She asked him if he could fly the White Cat.
Billy Anker didn't seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.
'What life's that, kid?' he said vaguely.
Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. 'This is where I live,' Mona informed him the next day: 'And this is where you live.'
She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth's deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn't need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, 'Jesus!' in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.
Seria Mau followed these domestic encounters with a kind of amused tolerance. It was like having pets. Their antics could often hiring her out of her recurrent cafards, ill-humours and tantrums where the White Cat's hormonal pharmacopoeia could not. She was reassured by Mona and Billy. She expected nothing new of them.
All the more surprising then, four or five days out of Redline, to catch them together in Mona's bedroom.
The lighting mimicked afternoon leaking through half-closed blinds somewhere in the temperate zones of Earth. An atmosphere of cinq а sept prevailed. There was a dish of rosewater by the bed for Billy Anker to dip his fingers in if he started to come too soon. Mona wore a short grey silk slip, which was up round her waist, and lots of lip colour to make it look as if she had already bitten them. She had hold of the chrome bedhead in both hands. Her mouth was open and through the bars her eyes had a faraway look. One breast had come free of the slip.
'Oh yes, fuck me, Billy Anker,' she said suddenly.
Billy Anker, who was curved over her in a manner both protective and predatory, looked younger than he had. His forearms were long and brown, corded in the yellow light. His unbound hair hung down round his face; he still had on his fingerless mitt. 'Oh, fuck me through the wall,' Mona said. This gave him pause; then he shrugged, lost his inturned look and carried on with what he had been doing. Mona went pink and gave a fluttering, delicate little cry. That was the last straw for Billy, who after a series of spasms groaned loudly and slumped over her. They slipped apart immediately and began to laugh. Mona lit a cigarette and let him take it from her without asking. He sat up against the bedhead with one arm round her. They smoked for a while then Billy Anker, casting around for something to slake his thirst, drank the rosewater from the bedside dish.
Seria Mau watched them in silence for a moment or two, thinking, Is this how he would have been with me?
Then she took control of the human quarters. She reduced the temperature by tens of degrees. She brought up the lights until they had the glare of hospital fluorescents. She introduced disinfectants into the air-conditioning. Mona the clone threw her arm across her eyes then, realising what must have happened, shoved Billy Anker away from her. 'Get off me before it's too late,' she said. 'Oh God, get off me.' She scrambled out of bed and into the corner of the room, where she clung with both hands to the nearest fixed object, shaking with fear and whispering, 'It wasn't me. It wasn't me.'
Billy Anker stared at her puzzledly. He wiped away the aerosol of disinfectant which stood on his face like sweat. Looked down at the palm of his hand. Laughed.
'What's going on?' he said.
Seria Mau examined him carefully. He looked like a plucked chicken in that light. His flesh looked as grey as his hair. She wasn't quite sure what she had seen in him.
She said in her ship's voice: 'This is your stop, Billy Anker.'
The clone whimpered, clung on harder, shut her eyes as tight as she could. 'You might well do that,' Seria Mau advised her: 'It's your stop too.' She dialled up the mathematics.
'Open the airlock,' she ordered.
She thought for a moment.
'No, wait,' she said.
Two minutes later, something levered its way out of nowhere on a remote curve of the Beach, at the edge of a system no one had ever bothered to name. Empty space convulsed. A splatter of particles organised itself in a millisecond or two from a fireworks display into the ugly lines of a K-ship-the White Cat, her torch already alight, heading in-system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic on a brutally straight line of fusion product.
Surveys of the system, carried out fifty years after humanity arrived on the Beach, had found a single solid object in a braiding orbital dance with gas giants. Though a little large, it was strictly a moon. Tidal heating in its core had raised the surface to temperatures resembling Earth's, generating also a loose and wispy atmosphere which featured the gases that support life. Against a curious greenish arc of sky ballooned the salmon-pink bulk of the nearest gas giant. A single fractal structure occupied the entire planet. Though from a distance this resembled vegetation, it was neither alive nor dead. It was just some mad old algorithm which, vented from a passing navigational system, had run wild then run out of raw materials. The effect was of endless peacock feathers a million different sizes: a clever drawing ramped into three dimensions. Mathematics trying to save itself from death.
Plush and velvety, surrounded by a vanishingly thin mist of itself, this structure defeated the eye at all scales. It did something strange and absorbent to the light. It lay brittle and exfoliated, fragmenting into a viral dust of itself, a useless old calculation which had accidentally become an environment. There was a biome: among its quaint bracts and stalks, local life forms moved with a kind of puzzled stealth. The logic of the ecology was unclear, its terminal fauna provisional. At dawn or dusk, something between a bird and a marmoset might be seen, making its way painfully to the tip of some huge feather to stare anxiously at the face of the gas giant, before it closed its eyes and began a fluting territorial aubade. No one had stayed long enough to find out any more.
The White Cat burned a clearing among the feathers, hovered above them momentarily, and lowered herself down. For a minute or two nothing more happened. Then a cargo port opened and two figures debouched. After a pause in which they turned back and seemed to be arguing with the ship itself, they hurried down the already-closing cargo ramp and stood in silence. They were naked, although they had between them what seemed to be some party clothes and the bottom half of an old G-suit. As they watched, the White Cat stood on its tail, shot into the sky, and vanished, all in the same easy, practised gesture.