'Look!' cried Billy Anker. 'Look down!'

The South Polar Artefact flashed beneath them. Seria Mau caught a fleeting glimpse of it-a featureless gunmetal ziggurat a million years old and five miles on a side at the base-before it vanished astern. 'It's opening!' cried Billy Anker. Then, in an awed whisper: 'I can see. I can see inside-' The sky lit up white behind them, and his voice turned to a despairing wail. The pod, growing frustrated, had hit the ziggurat with something from the bottom shelf of its arsenal, something big. Something EMC.

'What did you see?' Seria Mau asked three minutes later, as they skulked at Redline L2 while the White Cat's mathematics tried to guess them a way out under the noses of their pursuers.

Billy Anker wouldn't say.

'How could they do that?' he railed. 'That was a unique historical item, and a working one. It was still receiving data from somewhere in the Tract. We could have learned something from that thing.' He sat white-faced in the human quarters, panting and wiping the adrenalin sweat off his face with his do-rag, the top half of the muddy EV suit peeled back. The shadow operators were cooing and fluttering round him, trying to fix his dislocated finger, but he kept batting them away with his other hand. 'This old stuff,' he said, 'it's all we have. It's our only resource!'

'Where you look, you find,' she told him. 'There will always be more, Billy Anker. There will always be more after that.'

'Nevertheless, everything I learned, I learned from that thing.'

'And what did you learn, Billy Anker?'

He tapped the side of his nose.

'You'd like to know,' he said, laughing as if this assertion showed how sharp and clean his intuition was. 'But I won't tell.' He was a beachcomber, with all the tidal scouring of the personality that implies. His big discovery shored him up. He had to believe she would be interested in whatever tacky insight into the nature of things he thought it gave him. 'I can tell you what EMC want, though,' he offered instead.

'I know that already. They want you. They followed me all the way from Motel Splendido to find you. And here's another thing to think about: the Moire pod wanted to try me out. They think they're good enough. But whoever's in that other ship wouldn't let them, in case you were caught in the crossfire. That's why Krishna Moire bumped your artefact, Billy. He's pissed at his superiors.'

Billy Anker grinned his sly grin.

'And are they good enough?' he said. 'To try you out?'

'What do you think?'

Billy Anker contemplated this answer with approval. Then he said, 'EMC don't want me. They want what I found.'

Seria Mau felt cold in her tank.

'It's it on board my ship?' she said.

'In a manner of speaking,' he acknowledged. He made a gesture meant to take in all of Radio Bay, maybe even the vast sweep of the Beach itself. 'It's out there too.'

EIGHTEEN

The Circus of Pathet Lao

Some hours after he shot Evie Cray, Ed Chianese found himself on the waste ground behind the New Men warren.

It was pitch black out there, lit with oddly angled flashes of white light from the docks. Occasionally a K-ship left its slip on a vertical line of fusion product, and for perhaps two or three seconds Ed could see low hummocks, pits, ponds, piles of broken engineering objects. The whole place had a smell of metal and chemicals. Vapour drifted out the yards like a ground mist. Ed was throwing up again, and the tank voices were back in his head. He dumped the guns in the first pool he came to. A life like his, and finally he had killed someone. He remembered boasting to Tig Vesicle:

'Once you've done all the things worth doing, you begin on the things that aren't.'

A little smoke came up from the pool, as if there was more in it than water. Shortly after he got rid of the guns, he came across an abandoned rickshaw. It loomed up in front of him suddenly-out of context, one wheel in a flooded hole-tilted at an odd angle against the sky. Detecting his approach, advertisements crawled across the sides of its hood, coalesced as soft lights in the air above it. Music started up. A voice echoed across the waste ground:

'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao.'

'No thanks,' Ed said. 'I'll walk.'

In the light of the next flare from the rocket yards, he discovered the rickshaw girl. She was on her knees, bowed down between the shafts, breathing in with a kind of hoarse whistle, letting it out as a grunt. Every so often her whole body tensed up as tight as a fist and began to tremble. Then she seemed to relax again. Once or twice she laughed to herself and said, 'Hey, man.' She was occupied with dying the way she had been occupied with life, to the exclusion of everything else. Ed knelt down beside her. It was like kneeling next to a foundered horse.

'Hold on,' he said. 'Don't die. You can make it.'

There was a painful laugh.

'The fuck you know about it,' the girl said thickly.

He could feel the heat pouring off her. He had the feeling it would rush away like that, full tilt, and then stop and never be replaced. He tried to put his arms round her to hold it in. But she was too big, so he just held one of her hands.

'What's your name?' he said.

'What's it to you?'

'You tell me your name, you can't die,' Ed explained. 'It's like somehow, you know, we made contact. So you owe me something, and all that.' He thought. 'I need you not to die,' he said.

'Shit,' she said. 'Other people go out in peace. I get a twink.'

Ed was surprised she could guess that.

'How do you know?' he said. 'You can't know that.'

She drew her breath in raggedly.

'Look at yourself,' she advised. 'You're as dead as me, only it's on the inside.' She narrowed her eyes. 'You got blood all on you, man,' she told him. 'You're all over blood. At least I haven't got blood on me.' This seemed to cheer her up in some way. She nodded to herself, settled back.

'I'm Annie Glyph,' she said. 'Or I was.'

'Visit today!' boomed the rickshaw's advertising chip suddenly. 'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao. Also: the future descried. Prophecy. Fortune Telling. Atheromancy.'

'I worked this city five years, on cafй йlectrique and sheer fucking guts,' Annie Glyph said. 'That's two years more than most.'

'What's atheromancy?' Ed asked her.

'I got no idea.'

He stared at the rickshaw. Cheap spoked wheels and orange plastic, totally Pierpoint Street. The rickshaw girls ran eighteen hours a day for speed money, and opium money to take the edge off the speed; then they blew up. Cafй йlectrique and guts: that was their boast. All they had in the end was a myth of themselves. They were indestructible: this destroyed them. Ed shook his head.

'How can you live with it?' he said.

But Annie Glyph wasn't living with it any more. Her eyes were empty, and she had slumped to one side, tipping the rickshaw over with her. He couldn't quite believe something as alive as her could die. Her huge body still had the sheen of sweat on it. Her rawboned face, dwarfed by the muscles of her neck and shoulders, masculised by the inboard testosterone patch the tailor had specified as part of the cheap conversion kit, had a kind of etched beauty. Ed studied it a moment or two then leaned forward to close her eyes. 'Hey, Annie,' he said. 'Sleep at last.' At this, something weird happened. Her cheekbones rippled and shifted uneasily. He put it down to the unsteady illumination of the rickshaw ads. But then her whole head blurred, and seemed to break up into lights.

'Shit!' Ed said. He jumped to his feet and fell over backwards.