Ed shrugged. 'I was never interested in that,' he said. 'With me it was more a question of not knowing the future. You know?'

She gave him a sudden warm smile.

'I imagine it was,' she said. 'Well, talk to her. You never know.'

'Talk to who?'

The receptionist finished smoothing her skirt then went to the door. Her back swayed, balancing the big hair. This gave her an interesting gait, Ed thought, for an older person. Curiously enough, he seemed to remember that walk. He followed her out and stood at the top of the steps, shading his eyes. It was full morning now. Maritime light was spraying up off the naked concrete, maritime light and heat to daze and irritate the unwary.

'Talk to who?' he repeated.

'Madam Sandra,' she said, not turning round.

For some reason this name made him shiver. He watched the receptionist walk away across the site towards the Circus of Pathet Lao in its blinding white carnival tent.

'Hey! So where do I find her?' he called.

The receptionist kept walking.

'Madam Sandra finds you, Ed. She finds you.'

Later that morning he stood on the dunes looking out to sea. The light was harsh and violet. Little red-throat lizards scuttled through the marram at his feet. He could hear saltwater dub basslines, bumping away in some cocktail lounge further down the access road. In front of him a faded sign on a tilted wooden post in the sand announced 'Monster Beach'. You couldn't tell which direction it was pointing, but Ed thought it was straight up. He grinned. Beats me, he told himself; but he was thinking less of the beach sign than of the elusive Sandra Shen. He was hungry again. On his way back to Annie Glyph's room, he heard some sounds he recognised issuing from the bar of the deserted Dunes Motel, a clapboard box in a weedy oyster-shell lot a little apart from the motel itself.

Ed stuck his head round the open door, out of the frying light and into the cool gloom inside, where he found three skinny old men in white caps and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers too big for them, throwing dice onto a blanket on the floor.

'Hey,' said Ed. 'The Ship Game.'

They looked up at him without interest, down again immediately. Their eyes were like dark brown studs, the whites curded with age. Neat stained moustaches. Skin coffeed by sunlight. Thin big-veined hands which looked fragile but weren't. Lives lived out slower and slower, steeped in the preservative of Black Heart Rum. Eventually one of them said in a soft, distant voice:

'You to pay to play.'

'It's the narrative of capital,' Ed agreed, and reached in his pocket.

The Ship Game-

Also known as Entreflex or Gobetween, this full-on collision of jacks and craps-with its hair-trigger jargon, its bone pieces like dead men's knuckles, its twelve coloured characters nobody really knew the meaning of any more-was endemic. It was galaxy-wide. Some said it arrived with the New Men, aboard their flagship the Remove All Packaging. Some said it originated on the ancient trundling sublight ships of the Icenia Credit. It was a pastime which had seen many forms. In the present one, an ironic subtext to everything that happened in empty space, the characters, and the names the players gave them, were supposed to represent the notorious N = 1000 Engagement, an early human/Nastic encounter during which, faced by the sheer number of events and conditions in fight-space-so many ships, so many dimensions to misappropriate, so much different physics to hide behind, so many nanosecond strategies in operation at once-the EMC admiral Stuart Kauffman abandoned the Tate-Kearney transformations and simply threw dice to decide his moves. Ed, who saw it less as a subtext than a source of income, had played the game all his adult life, the first ship he stowed away on to the last ship he jumped. The soft voices of the old men filled the bar.

'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 cafй йlectrique, 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 Cafe 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 artifacts drifted slowly around in the vacuum as if they had been stirred. Some meaningless ambush, three freighters and an armed yawl, La Vie Fuerique, 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 offthe 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.