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“Cheer up,” he said.

“You could have told me you were going.”

Kearney held up the Sony. “Look! Let’s walk on the beach.”

“I’m not speaking to you.”

But Anna loved to be filmed. The rest of the day, while seabirds flickered over the shallows or hung like kites above the beach, she ran, sat, rolled, posed looking out to sea, against the white sand in the coastal clarity of light. “Let me look!” she insisted. “Let me look!” Then screams of laughter as the images poured like a stream of jewels across the little monitor. She wouldn’t wait to see them on the TV. She had the impatience of a fourteen-year-old—that life had not allowed her to remain fourteen, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy.

“Here’s something you don’t know,” she said. They sat for a moment on a dune, and she told him about the Mann Hill Sea Monster—

November 1970: three thousand pounds of rotting flesh is washed onto the Massachusetts sand. Crowds gather all the next day, motoring up from Providence and down from Boston. Parents stare, startled by the blubbery flippers. Kiddies dart and dash up close enough to frighten themselves. But the thing is too decayed ever to be identified; and though its bone structure resembles that of a plesiosaur, consensus has it that the gale has brought in nothing more exotic than the remains of a basking shark. In the end, everyone goes home, but the arguments continue for thirty years—

“I bet you didn’t know that!” said Anna, leaning back against Kearney’s chest and encouraging him to put his arms around her. “Though you’ll say you did.” She yawned and looked out over the bay, which was darkening like the fine crust on a blob of mercury. “I’m tired out, but in such a nice way.”

“You should go to bed early,” he said.

That evening she drank most of the wine, laughed a lot and took off her clothes, then fell asleep suddenly on the bed. Kearney pulled the covers over her, drew the faux-gingham curtains, and plugged the handicam into the TV. He turned off the lights and for a while ran idly through the stuff he had taken on the beach. He rubbed his eyes. Anna snored suddenly, said something indistinct. The last of the handicam images, ill-lit and grainy-looking, showed her in the corner of the room. She had got as far as unbuttoning her jeans. Her breasts were already bare, and she was turning her head as if Kearney had just spoken to her, her eyes wide, her mouth sweet but tired with acceptance, as if she already knew what was going to happen to her.

He froze that image on the screen, found a pair of scissors and cut two or three lengths of the wire he had bought that morning. These, he placed close to hand on the bedside table. Then he took off his clothes, stripped the chef’s knife out of its plastic wrap, pulled back the bedclothes and looked down at her. She lay curled up, with one arm placed loosely round her knees. Her back and shoulders were as thin and unmuscled as a child’s, the spine prominent and vulnerable. Her face, in profile, had a sharp, hollowed-out look, as if sleep was no rest from the central puzzle of being Anna. Kearney stood above her, hissing through his teeth, mainly in anger at the things that had led her here, led him here. He was about to start when he thought he would throw the Shrander’s dice, just to be sure.

She must have heard them tumbling on the bedside table, because when he turned back she was awake and looking up at him, dull and fractious with sleep, her breath sour from the wine. Her eyes took in the knife, the wire, Kearney’s unaccustomed erection. Unable to understand what was happening, she reached up with one hand and tried to pull him down towards her.

“Are you going to fuck me now?” she whispered.

Kearney shook his head, sighed.

“Anna, Anna,” he said, trying to pull away.

“I knew,” she said, in a different voice. “I always knew you’d do it in the end.”

Kearney detached himself gently. He put the knife back on the bedside table. “Kneel up,” he whispered. “Kneel up.”

She knelt up awkwardly. She seemed confused.

“I’ve still got my knickers on.”

“Shh.”

Kearney held her with his hand. She moved against him, made a small noise and began to come immediately.

“I want you to come!” she said. “I want you to come too!”

