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“You’re so nice,” she said, when he came back. “Hug me.”

He stared at her in the dark. “Were you even asleep?” he said.

“Please.”

She rolled against him. As soon as he touched her, she groaned and pulled away, raising her behind in the air and burying her face in the pillow while he manipulated her with one hand and himself with the other. At first she tried to join in, but he wouldn’t let her touch him. He kept her at the edge of coming, breathing in great sobbing gasps, whimpering into the pillow between each breath. He watched her like this until watching her had made him so hard again his cock hurt. Finally he brought her off with two or three quick little circular rubs and let himself come onto the small of her back. Gorselands had never seemed so close. He had never felt so in control. Engineering that, he supposed, was her way of feeling in control. With her face still in the pillow she said:

“I really didn’t mean to do that right up until I did it.”

“Didn’t you?” said Kearney.

“You’ve made me very sticky.”

“Stay there, stay there,” he ordered her, “don’t move,” and fetched tissue to wipe her dry.

He went everywhere with her after that. He was attracted by her cleverly chosen clothes, sudden bursts of laughter, dissembled narcissism. At nineteen, her fragility was already obvious. She had a confusing relationship with her father—some kind of academic in the north—who had wanted her to attend a university closer to home. “He’s sort of disowned me,” she said, looking up at Kearney with a soft, dawning surprise, as if it had just happened. “Can you understand why anyone would do that?” She had tried to kill herself twice. Her friends, in the way students are, were almost proud of this; they took care of her. Kearney, they intimated fiercely, had responsibilities too. Anna herself seemed only embarrassed: forgotten for a minute, though, she began to waste away. “I don’t think I’m eating much,” she would say helplessly on the telephone. She had the air of someone the simplest levels of whose personality must be held together, hands on, daily.

Kearney was drawn to her by all that (not to say by a species of deep gallantry he detected in her, the presence at some level beneath all these gestures of panic and self-defeat, of a woman determined to have what life her demons would allow). But it was her way of having sex that kept him there. If Kearney wasn’t precisely a voyeur, Anna wasn’t quite an exhibitionist. Neither of them ever knew quite what they were. They were a mystery to one another.

Eventually that in itself would enrage them: but those early encounters were like water in a desert. They married in a register office two days after he got his doctorate—he bought for the occasion a Paul Smith suit. They were together ten years after that. They never had children, though she said she wanted them. He saw her through two stretches of therapy, three more bouts of anorexia, a last, almost nostalgic attempt to do away with herself. She watched him follow the funding from university to university, doing what he called “McScience” for the corporates, keeping track of the new discipline of complexity and emergent properties, all the time staying ahead of the game, the Shrander, the body count. If she suspected anything, she never spoke. If she wondered why they moved so often, she never said. In the end he told her everything one night, sitting on the edge of her bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, staring down at her bandaged wrists and wondering how they had come to this.

She laughed and took his hands in hers. “We’re stuck with each other now,” she said, and within the year they were divorced.

Two days out from
Redline, and the
White Cat
was changing course every twelve nanoseconds. Dyne-space enfolded the ship in a figured, incalculable blackness, out of which reached the caressing fingers of weakly reacting matter. The shadow operators hung motionless at the portholes whispering to one another in the old languages. They had taken on their usual form, of women biting their knuckles in regret. Billy Anker wouldn’t have them near him. “Hey,” he said, “
we
don’t know what they want!” He tried to exclude them from the human quarters, but they crept in like smoke while he was asleep and hung up in the corners watching him dream his exhausted dreams.

Seria Mau watched him too. She knew that she would soon have to have his account of himself, and of the object she had bought from Uncle Zip. Meanwhile she spent her time with the ship’s mathematics, trying to understand what was going on behind them, where, several lights adrift, the
Krishna Moire
pod wove itself chaotically round the curious hybrid signature of the Nastic ship, to make a single, watery, undependable trace in the display.

“It’s hard to feel threatened, when they stay back so far.”

“Perhaps they don’t want us to panic,” the mathematics suggested. “Or—” with its equivalent of a shrug “—perhaps they do.”

“Can we lose them?”

“Their computational success is high, but not as high as mine. With luck, I can keep them at arm’s length.”

“But can we lose them?”

“No.”

