Antoyne trudged up one slope of dust, down the next, craned his neck at the stripped hull of an early Creda Starliner, leaned in through a second floor factory window to find somewhere he could shit. Some people go to the tailor early in life and have themselves cut so they don’t need to do that. Antoyne wasn’t one of those. A shit was a shit for Antoyne, that’s what he always said: it was a sensation he enjoyed. Although sometimes, given the product, you wondered what was going on inside you. He squatted between some items  of abandoned  machinery  for a couple  of minutes, groaning, then  became aware that  something  was in there with him. It was very close. Perhaps it was even kneeling right next to him, almost brushing his shoulder, and smelling ranker, whatever it was, than Antoyne’s bowel movement. It was amused by him. Full of passive terror, he stared hard away from where he thought it was until it had gone, then pulled up his chinos and fastened his belt. He went into a corner and threw up. Then he left the factory and stared out across the sea of dust, above which, at the horizon, floated mesa after rotting mesa the colour of pigeon’s wings. Sex, he thought. It reeked of sex. There were no tracks in the dust but his own. He had neither seen nor heard anything. On his way back through the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate he spotted the item they were supposed to pick up, floating motionlessly at a street intersection in the distance.

It was a bone colour, on the yellow side of white. Closer inspection revealed it to be twelve feet long, longitudinally ribbed for about two thirds of its length, with a blunt sloping point at one end. It seemed to be made of porcelain with the hair-fine brown craqueleur of an ageing urinal. It was very warm to the touch, like anything  left standing  in the afternoon  sun. Antoyne  shoved it along, up and down the avenues, looking for the landing field. It wasn’t hard work but it wasn’t easy either. Soon he came upon Liv Hula, standing in the middle of the street staring up at a corpse which hung in the air about four feet above her head. When Fat Antoyne arrived all she said was, ‘What do you think of this?’

Antoyne stopped pushing the mortsafe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said.

‘You get dead people,’ Liv Hula agreed, ‘but they don’t float.’