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He had heard words he didn’t understand.

Kefahuchi Tract.

“What does that mean?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”

Mistaking this for an accusation, the woman fell silent and stared at the ground near his feet. She had on a curious mixture of good-quality coats and cardigans; green wellington boots; homemade fingerless mitts. Unlike the others she had no baggage. Her face, tanned by exhaust fumes, alcohol and the wind that blows incessantly around the base of Centre Point, had a curiously healthy, rural look. When she looked up at last, her eyes were pale blue. “I wonder if you could spare me the money for a cup of tea?” she said.

“I’ll do more than that,” Kearney promised. “Just tell me what you mean.”

She blinked.

“Wait here!” he told her, and at the nearest Pret bought three All Day Breakfasts, which he put in a bag with a large latte. Back in Soho Square, the woman hadn’t moved, but sat blinking into the weak sunlight, occasionally calling out to passersby, but reserving most of her attention for two or three pigeons hobbling about in front of her. Kearney handed her the bag.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

She gave him a cheerful smile. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “I take my medication. I always take it.” She held the Pret bag for a moment then returned it to him. “I don’t want this.”

“Yes you do,” he said, taking things out to show her. “Look! All Day Breakfast!”

“You eat it,” she said.

He put the bag down next to her on the bench and took her by the shoulders. He knew that if he said the right thing she would prophesy. “Listen,” he assured her, as urgently as he knew how, “I know what you know. Do you see?”

“What do you want? I’m frightened of you.”

Kearney laughed.

“I’m the one frightened,” he said. “Look, have this. Have these.”

The woman glanced at the sandwiches in his hands, then looked over her left shoulder as if she had seen someone she knew.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want them.” She strained to keep her head turned away from him. “I want to go now.”

“What do you see?” he insisted.

“Nothing.”

“What do you see?”

“Something coming down. Fire coming down.”

“What fire?”

“Let me go.”

“What fire is that?”

“Let me go, now. Let me go.”

Kearney let her go and walked away. Aged eighteen, he had dreamed of himself at the end of a life like hers. He was reeling and staggering down some alley, full of revelation like a disease. He was old and regretful, but for years something had been combusting its way from the centre of him towards the outer edge, where it now burst uncontrollably from his fingertips, from his eyes, his mouth, his sex, setting his clothes on fire. Later he had seen how unlikely this was. Whatever he might be, he wasn’t mad, or alcoholic, or even unlucky. Looking back into Soho Square, he watched the schizophrenics passing his sandwiches from hand to hand, peeling them apart to examine the filling. He had stirred them like soup. Who knew what might come to the surface? In principle, he felt sorry for them, even amiable. The praxis of it was bleaker. They were as disappointing as children. You saw light in their eyes, but it was the ignis fatuus. In the end, they knew less than Brian Tate, and he knew nothing at all.

Valentine Sprake, who claimed to know as much as Kearney, perhaps more, wasn’t at the Lymph Club; no one had seen him there for a month. Eyeing the yellowed walls, the afternoon drinkers, the TV above the bar, Kearney bought a drink and wondered where he should look next. Outside, the afternoon had turned to rain, the streets were full of people talking into mobile phones. Knowing that he would be forced, sooner or later, to face an empty apartment on his own, he sighed with impatience, turned up the collar of his jacket, and went home. There, ill at ease but worn out by what he thought of as the emotional demands of Brian Tate, Anna Kearney and the woman in Soho Square, he turned on all the lights and fell asleep in an armchair.

“Your cousins are coming,” Kearney’s mother told him.

He was eight. He was so excited he ran away as soon as they arrived, off across the fields behind the house and through a strip of woodland, until he came to a pond or shallow lake surrounded by willows. It was his favourite place. No one was ever there. In winter, brown reeds emerged from the thin white cat-ice at its margins; in summer, insects buzzed among the willows. Kearney stood for a long time, listening to the diminishing cries of the other children. As soon as he was sure they wouldn’t follow him, a kind of hypnotic tranquillity came over him. He pulled his shorts down and stood with his legs apart in the sun, looking down at himself. Someone at school had shown him how to rub it. It got big but he couldn’t make it do anything else. Eventually he grew bored and climbed out along a cracked willow trunk. He lay there in the shade, looking down into the water, which teemed with tiny real fishes.