She couldn’t bear that idea. It was a limitation. It was like being a child again. “
Well then, do something!
” she screamed. After some thought the mathematics put her to sleep, which for once she welcomed.

She dreamed again of the time they were all still happy. “Let’s go away!” the mother said. “Would you like to go away?” Seria Mau clapped her hands, while her brother ran up and down the family room, shouting, “Let’s go away! Let’s go away!” though when the time came he threw a tantrum because he couldn’t take his little black cat. They caught the Rocket Train north, to Saulsignon. It was a long journey in a lost season—not quite winter, not quite spring—slow and exciting by turns. “If it’s a Rocket Train it should go faster!” the little boy shouted, running up and down the aisle. The sky was a stretched blue over long hypnotic lines of plough. They got down at Saulsignon the afternoon of the next day. It was the tiniest of stations, with wrought iron posts and tubs of Earth flowers, washed bright as a new pin by the little showers of rain falling through the sunlight. The platform cat licked its tortoiseshell fur in a corner, the Rocket Train departed, and a white cloud obscured the sun. Outside the station a man walked by. When he stopped to look back, the mother shivered and wrapped her honey-coloured fur coat about her, drawing its collar tight with one long white hand.

Then she laughed and the sun came out again. “Come along, you two!” And there, moments later it seemed, was the sea!

Here the dream ended. Seria Mau waited attentively for the reprise, or second act, in which the conjuror would appear, dressed in his beautiful top hat and tails. When nothing happened she was disappointed. As soon as she woke up she switched on all the lights in the human quarters. The shadow operators, caught bending solicitously over Billy Anker’s bed in the dark, fled right and left.

“Billy Anker,” Seria Mau called. “Wake up!”

A few minutes later he stood blinking and rubbing his eyes in front of the Dr. Haends package in its red gift box.

“This?” he said.

He looked puzzled. He poked about behind the box. He picked up one of Uncle Zip’s roses and sniffed it. He raised the lid of the box cautiously (a bell chimed, a soft spotlight seemed to shine down from above) and eyed the upwelling and slow purposive spill of white foam. The bell chimed again. A female voice whispered, “Dr. Haends. Dr. Haends, please.” Billy Anker scratched his head. He put the lid back on the box. He took it off again. He reached out to touch the white stuff with his finger.

“Don’t do that!” warned Seria Mau.

“Shh,” said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. “I look inside,” he said, “and I don’t see anything. Do you?”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“Dr. Haends to surgery, please,” insisted the quiet voice.

Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. “I never saw anything like this before,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know what Uncle Zip did to it.” He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. “It didn’t look like this when I found it,” he said. “It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.” He shrugged. “Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn’t have these theatrical values.” He smiled in a way she didn’t understand, looking off into the distance. “That’s Uncle Zip’s signature, if you like,” he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau’s fetch wove nervously around his ankles.

“Where did you find it?” she said.

Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch’s eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:

“You can’t outrun EMC forever.”

“It’s not me they’re after,” she reminded him.

“All the same,” he said, “they’ll catch you in the end.”

“Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It’s easy to lose yourself out here.”

“You’re already lost,” Billy Anker said. “I admire that you stole a K-ship,” he went on quickly: “Who wouldn’t? But you’re lost, and you aren’t finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You’re doing the wrong thing. You know?”

“How come you say these things?” she shouted. “How come you make me feel bad like this?”

He couldn’t answer that.

“What’s the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I’m not a refund kind of guy?” She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn’t his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know you well enough to say that.”

“No,” he said.

“I was wrong,” she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn’t fill. “It was wrong of me.”

She had to be content with a shrug.

“So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you’re clearly so proud of.”

“Take this ship deep,” he said. “Take it to the Tract.”

“I don’t know why I’m talking to you, Billy Anker.”

He laughed.

“I had to try,” he said. He said, “OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.”

She laughed.

“Billy Anker, what can
you
tell
me
about that?” He went on anyway.

Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the “affected area” and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. “Containment” was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.

After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and—especially—navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

K-tech was born.

“So?” said Seria Mau. “This is not news.”

She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. “None of this is news to my life,” she said. “You know?”

“I know,” said Billy Anker. He went on:

“EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, ’We don’t make the wars,’ and then have ‘ terrorists’ killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC
became
the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.” He grinned. “But here’s the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip’s generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they’re adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can’t build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.