He was ready, without knowing it, for the next great transition of his life.
'Are we hiding?' Anna said.
'Yes.'
She came and put herself in front of him, close to, so that he could feel the heat from her skin.
'Are you sure?'
Perhaps he wasn't. Perhaps he was waiting. He sat out there on Monster Beach each night after she had gone to sleep. If he expected his nemesis, he was disappointed: for once it was nowhere near. Something in that relationship had changed forever. For the first time since their original encounter, Kearney-though he shook with fear upon confronting the idea-was encouraging the Shrander to catch up. Did he feel it stop? Turn its head, as intelligently as a bird, to listen for him now? Did it wonder why he was trailing his coat?
Out there at night he hadn't much else to do but wait, and watch the ocean waves go in and out beneath the hard stars. Cold offshore winds picked up the sand and trickled it, hissing, between the marram grass on the dunes. There was a shivering luminescence. Kearney had a sense of things as endless: in this scheme the beach became a metaphor for some other transitional site or boundary, a beach at the edge of which lapped the whole universe. What kinds of monsters might wash up on a beach like that? More than the rotten, devolved carcass of a basking shark; more than the plesiosaur for which it had been so briefly and headily mistaken in 1970. Most nights he would go back into the cottage and take out the pocket drive containing Brian Tate's last data. Most nights he turned it over for a minute or two in his hands in the cold blue light of the TV screen, then put it away again. Once, he got out his laptop and connected the drive to it, though he switched neither of them on, going instead into the bedroom where he got fully clothed into bed beside Anna and placed the palm of his hand against her sex until she half-woke and groaned.
By day he played those old records, or sifted through the TV channels looking for anything that passed for science news. Everything seemed to amuse him. Anna didn't know what to make of it. One morning at breakfast she asked him:
'Will you kill me, do you suppose?'
'I don't think so,' he answered. 'Not now.' Then he said, 'I don't know.'
She put her hand over his.
'You will, you know,' she said. 'You won't be able to stop yourself in the end.'
Kearney stared out of the window at the ocean.
'I don't know.'
She took away her hand and kept herself to herself all morning. Equivocation always made her puzzled and, he thought, angry. It had to do with her childhood. Her problem with life was really the same as his: not giving it much credit, she had sought something which seemed more demanding. But there was more to what was happening than that. They'd driven themselves past the norms of their relationship, they had no idea what to make of each other. He didn't want her to be healthy. She didn't want him to be reliable or good-natured. They paced around one another by night, looking for openings, looking for less ordinary attitudes to force on one another. Anna was good at it. She surprised him by inviting him, off the back of one those brilliant, vulnerable smiles of hers:
'Would you like to put your cock inside me?'
They had taken the patchwork quilt off the bed and arranged it in front of the hearth, where driftwood was burning down to pure white ash. Anna, almost as white, lay half on her side in the firelight. He looked down thoughtfully at the hollows and shadows of her body.
'No,' he told her. 'I don't think I would.'
She bit her lip and turned her back.
'What's the matter with me?'
'You never wanted it,' he said cautiously.
'I did want it,' she said. 'I wanted it from the beginning, but it was easy to see you didn't. Half the girls at Cambridge knew. All you'd do was wank them off, and you never even came yourself. Inge Neumann -the girl with the Tarot cards?-was quite puzzled about it.' At this he looked so mortified she laughed. 'At least I got you to come,' she said.
The only reprisal he had was to tell her about Gorselands.
'You would never see the house from the road,' he said. He leaned forward, anxious with the effort of imagining it all. 'It was so well hidden. Only trees thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate.' In the grounds, everything was cool and shadowy except where the sun struck through on to a lawn like a broad pool. 'It looked so real.' The same light struck through into a third floor room, where, in the heat under the roof, it was always late afternoon and there was always a deep, inturned breathing sound, like the breath of someone who has lost all consciousness of themselves. 'Then my cousins would arrive and begin taking their clothes off.' He laughed. 'That's what I imagined, anyway,' he said. When Anna looked puzzled, he said: 'I would watch them and masturbate.'