Kearney shook his head. He held her there quietly in the night until she buried her face in the pillow and stopped trying to control herself. He fetched the bottle of wine and gave her half a glassful and they lay on the bed and watched the television. First Anna on the beach, then Anna undressing, while the camera moved slowly down one side of her body and up the other; then, as she grew bored, a CNN news segment. Kearney turned the sound up just in time to hear the words “. . . Kefahuchi Tract, named after its discoverer.” Flaring across the screen in colours that couldn’t be natural appeared some cosmic object no one could understand. It looked like nothing much. A film of rosy gas with a pinch of brighter light at its centre.

“It’s beautiful,” Anna said, in a shocked voice.

Kearney, sweating suddenly, turned the sound down.

“Sometimes I think this is all such bollocks,” he said.

“It is beautiful, though,” she objected.

“It doesn’t look like that,” Kearney told her. “It doesn’t look like anything. It’s just data from some X-ray telescope. Just some numbers, massaged to make an image. Look around,” he told her more quietly. “That’s all anything is. Nothing but statistics.” He tried to explain quantum theory to her, but she just looked bemused. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s just that there isn’t really anything there. Something called decoherence holds the world into place the way we see it: but people like Brian Tate are going to find maths that will go round the end of that. Any day now we’ll just go round decoherence on the back of the maths, and all this—” he gestured at the TV, the shadows in the room “—will mean as much to us as it does to a photon.”

“How much is that?”

“Not much.”

“It sounds awful. It sounds undependable. It sounds as if everything will just—” she made a vague gesture “—boil around. Spray about.”

Kearney looked at her.

“It already does,” he said. He raised himself on one elbow and drank some wine. “Down there it’s just disorder,” he was forced to admit. “Space doesn’t seem to mean anything, and that means that time doesn’t mean anything.” He laughed. “In a way that’s the beauty of it.”

She said in a small voice, “Will you fuck me again?”

The next day he managed to get Brian Tate on the phone and ask him, “Have you seen that crap on TV?”

“Sorry?”

“This X-ray object, whatever it is. I heard someone from Cambridge talking about Penrose and the idea of a singularity without an event horizon, some bollocks like that—”

Tate seemed distracted. “I haven’t heard about any object,” he said. “Look Michael, I need to talk to you—”

The connection went down. Kearney stared angrily at his phone, thinking of Penrose’s definition of the event horizon not as a limitation of human knowledge but as
protection
against the breakdown of physical laws which might otherwise leak out into the universe. He switched the television on. It was still tuned to CNN. Nothing.

“What’s the matter?” asked Anna.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Look, would you mind if we went home?”

He drove the Pontiac into Logan International. Three hours later they were on a standby flight, climbing above the Newfoundland coast, which at that point looked like a skin of mould on the sea. Up they went through a layer of cloud, then broke into glaring sunlight. Anna seemed to have put aside the events of the night. She spent much of the journey staring down at the surface of the clouds, a faint, almost ironical smile on her face; although once she took Kearney’s hand briefly and whispered:

“I like it up here.”

But Kearney’s mind was on other journeys.

In his second year at Cambridge, he had worked in the mornings, cast cards in his room in the afternoon.

To represent himself, he always chose The Fool.

“We move forward,” Inge had told him before she found someone who would fuck her properly, “by the deeply undercutting action of desire. As The Fool steps continually off his cliff and into space, so we are presences trying to fill the absence that has brought us forth.” At the time, he had had no idea what she meant by this. He supposed it was some bit of patter she had learned to make things more interesting. But he began with this image of himself in mind: so that each journey would be, in every sense, a trip.

He had to remove The Fool from the deck before the cards could be dealt. Late afternoon, as the light went out of the room, he laid it on the arm of his chair, from which it fluoresced up at him, more an event than a picture.

Through simple rules, a cast of the cards determined the journey that would be based upon it. For instance: if the card turned up was a Wand, Kearney would go north only if the trip was to take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up was a Knight. Further rules, whose clauses and counter-clauses he intuited with each cast and recast of the cards, covered the choice of south, west and east; of destination; even of the clothes he would wear.

