'I'm certain,' Annie said. 'I'm sorry.'
'Hey,' said the rickshaw girl, 'don't apologise. You work the port you're on a diet of raw sentiment.'
Annie laughed. She sniffed and wiped her eyes.
'You take care too,' she told Ed.
With that she was gone. Ed watched the rickshaw grow smaller and smaller as it crossed the bare concrete to the spaceport gate, its advertisements streaming after it like a cloud of coloured scarves and butterflies in the sun. Annie's little hand appeared for a moment, to be waved back at Ed, forlorn and cheerful at the same time. He heard her call something which he worked out later was, 'Don't spend too much time in the future!' Then she turned the corner to the city, and he never saw her again in that life.
Ed went and got drunk the rest of the day at the Cafй Surf and was dragged home in the dark by his former gambling partners from the Dunes Motel. There, he found Sandra Shen waiting for him with the fishtank under her arm. The old men laughed and blew on their hands to indicate scorching. 'You in trouble now, my man!' they predicted. All that night, pale white motes flickered in the dark in Annie Glyph's old room; then, later, on the dunes outside. Next day he woke exhausted aboard The Perfect Low. He was alone, and the ship was warming for take-off He felt the hum of engines through her frame. He felt the tremble in the tips of her fins. The oily preflight roll of the dynaflow drivers came up to him from somewhere below and the hair rose on the back of his neck for the millionth time because he was alive in this place and this time, and leaving it all only to find something else out there.
Always more. Always more after that.
The little freighter shook with the excitement of it too. She balanced herself carefully on a column of flame and in her own tubby fashion hurled herself skyward.
'Hey Ed,' came Sandra Shen's dry voice a minute or two later. 'Look at this!'
The New Venusport parking orbit was full of K-ships. Pods and superpods stretched away as far as Ed could see, hundreds of them, in restlessly layered and shifting formations. They dipped in and out of local space, extruding w eapons, as suspicious of one another as animals, hulls simmering gently in a bouillabaisse of particles. They shimmered with navigational fields, defensive fields, fields for target acquisition and ordnance control, fields which shed everything from soft X-rays to hard light, Local space miraged and twisted around them. They were hunting without moving. He could almost hear the poisonous throb of their engines.
War! he thought.
The Perfect Low, receiving clearance, edged between them and out of the lot.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Sparks in Everything
After the argument with Anna, Michael Kearney dressed and took the rental car into Boston, where he drank beer and caught Burger King before it closed, after which he sped deliberately up and down the coast road, driving in and out of thick white pockets of fog while he ate a bacon double cheeseburger with fries. The ocean, when you could see it, was a silver strip far out, the dunes at the south end of the bay heaped up black against it. Seabirds cackled on the beach even in the dark. Kearney parked the car, cut the engine, listened to the wind in the grass. He made his way down through the dunes and stood on the damp sand, stirring with the toe of one shoe the bands of tide-sorted shingle. After a moment, he had the impression of something huge sweeping in across the bay towards him. The monster was returning to its beach. Or perhaps not the monster itself, but whatever lay behind it, some condition of the world, the universe, the state of things, which is black, revelatory and, in the end, a relief-something you don't want to know but are perversely glad to have confirmed. It swept in directly from the east, directly from the horizon. It passed over him, or perhaps into him. He shivered and turned away from the beach, and trudged back up the dunes to the car, thinking about the woman he had killed in the English Midlands, where their idea of a dinner-table game was to ask:
'How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?'
Even as he spoke he had wished he could answer differently. He had wished he could say the decent, optimistic kinds of things they were saying. Remembering this, he saw clearly how he had marginalised his own life. He had brought his life upon himself. Driving back to the cottage, he lowered the side window and threw the Burger King packaging out into the night.
When he got back, the cottage was silent.
'Anna?' he called.
He found her in the front room. The TV was on, with the sound turned down. Anna had dragged the quilt off the bed again and now sat cross-legged on it by the fire, her hands resting, palms upwards, on her knees. The pound or two she had put on over the last month made her thighs, belly and buttocks seem smooth and young; above, she was still as ribby as a horse. He had a feeling there was some insight in all this he wasn't quite close enough to see. Her wrists were so white that the veins in them looked like bruises. Next to her she had placed the carbon-steel chefs knife he had bought on their first visit to the beach. Its blade flickered in the TV light, uncertain and grey, which filled the room.
'I'm trying to scrape up all the courage I have, here,' she said, without looking away from the fire. Her voice was friendly. 'I knew you wouldn't want me if I got well.'
Kearney picked up the knife and put it out of her reach and his. He bent over her and kissed her spine where it snaked up between the thin scapulae.
'I do want you,' he said. He touched her wrists. They were hot but bloodless. 'Why are you doing this?'
She shrugged. She laughed a little fake laugh. 'It's a measure of last resort,' she said. 'It's a vote of no confidence.' Kearney's laptop lay open on top of the TV set, also switched on, though it displayed only wallpaper. Into it, Anna had plugged the pocket drive they got from Tate. Of all these gestures, Kearney thought, this was probably the most dangerous. When he said so, she shrugged. 'What I hate most of all is that you don't even need to kill me any more,' she said.
'Is that what you want? Me to kill you?'
'No!'
'Then what?'
'I don't know,' she said. 'Just please fuck me properly.'
It was awkward for both of them. Anna, instantly wet, presented herself determinedly; Kearney was less certain how to proceed. When he finally managed to penetrate her, he couldn't believe the heat of it. They began with what they knew, but she soon made him face her, urging him, 'Like this. Like this. I want to see you, I want to see your face.' Then: 'Is this better? Am I better than them?' For a second, he heard his cousins' laughter; Gorselands opened itself to him, then tilted and flickered away forever. He laughed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes!' It didn't last long, but she sighed and embraced him and gave further warm little sighs and smiles in a way she had never done before. They lay in front of the fire together for a while, then she encouraged him to try again.
'God,' he said experimentally. 'You're so wet.'
'I know. I know.'
The TV chirped almost silently to itself in the gloom above them. Ads passed across its screen, to be replaced by the logo of some science channel, and after that an image of great roseate streamers of gas and dust, studded with actinic stars, pocked and wrapped with velvety blackness, full of the beautiful false clarity of a Hubble telescope image. 'The Kefahuchi Tract,' announced the voice-over, 'named after its discoverer, may upset all our-' There was a sense of the screen filling suddenly, overflowing. Silent sparks of light began to pour out of it into the room, bouncing and foaming across the bare boards to the fireside, where they encountered Anna Kearney, biting her lower lip and moving her head back and forth in a dreamy, inturned manner. Into her hair they flowed, down her flushed cheeks, across her breastbone. Taking them to be a part of what she was feeling, she moaned a little, rubbing them in handfuls into her face and neck.