He could never face other children. They excited him too much. He could never face his cousins. Two or three years later, he would invent the house he called “Gorselands,” sometimes “Heathlands,” where his dreams of them, prurient yet somehow transfiguring, could be worked out in a landscape without threat.

At Gorselands it would always be full summer. From the road, people would see only trees, thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate on the old wooden gate. Every afternoon, the pale, scarcely teenaged girls his cousins had become would squat in the warm sun-speckled gloom—their grubby feet slightly apart, their scratched knees and bundled-up skirts close to their chests—rubbing quickly and deftly at the stretched white fabric between their legs, while Michael Kearney watched them from the trees, aching inside his thick underpants and grey school shorts.

Sensing him there, they would look up suddenly, at a loss!

Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life, had, by the age of eight, already made Kearney vulnerable to the attentions of the Shrander. It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the willow, just as it had sorted the stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its attentions had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal water, or felt something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks. Dragons were expressed as the smoke from engines, while the mechanical parts of the engines themselves turned over with a kind of nauseous oily slowness, and Kearney woke to find a rubber thing soaking in the bathroom sink.

The Shrander was in all of that.

Much of the halo
is burnt-out stuff, litter from the galaxy’s early evolution. Young suns are at a premium, but you can find them. Still running on hydrogen, they welcome the human visitor with an easy warmth, like the mythic hostelries of Ancient Earth. Two days later, the
White Cat
popped out next to one of them, switched off her dynaflow drivers, and parked herself demurely above its fourth planet, which had been named, in honour of its generous facilities, Motel Splendido.

Motel Splendido was as old, in terms of human habitation, as any other rock on that quarter of the Beach. It had a tidy climate, oceans, and air no one had fucked up yet. There were spaceports on both its continents, some of them public, others less so. It had seen its share of expeditions, fitted out, kitted up and despatched under the deracinating glare of the Kefahuchi Tract, which roared across the night sky like an aurora. It had seen, and still saw, its share of heroes. Gold diggers of 2400AD, they risked everything on a throw of the dice. They thought of themselves as scientists, they thought of themselves as investigators, but they were really thieves, speculators, intellectual cowboys. Theirs was the heritage of science as it had defined itself four hundred years before. They were beachcombers. They went out one morning with their lives all washed up and returned in the evening corporate CEOs heavy with patents: that was the typical trajectory on Motel Splendido: that was the direction of things. As a result it was a good planet for money. One or two puzzling artefacts lay quarantined in its deserts, which had themselves not been deserts until the escape forty years before of a two-million-year-old gene-patching programme someone had picked up on a derelict less than two lights along the Beach. That had been the big discovery of its generation.

Big discoveries were the thing on Motel Splendido. Every day, in any bar, you could hear about the latest one. Someone had found something among all that alien junk which would turn physics, or cosmology, or the universe itself, on its head. But the real secrets, the long secrets, were in the Tract if they were anywhere, and no one had ever returned from there.

No one ever would.

Most people came to Motel Splendido to make their fortune, or their name; Seria Mau Genlicher came to find a clue. She came to make a deal with Uncle Zip the tailor. She talked to him by fetch, from the parking orbit, but not before the shadow operators had tried to persuade her to go down to the surface in person.

“The surface?” she said, laughing rather wildly.
“Moi?”

“But you would enjoy it so. Look!”

“Leave this alone,” she warned them: but they showed her how much fun it would be, all the same, down where Carmody, a seaport long before it was a spaceport, was opening its sticky, fragrant wings against the coming night . . .

