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The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

“Ever feel like that, Kearney?”

Kearney considered.

“No.”

Valentine Sprake’s face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. “No?” he said. “Oh well.”

He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he had been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absentminded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levi’s which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand—its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness—he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.

“Look at this.”

“I don’t want it.” Kearney backed away. “I don’t want it.”

“More fool you,” said Valentine Sprake. “I got it off the shelf there.” He tore out two or three pages of the volume—which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth’s beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of
Madame Bovary
—and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. “I can’t be bothered with people who don’t know their own minds.”

“What do you want from me?”

Sprake shrugged. “You phoned me,” he said. “As I heard it.”

“No,” said Kearney. “I got some sort of answer service, but I didn’t leave a message.”

Sprake laughed.

“Oh yes you did. Alice remembered you. Alice quite fancies you.” He rubbed his hands busily. “How about a cup of tea?”

“I’m not even sure you’re here,” Kearney said, looking anxiously at the sofa. “Did you understand anything you were saying over there?” Then he said: “It’s caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two days ago. I thought you might know what to do.”

Sprake shrugged.

“You already know what to do,” he suggested.

“I’m sick of doing it, Valentine.”

“You’d better get out, then. I doubt you’ll finish with a whole skin whatever you do.”

“It doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know if it ever worked.”

Sprake gave him a small colourless smile. “Oh, it works,” he said. “You’re just a wanker.” He held up one hand in the pretence that Kearney might take offence. “Only joking. Only joking.” He kept smiling for a moment or two, then added: “Mind if I roll a cigarette?” On the inside of his left wrist he had a homemade tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Kearney shrugged and went into the galley. While Kearney made the tea Sprake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to fill with streetlight instead.

At one point he said, “The Gnostics were wrong, you know.” Then, when Kearney didn’t reply:

“There’s a mist coming up over the river.”

After that there was quite a long pause. Kearney heard two or three small movements, as of someone removing a book from a shelf; then an intake of breath. “Listen to this—” Sprake began, but fell silent immediately. When Kearney came out of the kitchen, the street door was open and the apartment was empty. Two or three books lay on the floor, surrounded by torn-out pages which looked like wings. Onto the empty white wall above the sofa, in a bright parallelogram of sodium light, something outside was projecting the shadow of an enormous beaked head. It looked nothing like the head of a bird. “Christ,” said Kearney, his heart beating so hard he could feel it rocking his upper body. “Christ!” The shadow began to turn, as if its owner, hanging in the air two storeys above a street in Chiswick, two in the morning, was turning to look at him. Or worse, as if it wasn’t a shadow at all.

“Jesus Christ, Sprake, it’s here!” Kearney shouted, and ran out of the apartment. He could hear Sprake’s footsteps thudding on the pavement somewhere ahead of him; but he never caught him up.

Central London, 3 a.m.

Fractals spilled across icy blue displays, developing into something that resembled the jerky frame-by-frame slow motion of a much earlier medium. Brian Tate rubbed his eyes and stared. Behind him, the suite was dark. It smelled of junk food, cold coffee. The male cat was sniffing about in a litter of discarded polystyrene cups and burger cartons around Tate’s feet. The female sat quietly on his shoulder, watching with a kind of companionable complicity the mathematical monster unspooling across the screens in front of them. Every so often she dabbed out a paw, mewing impatiently, as if to draw Tate’s attention to something he had missed. She knew where the action was. Tate took off his glasses and put them on the desk in front of him. Even at these speeds there was nothing to see.

Or almost nothing. At Los Alamos, bored—though he would never have admitted it to anyone—by the constant talk about physics and money, he had spent most of his free time in his room, switching restlessly from TV channel to TV channel with the sound turned down. This led him to think about choice. The moment of choice, he thought, could be located very exactly as one image flickered, broke and was replaced by the next. If you levered things apart, if you could get into the exact moment of transition, what would you find? Entertaining himself with the fantasy of an unknown station—something more watchable than reruns of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
—transmitting into the gap, into the moment of choice, he had tried to record a series of channel changes on the VCR and play them back in stop-frame. This had proved to be impossible.

He reached back to stroke the cat’s ears. She evaded him, jumped down onto the floor, where she hissed at the male until he retreated under Tate’s chair.

Tate, meanwhile, picked up the telephone and tried Kearney’s home number. There was no answer.

He left another message.

When Uncle Zip heard
Seria Mau say the words “Dr. Haends,” he sat perfectly still for a fraction of a second. Then he shrugged. “You should bring it back,” he repeated. This was his idea of an apology. “I’ll be generous to you.”

“Uncle Zip? Do you know a Dr. Haends?”

“I never heard of him,” said Uncle Zip quickly, “and I know every tailor from here to the Core.”

“Do you think it’s military?”

“No.”

“Do you think it’s modern?”

“No.”

“So what can I do?”

Uncle Zip sighed. “I already told you: bring it back to me.”

Seria Mau felt reluctant. She felt as if some other avenue should open up for her at this point. She said:

“You’ve lost your credibility here—”

Uncle Zip threw up his hands and laughed.

“—and I want to meet this guy, this Billy Anker.”

