He called: “Madam Shen? Hello?”
Nothing. Then alarm bells went off all over the ship and she popped out of the dynaflow very suddenly and the Kefahuchi Tract filled all three screens like a bad eye. It was very close.
“Shit,” said Ed.
He got back in the pilot seat. “Direct connect,” he ordered. “And give me the fakebooks.” He stared up at the screens. Light poured out of them. “I’ve been here,” he said, “but I can’t—There! Rotate that. Again. Jesus, it’s Radio Bay!”
It was worse than that. He was in his old stamping ground—the gravitation alley at Radio RX-1. The accretion disc roared up at him, quaking with soft X-ray pulses. He was coming in at a steep angle with his fusion torch full on. His coms were getting nothing but the identification beacons of the derelict research hulks—Easyville, Moscar 2, The Scoop: then, very faintly, Billy Anker’s legendary Transubstantiation Station—communications as old as rust, Ed’s past rushing back at him, partial, decoherent, twinked out. Any moment, he would be caught up in the Schwarzschild surf, doomed to do the Black Hole Boogie in a fat tub. “Get us out of here,” he told the direct connect. Nothing happened. “Am I giving orders or not?” he asked the shadow operators. “Can you see my lips move?” They looked away from him and covered their faces. Then he caught sight of a twist of frail light on the inner edge of the accretion disc.
He began to laugh. “Oh fuck,” he said.
It was Billy Anker’s wormhole.
“Come on, Billy,” Ed said, as if Billy was sitting next to him, rather than dead from this exact same adventure more than a decade ago: “What do I do next?”
Something had entered the ship’s mathematics. It was inside the Tate-Kearney transformations themselves, fractally folded between the algorithms. It was huge. When Ed tried to talk to it, everything shut down. The screens went dark, the shadow operators, who had sensed it there days before, streaked about in panic, brushing Ed’s face like very old muslin rags. “We didn’t want this,” they told him. “We didn’t want you in here!” Ed battered at them with his hands. Then the screens fired up again, and the wormhole leapt suddenly into view, very clear and close, a spindle of nothing against the exposed grimace of RX-1.
The whole of the local space of The Perfect Low had, meanwhile, turned into a kind of agitated purple cloud, through which the alien mortsafes could be seen weaving their chaotic orbits, faster and faster like the shuttles of a loom. You could feel the ship shake to her frame with the approach of some catastrophic event, the phase change, the leap to the next stable state.
“Fucking hell,” Ed said. “What’s going on out there?”
There was a soft laugh. A woman’s voice said: “They’re the engine, Ed. What did you think they were?”
In the calm that followed this announcement, Ed hallucinated a white cat at his feet: tricked thus into looking down, saw instead a spill of light emerging like bright foam from Sandra Shen’s fishtank and licking out towards him.
“Hey!” he shouted.
He jumped out of the pilot seat. The shadow operators spread their arms and streamed away from him into the dark and empty ship, rustling in terror. Light continued to pour out of the fishtank, a million points of light which shoaled round Ed’s feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into a shape he almost recognised. Each point, he knew (and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that), would also make the same shape.
“Always more,” he heard someone say. “Always more after that.”
He threw up suddenly. The entity calling itself Sandra Shen had begun to assemble itself in front of him.
Whatever she was, she had energy. First she presented as Tig Vesicle, with his shock of red hair, eating a Muranese fish curry off the end of a throwaway plastic fork. “Hi, Ed,” he said. “The fuck we are! You know?” But that didn’t satisfy her, so she got rid of it and presented as Tig’s wife, half-naked in the gloom of the warren. Ed was so surprised he said, “Neena, I—” Neena got whipped away immediately and was replaced by the Cray sisters. “Dipshit,” they said. They laughed. Between each version of herself, Sandra Shen filled up the control room with sparkling motes of light, like one of her own tableaux, “Detergent Foam in a Plastic Bowl, 1958.” Finally she firmed up as the Sandra Ed first met, walking briskly along Yulgrave towards him in the blowing snow—a small, plump, oriental-looking woman, her gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh, her perfect oval face shifting constantly as she exchanged youth and yellow old age, her eyes sexy and fathomless with the charisma of something never human.
“Hello, Ed,” she said.
Ed stared at her. “You were all of them,” he said. “None of that was real. You were everyone in that part of my life.”
“ ’Fraid so, Ed.”
“You’re not just a shadow operator,” he guessed.
“No, Ed, I’m not.”
“There was no Tig.”
“No Tig.”
“There were no Cray sisters.”
“Theatre, Ed, every moment of it.”
“There was no Neena . . .”
“Hey, Neena was fun. Wasn’t Neena fun?”
Ed couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt more used and manipulated—more self-disgusted—than at any point in his life before. He shook his head and turned away.
“Painful, isn’t it?” said Sandra Shen.
Ed told her: “Fuck off.”
“That’s a disappointing attitude, Ed, even for a twink. Don’t you want to know the rest of it? Don’t you want to know why?”
“No,” Ed said. “I don’t.”
“It got your head in the fishtank, Ed.”
“Another thing,” he said. “What was all that about? What was happening to me in there? What was that stuff I had to put my head in? Because, you know, it’s disgusting to do that, day after day.”
“Ah,” said Sandra Shen. “That was me. I was always in there with you, Ed. You weren’t alone. I was the medium. You know? Like the proteome in the twink-tank? You swam to the future through me.” She smoked her cigarette meditatively. “That’s not quite true,” she admitted. “I misled you there. I was training you, but not so much to see the future as be it. How’d you like that idea, Ed? Be the future? Change it all. Change everything.” She shook her head, as if this was a bad day for explaining herself. “Put it another way,” she tried. “When you applied for this job, you said you flew every kind of ship but one. What’s the only kind of ship you never flew?”
“Who are you?” Ed whispered. “And where are you taking me?”
“You’ll know soon, Ed. Look!”
A filmy twist of light, a faint vertical smile seven hundred kilometres high, hung above them. The Perfect Low shuddered and rang as the forces that kept the wormhole open engaged with elements of Sandra Shen’s ad hoc engine. “There are more kinds of physics in play here,” she informed Ed, “than you people dream of in your philosophy.” Outside the hull, the aliens redoubled their efforts, shuttling faster and in more complex patterns. Suddenly Madam Shen’s eyes were full of excitement. “Not many people have done this achievement, Ed,” she reminded him. “You’re out in front here, you’ve got to admit that.”