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“Give it all up, Billy Anker, and come away with me.”

What did she mean by that? What
could
she mean? She was a rocket ship and he was a man. She thought about that. She watched over him while he slept, and had her own dreams.

In Seria Mau’s dreams, which played themselves out as inaccurately as memories in the extended sensorium of the
White Cat,
Billy Anker knelt over her, smiling down endlessly while she smiled up at him. She was in love, but didn’t quite know what to want. Puzzled by herself, she simply exhibited herself to him in a daze. She wanted to feel the weight of his gaze, she realised, in a room full of light, on a summer afternoon. But a kind of shadow version of this event dogged her imagination and sometimes made things seem absurd—it was cold in the house, there was food cooling on a tray, the boards were bare, she was so much smaller than him; all she felt was embarrassment and a kind of uninspired chafing. In an attempt to discover how she should act, she ran footage of Mona the clone’s companions in the days before she blew them out the airlock. From this she learned to say, with a kind of angry urgency, “I want to do it. I want to fuck.” But in the end Seria Mau had no interest in being penetrated; indeed, she was rather upset by the absurdity of the idea.

Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, “I’m committing suicide.”

“Come away now dear and eat,” the shadow operators said listlessly.

“I mean it,” Mona threatened.

She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and—over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa—told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.

She asked him if he could fly the
White Cat
.

Billy Anker didn’t seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.

“What life’s that, kid?” he said vaguely.

Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. “This is where I live,” Mona informed him the next day: “And this is where you live.”

She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth’s deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn’t need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, “Jesus!” in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.

Seria Mau followed these domestic encounters with a kind of amused tolerance. It was like having pets. Their antics could often bring her out of her recurrent cafards, ill-humours and tantrums where the
White Cat
’s hormonal pharmacopoeia could not. She was reassured by Mona and Billy. She expected nothing new of them.

All the more surprising then, four or five days out of Redline, to catch them together in Mona’s bedroom.

The lighting mimicked afternoon leaking through half-closed blinds somewhere in the temperate zones of Earth. An atmosphere of
cinq à sept
prevailed. There was a dish of rosewater by the bed for Billy Anker to dip his fingers in if he started to come too soon. Mona wore a short grey silk slip, which was up round her waist, and lots of lip colour to make it look as if she had already bitten them. She had hold of the chrome bedhead in both hands. Her mouth was open and through the bars her eyes had a faraway look. One breast had come free of the slip.

“Oh yes, fuck me, Billy Anker,” she said suddenly.

Billy Anker, who was curved over her in a manner both protective and predatory, looked younger than he had. His forearms were long and brown, corded in the yellow light. His unbound hair hung down round his face; he still had on his fingerless mitt. “Oh, fuck me through the wall,” Mona said. This gave him pause; then he shrugged, lost his inturned look and carried on with what he had been doing. Mona went pink and gave a fluttering, delicate little cry. That was the last straw for Billy, who after a series of spasms groaned loudly and slumped over her. They slipped apart immediately and began to laugh. Mona lit a cigarette and let him take it from her without asking. He sat up against the bedhead with one arm round her. They smoked for a while then Billy Anker, casting around for something to slake his thirst, drank the rosewater from the bedside dish.

Seria Mau watched them in silence for a moment or two, thinking, Is this how he would have been with me?

Then she took control of the human quarters. She reduced the temperature by tens of degrees. She brought up the lights until they had the glare of hospital fluorescents. She introduced disinfectants into the air-conditioning. Mona the clone threw her arm across her eyes then, realising what must have happened, shoved Billy Anker away from her. “Get off me before it’s too late,” she said. “Oh God, get off me.” She scrambled out of bed and into the corner of the room, where she clung with both hands to the nearest fixed object, shaking with fear and whispering, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”

Billy Anker stared at her puzzledly. He wiped away the aerosol of disinfectant which stood on his face like sweat. Looked down at the palm of his hand. Laughed.

“What’s going on?” he said.

Seria Mau examined him carefully. He looked like a plucked chicken in that light. His flesh looked as grey as his hair. She wasn’t quite sure what she had seen in him.

She said in her ship’s voice: “This is your stop, Billy Anker.”

The clone whimpered, clung on harder, shut her eyes as tight as she could. “You might well do that,” Seria Mau advised her: “It’s your stop too.” She dialled up the mathematics.

“Open the airlock,” she ordered.

She thought for a moment.

“No, wait,” she said.

Two minutes later, something levered its way out of nowhere on a remote curve of the Beach, at the edge of a system no one had ever bothered to name. Empty space convulsed. A splatter of particles organised itself in a millisecond or two from a fireworks display into the ugly lines of a K-ship—the
White Cat,
her torch already alight, heading in-system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic on a brutally straight line of fusion product.

Surveys of the system, carried out fifty years after humanity arrived on the Beach, had found a single solid object in a braiding orbital dance with gas giants. Though a little large, it was strictly a moon. Tidal heating in its core had raised the surface to temperatures resembling Earth’s, generating also a loose and wispy atmosphere which featured the gases that support life. Against a curious greenish arc of sky ballooned the salmon-pink bulk of the nearest gas giant. A single fractal structure occupied the entire planet. Though from a distance this resembled vegetation, it was neither alive nor dead. It was just some mad old algorithm which, vented from a passing navigational system, had run wild then run out of raw materials. The effect was of endless peacock feathers a million different sizes: a clever drawing ramped into three dimensions. Mathematics trying to save itself from death.