“I should know better than to argue with a fetch!” He stared at her, still amused but suddenly alert. “First off, Billy Anker is not known to be a guy with a refund policy,” he said quietly. “In addition, he is my guy, not yours. Thirdly, he is not a cutter. You understand? What do you think you’d get from him, young woman, that you won’t get from me?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. Something. I don’t know what. But you aren’t telling me what you know. And I have to start somewhere.”

He stared at her a moment longer, and she could see him think.

Then he said, in a throwaway voice: “OK.”

“I’ve got money.”

“I don’t want money for this,” said Uncle Zip. “When I think about it this could work out for all of us. Even Billy.” He smiled to himself. “I’ll give you Billy as a favour. Maybe you’ll do me a favour sometime down the line.” He waved one hand dismissively. “It won’t be much, no problem.”

“I’d rather pay.”

Uncle Zip got gracefully to his feet.

“Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth,” he advised her flatly. “Take my deal, I’ll let you in on Billy’s whereabouts. Maybe also his present ambitions.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Hey, don’t think too long.”

While he sat, he had balanced his accordion on his powerful thighs. Now he took it up, and got the straps back over his shoulders, and squeezed out a long introductory chord. “What’s money anyway?” he said. “Money isn’t everything. I go down to the Core, it’s five hundred light-years of money. Money all the way. They got entire planetary systems designated FTZs. They got women with two days’ training, sweating out lousy little do-it-yourself splicing kits, what for? So their kids can eat. Oh, and so
Earth
kids can get a legal patch at a factor five mark-up. Break the seal on the code and give themselves metabolic collapse on a Saturday night. You know what those corporates say?”

“What do they say, Uncle Zip?”

“They say, ’Money has no morality,’ in these voices make you want to puke. They’re proud of it.”

It was 2 a.m. in Carmody, and the Kefahuchi Tract glittered across the sky as bright as Uncle Zip’s accordion. He played another chord, and then a series of brash arpeggios that rippled one into the next. He puffed up his cheeks and began to stamp his feet. One by one, his audience slipped back into the parlour, giving weak apologetic grins to Seria Mau’s fetch. It was as if they had been waiting somewhere down Henry Street, some bar not far down, for the music to start up again. They brought bottles in brown bags, and this time one or two shy women were with them, casting glances out of the side of their eyes at Uncle Zip then looking quickly away again. Seria Mau listened to another song, then let herself fade into brown smoke.

On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade: cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis. Every afternoon his shop was full of nervous mothers-to-be, designing their baby to have genius. “Everybody wants to be rich,” he would complain. “I made a million geniuses. Also, everybody wants to be Buddy Holly, Barbra Streisand, Shakespeare. Let me tell you: no one knows what those men looked like.” It was barely illegal. It was all, as he said, a bit of fun. There was only so far he could go. It was the modern equivalent, he said, of a kiss-me-quick hat you bought on Labour Day. Or maybe that old kind of tattoo they had back then. In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He cut alien DNA. He didn’t care what he cut, or who he cut for as long as they could pay.

As for his audience, they were cultivars: every one cloned—even the shy young women in the black tube skirts—from his own stemcells, deep-frozen insurance he took out the day he went to Radio Bay. They were his younger self, before he found his big secret, come to worship twice-nightly at the shrine he had made of his success.

Motel Splendido turned, nightside up, beneath the
White Cat
. From the parking lot, Seria Mau stared down. Carmody appeared like a sticky, abbreviated smear of light the colour or extent of which you couldn’t be sure, on its island in the curve of the southern ocean. She dawdled her fetch along its magically lighted streets. Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matte plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and oyster satin. Down by the ocean, transformation dub, saltwater dub, pulsed from the bars, the soundtrack of a human life, with songs like “Dark Night, Bright Light” and others. Human beings! She could almost smell their excitement at being alive there in the warm black heart of things among the sights. She could almost smell their guilt. What was she looking for? She couldn’t say. All she could be sure of was that Uncle Zip’s hypocrisy had made her restless.

Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars—the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner—they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice they pawed and fought pantomimically and tossed folding money at one another, laughing and snuffling.

“Hey,” they said when Seria Mau fetched up. “Here, kitty kitty!”

There was nothing they could do to her. She was safe with them. It was like having grown-up brothers. For a moment or two they threw the dice at blinding speed. Then one of them said, without looking up: “You don’t get bored, being
not real
that way?”

They couldn’t play for laughing at that.

Seria Mau watched the game until a bell rang softly on the
White Cat
and drew her away.

As soon as she was gone, two of the shadow boys turned on the third and cut his throat for cheating, then, overcome by the pure existential moment, cradled his head in the warm golden light as he smiled softly up at nothing, bubbling his life out all over them like a benediction. “Hey you,” they comforted him, “you can do it all again. Tonight you’ll do it all again.”

Up in the parking lot, Seria Mau sighed and turned away.

“You see?” she told her empty ship. “It always comes to this. All the fucking and the fighting, it all comes to nothing. All the pushing and the shoving. All the things they give each other. If for a moment I thought—” Could she still cry? She said, apropos of nothing: “Those beautiful boys in the sunlight.” This made her remember what she had said to the Nastic commander, out there in the shadow of his stupidly big ship. It made her remember the package she had bought from Uncle Zip, and what she intended to do with it. It made her recall Uncle Zip’s offer. She opened a line to him and said:

“OK, tell me where this Billy Anker guy is.” She laughed, and, mimicking the tailor’s manner, added, “Also his present ambitions.”