The corpse was of an old guy, snappily dressed in a loose shirt worn outside bronze pleat-front  plus fours, with tan loafers, no socks and a white golf cap. He had a quiet smile on his face as if to say, ‘Being dead means less to me than than you’d think,’ and he was swimming in the air, like an instructor  in some new kind of meditational  discipline, tracing a slow, graceful butterfly symbol. Two or three dice drifted in loose orbits round  his head, and a worn-out advertisement from one of the fuck-resorts further into the twilight zone was trying to draw him into a conversation about photography. A hot wind blew up and down the street. Otherwise things were completely silent. Antoyne said:

‘I’m sorry I threw up in your pilot chair.’

He offered Liv the heart-shaped  stone  Irene  had  given him, which she took absently, still staring up at the corpse.

‘Do you want some help with that thing?’ she said.

They got round  the back of the mortsafe  and  leaned into  it. Pushing was much  easier with two. Halfway across the landing field, Liv handed him back the stone.

‘This won’t work, Antoyne,’ she said, giving him a very direct look.

15 Random Acts of Downward Causation

FIFTEEN

Random Acts of Downward Causation

Saudade: Autumn when you could tell. Rain, anyway.

At SiteCrime, all the talk was war. The Nastic – allies for a day or two some time in the middle 2400s, but now in possession of new physics and a hybrid cosmology that trumped the rest – were moving out of bases in Delta Carinae. Rumour said that EMC had a new best buy in its arsenal, even now being R&D’d from alien blueprints on a secret research asteroid in the very shadow of the Tract. No one knew what it was. They called it the ‘field weapon’ or  the  ‘non-Abelian’  weapon.  Meanwhile,  Lens  Aschemann’s ghost hung in a corner on the fifth floor. I don’t pity the dead, the assistant thought, not when they persist like this. Two floors down it was common  knowledge: she would be helpless without  him. One floor up they said she had no personality. What the assistant thought of these opinions, if she knew, went unrecorded.  She did her work. She watched Toni Reno and his loader fade to zero. As Epstein the thin cop put it, there was never a point at which you could safely say, ‘They’re gone’, but after ten days only a sketch remained.

Meanwhile, though  she had alerted Port  Authorities  all over the Halo, the Nova Swing slipped away, and went curiously unreported.