'But this wasn't real?'
'Oh no. It was just a fantasy.'
'Then I don't-'
'I had nothing to do with them in life.' He had never once approached them in life. They had seemed too energetic, too brutal. 'The Gorselands fantasy spoilt everything for me. When I got to Cambridge I couldn't do anything.'
He shrugged.
'I don't know why,' he admitted. 'I just couldn't forget it. The promise of it.'
She stared at him.
'But that's so exploitative,' she said, 'using other people for something that only ever goes on inside you.'
'I ran away from the things I wanted-' he tried to explain.
'No,' she said. 'That's awful.'
She took the quilt by one corner and dragged it back into the bedroom. He heard the bed creak as she flung herself down on it. He felt abashed, caved-in. He said miserably, at least half-believing himself: 'I always thought the Shrander was my punishment for that.'
'Go away.'
'You used me,' he said.
'I didn't. I never did.'
TWENTY-SIX
50,000 degrees K
'We had some luck of course,' admitted Uncle Zip.
Seria Mau had returned to orbit to find the Moire pod all over everything like a cheap suit. She had given them some grief on her way out of there, and was now holed up among the gravitational rocks and shoals of the inner system, talking to Uncle Zip via a network of randomly switching proxy transmitters. The Moire pod -accepting this precaution as a challenge, and rather glad to be out of a fight Uncle Zip wouldn't allow them to win-had licked their wounds, pooled their mathematics and were rolling up the network at a rate of ten million guesses a nanosecond. Meanwhile, Seria Mau's fetch looked up at Uncle Zip, and Uncle Zip looked down at her. She could barely see his pipe-clayed face and fancy waistcoat for the creaking under-curve of his belly, clad in captain's ducks and restrained by a black leather belt fully eight inches wide. He had in one hand something that resembled a brass telescope, and in the other an ancient paper fakebook, 'The Galaxy and its Stars'. His sailor hat was on his head, with Kiss Me Quick in cursive script around the crown.
'There's no substitute for luck,' he said.
What had happened was this: in their haste to beat one another to the White Cat, Uncle Zip and the commander of the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void had collided in the Motel Splendido parking lot. At the time of the collision, Uncle Zip's vehicle of choice-the K-ship El Rayo X, on loan, along with the Krishna Moire pod, from undisclosed contacts in the bureaucracy of EMC-had already torched up to around twenty-five per cent the speed of light. Thirty or forty seconds later, it was buried deep below the Nastic vessel's greenish rind-like hull, having penetrated the whorled internal structures as far as the command and control centre before losing momentum. Touching the Void absorbed this incoming energy in a simple Newtonian fashion, retransmitting it as heat, noise, and-finally-a sluggish acceleration in the direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Its ruptured hull was promptly surrounded by clouds of shadow operators trying to make damage estimates. A caul of tiny repair machines-low-end swarming programmes mediating via a substrate of smart ceramic glue--began to seal the hole.
'Meanwhile,' said Uncle Zip, 'I find
that by his own lights the guy is in fact already dead, though his ship-math maintains him as some sort of fetch. I say, "Hey, we can still work together. Being dead this way is no impediment to that," and he agrees. It made sense we worked together. Working together can sometimes be the right thing.'
So that was how it was. Uncle Zip's shadow operators, correctly assuming that neither ship was going anywhere on its own, began to build software bridges between the K-ship's mathematics and the propulsion systems of its new host. No one had ever done this before: but within hours they were back up and running and in pursuit of the White Cat, their origin, position and motives cloaked beneath the curious double signature which had so puzzled Seria Mau. 'Some luck was involved,' Uncle Ziprepeated. He seemed to like the idea. He spread his hands comfortably. 'Things came unstuck a couple of times along the way. But here we are.'
He looked down at her. 'You and me, Seria Mau,' he said, 'we got to work together too.'
