Ed shrugged.
“That so doesn’t describe the experience,” he told her.
He really didn’t know what happened to him when his head was in the fishtank, but he knew it wasn’t anything as twitchy or aggressive as that. He thought that was her temperament showing. As a description it revealed more about her than it did about prophecy. “Anyway,” he told her, “direction was always the difficulty with me. Speed was never a problem.”
He added, for no reason he could see: “My dreams have been bad lately.”
“Things are tough all over, Ed.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Sandra Shen grinned at him. “Talk to Annie,” she advised. A few white motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. Unsure whether this was menace or a joke, he put his head back in the tank so he didn’t have to watch. After a moment he heard her say:
“I’m sick of selling the past, Ed. I want to start on the future.”
“Do I say anything when I’m in here?”
The more he worked with the fishtank, the worse Ed’s dreams became.
Space, but not empty. A kind of inchoate darkness wrapped over itself like the bow wave of the Alcubiere warp but worse than any of that. The cold water of a meaningless unsalted sea, the information supersubstance, substrate of some universal algorithm. Lights which shivered and writhed away from him in shoals. This was the work Sandra Shen had given him, prophecy, or the failure of prophecy, nothing revealed, a journey that went on forever, then stopped quite suddenly to leave him looking down on things from above.
Bits and pieces of landscape, but notably a house. There would be some damp countryside, a pretty old railway station, hedges, a field tipped up at an angle, then this house, dour, four-faced, made of stone. There was a sense that these items had assembled themselves only a moment before. But that they were—or had been—in some sense real, he had no doubt. He always approached the house from above like that, and from an angle, as if arriving by plane: a tall house with a roof of purple grey slate, Flemish gables, extensive gloomy gardens in which the laurels and lawns were always wintered. White birch trees grew a little way away. It was often raining, or misty. It was dawn. It was late afternoon. After a moment or two, Ed found himself entering the house, and at that point he was woken up by the tail end of his own despairing cry.
“Hush,” said Annie Glyph. “Hush, Ed.”
“I remember things I haven’t seen,” Ed cried out.
He clung to her, listening to her heart, which beat thirty times a minute or less. It was always there to reclaim him, that huge dependable heart, to fetch him out of the standing wave of his own terror. On the down side, it soothed him almost instantly back into unconsciousness, where one night the dream moved on and he was the one place he didn’t want to be. Inside the house. He saw stairs. “Waraaa!” he shouted, ambushing his sister in the hall. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner. It was too late to help. He looked into his sister’s face, full of some rage he couldn’t name. He ran away, shouting.
“After she left, our father stood on the kitten,” he told Annie next morning. “It died. He didn’t mean that to happen. But that was when I made up my mind I’d leave too.”
She smiled. “Travel the galaxy,” she said.
“Fly the ships,” he said.
“Have all the pussy you could find.”
“That and more,” Ed said with a grin.
He sat for a minute after Annie had gone to work, thinking:
That was the black kitten I remembered, then: but there was more to it than that. Before the sister went away. He thought he saw a river, a woman’s face. Fingers trailed in water. A voice saying delightedly but far off:
“Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we lucky to have this?”
We were all together then, Ed thought.
Ed did his first show in a tuxedo.
Thereafter, for obvious reasons, he would favour a cheap blue boiler suit made of easily washable fabrics: but the first time he was resplendent. They built a cramped little stage for him, between “Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999” and “Toyota Previa with Clapham Schoolchildren, 2002,” lighting it with racks of antique coloured spots and some careful holographic effects designed to maintain the theme. In the centre of the stage Ed had the bare wooden chair on which he would sit while he used the fishtank; also a microphone as old as the lights.
“It won’t actually be connected to anything,” Harryette said. “We’ll handle the sound in the usual way.”
The hermaphrodite seemed nervous. She had fussed around all afternoon. She specialised in stage management, and was always describing how she had worked her way up to it from being an ordinary stagehand. It was Harryette who had insisted on the tuxedo. “We want you to seem commanding,” she said. She was proud of her ideas. Privately, Ed thought they bordered on the fatuous. With her shaved head, live tattoos and thatch of reddish armpit hair, he thought she was the least appealing of Sandra Shen’s manifestations. He kept wanting to say, “Look, you’re a shadow operator, you could run on anything. So why this?” but he couldn’t find the right moment. Also he wasn’t sure how an algorithm would take that sort of criticism. Meanwhile he had to listen to her explain, as she indicated the tableaux on each side of the tiny stage:
“We site ourselves on the cusp like this to exploit suggestions of impermanence and perpetual change.”
“I can see we’d want to do that,” Ed said.
He didn’t see why they had to have the hologram backdrop of the Kefahuchi Tract, shimmering away behind the stage as if projected on a satin curtain. But when he asked Harryette about it, she changed the subject immediately, morphing into Sandra Shen and advising him: “What you’ve got to recognise, Ed, is that they want you dead. All prophecy is a sending-on-before. The audience need you to be dead for them.”
Ed stared at her.
On the night, he wasn’t sure what the audience wanted from him. They filed into the performance space in a kind of rustling hush, a broad sample of New Venusport life. There were corporates from the enclaves, dressed in careful imitation of the tableaux in the offstage shadows; geeks and cultivars from Pierpoint Street; little perfect port prostitutes smelling of vanilla and honey; rickshaw girls, tank addicts, eight-year-old gun punks and their accountants. There were quite a few New Men with their pliable-looking, etiolated limbs and inappropriate facial expressions. They were quieter than a circus audience ought to be, they had bought less food and drink than Ed had expected. They were ominously attentive. They didn’t look as if they wanted him dead. He sat on the wooden chair in his tuxedo in the coloured spotlight and stared out at them. He felt hot and a bit sick. His clothes felt too tight.
“Ah,” he said.
He coughed.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Rows of white faces stared at him. “The future. What is it?”
He couldn’t think of anything to add to that, so he bent forward, picked up the fishtank, which had been placed on the floor between his feet, and set it on his lap. Ed’s duty was to see. It was to speak. He had no idea if prophecy was entertainment or a service industry. Madam Shen had not been clear on that.
“Why don’t I get my face in this?” he suggested.