The lights had gone on in those ridiculous glass towers which spring up wherever the human male does business. The streets of the port below were filled with a warm pleasant smoky twilight, through which all intelligent life in Carmody was drifting, along Moneytown and the Corniche, towards the steam of the noodle bars on Free Key Avenue. Cultivars and high-end chimerae of every size and type—huge and tusked or dwarfed and tinted, with cocks the size of an elephant’s, the wings of dragonflies or swans, bare chests patched according to fashion with live tattoos of treasure maps—swaggered the pavements, eyeing one another’s smart piercings. Rickshaw girls, calves and quadriceps modified to have the long-twitch muscle fibre of a mare and the ATP transport protocols of a speeding cheetah, sprinted here and there between them, comforted by local opium, strung out on
café électrique
. Shadow boys were everywhere, of course, faster than you could see, flickering in corners, materialising in alleys, whispering their ceaseless invitation:

We can get you what you want.

The code parlours, the tattoo parlours—all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmody Rose bourbon—the storefront tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark sea, then a late-night trip to Moneytown—wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter rose above them. Music was everywhere, transformation dub bruising the ear, you could hear its confrontational basslines twenty miles out to sea. Above this clamour rose the sharp, urgent pheromone of human expectation—a scent compounded less of sex or greed or aggression than of substance abuse, cheap falafel and expensive perfume.

Seria Mau knew smells, just as she knew sights and sounds.

“You act as if I don’t know anything about this,” she told the shadow operators. “But I do. Rickshaw girls and tattoo boys. Bodies! I’ve been there and done that. I saw it all and I didn’t want it.”

“You could at least run yourself in a cultivar. You would look
so nice
.”

They brought out a cultivar for her. It was herself, seven years old. They had decorated its little pale hands with intricate henna spirals then put it in a floor-length frock of white satin, sprigged with muslin bows and draped with cream lace. It stared shyly at its own feet and whispered: “What was relinquished returns.”

Seria Mau drove the shadow operators away.

“I don’t want a body,” she screamed at them. “I don’t want to look nice. I don’t want those feelings a body has.”

The cultivar fell back against a bulkhead and slid down onto the deck looking puzzled. “Don’t you want me?” it said. It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. “I’m not sure where I am,” it said, before its eyes closed tiredly and it stopped moving. At that the shadow operators put their thin paws over their faces and retreated into the corners, making a noise like “Zzh zzh zzh.”

“Open me a line to Uncle Zip,” said Seria Mau.

Uncle Zip the tailor ran his operation from a parlour on Henry Street down by the Harbour Mole. He had been famous in his day, his cuts franchised in every major port. A fat, driven man with protuberant china-blue eyes, inflated white cheeks, rosebud lips, and a belly as hard as a wax pear, he claimed to have discovered the origins of life, coded in fossil proteins on a system in Radio Bay less than twenty lights from the edge of the Tract itself. Whether you believed that depended on how well you knew him. He had shipped out talented and come back focused, that was certain. Whatever codes he found, they made him only as rich as any other good tailor: Uncle Zip wanted nothing more, or so he said. He and his family lived above the business, in some ceremony. His wife wore bright red flamenco skirts. All his children were girls.

When Seria Mau fetched up in the middle of the parlour floor, Uncle Zip was entertaining.

“This is just a few friends,” he said, when he saw her at his feet. “You can stay and learn a thing or two. Or you can come back later.”

He had got himself up in a white dress shirt and black trousers the waist of which came up to his armpits, and he was playing the piano accordion. A round, rosy patch of blusher on each chalk-white cheek made him look like a huge porcelain doll, glazed with sweat. His instrument, an elaborate antique with ivory keys and glittering chromium buttons, flashed and flickered in the Carmody neon. As he played, he stamped from side to side to keep the beat. When he sang, it was in a pure, explosive countertenor. If you couldn’t see him you didn’t know immediately whether you were listening to a woman or a boy. Only later did the barely controlled aggression of it convince you this voice belonged to a human male. His audience, three or four thin, dark-skinned men in tight pants, lurex shirts and jet-black pompadour haircuts, drank and talked without seeming to pay him much attention, although they gave thin smiles of approval when he hit his high, raging vibrato. Occasionally two or three children came to the open parlour door and egged him on, clapping and calling him Papa. Uncle Zip stamped and played and shook the sweat off his china brow.