'Is that what you want? Me to kill you?'

'No!'

'Then what?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Just please fuck me properly.'

It was awkward for both of them. Anna, instantly wet, presented herself determinedly; Kearney was less certain how to proceed. When he finally managed to penetrate her, he couldn't believe the heat of it. They began with what they knew, but she soon made him face her, urging him, 'Like this. Like this. I want to see you, I want to see your face.' Then: 'Is this better? Am I better than them?' For a second, he heard his cousins' laughter; Gorselands opened itself to him, then tilted and flickered away forever. He laughed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes!' It didn't last long, but she sighed and embraced him and gave further warm little sighs and smiles in a way she had never done before. They lay in front of the fire together for a while, then she encouraged him to try again.

'God,' he said experimentally. 'You're so wet.'

'I know. I know.'

The TV chirped almost silently to itself in the gloom above them. Ads passed across its screen, to be replaced by the logo of some science channel, and after that an image of great roseate streamers of gas and dust, studded with actinic stars, pocked and wrapped with velvety blackness, full of the beautiful false clarity of a Hubble telescope image. 'The Kefahuchi Tract,' announced the voice-over, 'named after its discoverer, may upset all our-' There was a sense of the screen filling suddenly, overflowing. Silent sparks of light began to pour out of it into the room, bouncing and foaming across the bare boards to the fireside, where they encountered Anna Kearney, biting her lower lip and moving her head back and forth in a dreamy, inturned manner. Into her hair they flowed, down her flushed cheeks, across her breastbone. Taking them to be a part of what she was feeling, she moaned a little, rubbing them in handfuls into her face and neck.

'Sparks,' she whispered. 'Sparks in everything.'

Kearney, hearing this, opened his eyes and got off her in terror. He grabbed up the chefs knife, then stood with it for a moment, naked and uncertain. 'Anna!' he said. 'Anna!' Fractal light poured from the TV screen like the fanned-out tail of a peacock. He ran aimlessly about the room for a moment until he found the Shrander's dice in their soft leather scrotum. Then he looked at Anna, looked at the knife. He thought he heard her try to warn him, 'It's coming, it's coming.' Then: 'Yes, kill me. Quickly.' Disgusted with himself forever, he threw down the knife and sprinted out of the cottage. That was it: something huge roared down towards him in the night, like a shadow out of the sky. Behind him he heard Anna laughing, and then murmuring again:

'Sparks. Sparks in everything… '

When Anna Kearney woke up, at five thirty the next morning, she found herself alone. The fire had gone out, the beach house was cold. The TV, still tuned to CNN, buzzed to itself and displayed images of current events: war in the Middle East, deprivation in the Far East, in Africa and Albania. War and deprivation everywhere. She rubbed her hands over her face, then, naked and shivering, stood up and collected her scattered underwear with amusement. I made him do it at last, she thought: but remembered the night only vaguely. 'Michael?' she called. The beach house had one external door, and he had left that open, allowing a little bright white sand to blow in across the threshold. 'Michael?' She pulled on her jeans and sweater.

Out on the beach the air was already bright, agitated. Kittiwakes swooped and fought over something in a clump of tidewrack. Up on the dunes Anna found flattened marram, the residue of some chemical smell, a long, shallow depression, as though something vast had settled there in the night. She looked down at Monster Beach: no marks.

'Michael!' she called.

Only the cries of the gulls.

She hugged herself against the cold breeze off the ocean, then walked back to the cottage, where she cooked eggs and sausages and ate them hungrily. 'I haven't felt so hungry,' she said to her own face in the bathroom mirror, 'since… ' But she couldn't think what to add, it had been so long ago.

She waited for him for three days. She walked on the dunes, drove into Boston, cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. She ate. Much of the time she just sat in a chair with her legs curled up, listening to the afternoon rain on the window and remembering everything she could about him. Every so often she switched the TV on, but mostly she left it off and, staring at it thoughtfully, tried to picture the things they had done the night he went.

On the morning of the third day she stood at the door listening to the gulls fighting up and down above the beach. 'You won't come back now,' she said, and went inside to pack her things. 'I'll miss you,' she said. 'I really will.' She disconnected the outboard drive from Kearney's laptop and hid it under a layer of clothes. Then, unsure how it would be affected by the airport fluoroscope, slipped it in her purse instead. She would ask them at the desk. She had nothing to hide, and she was sure they would let it through. When she got back she would find Brian Tate, and hope-whatever had happened to him -he could carry on Michael's work. If not, she would have to phone someone at Sony.

She locked the beach house door and put the bags in the BMW. One last look along the dunes. Up there, with the wind taking her breath away, she had a clear memory of him at Cambridge, twenty years old, telling her with a kind of urgent wonder, 'Information might be a substance. Can you imagine that?'

She laughed out loud.

'Oh, Michael,' she said.

TWENTY-NINE

Surgery

The shadow operators flew to Seria Mau from all parts of the ship. They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain. They abandoned the portholes, next to which they had been biting their thin, bony knuckles. They emerged from the software bridges and fakebook archives, the racked hardware on the smart-plastic surfaces of which they had lain undistinguishable from two weeks' dust in her father's house. They had undergone a sea change. Gossip rustled between them, bursts of data flickering like silver and random colours-

They said: 'Has she-?'

They said: 'Dare we-?'

They said: 'Is she really going out with him?'

Seria Mau watched them for a moment, feeling as remote as space. Then she ordered:

'Cut me the cultivar you have always wanted me to have.'

The shadow operators could scarcely believe their ears. They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors' Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math. They dried it out and eyed it critically. 'You'll look very nice, dear,' they told it, 'if you just wipe the sleep from your blue eyes now. Very nice indeed.' They brought it to the room in which she kept the Dr Haends package.

'Here she is,' they said. 'Isn't she lovely? Isn't she charming?'

'I could have done without the dress,' said Seria Mau.

'Oh but dear: she had to wear something.'

It was herself, twelve years old. They had decorated her pale hands with spirals of tiny seed pearls, and turned her out in a floor-length frock of icy white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped in cream lace. Her train was supported at each corner by hovering, perfect, baby boys. She stared shyly up at the cameras in the corners, whispering:

'What was relinquished returns.'

'I can do without that, too,' said Seria Mau.

'But you must have a voice, dear-'