Eventually that in itself would enrage them: but those early encounters were like water in a desert. They married in a register office two days after he got his doctorate—he bought for the occasion a Paul Smith suit. They were together ten years after that. They never had children, though she said she wanted them. He saw her through two stretches of therapy, three more bouts of anorexia, a last, almost nostalgic attempt to do away with herself. She watched him follow the funding from university to university, doing what he called “McScience” for the corporates, keeping track of the new discipline of complexity and emergent properties, all the time staying ahead of the game, the Shrander, the body count. If she suspected anything, she never spoke. If she wondered why they moved so often, she never said. In the end he told her everything one night, sitting on the edge of her bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, staring down at her bandaged wrists and wondering how they had come to this.
She laughed and took his hands in hers. “We’re stuck with each other now,” she said, and within the year they were divorced.
20
Three Body Problem
Two days out from Redline, and the White Cat was changing course every twelve nanoseconds. Dyne-space enfolded the ship in a figured, incalculable blackness, out of which reached the caressing fingers of weakly reacting matter. The shadow operators hung motionless at the portholes whispering to one another in the old languages. They had taken on their usual form, of women biting their knuckles in regret. Billy Anker wouldn’t have them near him. “Hey,” he said, “we don’t know what they want!” He tried to exclude them from the human quarters, but they crept in like smoke while he was asleep and hung up in the corners watching him dream his exhausted dreams.
Seria Mau watched him too. She knew that she would soon have to have his account of himself, and of the object she had bought from Uncle Zip. Meanwhile she spent her time with the ship’s mathematics, trying to understand what was going on behind them, where, several lights adrift, the Krishna Moire pod wove itself chaotically round the curious hybrid signature of the Nastic ship, to make a single, watery, undependable trace in the display.
“It’s hard to feel threatened, when they stay back so far.”
“Perhaps they don’t want us to panic,” the mathematics suggested. “Or—” with its equivalent of a shrug “—perhaps they do.”
“Can we lose them?”
“Their computational success is high, but not as high as mine. With luck, I can keep them at arm’s length.”
“But can we lose them?”
“No.”
She couldn’t bear that idea. It was a limitation. It was like being a child again. “Well then, do something!” she screamed. After some thought the mathematics put her to sleep, which for once she welcomed.
She dreamed again of the time they were all still happy. “Let’s go away!” the mother said. “Would you like to go away?” Seria Mau clapped her hands, while her brother ran up and down the family room, shouting, “Let’s go away! Let’s go away!” though when the time came he threw a tantrum because he couldn’t take his little black cat. They caught the Rocket Train north, to Saulsignon. It was a long journey in a lost season—not quite winter, not quite spring—slow and exciting by turns. “If it’s a Rocket Train it should go faster!” the little boy shouted, running up and down the aisle. The sky was a stretched blue over long hypnotic lines of plough. They got down at Saulsignon the afternoon of the next day. It was the tiniest of stations, with wrought iron posts and tubs of Earth flowers, washed bright as a new pin by the little showers of rain falling through the sunlight. The platform cat licked its tortoiseshell fur in a corner, the Rocket Train departed, and a white cloud obscured the sun. Outside the station a man walked by. When he stopped to look back, the mother shivered and wrapped her honey-coloured fur coat about her, drawing its collar tight with one long white hand.
Then she laughed and the sun came out again. “Come along, you two!” And there, moments later it seemed, was the sea!
Here the dream ended. Seria Mau waited attentively for the reprise, or second act, in which the conjuror would appear, dressed in his beautiful top hat and tails. When nothing happened she was disappointed. As soon as she woke up she switched on all the lights in the human quarters. The shadow operators, caught bending solicitously over Billy Anker’s bed in the dark, fled right and left.
“Billy Anker,” Seria Mau called. “Wake up!”
A few minutes later he stood blinking and rubbing his eyes in front of the Dr. Haends package in its red gift box.
“This?” he said.
He looked puzzled. He poked about behind the box. He picked up one of Uncle Zip’s roses and sniffed it. He raised the lid of the box cautiously (a bell chimed, a soft spotlight seemed to shine down from above) and eyed the upwelling and slow purposive spill of white foam. The bell chimed again. A female voice whispered, “Dr. Haends. Dr. Haends, please.” Billy Anker scratched his head. He put the lid back on the box. He took it off again. He reached out to touch the white stuff with his finger.
“Don’t do that!” warned Seria Mau.
“Shh,” said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. “I look inside,” he said, “and I don’t see anything. Do you?”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“Dr. Haends to surgery, please,” insisted the quiet voice.
Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. “I never saw anything like this before,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know what Uncle Zip did to it.” He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. “It didn’t look like this when I found it,” he said. “It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.” He shrugged. “Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn’t have these theatrical values.” He smiled in a way she didn’t understand, looking off into the distance. “That’s Uncle Zip’s signature, if you like,” he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau’s fetch wove nervously around his ankles.
“Where did you find it?” she said.
Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch’s eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:
“You can’t outrun EMC forever.”
“It’s not me they’re after,” she reminded him.
“All the same,” he said, “they’ll catch you in the end.”
“Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It’s easy to lose yourself out here.”
“You’re already lost,” Billy Anker said. “I admire that you stole a K-ship,” he went on quickly: “Who wouldn’t? But you’re lost, and you aren’t finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You’re doing the wrong thing. You know?”
“How come you say these things?” she shouted. “How come you make me feel bad like this?”
He couldn’t answer that.
“What’s the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I’m not a refund kind of guy?” She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn’t his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know you well enough to say that.”