Light

'But this wasn't real?'

'Oh no. It was just a fantasy.'

'Then I don't-'

'I had nothing to do with them in life.' He had never once approached them in life. They had seemed too energetic, too brutal. 'The Gorselands fantasy spoilt everything for me. When I got to Cambridge I couldn't do anything.'

He shrugged.

'I don't know why,' he admitted. 'I just couldn't forget it. The promise of it.'

She stared at him.

'But that's so exploitative,' she said, 'using other people for something that only ever goes on inside you.'

'I ran away from the things I wanted-' he tried to explain.

'No,' she said. 'That's awful.'

She took the quilt by one corner and dragged it back into the bedroom. He heard the bed creak as she flung herself down on it. He felt abashed, caved-in. He said miserably, at least half-believing himself: 'I always thought the Shrander was my punishment for that.'

'Go away.'

'You used me,' he said.

'I didn't. I never did.'

TWENTY-SIX 50,000 degrees K

'We had some luck of course,' admitted Uncle Zip.

Seria Mau had returned to orbit to find the Moire pod all over everything like a cheap suit. She had given them some grief on her way out of there, and was now holed up among the gravitational rocks and shoals of the inner system, talking to Uncle Zip via a network of randomly switching proxy transmitters. The Moire pod -accepting this precaution as a challenge, and rather glad to be out of a fight Uncle Zip wouldn't allow them to win-had licked their wounds, pooled their mathematics and were rolling up the network at a rate of ten million guesses a nanosecond. Meanwhile, Seria Mau's fetch looked up at Uncle Zip, and Uncle Zip looked down at her. She could barely see his pipe-clayed face and fancy waistcoat for the creaking under-curve of his belly, clad in captain's ducks and restrained by a black leather belt fully eight inches wide. He had in one hand something that resembled a brass telescope, and in the other an ancient paper fakebook, 'The Galaxy and its Stars'. His sailor hat was on his head, with Kiss Me Quick in cursive script around the crown.

'There's no substitute for luck,' he said.

What had happened was this: in their haste to beat one another to the White Cat, Uncle Zip and the commander of the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void had collided in the Motel Splendido parking lot. At the time of the collision, Uncle Zip's vehicle of choice-the K-ship El Rayo X, on loan, along with the Krishna Moire pod, from undisclosed contacts in the bureaucracy of EMC-had already torched up to around twenty-five per cent the speed of light. Thirty or forty seconds later, it was buried deep below the Nastic vessel's greenish rind-like hull, having penetrated the whorled internal structures as far as the command and control centre before losing momentum. Touching the Void absorbed this incoming energy in a simple Newtonian fashion, retransmitting it as heat, noise, and-finally-a sluggish acceleration in the direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Its ruptured hull was promptly surrounded by clouds of shadow operators trying to make damage estimates. A caul of tiny repair machines-low-end swarming programmes mediating via a substrate of smart ceramic glue--began to seal the hole.

'Meanwhile,' said Uncle Zip, 'I find that by his own lights the guy is in fact already dead, though his ship-math maintains him as some sort of fetch. I say, "Hey, we can still work together. Being dead this way is no impediment to that," and he agrees. It made sense we worked together. Working together can sometimes be the right thing.'

So that was how it was. Uncle Zip's shadow operators, correctly assuming that neither ship was going anywhere on its own, began to build software bridges between the K-ship's mathematics and the propulsion systems of its new host. No one had ever done this before: but within hours they were back up and running and in pursuit of the White Cat, their origin, position and motives cloaked beneath the curious double signature which had so puzzled Seria Mau. 'Some luck was involved,' Uncle Ziprepeated. He seemed to like the idea. He spread his hands comfortably. 'Things came unstuck a couple of times along the way. But here we are.'

He looked down at her. 'You and me, Seria Mau,' he said, 'we got to work together too.'

'Don't hold your breath, Uncle Zip.'

'Why is that?'

'Because of everything. But mainly because you killed your son.'

'Hey,' he said. 'You did that. Don't look at me!' He shook his head. 'It must be convenient to forget events so soon.'

Seria Mau had to acknowledge the truth of that.

'But it was you involved me with him,' she said. 'You wound me up and set me going. And why bother, anyway, when you already knew where Billy was? You knew it all along, or else you couldn't have told me. You could have found him any time. Why the charade?'

Uncle Zip considered how to answer.

'That's true,' he admitted in the end: 'I didn't need to find him. But I knew he would never share that secret source of his. He was down there on that shithole rainy planet for ten years, just hoping I would ask, so he could say no. So instead I sent him what he needed: I sent him a sad story. I showed him he could still do something good in the world. I sent him someone worse off than he was, someone he could help. I sent him you. I knew he'd offer to take you there.'

He shrugged.

'I figured I could follow you,' he said.

'Uncle Zip, you bastard.'

'Some people have said that,' admitted Uncle Zip.

'Well, Billy told me nothing in the end. You didn't guess him right. He only came aboard my ship to have sex with the Mona clone.'

'Ah,' said Uncle Zip. 'Everyone wants sex with Mona.'

He smiled reminiscently.

'She was one of mine, too,' he said. Then he shook his head sadly. 'Things weren't good between me and Billy Anker since his first day out the incubator. It sometimes happens with a father and a son. Maybe I was too tough on him. But he never found himself, you know? Which was a pity, because he so much resembled me when I was young, before I did one entrada too many and as a consequence got this fat disease.'

Seria Mau cut the connection.

Thesound of alarms. Under its shifting blue and grey internal light, the White Cat felt empty and haunted at the same time. Shadow operators hung beneath the ceilings of the human quarters, pointing at Seria Mau and whispering among themselves like bereaved sisters. 'For God's sake what's the matter now?' she asked them. They covered one another's bruised-looking mouths with their fingers. The Moire pod had chased down most of the RF proxies and were running about after the rest like a lot of dogs on the Carmody waterfront at night. 'We have a buffer a few nanoseconds thick,' her mathematics warned her. 'We should either fight or leave.' It thought for a moment. 'If we fight, they'll probably win.'

'Well then, go.'

'Where?'

'Anywhere. Just lose them.'

'We might lose the K-pod, but not the Nastic ship. Their navigational systems aren't as good as me, but their pilot is better than you.'