'Don't hold your breath, Uncle Zip.'
'Why is that?'
'Because of everything. But mainly because you killed your son.'
'Hey,' he said. 'You did that. Don't look at me!' He shook his head. 'It must be convenient to forget events so soon.'
Seria Mau had to acknowledge the truth of that.
'But it was you involved me with him,' she said. 'You wound me up and set me going. And why bother, anyway, when you already knew where Billy was? You knew it all along, or else you couldn't have told me. You could have found him any time. Why the charade?'
Uncle Zip considered how to answer.
'That's true,' he admitted in the end: 'I didn't need to find him. But I knew he would never share that secret source of his. He was down there on that shithole rainy planet for ten years, just hoping I would ask, so he could say no. So instead I sent him what he needed: I sent him a sad story. I showed him he could still do something good in the world. I sent him someone worse off than he was, someone he could help. I sent him you. I knew he'd offer to take you there.'
He shrugged.
'I figured I could follow you,' he said.
'Uncle Zip, you bastard.'
'Some people have said that,' admitted Uncle Zip.
'Well, Billy told me nothing in the end. You didn't guess him right. He only came aboard my ship to have sex with the Mona clone.'
'Ah,' said Uncle Zip. 'Everyone wants sex with Mona.'
He smiled reminiscently.
'She was one of mine, too,' he said. Then he shook his head sadly. 'Things weren't good between me and Billy Anker since his first day out the incubator. It sometimes happens with a father and a son. Maybe I was too tough on him. But he never found himself, you know? Which was a pity, because he so much resembled me when I was young, before I did one entrada too many and as a consequence got this fat disease.'
Seria Mau cut the connection.
Thesound of alarms. Under its shifting blue and grey internal light, the White Cat felt empty and haunted at the same time. Shadow operators hung beneath the ceilings of the human quarters, pointing at Seria Mau and whispering among themselves like bereaved sisters. 'For God's sake what's the matter now?' she asked them. They covered one another's bruised-looking mouths with their fingers. The Moire pod had chased down most of the RF proxies and were running about after the rest like a lot of dogs on the Carmody waterfront at night. 'We have a buffer a few nanoseconds thick,' her mathematics warned her. 'We should either fight or leave.' It thought for a moment. 'If we fight, they'll probably win.'
'Well then, go.'
'Where?'
'Anywhere. Just lose them.'
'We might lose the K-pod, but not the Nastic ship. Their navigational systems aren't as good as me, but their pilot is better than you.'
'Don't keep saying that!'shrieked Seria Mau. Then she laughed. 'What does it matter, after all? They won't hurt us-not until they find out where we're going, anyway. And maybe not even then.'
'Where are we going?'
'Wouldn't you like to know!'
'We can't go there unless I do,' the mathematics reminded her.
'Ramp me up,' said Seria Mau. Instantly, the fourteen dimensions of the White Cat's sensorium folded out around her, and she was on ship-time. One nanosecond, she could smell vacuum. Two, she could feel the minute caress of dark matter against the hull. Three, she could tune into the hideous fusion life of the local sun, with its sounds no one has ever described. Four nanoseconds, and she had the shifting constantly redesigned command languages of the Moire pod drifting up to her through something like layers of clear liquid, which was the encryption they were suspended in. In five nanoseconds she knew everything about them: propulsion status, rate of burn, ordnance on call. What damage they were carrying from the day's encounter-the hulls thinned at crucial points from particle ablation, the arsenals depleted. She could feel the nanomachines working overtime to shore up their internal architecture. They were too young and stupid to realise how damaged they were. She thought she could beat them, whatever the mathematics said. She hung there a further nanosecond, warming herself in the fourteen-dimensional night. Blinks and fibres of illumination came and went. Distant things like noises. She heard Krishna Moire say, 'Got: it!' but knew he hadn't.
This was the place for her.
