None of them mattered if you were involved with R.I. Gaines. Everything Rig ever did implied that the real action was happening elsewhere. Some other domain of possibilities was being actively explored alongside this one. Gaines’ motives were so obscure – his projects went so unreported, even in the hierarchy of EMC – that in the end only your own part in an op could be described (for the same reason, it could hardly be called a ‘contribution’, since you had no idea what it contributed to). Every time Imps’ alien visitor appeared, she forced him to query not why Rig Gaines wanted him out here in the middle of nowhere, but what facet of his so-called personality had prompted him to agree to come there in the first place.

Days like that, when she had departed, leaving the lights turned off in van Sant’s head, his instruments showed him nothing but his own cast-off past: Levy flight after Levy flight into empty space. He had no consolation but the long slow struggle to understand his own course. That and the Tract. Because the Tract is gaining on us, Imps thought: it’s slowly catching up with the real universe. The first place it would wash over was the Beach. Meanwhile, Imps van Sant was closer to it, he believed, than any other living beachcomber: which meant the first one it would wash over was him.

A long way off, in the ballroom of the Deleuze Motel, the assistant sat recovering herself. She drank barrel proof rum from the bottle and watched the old men work the overend on one another at the Ship Game – adjusting their white caps, shooting the cuffs of their formal shirts with sharp economical gestures, whispering, ‘Well now,’ or ‘Now you fucked.’ In their opinion, the night was moving along: every so often one of them would cock his head at the sound of the ocean, lean across, and, black eyes as empty as raisins, assure the assistant that the night was moving right along. Dice rattled and scattered, shedding alien luck as friction brought them to a standstill. The faint smell of vomit coming and going in the cold air, the assistant realised, originated with her. Three am, the tide was fully out. R.I. Gaines walked in through the sea-facing wall.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘The Ship Game! Make room!’