He never cast the cards once the journey had started. There was too much to occupy him. Whenever he looked up there was something new in the landscape. Gorse spilled down the side of a steep little hill with a farm on top. Factory chimneys dissolved in a blaze of sun he couldn’t look into. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage, sounding like the spatter of rain on a window. Between each event his reverie poured itself, as seamless as golden syrup. He wondered what the weather would be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turned to the
Independent
to find out, read: “Global economy likely to remain subdued.” Suddenly, he noticed the wristwatch of the woman sitting across the aisle. It was made of plastic, with a dial transparent to its own works, so that, in the complexity of the greenish, flickering cogs, your eye lost the position of the hands!

What was he looking for? All he knew was that the clean yellow front of an Intercity train filled him with excitement.

Kearney worked in the morning. In the afternoon he cast the Tarot. At weekends he made journeys. Sometimes he saw Inge around the town. He told her about the cards; she touched his arm with a kind of rueful affection. She was always pleasant, though a little puzzled. “It’s just a bit of fun,” she would repeat. Kearney was nineteen years old. Mathematical physics was opening to him like a flower, revealing his future inside. But the future wasn’t quite enough. By following the journeys as they fell out, he believed then, he would open for himself what he thought of as a “fifth direction.” It would lead to the real Gorselands, perhaps; it would enact those dreams of childhood, when everything had been filled with promise, and predestination, and light.

“Michael!”

Kearney stared around him, uncertain for a moment where he was. Light will transform anything: a plastic drinking glass full of mineral water, the hairs on the back of your hand, the wing of an airliner thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. All these things can be redeemed and become for a time essentially themselves. The cabin crew had begun to run up and down the aisles, emptying the seatback trays. Shortly afterwards the engines throttled up and then down again, as the aircraft banked and slipped down into the cloud. Vapour roiled in the wingtip turbulence, then the runway was visible, and the illuminated day transformed itself suddenly into the wet, windswept spaces of London Heathrow.

“We’re landing!” said Anna excitedly.

She clutched his upper arm and stared out of the window. “We’re landing!”

In the end all the journeys had led to, of course, was the Shrander. The Shrander had been waiting for him, all along, to catch up.

Seria Mau opened a
line to the human quarters and found them clustered round the hologram display again. This time it was showing some of the complex machinery in the
White Cat
’s hold, being operated onsite in the middle of a desert of olivine sand and low melted-looking heaps of rock which when you studied them hard turned out to be ruins.

“The guys knew how to party all right,” one of the men said. “This stuff went down at twelve thousand Kelvin, maybe more, from some kind of large-scale gamma emitter. Looks as though they piped the output of a small star in here,” he said. “A million years ago, and they were fighting over assets a million years older than that. Jesus! Will you just look at this?”

“Jesus,” repeated the female clone listlessly. “What a fucking bore.”

They all laughed and gathered round the display. The two women, who were wearing identical shocking-pink tube skirts with a satin look, held hands behind their backs.

Seria Mau stared at them. They made her angry. It was just more fucking and fighting and shoving. All they ever talked about was profit-sharing deals, art events they had seen, holidays at the Core. All they ever talked about was the rubbish they had bought or would like to buy. What use were they to anyone, even themselves? What had they brought aboard her ship? “What have you brought aboard my ship?” she demanded in a loud voice. They started, glanced at each other, she thought guiltily. They looked around for the source of the voice. “Why have you brought this stuff on board?”

Before they could answer she cut away from them to her signature display. There was the K-ship, and tethered to it like a blind camel on a bit of rope was the Nastic battle cruiser. She had identified it now. She had matched its signature to the fakebooks stored in the
White Cat
’s databanks. A front-line cruiser called
Touching the Void,
it was the vessel whose commander had paid her for the
Vie Féerique
ambush. He had told her, “I know where you are going.” She shivered in her tank at this memory.

“What are they doing?” she asked the mathematics.

“Staying where they are,” it reported.

“They’re going to follow me wherever I go!” Seria Mau shrieked. “I hate this! I hate it! No one can follow us, no one is good enough.”