It was the place for people who didn't know what they were any more. Who had never known. Uncle Zip had called her 'a sad story'. Her mother was long dead. She had not seen her brother or father for fifteen years. Mona the clone had felt only contempt for her, and Billy Anker had pitied her even as she killed him: in addition his hard death still hung before her, like the menu for her own. Then she conned herself that all the complex stuff of being human was transparent at this level of things, and she could see straight through it to the other side-right to the simple code beneath. She could stay or go: in this place as in life. She was the ship.
'Arm me,' she commanded.
'Is this what you want;'
'Arm me.'
At that exact juncture, the K-pod found the last of her proxies and began unspooling the thread that led to her. But she was connected, and they were still thinking in milliseconds. Each time they found her, she was somewhere else. Then, in the instant it took them to realise what had happened, she had got into their personal space.
The engagement had to take place within one and a half minutes, or Seria Mau would burn out. During that time she would flicker unpredictably in and out of normal space fifty or sixty thousand times. She would remember little of it afterwards, an image here, an image there. In ship-space, a high-end gamma burst, generating 50,000K for an endless fourteen nanoseconds, looked like a flower. Targets turned under the gaze of her acquisition systems like diagrams, to be flipped this or that number of degrees in seven dimensions until they bloomed like flowers too. To the targets themselves the White Cat seemed to come out of nowhere on three or four different arcs which though sequential appeared simultaneous, in a mist of decoys, false signals and invented battle languages, a froth of code and violence which could have only the one conclusion. 'The fact is, boys,' she commiserated, 'I'm not sure which of these is me.' The Norma Shirike, struggling to connect, broke up into a cloud of pixels, like jigsaw pieces blown off a table in a high wind. The Kris Rhamion and the Sharmon Kier, trying not to run into one another in their haste to get away, ran into a small asteroid instead. Suddenly, it was all unmatched bits and pieces, floating in nowhere. They had ragged edges. None of them looked human, at any scale she chose. Local space was cooling down, but it was still like a cooker, resonating with light and heat, glittering with exotic particles and phase states. It was beautiful.
'I love it in here,' she said.
'You have three milliseconds left,' the mathematics warned her. 'And we didn't get them all. I think one of them left the system. But Moire himself is loose and I'm still looking for him.'
'Leave me in here.'
'I can't do that.'
'Leave me in, or we're stuffed anyway. He used hi
s team as decoys, went on ship-time late. The bet was he would have a millisecond or two left to bounce me as I slowed down.' It was a textbook tactic and she had fallen for it. 'Moire, you fucker, I know what you're up to!'Too late. She was back on normal time. The tank proteome, flushed with nutrients and hormonal tranquillisers, was beginning to try and repair her. She could barely stay awake. 'Fuck,' she told the mathematics. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.' There was laughter on the RF frequencies. Krishna Moire flickered briefly into existence in front of her, dressed in his powder-blue stormtroop uniform.
'Hey, Seria,' he said. 'What's this, you ask? Well it's goodnight from me. And a fucking goodnight to you.'
'He's on us,' said the mathematics.
Moire's ship flickered towards her through the wreckage. It looked like a ghost. It looked like a shark. Nothing she could do would be fast enough. The White Cat turned and turned in panic like one of her own victims, looking for a way out. Then everything lit up like a Christmas tree, and the Krishna Moire was batted away in the blast, a black needle toppling end over end against the dying flare of the explosion. In the same instant, Seria Mau became aware that something huge had materialised beside the White Cat. It was the Nastic cruiser, its vast, mouldy-looking hull, like a rotting windfall in some old orchard, still crawling with autorepair media.
'Jesus,' she said. 'They bumped him. Uncle Zip bumped his own guy.'
'I don't think it was Uncle Zip,' the mathematics said. 'The command came from somewhere else in the ship.' A dry laugh. 'It's like the bicameral mind in there.'
Seria Mau felt weepy when she heard this.
'It was the commander,'she said. 'He always liked me. And I always liked him.'
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