo ramp, turned round at the top. "Can I tell you something, Vic?" he said. "Just before I go? Even the paint on this vehicle is toxic." Someone pulled him inside suddenly and the hatch closed.

The K-ship raised itself a little and slid smoothly forward, nose down, until it hung just above the hood of the Cadillac. There was a frying sound-the air itself being cooked-as its armaments extended and retracted in response to a change of government fifty lights down the Beach. In the Cadillac, Aschemann and his assistant felt its heat and steady gaze upon them. Every time either of them exhaled, the K-captain, buffered and secure in its proteome tank at the heart of the machine, knew. It wanted them to know that it knew. A minute stretched to two, then three. While they sat there wondering what to do, it mapped every strand of their DNA; at the same time, its mathematics was counting Planck-level fluctuations in the vacuum just outside the photosphere of the local star, where the rest of the de Luxe pod remained concealed. It gave them a moment to appreciate how capable it was of these and other divergent styles of behaviour. Then it revolved lightly around its vertical axis, torched up and quit the gravity well at just under Mach 42, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas.

Lens Aschemann sighed. "Who'll save us from the machines, Vic?" he asked.

No answer. The driver's door swung open in the wind.

Paulie DeRaad's rickshaw girl had watched all this from a couple of hundred yards away on the city side of the Lots.

She didn't know what to make of it. She wasn't prepared to say it was the grossest or most interesting thing she'd ever seen, because here in 2444AD, everyone saw new things all the time. "And when you pull for a living," she remarked to her fare, "you see it all." In this case, "all" meant bodies were scattered over the Lots. White, thick, gritty smoke was still going up from the crashed vehicle. Two small figures-kiddies, you'd say-were helping each other crawl away. She wasn't sure what happened to Paulie DeRaad, though he didn't look well when she last saw him.

One thing: a breeze had got up for a change, so maybe they could look forward to better weather. Another: as the K-ship took off on its line of light like a crack right across the solidity of things, a figure in a black watch cap was sprinting away from the Cadillac. It was the guy Vic who she had talked to. "He can run, that guy," she was forced to admit. "He has a nice action if he would train a little. Or, easier, he could get a package." The rain turned to sleet as it moved away to the west, which briefly made visibility even poorer than before; but she could see he had his bag over his shoulder and his gun in his hand. After a minute or two, the Cadillac's engine started and it rolled slowly over the concrete as if it would follow him. But they never got out of first gear and soon drifted to a halt. Shouting came from inside, some kind of disagreement was in progress. The driver's door opened and a woman got out. Then she got back in again and slammed the door. Vic Serotonin put the Baltic Exchange between him and the Cadillac and disappeared into the event site. Don't blame me, the rickshaw girl thought. I offered the guy a lift.

"Did you see that?" she said. "He went the wrong way."

The fare, who had something wrong with his voice to add to his troubles, made a noise like three notes of music played at the same time. "Moths mated to foxes," he said, "fluttering into their faces in the desert air." He laughed. A few dim motes of light issued from under the rickshaw hood to join its shoal of sponsor ads. "The faces of the foxes are like flowers to them, they circle closer." The Annie shrugged. Some fares wanted your input, some didn't. That was another thing you learned.

"Hey, are we going to haul?" she wanted to know. "Because we got no business here."

"Let's haul," said the three voices, one after another.

"It's your ride, hon."

She took one more look at the pink Cadillac and sighed. That sure was her favourite car. With its subtle paint blends and frenched tail lights, it had been the best part of her day so far. "I'd just once like to be that pretty," she told herself. Then she turned the rickshaw around and trotted off towards Saudade at a steady pace. "Don't you worry," she reassured the Point kid. "I know where they kept you."

"Let's haul."