Directions   followed,  then   the   dial-up   collapsed.  Antoyne looked around the control room, with its homely smells of vomit, fried  food  and  electrical  fields. Wondering  what  Renoko  had meant when he described himself as ‘here’, he got up abruptly and searched the ship from top to bottom.  It took an hour to check every companionway. Sometimes Antoyne felt the need go back and check the ductwork  too. Only when he was sure the Nova Swing was empty did he feel safe enough to leave.

Deep in the eight-acres of the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate, a curiously self-similar grid of buildings, he found the lost property office. Its door hung open. No one had been there for weeks. Dust had drifted across the floor and gathered as a thin film in the curls and creases of the yellowing waybills pinned to the walls. Antoyne called ‘Hello?’ and receiving no answer sat down on a chair to wait. He read some of the paper. ‘Ambo Danse VI, d.i.f. Details at site.’ Over this someone had written, ‘Fedy wants to know where this is!’ A thousand  dice were scattered on the counter, some of them lighting up dimly from inside if you passed your hand above them.  Antoyne sat, turning  the heart-shaped  stone between his fingers and listening to the wind bang about outside as if it had misplaced something. He felt uneasy just sitting there. He found another room: nothing. He poked his head out of the back door, which was off its top hinge, and looked up and down the street. Nothing.

He opened his dial-up and said, ‘Hi!’ but all he could hear in the pipe was a sound like very distant canaries.

‘Renoko?’

Halfway  through  the  afternoon,  he  gave up  and  went  out into  the  avenues between the  buildings.  Everything  seemed to hang suspended in the late afternoon light, static and fried. Even Antoyne’s movements were reluctant. They were the movements of a fatter man. The Mambo  Rey Postindustrial  State, stripping away his pretensions,  had resolved him as an earlier version of himself. It was the story of his life. All the buildings were neglected. In addition some of them were curiously damaged. Splintered wood,  deformed   aluminium   siding.  Cracked  asbestos  panels flung about. In each case it was as if something had burst into the structure  from one avenue and out of it into the next. Antoyne could smell the broken wood in the air. He wandered about until he found himself on the edge of the estate where, the other side of a weed-grown strip of cement, the skeletal sheds and rusting hoppers of abandoned  lanthanide  workings stretched away between empty evaporation ponds and wrecking yards so silted up that the ancient ships seemed to lean at angles out of a milky grey sea. The light was a resin coating on all of it.