'Ten years ago,' he said, 'I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn't alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called "science" from some piece of junk he'd salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.' He laughed softly. 'A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn't.'

'How?'

Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.

'I went down it,' he said.

She stared at him. 'But… ' she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.

She said: 'Didn't you care?'

He shrugged. 'I wanted to know,' he said.

'Billy Anker-'

'Oh, it's no way to travel,' he said. 'It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it's like- ' He examined his damaged hand. 'Who knows what it's like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can't describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can't give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?' The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himself; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. 'I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?'

She couldn't.

She thought: If you can't stop yourself trying to attract people this way, Billy Anker, it's because you have no self-esteem. We want a human being, all you dare show us is the lack of Hearts. Then suddenly she realised who he reminded her of. The ponytail, if it had still been black; the thin dark-skinned face, if it hadn't been so tired, so burned out by the rays of distant suns: neither would have looked out of place at the tailorshop party on Henry Street in downtown Carmody, in the soft humid night of Motel Splendido-

'You're one of Uncle Zip's clones,' she said.

At first she thought this would shock him into saying something new. But he only grinned and shrugged it off. 'The personality didn't take,' he said. A complex expression crossed his face.

'He made you for this.'

'He wanted a replacement. His entradista days were over. He thought the child would follow the father. But I'm my own man,' Billy Anker said. He blinked. 'I say that to everyone, but it's true.'

'Billy -'

'Don't you want to know what I found?"

'Of course I do,' she said. She didn't care one way or another at that moment, she was so chilled by his fate. 'Of course I do.'

He was silent for a time. Once or twice he started to speak, but language seemed to fail him. Finally he began:

'That place: it butts up against the Tract so tight you can practically hear the rush and roar of it. You fall out the wormhole, toppling end over end, all your control systems redlined, and there it is. Light. Deep light. Fountains, cascades, falling curtains of light. All the colours you can imagine and some you can't. Shapes they used to see through optical telescopes, in the old days back on Earth. You know? Like gas clouds, and clouds of stars, but evolving there in human time in front of you. Building and falling like surf.' He was silent again, looking inside himself as if he'd forgotten she was there. Eventually he said: 'And you know, it's small, that place. Some used-up old moon they sent down the wormhole for their own purposes. No atmosphere. You can make out the curve of the horizon. And bare. Just white dust on a surface like a cement floor…

'A cement floor,' he whispered. 'You hear the K-code resonating in it like the sound of a choir.' He raised his voice. 'Oh, I didn't stay,' he said. 'I wasn't up to it. I saw that at once. I was too scared to stay. I could feel the code, humming in the fabric, I could hear the light pour over me. I could feel the Tract at my back, like something watching. I couldn't believe they would drive a wormhole through to somewhere so insane. I grabbed a few things-just like the old prospectors, the first few things I saw-and I got out of there as fast as I could.'

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Haends package.

'That was one of them,' he said. After a moment he shivered. 'I got the Karaoke Sword off the moon, but it was a long time before I could go anywhere. We just hung there in the wash of light. Even the ship felt a kind of terror. I couldn't make myself enter the wormhole again. A wormhole is a lottery. It's a one-shot thing, even for a man like me. In the end I took absolute navigational fixes-fixes from the standing gravity wave, also fixes I was less certain of, from the anisotropy of the whole universe-to find out where I was. Then I came back the long way round, by dynaflow. I was broke, so I got together a few of the things I'd found, and sold them on. It was a mistake. After that I knew everyone in the galaxy would want to know what I knew. I hid up.'

'But you could find the place again,' said Seria Mau. She held her breath.

'Yes,' he said.

'Then take me there, Billy Anker. Take me to that planet!'

He looked down at his hands, and after a time shook his head. 'It's important we don't lead them there,' he said. 'You can see that.' He held up his hand to forestall her arguments. 'But that's not the reason. Oh, I'd take you there despite them, because I can tell how much that package means to you. Between you and me and the White Cat, we might lose them on the way-'

'Then why not take me? Why?'

'Because it's no place for you or me.'

Seria Mau walked her fetch away from him and through a bulkhead. Billy Anker looked surprised. The next time he heard her voice, it was the ship's voice. It came from all around him. 'I see right through you, Billy Anker,' she said. She tut-tutted mildly. 'All this talk about leaving the Beach, and you're too scared to swim.'

He looked angry then stubborn. 'That's no place for human beings,' he insisted.

'I'm not a human being!'

He smiled. His face lit up softly and shed the years, and she saw he was his own man after all.

'Oh yes you are,' he said.

TWENTY-ONE

War

Ed Chianese continued his training as a visionary.

Madam Shen liked to work in the Observatorium, preferably among the tableaux themselves. She had a personal fondness for 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999'. Ed, made nervous by the fixed gazes and untrustworthy expressions of the two ancient scientists, felt more comfortable in the front office, or the bar at the Dunes Motel.

His tutor remained unpredictable. Sometimes she came as herself; sometimes as the receptionist with her Dolly Parton tits and Oort Country chat; sometimes as an ill-tempered hermaphrodite carnie called Harryette who wore black singlets to show off the points of her little breasts, often teaming them with colored spandex tights which bulged alarmingly at the crotch. Sometimes she didn't come at all, and Ed could go back to throwing dice on the blanket. (Though now he had begun to lose regularly. You forfeit your luck when you start trying to see the future in this life, the old men told him, cackling dutifully as they sheafed up his money.) Whoever she came as, Sandra Shen was short. She wore short skirts. She smoked the short local cigarettes of tobacco and bat guano, oval in cross-section, acrid in use. He tried to think of her as a human being: never got to know her well. She wasn't young any more, he was certain of that. 'I'm tired, Ed,' she would complain. 'I've been doing this too long.' She didn't say what, though he took her to mean the Circus of Pathet Lao.