In the dream, Seria Mau saw herself from above. All these years on, she wept at what she had done to herself back then. Her skin was like a fish’s skin. She was trembling in the tank like a damaged experimental animal. But her brother would not even wave her goodbye that day. That in itself was reason enough. Who wanted a world like that, where you had to be the mother all the time, and your brother wouldn’t even wave goodbye?
Abruptly Seria Mau was looking at a picture of a blank interior wall covered with ruched grey silk. After some time, the upper body of a man—he was tall, thin, dressed in a black tailcoat and starched white shirt; he held in one white-gloved hand a top hat, in the other an ebony cane—bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. Seria Mau trusted him immediately. He had laughter in his eyes—they were a penetrating light blue—and a black pencil moustache, and his jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he smiled at her, and in a quiet, friendly voice said:
“You must forgive yourself all this.”
“But—” Seria Mau heard herself reply.
At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows opening onto the blunt glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. This made the room itself appear to be toppling through space at a measured, subrelativistic pace.
“You must forgive yourself for everything,” the conjuror said.
Slowly, he tipped his hat to her, and bowed himself back out of the picture. Before he had quite gone, he beckoned her to follow him. She woke up suddenly.
“Send the shadow operators to me,” she told her ship.
27
The Alcubiere Break
Ed’s fishtank movie showed him his sister leaving again.
“But will you come back?” the father begged her. There was no answer to that. “But will you?”
Ed wrenched his head around on his neck as far as it would go, stared at anything—the flower tubs, the white cumulus clouds, the tabby cat—so as not to look at either of them. He wouldn’t have a kiss from her. He wouldn’t wave goodbye. She bit her bottom lip and turned away. Ed knew this was a memory. He wished he could piece it together with the other stuff he remembered, make sense of the shitty retrospective project of his life. But her face wavered as if behind water, decoherent and strange, and suddenly he was right through it and out the other side.
Everything lurched as he went through, and there was nothing but blackness and a sense of enormous speed. A few dim points of light. A chaotic attractor churning and boiling in the cheap iridescent colours of 400-year-old computer art. Like a wound in the firmament.
“You believe this shit?” Ed said.
His voice echoed. Then he was out the other side of that too, and toppling in empty space forever, where he could hear the precise roaring surf of the songs of the universe, nested inside each other like fractal dimensions—
—and then woke and found he was still on stage. It was unusual for that to happen, and maybe what had wakened him was this unlooked-for noise he had heard, swelling up to penetrate his prophetic coma like the sound of the waves as they fall on Monster Beach. He opened his eyes. The audience, still on its feet, was applauding him for the third solid minute. Of them all, Sandra Shen was the only one still seated. Eyeing him from the front row with an ironic smile, she tapped her little oriental paws slowly together. Ed leaned forward to try and hear the sound they made. Fainted.
Next he woke with the smell of salt in his nostrils. The great bulk of the dunes was black over him. Above that, the neck of the night with its cheap ornaments strung round it. Both of those were more comforting than the silhouette of the circus owner, the red ember of her bat-shit cigarette. She seemed pleased.
“Ed, you did so well!”
“What did I say? What happened?”
“What happened, they loved you Ed,” she answered. “You shot right through. I’d say you were their boy.” She laughed. “I’d say you were my boy too.”
Ed tried to sit up.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Annie had to be somewhere else, Ed. But I’m here.”
Ed stared up at her. She was kneeling behind his head, bent over so she could look in his face. Her face was upside down to him, faint, sallow with clues. A few lively motes spilled from her eyes, blew away on the sea wind. She smiled and stroked his forehead.
“Still bored, Ed? No need to be. The circus is yours. You can name your price. We can start selling futures. Oh, and Ed?”
“What?”
“We leave in a fortnight.”
He felt relieved. He felt doomed. He didn’t know how to tell Annie. He drank all day in the bars of the coastal strip; or—which was not like him—practised voluntarily with the fishtank in the afternoons. He would have played the Ship Game, but the old men were long gone from the Dunes Motel. He would have twinked out but he was afraid to go downtown. Annie, meanwhile, absented herself from his life. She worked all night, and came in quietly after she thought Ed had gone to sleep. When they did meet, she was preoccupied, quiet, withdrawn. Had she guessed? She looked away from him when he smiled. This made him wretched enough to say:
“We have to talk.”
“Do we, Ed?”
“While we still remember each other.”
A week after he hit the jackpot, she didn’t come home at all.
She was away three days. During that time, Madame Shen prepared to leave New Venusport. The exhibits were folded. The attractions were packed. The big tent was struck. Her ship, The Perfect Low, came down from the parking lot one bright blue morning. It turned out to be a tubby brass-coloured little dynaflow HS-SE freighter, forty or fifty years old, built cheap and cheerful with a pointed nose and long curved fins at the back. “Well, Ed, what do you think of the rocket?” Sandra Shen asked. Ed stared up at the ripe-avocado geometry of its hull, blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core.
“It’s a dog,” he told her. “You want my opinion.”
“You’d prefer a hyperdip,” she said. “You’d prefer to be back on France Chance IV, going dive for dive with Liv Hula in a smart carbon hull. She couldn’t have done it without you, Ed. She went on record later, ’I only pushed so hard because I was afraid Ed Chianese would get there first.’ ”
Ed shrugged.
“I did all that,” he said. “I’d prefer to be with Annie now.”
“Oh ho. Now he can go, he can’t bring himself to leave. Annie’s got things to do at the moment, Ed.”
“Things for you?”
It was Sandra Shen’s turn to shrug. She continued to gaze wryly up at her ship. After a moment she said: “Don’t you want to know why they love your show? Don’t you want to know why they changed their minds about you?”
Ed shivered. He wasn’t sure he did.
“Because you stopped the war-talk, Ed, and all the stuff about eels. You gave them a future instead. You gave them the Tract, glittering in front of them like an affordable asset. You took them in there, you showed them what they might find, what it might make them. Everything’s worn out down here, and they know it. You didn’t offer them retro, Ed. You said it hadn’t all been done. You said, ’Go deep!’ That’s what they wanted to hear: one day soon they were going to get off the beach at last, and into the sea!”