In a time like that, who needed a circus? The halo was a circus in itself. Circus was in the streets. It was inside people's heads. Eat fire? Everyone was a fire-eater. Everyone had geek genes and a story to tell. Sentient tattoos made everyone the Illustrated Man. Everyone was high on some flying trapeze issue of their own. It was the flight into the grotesque. The tusked cultivar on Electric Avenue, the twink curled foetally in the twink-tank: whether they knew it or not, they had asked and answered all the questions the universe could support for now. They were their own audience, too.

The only thing you couldn't be was an alien, so Sandra Shen kept a few of those. And prophecy was still popular, because no one could quite do it yet. But in the face of the uniform grotesque, the Circus of Pathet Lao had been forced to look elsewhere for the cheap thrill at the heart of performance, and-through a series of breathtaking acts of the imagination devised and sometimes acted in by Sandra Shen herself-present the vanished normal.

As a result, Ed Chianese's age was able to define itself as the cultural opposite of 'Having Breakfast, 1950'. It could thrill to 'Buying an Underwired Bra at Dorothy Perkins, 1972', or 'Novel Reading, early 1980's', and snigger over the perverse 'A New Baby', and 'Toyota Previa with West London School Children', both 2002. Most extraordinary of all-perched as it was so exactly on the historical cusp-was the astonishing 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Computer Monitor, 1999'. These gemlike tableaux-acted out behind glass under powerful lights by the clones of fat men about to have heart attacks on a Zurich metro platform, anorexic women dressed in the Angelino sport-fuck wear of 1982-brought to life the whole bizarre comfortingness of Old Earth. Such desperate fantasies were the real earners. Like fairy godmothers they had blessed the Circus at its inception, funded its early whirlwind travels across the halo, and now supported its declining years in the twilight zone of New Venusport.

Success is often its own downfall. People weren't coming to watch any more. They were coming to get their own ideas. They weren't content to spectate the vanished past; they wanted to be it. The retro lifestyles emerging from the corporate enclaves had less historical accuracy than a Shen tableau but a softer, more buyable feel. The look was 'Dress Down Friday'. It was the Erickson phone and an Italian wool sweater worn across the shoulders with its arms knotted loosely in front. Meanwhile, at the radical edge, a gene tailor and ex-entradista from Motel Splendido was reputed to have made himself over as the exact replica of a Victorian music hall star, using actual DNA.

In the face of competition like that, Madame Shen was thinking of moving on. But there were other reasons for that, too.

You go too deep, you expect to get burned. There isn't any way around that. Ed dreamed of a dipship breaking up in slow motion in the photosphere of a G-type star. The dipship was Ed. Then he dreamed he was back in the twink-tank but the tank world had come apart and he could already hear voices from every cupboard, every corner, every pretty girl's petticoat. Then he woke with a start and it was full day, and he could hear the sea one side of the dunes and the circus on the other. He found two vegetable samosas wrapped in a slip of greaseproof paper, also some money, together with a note which read: Go see the receptionist about work. Annie Glyph's handwriting was as careful and literate as her way of having sex. Ed ate the samosas, looking comfortably around the little room, with the marine light falling into it and the sea air filling it. Then he crumpled the paper, took a shower to get the blood off him, and went out.

Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao, occupied a two-acre concrete site on the boundary of the noncorporate spaceport.

The Observatorium, housed in a series of bizarre pressure tanks and magnetic vessels, took up less than a quarter of this; while the Circus itself was contained in a single building the curves and volutes of whose composite construction had been designed to resemble a carnival tent. The rest of the compound was living quarters. All exactly what you would expect-weeds, salt-streaked alloy siding, blistered paint, old carnie holograms with no memory of themselves as human, which, faded but energetic, woke into life as you passed, pursuing, hectoring, cajoling. Everyone who worked here would be like that-lively but disconnected. Ed felt like that too. He had to walk across the whole site to find the front office, which was in another clapped-out wooden building, greyish white under a faulty neon sign.

The receptionist wore a blonde wig.

It was big hair, platinum hair, piled high and sold cheap. In front of her she had a holographic terminal of a type with which Ed was unfamiliar. This resembled an old-fashioned fishtank, in which he thought he discerned now and then a stream of bubbles, a fake clamshell open on a miniature mermaid. The receptionist was like a mermaid herself. Older than she looked, she sat demurely beneath her hair, a small woman with a personal sense of humour and an accent he could not place.

When Ed explained his purpose the whole thing took on a curiously formal air. She asked him for his details, which except for his name he made up. She asked him: what he could do. That was easier.

'Fly any kind of ship,' he boasted.

The receptionist pretended to look out the window.

'We don't need a pilot momentarily,' she said. 'As you can see, we're on the ground.'

'Sunjammers, deep freighters, star ships, dipships. I've been there,' Ed went on, 'and flown it.' He was surprised how close to the truth this was. 'Fusion engines to dynaflow drivers. Some stuff I never knew what it was, Earth controls bolted onto alien equipment.'

'I'm sympathetic,' the receptionist said. 'But is there anything else you can do?'

Ed thought.

'I rode navigator on Alcubiere ships,' he said. 'You know, the big ones that bunch reality up in front of them as they go? It's like a ruckle in cloth.' He shook his head, trying to visualise the Alcubiere warp. 'Or maybe not like that at all. Anyway, space gets wrenched, matter gets wrenched, time goes out the window with everything else. Close into the ship you can just about survive it. The navigators surf that part of the wave. They go out in EVA pods and park in the warp, trying to see what's next. One thing they can see from there, it's their lives flushing away in front of them.'

He felt bleak now when he talked about it. 'They call it the bow wave,' he explained.

'The kind of jobs we have-' the receptionist began.

'You see some weird shit as a navigator. It looks like all these silvery eels, under the sea. Migrating. It's some kind of radiation, that was how it was explained to me, but you don't see it as that. Your life kind of leaks away as eels under the sea, and you watch it go. Afterwards,' Ed said, 'you can't work out why you'd do a job like that.' He looked at his hands. 'I surfed that wave and a few others too. Anyway, I can fly any kind of rocket. Except K-ships of course.'

The receptionist shook her head.

'I meant,' she said, 'can you do anything like stack crates, clean up after animals. That kind of work.' She consulted the terminal again and added: 'Or prophecy.'

Ed laughed. 'Pardon?'

She regarded him evenly.

'Telling the future,' she explained, as if to someone who didn't know the word but was bright enough to learn it.

Ed leaned forward and looked into the terminal.

'What is going on in there?' he said.

Her eyes were a confusing colour. Sometimes it was jade, sometimes the green of a salt wave; sometimes, somehow, both at once. There were dots of silver in her pupils which seemed ready to break up, drift away. Suddenly, she switched off the terminal and stood up as if she had to be somewhere else and had no more time to talk to Ed. Standing up, she seemed taller and younger, though some of it was shoes and she still had to look up to make eye contact. She wore a pale denim jacket with cowboy pockets and patterns of rhinestones, and a black patent-leather tube skirt. She smoothed the skirt across the front ofher thighs and said: 'We're always on the lookout for a prophet.