'We already saved each other, now it's time to save ourselves. You know I'm right.'

A long curved wave of bleakness raced towards Ed Chianese's shore: the Alcubiere break, which is the black surf gravity; which is the coiled swell of empty space that sucks into itself one significant event of your life after another and if you don't move on you're left there gazing out across nothing at nothing much again.

'I guess,' he said.

'Hey,' she said. 'Look at me.' She came close and made him look in her eyes. 'Ed, you'll be OK.'

Her tailored pheromones caused his head to spin. Her very voice gave him an erection. He kissed her. 'Mmmm,' she said. 'That's nice. You'll soon be out there again, flying those famous lady-pilots. Which I have to say I'm jealous of them.' Her eyes were the colour of speedwell in the water meadows of a New Venusport corporate village. Her hair smelled of peppermint shampoo. Despite all this, she had completely natural lines. It was art not artifice. You would never know she had been to the tailor. She was sex on a stick, Mona the clone, the porn in your pocket.

'I got what I wanted, Ed -'

'I'm glad,' Ed made himself say. 'I really am.'

' — and I hope you will too.'

He kissed the top of her head. 'You take care, Annie.'

She let him see her smile.

'I will,' she said.

'Bella Cray… '

Annie shrugged.

'You didn't know me, Ed. How will she?'

She detached herself from him gently and got back in the rickshaw. 'You certain about this?' the rickshaw girl was prompted to enquire. 'Because you been in and out of there before.'

'I'm certain,' Annie said. 'I'm sorry.'

'Hey,' said the rickshaw girl, 'don't apologise. You work the port you're on a diet of raw sentiment.'

Annie laughed. She sniffed and wiped her eyes.

'You take care too,' she told Ed.

With that she was gone. Ed watched the rickshaw grow smaller and smaller as it crossed the bare concrete to the spaceport gate, its advertisements streaming after it like a cloud of coloured scarves and butterflies in the sun. Annie's little hand appeared for a moment, to be waved back at Ed, forlorn and cheerful at the same time. He heard her call something which he worked out later was, 'Don't spend too much time in the future!' Then she turned the corner to the city, and he never saw her again in that life.

Ed went and got drunk the rest of the day at the Cafй Surf and was dragged home in the dark by his former gambling partners from the Dunes Motel. There, he found Sandra Shen waiting for him with the fishtank under her arm. The old men laughed and blew on their hands to indicate scorching. 'You in trouble now, my man!' they predicted. All that night, pale white motes flickered in the dark in Annie Glyph's old room; then, later, on the dunes outside. Next day he woke exhausted aboard The Perfect Low. He was alone, and the ship was warming for take-off He felt the hum of engines through her frame. He felt the tremble in the tips of her fins. The oily preflight roll of the dynaflow drivers came up to him from somewhere below and the hair rose on the back of his neck for the millionth time because he was alive in this place and this time, and leaving it all only to find something else out there.

Always more. Always more after that.

The little freighter shook with the excitement of it too. She balanced herself carefully on a column of flame and in her own tubby fashion hurled herself skyward.

'Hey Ed,' came Sandra Shen's dry voice a minute or two later. 'Look at this!'

The New Venusport parking orbit was full of K-ships. Pods and superpods stretched away as far as Ed could see, hundreds of them, in restlessly layered and shifting formations. They dipped in and out of local space, extruding w eapons, as suspicious of one another as animals, hulls simmering gently in a bouillabaisse of particles. They shimmered with navigational fields, defensive fields, fields for target acquisition and ordnance control, fields which shed everything from soft X-rays to hard light, Local space miraged and twisted around them. They were hunting without moving. He could almost hear the poisonous throb of their engines.

War! he thought.

The Perfect Low, receiving clearance, edged between them and out of the lot.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Sparks in Everything

After the argument with Anna, Michael Kearney dressed and took the rental car into Boston, where he drank beer and caught Burger King before it closed, after which he sped deliberately up and down the coast road, driving in and out of thick white pockets of fog while he ate a bacon double cheeseburger with fries. The ocean, when you could see it, was a silver strip far out, the dunes at the south end of the bay heaped up black against it. Seabirds cackled on the beach even in the dark. Kearney parked the car, cut the engine, listened to the wind in the grass. He made his way down through the dunes and stood on the damp sand, stirring with the toe of one shoe the bands of tide-sorted shingle. After a moment, he had the impression of something huge sweeping in across the bay towards him. The monster was returning to its beach. Or perhaps not the monster itself, but whatever lay behind it, some condition of the world, the universe, the state of things, which is black, revelatory and, in the end, a relief-something you don't want to know but are perversely glad to have confirmed. It swept in directly from the east, directly from the horizon. It passed over him, or perhaps into him. He shivered and turned away from the beach, and trudged back up the dunes to the car, thinking about the woman he had killed in the English Midlands, where their idea of a dinner-table game was to ask:

'How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?'

Even as he spoke he had wished he could answer differently. He had wished he could say the decent, optimistic kinds of things they were saying. Remembering this, he saw clearly how he had marginalised his own life. He had brought his life upon himself. Driving back to the cottage, he lowered the side window and threw the Burger King packaging out into the night.

When he got back, the cottage was silent.

'Anna?' he called.

He found her in the front room. The TV was on, with the sound turned down. Anna had dragged the quilt off the bed again and now sat cross-legged on it by the fire, her hands resting, palms upwards, on her knees. The pound or two she had put on over the last month made her thighs, belly and buttocks seem smooth and young; above, she was still as ribby as a horse. He had a feeling there was some insight in all this he wasn't quite close enough to see. Her wrists were so white that the veins in them looked like bruises. Next to her she had placed the carbon-steel chefs knife he had bought on their first visit to the beach. Its blade flickered in the TV light, uncertain and grey, which filled the room.

'I'm trying to scrape up all the courage I have, here,' she said, without looking away from the fire. Her voice was friendly. 'I knew you wouldn't want me if I got well.'

Kearney picked up the knife and put it out of her reach and his. He bent over her and kissed her spine where it snaked up between the thin scapulae.

'I do want you,' he said. He touched her wrists. They were hot but bloodless. 'Why are you doing this?'

She shrugged. She laughed a little fake laugh. 'It's a measure of last resort,' she said. 'It's a vote of no confidence.' Kearney's laptop lay open on top of the TV set, also switched on, though it displayed only wallpaper. Into it, Anna had plugged the pocket drive they got from Tate. Of all these gestures, Kearney thought, this was probably the most dangerous. When he said so, she shrugged. 'What I hate most of all is that you don't even need to kill me any more,' she said.