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.
'Bored already, Ed?' she said.
The next night Bella Cray was in the audience for his show.
'Christ!' whispered Ed. He looked around for Sandra Shen: she was off on other business. Ed was stuck there in the glare of the old theatre lights, the cold white glare of Bella Cray's smile. There she was, sitting in the front row not two yards away, knees together, handbag in her lap. Her white secretary blouse had a little saddle of perspiration under each armpit, but her lipstick was bright and fresh and she was mouthing something he couldn't quite make out. He remembered her saying, just before he shot her sister, 'What can we do, Ed? We're all fish.' To get away from her, he plunged his head into the tank. As the world went out he heard her calclass="underline"
'Hey, Ed! Break a leg!'
When he woke up she was gone. His head was full of a high, pure ringing sound. Annie Glyph lugged him into the dunes, where she laid him down in the cool air and distant sound of the surf. He rested his head in her lap and held her hand. She told him he had prophesied war again, and worse; he didn't tell her about seeing Bella Cray in the audience. He didn't want to worry her. Also, he had spent a tiring hour inside the tank. He had watched his dead mother's things thrown on the bonfire, seen his sister leave for other worlds, resented his father for being ordinary and weak, left for other worlds himself: then he had been led past his own past, into some completely unknowable state. He was worn out with it.
'It's good you're here,' he said.
'You should stop doing this, Ed. It isn't worth it.'
'Do you think they'll let me stop? Do you think she'll let me stop? Everyone but you wants to kill me or use me. Maybe both.'
Annie smiled and shook her head slowly.
'That's ridiculous,' she said.
She gazed out to sea. Alter a minute or two she said in a different voice, 'Ed, don't you sometimes want someone smaller? Really? Someone nice and small to fuck, and not just that: to be with?'
He squeezed her huge hand.
'You're a rock,' he told her. 'Everything breaks on you.'
She pushed him away and went down to the water.
'Jesus, Ed,' she shouted into the sea wind. 'You fucking twink.'
Ed watched her striding up and down at the tideline, picking up large stones and pieces of driftwood and hurling them far out into the ocean. He got himself carefully to his feet and left her there to her demons.
The spaceport was empty. Everyone had gone home long ago. The night was just chain-link rattling in the wind, smell of the tide, a voice calling out from some motel cabin. Mercury vapour light made everything look half real. Empty sheds, intermittent traffic. It was like that most nights. Nothing for hours, then four ships in twenty minutes-two tubby freighters in from the Core; the tender of a vast Alcubiere ship hanging somewhere up in the parking lot like an asteroid; some semi-corporate short-hauler, skulking down on business no one could afford to acknowledge. There would be bursts of flame the orange colour of New Men hair, then darkness and cold wind until morning. Ed didn't feel like going back to the room until Annie was asleep. Instead he wandered over and stood between the rocket sheds, looking up at the huge ships, enjoying their smells of stressed metal and burnt pSi fuel.
After a while he noticed a figure pushing a wheeled waste bin slowly across the concrete in his direction. It was Bella Cray. Since her sister's death her skirts were tighter. Bella was making-up for two, with several colours of eye shadow and lips that resembled a pumped-up rosebud. Those lips were the first thing you saw coming towards you. Going away, she presented as buttocks. Somewhere in between was her handbag full of guns.
'Hey, Ed,' she said, 'look at this!"
The waste bin was almost as big as her. Folded awkwardly into it, their long legs hanging over the side, were Tig and Neena Vesicle. Their expressions were puzzled. They were dead. Up from the bin came a smell of alien fluids, bitter and hopeless. Neena's eyes were still open, and she was looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract the way she had looked at Ed while he was fucking her in the warren, so that he expected her to laugh breathlessly and say, 'Oh I'm so far in you!' Tig Vesicle didn't even look like Tig any more.