Plush and velvety, surrounded by a vanishingly thin mist of itself, this structure defeated the eye at all scales. It did something strange and absorbent to the light. It lay brittle and exfoliated, fragmenting into a viral dust of itself, a useless old calculation which had accidentally become an environment. There was a biome: among its quaint bracts and stalks, local life forms moved with a kind of puzzled stealth. The logic of the ecology was unclear, its terminal fauna provisional. At dawn or dusk, something between a bird and a marmoset might be seen, making its way painfully to the tip of some huge feather to stare anxiously at the face of the gas giant, before it closed its eyes and began a fluting territorial aubade. No one had stayed long enough to find out any more.

The
White Cat
burned a clearing among the feathers, hovered above them momentarily, and lowered herself down. For a minute or two nothing more happened. Then a cargo port opened and two figures debouched. After a pause in which they turned back and seemed to be arguing with the ship itself, they hurried down the already-closing cargo ramp and stood in silence. They were naked, although they had between them what seemed to be some party clothes and the bottom half of an old G-suit. As they watched, the
White Cat
stood on its tail, shot into the sky, and vanished, all in the same easy, practised gesture.

Mona the clone stared helplessly about.

“She might at least have dropped us near a town,” she said. “The bitch.”

Thrown into a fugue to which—for once—the mathematics of the
White Cat
had made no contribution, Seria Mau Genlicher, pilot of the spaceways, dreamed she was ten years old again. One moment her mother was smiling and excited; the next she was dead and in a photograph, which not long later went up into the wet afternoon air in grey smoke.

The father couldn’t bear anything that reminded him of his wife. That photograph was too hard to bear, he said. Just too hard to bear. All winter, he locked himself in his study, and when Seria Mau brought him the tray at lunchtime, touched her cheek and cried. Stay for a moment, he urged her. Be the mother for just a moment. She couldn’t begin to articulate the embarrassment she felt at this. She looked at the floor, which only made it worse. He kissed her gently on the top of the head, then with one finger under her chin, gently compelled her to face him again. You look like her, he said. You look so like her. A gasp came from him. Sit here, no here, like this. Like this. He put his fingers down between Seria Mau’s legs then gasped and burst into tears. Seria Mau took the tray and went out. Why would he do that? She felt as stiff and awkward as someone learning how to walk.

“Waraaa!”
said her brother, ambushing her on the landing. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner.

All that winter, K-ships roared low over the New Pearl River. They made sudden dirty white arcs across the sky. The father took Seria Mau and her brother to the base, to watch those ships come in. It was war. It was peace. Who knew what it would be, out there on the edge of the galaxy, with the Nastic only three systems away, and unknown assets at large in the Kuiper Belt, presenting as lumps of dirty ice? The children loved it. There followed the best and worst of times, marked by parades and marches, economic crashes, political speeches, the overturning of scientific paradigms: fresh news every day. That was when Seria Mau made up her mind. That was when she made her own plans. She collected holograms—little black cubes full of stars, roseate nebulae, wisps of floating gas—the way other girls collected cosmetics. “This is Eridon Omega,” she explained to her brother, “south of the White Cawl. The
Vittor Neumann
pod rules there. Just let the Nastic try anything against them!” Her eyes glowed. “They have ordnance that evolves itself, generation by generation, in a medium
outside
the ship. Whole worlds are at stake here!” She watched herself say this in the mirror, with no idea why she looked so wild-eyed and excited. The morning of her thirteenth birthday, she signed up. EMC were always looking for recruits, and for the K-pods they only wanted the youngest, fastest people they could find.

“You should be proud of me,” she told the father.

“I’m proud,” her brother said. He burst into tears. “
I
want to be a space ship too.”

Saulsignon was a training camp by then. There were wire fences everywhere. The little railway station had lost its look of Ancient Earth, its flower tubs and the tabby cat which made the brother angry because it reminded him of his little black kitten. They stood there, the three of them, on her last day, awkward in the wind and rain.

“Will you get leave?” the father said.

Seria Mau laughed triumphantly.

“Never!” she said.

As soon as this word was out, the dream faded to nothing, like lights going down. When they came up again, they came up in the magic shop window. Ruby-coloured plastic lips. Feathers dyed bright orange and green. Bundles of coloured scarves that would go into the magician’s shiny hat and then hop out as live white pigeons. All that stuff which, though sometimes pretty, was always fake: always made to mislead and dissemble. Seria Mau stood in front of the glass for some time, but the conjuror never came. Just as she was turning to leave, she heard a faint bell ring, and a voice whispered, “When will you come for me, Dr. Haends?” She looked around in surprise at the empty street. There was no doubt about it. The voice had been her own. When she woke, she thought for a moment that someone was bending over her: in the same instant, she saw herself marooning Billy Anker and Mona the clone in the shadow of the gas giant. The memory of an act that bad could only make you feel absurd.