Light

'France chance, honey,' the pilot said. 'That's no fusion engine.' Fierce annular shockwaves in no detectable medium were spilling back along the White Cat's course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein's universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. 'They were building themselves a new drive,' the pilot said. 'New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can't deal with that. My guess: we're stuffed.'

Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.

'They'll go to Sigma End,' he decided. 'Make the best time you can.'

'I'm on it,' the pilot said.

Sigma End, Billy Anker's old stamping ground, was a cluster of ancient research stations and lashed-up entradista satellites sited in and around the Radio RX-i accretion disc. Everything there was abandoned, or had the air of it. Anything new attracted the attention like a campfire seen in the distance for one night on an empty coast. This was deep Radio Bay. In places like this, Earth ran out of reach. Logistics went down. Supply lines dried up. Everything was for grabs, and the mad energy of the accretion disc lay over all of it. The black hole churned and churned, ripping material out of its companion star, V404 Stueck-Manibel, a blue supergiant at the end of its life. Those two had been locked together for a few billion years or so. This was the last of it: the wreckage of a fine old relationship. It looked like everything was going down the tubes for them.

'Which probably it is,' Uncle Zip's pilot told him. 'You know?'

'I didn't ask you here for your religious opinions,' said Uncle Zip. He stared out across the disc, and a faint smile crossed his fat white face. 'What we are looking at here is the most efficient energy transfer system in the universe.'

That disc was a roaring Einsteinian shoal. Gravitational warping from RX-1 meant you could see all of it, even the underneath, whatever angle you approached it from. Every ten minutes, transition states quaked across it, causing it to spike in the soft X-ray band, huge flares echoing backwards and forwards to illuminate the scattered experimental structures of Sigma End. Go close enough and this mad light enabled you to see clusters of barely pressurised vessels like leaky bathtubs, each hosting a failing hydroponic farm and two or three earthmen with lost eyes, bad stubble, radiation ulcers. You could see planets with ancient mass-drivers let into them, holding positions in the last stable orbit before the Schwarzchild radius. You could stumble over a group of eight perfectly spherical nickel-iron objects each the size of Motel Splendido, set into an orbital relationship which in itself seemed to be some sort of engine. But the outright prize, Uncle Zip said, went to the following effort: twenty million years before mankind arrived, some fucker had tapped off a millionth of one per cent of the output of the RX-1 system and punched a wormhole straight out of there to some destination no one knew. They had left behind no archeology whatsoever. No clue of how you would do it. Just the hole itself.

'Deep guys,' he said. 'Some really deep guys.'

'Hey,' the pilot interrupted him. 'I got them.' Then he said: 'Shit.'

'What?'

'They're going down it. There. Look.'

It was hard to lift the worrnhole out of the overall signature of the accretion disc. But El Rayo X came with the equipment to do that, and on the displays Uncle Zip could just make it out, there in the boiling gravitational rapids just outside the last stable orbit: a fragile vulva of light into which the White Cat could be seen propelling herself like a tiny sliver of ice, those curious annular shockwaves still slipping regularly back along her brilliant raw trail of fusion product.

THIRTY Radio RX-1

In the days that followed The Perfect Low wove her way across the halo. She was all bustle, her hull crowded to capacity, a warm, smelly node of humanity flying in the teeth of the vast Newtonian grin of empty space. A sense of purpose prevailed. Status-conscious and competitive at close quarters, the carnies were always dissatisfied with their accommodation, always, moving children and livestock from one part of the ship to another. Ed pushed his way up and down the packed companionways for a couple of days; then took up with an exotic dancer called Alice.

'I'm not looking for complications,' he warned her.

'Who is?' she said with a yawn.

Alice had good legs and bright expressionless eyes. She lay with her elbows on his bunk, staring out the porthole while he fucked her.

'Hello?' he said.

'Look at this,' she said. 'What do you make of this?'

Out in the vacuum, eighty metres from the porthole, hung an object Ed recognised: a mortsafe maybe fifty feet in length, brass-coloured, and decorated with finials, groins and gargoyles, its blunt bow shaped like a head melted and streamlined by time. It was one of Sandra Shen's aliens. They were never loaded aboard The Perfect Low. Instead, the day the circus left New Venusport they took off too, each firing some weird engine of its own-something that produced a mist of blue light, or curious slick pulses of energy that presented as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth-and giving new meaning to the words 'containment vessel'. Since then, they had followed the ship with a kind of relentless ease, flying lazy, complex patterns around its direction of travel, circling it when it lay at rest like aboriginals in the night in ancient movies.

'What do they want?' Alice asked herself. 'You know? I wonder how they think.' And when Ed only shrugged: 'Because they aren't like us. Any more than she is.'

She turned her attention to the world they now orbited, which could be seen-if you craned your neck a little and pressed your face up to the porthole-as a long bulge limned by its own atmosphere.

'And look at this dump,' she said. 'Planet of the Damned.'

She was right. The Perfect Low's course was, in circus terms, as unrewarding as it was unpredictable. From the start they had avoided the halo moneypots-Polo Sport, Anais Anais, Motel Splendido-in favour of nightside landings on agricultural planets like Weber II and Perkins' Rent. Few performances were given. After a while, Ed noticed the ship's complement getting smaller. He never got the hang of what was going on. Sandra Shen was no help. He would glimpse her off in the distance, mediating an argument between carnies: by the time he had pushed his way towards her, she had gone. He knocked on the control-room door. No answer. 'If I'm not doing shows,' he said, 'I don't know why you made me train so hard.' Ed went back to his bunk and sweaty engagements with Alice while the dark matter trailed its weakened fingers down the hull outside. 'Another lot went last night,' she would say morosely after they had finished. The ship got emptier and emptier. The next time they landed, Alice went, too.

'We're not getting the work,' she said. 'We're not getting the shows.' There was no sense in staying under those circumstances. 'I can get a connection from here down to the Core,' she said.

'Take care,' Ed said.

He looked around him the next day and the circus was gone: Alice had been the last of it. Had she stayed for him? More out of nerves, he thought. It was a long way to the Core.

Madam Shen's exhibits still filled one hold. Everything else was gone. Ed stood in front of 'Michael Kearney Brian Tate Looking Into A Monitor, 1999'. There was something feral and frightened in their expressions, as if they had used up all their effort to get the genie out of the bottle and were beginning to wonder if they would ever persuade it to go back in again. Ed shivered. In the other holds he found: a spangled Lycra bodysuit; a child's sock. The companionways still smelled of food, sweat, Black Heart rum. Ed's footsteps seemed to fill the hull, then echo out past it and into empty space.