'Will you kill me, do you suppose?'

'I don't think so,' he answered. 'Not now.' Then he said, 'I don't know.'

She put her hand over his.

'You will, you know,' she said. 'You won't be able to stop yourself in the end.'

Kearney stared out of the window at the ocean.

'I don't know.'

She took away her hand and kept herself to herself all morning. Equivocation always made her puzzled and, he thought, angry. It had to do with her childhood. Her problem with life was really the same as his: not giving it much credit, she had sought something which seemed more demanding. But there was more to what was happening than that. They'd driven themselves past the norms of their relationship, they had no idea what to make of each other. He didn't want her to be healthy. She didn't want him to be reliable or good-natured. They paced around one another by night, looking for openings, looking for less ordinary attitudes to force on one another. Anna was good at it. She surprised him by inviting him, off the back of one those brilliant, vulnerable smiles of hers:

'Would you like to put your cock inside me?'

They had taken the patchwork quilt off the bed and arranged it in front of the hearth, where driftwood was burning down to pure white ash. Anna, almost as white, lay half on her side in the firelight. He looked down thoughtfully at the hollows and shadows of her body.

'No,' he told her. 'I don't think I would.'

She bit her lip and turned her back.

'What's the matter with me?'

'You never wanted it,' he said cautiously.

'I did want it,' she said. 'I wanted it from the beginning, but it was easy to see you didn't. Half the girls at Cambridge knew. All you'd do was wank them off, and you never even came yourself. Inge Neumann -the girl with the Tarot cards?-was quite puzzled about it.' At this he looked so mortified she laughed. 'At least I got you to come,' she said.

The only reprisal he had was to tell her about Gorselands.

'You would never see the house from the road,' he said. He leaned forward, anxious with the effort of imagining it all. 'It was so well hidden. Only trees thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate.' In the grounds, everything was cool and shadowy except where the sun struck through on to a lawn like a broad pool. 'It looked so real.' The same light struck through into a third floor room, where, in the heat under the roof, it was always late afternoon and there was always a deep, inturned breathing sound, like the breath of someone who has lost all consciousness of themselves. 'Then my cousins would arrive and begin taking their clothes off.' He laughed. 'That's what I imagined, anyway,' he said. When Anna looked puzzled, he said: 'I would watch them and masturbate.'

'But this wasn't real?'

'Oh no. It was just a fantasy.'

'Then I don't-'

'I had nothing to do with them in life.' He had never once approached them in life. They had seemed too energetic, too brutal. 'The Gorselands fantasy spoilt everything for me. When I got to Cambridge I couldn't do anything.'

He shrugged.

'I don't know why,' he admitted. 'I just couldn't forget it. The promise of it.'

She stared at him.

'But that's so exploitative,' she said, 'using other people for something that only ever goes on inside you.'

'I ran away from the things I wanted-' he tried to explain.

'No,' she said. 'That's awful.'

She took the quilt by one corner and dragged it back into the bedroom. He heard the bed creak as she flung herself down on it. He felt abashed, caved-in. He said miserably, at least half-believing himself: 'I always thought the Shrander was my punishment for that.'

'Go away.'

'You used me,' he said.

'I didn't. I never did.'

TWENTY-SIX

50,000 degrees K

'We had some luck of course,' admitted Uncle Zip.

Seria Mau had returned to orbit to find the Moire pod all over everything like a cheap suit. She had given them some grief on her way out of there, and was now holed up among the gravitational rocks and shoals of the inner system, talking to Uncle Zip via a network of randomly switching proxy transmitters. The Moire pod -accepting this precaution as a challenge, and rather glad to be out of a fight Uncle Zip wouldn't allow them to win-had licked their wounds, pooled their mathematics and were rolling up the network at a rate of ten million guesses a nanosecond. Meanwhile, Seria Mau's fetch looked up at Uncle Zip, and Uncle Zip looked down at her. She could barely see his pipe-clayed face and fancy waistcoat for the creaking under-curve of his belly, clad in captain's ducks and restrained by a black leather belt fully eight inches wide. He had in one hand something that resembled a brass telescope, and in the other an ancient paper fakebook, 'The Galaxy and its Stars'. His sailor hat was on his head, with Kiss Me Quick in cursive script around the crown.

'There's no substitute for luck,' he said.

What had happened was this: in their haste to beat one another to the White Cat, Uncle Zip and the commander of the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void had collided in the Motel Splendido parking lot. At the time of the collision, Uncle Zip's vehicle of choice-the K-ship El Rayo X, on loan, along with the Krishna Moire pod, from undisclosed contacts in the bureaucracy of EMC-had already torched up to around twenty-five per cent the speed of light. Thirty or forty seconds later, it was buried deep below the Nastic vessel's greenish rind-like hull, having penetrated the whorled internal structures as far as the command and control centre before losing momentum. Touching the Void absorbed this incoming energy in a simple Newtonian fashion, retransmitting it as heat, noise, and-finally-a sluggish acceleration in the direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Its ruptured hull was promptly surrounded by clouds of shadow operators trying to make damage estimates. A caul of tiny repair machines-low-end swarming programmes mediating via a substrate of smart ceramic glue--began to seal the hole.

'Meanwhile,' said Uncle Zip, 'I find that by his own lights the guy is in fact already dead, though his ship-math maintains him as some sort of fetch. I say, "Hey, we can still work together. Being dead this way is no impediment to that," and he agrees. It made sense we worked together. Working together can sometimes be the right thing.'

So that was how it was. Uncle Zip's shadow operators, correctly assuming that neither ship was going anywhere on its own, began to build software bridges between the K-ship's mathematics and the propulsion systems of its new host. No one had ever done this before: but within hours they were back up and running and in pursuit of the White Cat, their origin, position and motives cloaked beneath the curious double signature which had so puzzled Seria Mau. 'Some luck was involved,' Uncle Ziprepeated. He seemed to like the idea. He spread his hands comfortably. 'Things came unstuck a couple of times along the way. But here we are.'

He looked down at her. 'You and me, Seria Mau,' he said, 'we got to work together too.'

'Don't hold your breath, Uncle Zip.'

'Why is that?'

'Because of everything. But mainly because you killed your son.'

'Hey,' he said. 'You did that. Don't look at me!' He shook his head. 'It must be convenient to forget events so soon.'

Seria Mau had to acknowledge the truth of that.

'But it was you involved me with him,' she said. 'You wound me up and set me going. And why bother, anyway, when you already knew where Billy was? You knew it all along, or else you couldn't have told me. You could have found him any time. Why the charade?'