“Is life a bitch or isn’t it, Ed?” she would say. Or: “Can you count to twelve?”
He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn’t hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of white sunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.
In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly décolleté emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren’t the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. “More practice, Ed. That’s all you need.” She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. “Well done, Ed. Well done.” Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.
“Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?” Annie asked him one night.
Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.
“It’s a living,” he said.
“Oh, very entradista,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.”
Ed shrugged.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes you do.”
Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.
“What do you know about her, Ed?” she called back in. “Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to see?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.”
“Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.”
Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.
“It’s a beautiful night out here. Let’s walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I’ll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!”
“I am a show,” Ed said.
Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn’t want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn’t want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. “Any time, man.”
When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.
“Is this wise?” was all she said.
“Everyone,” he said, “deserves a break.”
“And yet, Ed, there’s Bella Cray.”
“What do you know about Bella?” he demanded. When she shrugged, he shrugged too.
“If you’re not scared of her, I’m not either.”
“Be careful, Ed.”
“I’m careful,” he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.
He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.
Had he lost them? He couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.
He didn’t get much time to think. There was a characteristic wet-sounding thump. At the same time, everything seemed to brighten and fade simultaneously. Half the street went out right in front of his eyes, and it still missed him.
“Jesus,” whispered Ed, backing away into a crowd of prostitutes tailored to look and act like sixteen-year-old Japanese girls from late twentieth-century internet fuck sites. “There was no need for that.” He touched his face. It felt hot. The prostitutes staggered about giggling nervously, their clothes in tatters, their skin sunburned to bright red. As soon as he could think again, Ed went off at a run. He ran until he didn’t know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there . . . He stared up and thought long and hard about Annie Glyph. It was like this the night he met her, bad light flickering across waste lots. Somehow he had brought her back to life just by asking her name. Now he was responsible for her.
He went back to the circus and found her sleeping. The room was full of her slow, calm heat. Ed lay down beside her and buried his face where her neck and shoulder met. After a moment or two she half woke and made room for him inside the curve of her body. He put his hand on her and she gave a big guttural grunt of pleasure. He would have to leave New Venusport before something happened to her because of him. He would have to leave her here. How would he tell her? He didn’t know.
She must have read his thoughts, because she came home a few nights later and said:
“What’s the matter, Ed?”
“I don’t know,” Ed lied.
“If you don’t know, Ed, you should find out,” she said. They stared puzzledly at one another.
Ed liked to walk around in the cold bright morning through the circus itself, moving from the salt smell of the dunes to the smell of warm dusty concrete that filled the air around the tents and pavilions.
He wondered why Sandra Shen had chosen this site. If you landed here, it was because you had no corporate credentials. If you left from here, no one wished you good luck. It was a transit camp, where EMC processed refugee labour before moving it on to the mines. Paperwork could maroon you at the noncorporate port for a year, during which your own bad choices would take the opportunity to stretch it to ten. Your ship rusted, your life rusted. But you could always go to the circus. This in itself worried Ed. What did it mean for Madam Shen? Was she trapped here too?
“This outfit ever move on?” he asked her. “I mean, that’s what a circus does, right? Every week another town?”
Sandra Shen gave him a speculative look, her face shifting from old to young then back again around its own eyes, as if they were the only fixed point in her personality (if personality is a word with any meaning when you are talking about an algorithm). They were like eyes looking out from cobwebs. She had a fresh drink beside her. Her little body was leaning back, elbows on the bar, one red high-heel hooked in the brass bar rail. Smoke from her cigarette rose in an exact thin stream, broke up suddenly into eddies and whorls. She laughed and shook her head.