Between Radia Marelli and Tupolev Avenue, the crime tourism quarter lay under rain and the promise of a short life. There was perpetual graininess in the air and the neon light. Every middle manager on North Hemisphere, New Venusport knew about the donkey parlours on Saudade. The chance to do donkey parlour crime – a near death experience worth anyone’s dollar – drew them off the starliners in numbers second only to Preter Coeur on a warm summer’s evening. Their wives came for the sensorium porn. You could tell the wives by their honey-coloured fur coats and ash-blond hair. Sensorium porn was delivered as direct live feed from an alien brain as it tried to understand human sex, or the use of quotidian objects and events from Earth history like a ‘book group’ or a mirror. A mirror was one of the favourites. The EMC wives – puzzled by everything, not so much acting-out as directing the same helpless performance of themselves as they had given all their lives – got off on the cognitive and perceptual gap. The selling point of sensorium porn was that it enabled you, finally, to ‘see the world from a different point of view’. They came down the Creda Line curious and went away users. It was a toxic trade.

The assistant stood with Epstein the thin cop, in the alley off Tupolev where Toni Reno had shucked his mortal coil. They were viewing Toni’s corpse. Epstein had called her half an hour ago and said:

‘You got a problem.’

Since death, Toni Reno’s reflective index had dropped eighty-five per cent across most of the electromagnetic spectrum including visible light. As a result he was hard to make out even in good weather. Every day now, Toni drew a crowd composed partly of tourists on their way to the Llubichik Street arcades, and partly of his followers – twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys who received realtime updates on his condition piped directly into their heads. Toni was nationwide. The more he faded, the more they came to view him. They copied his dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket and bought shoes exactly like Toni Reno’s. Arguments sometimes broke out between them and the passing trade. Or the fans themselves got into arguments about what Toni meant to them, what kind of a role-model Toni really, actually, was. So committed to Toni they had committed suicide over the issue, one or two of them now drew small followings of their own. The uniform branch, Epstein told the assistant, took a back seat as far as this activity went, on the grounds that it constituted either commerce or religion, both being a right you had protected in Saudade.

‘He’s still here then,’ the assistant said.

‘Still here,’ Epstein said.

‘So what’s our problem?’

‘We don’t have a problem.’

‘Then what?’

‘It’s you who has the problem.’