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“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.