Anna approached until the heat began to tighten the skin above her eyes. At that distance, the summerhouse steadied itself. It reverted to the familar. Then a dense spew of smaller items fountained up from the flowerbeds, poured out of the door, blew off the roof, resolving itself into a display of a thousand fireflies, sleet falling through car headlights, showers of jewels and boiled sweets, enamelled lapel badges, shards of stained glass. Strings of coloured fairy lights and fake pearls, glittering Christmas baubles. Little mechanical toys – beetles, novelty swimmers, jumping kangaroos, all powered by rusted-up clockwork from the first great phase of Chinese industrialisation. Parti-coloured juggling balls. A thousand giveaway pens. A thousand cheap GPS systems that no longer ran. Bells and belts. Birds that really whistled; birds that sang. A million tiny electrical components and bits of ancient circuit boards as if every transistor radio ever made had been buried in the earth, and with them – like a kind of grave-goods! – the faint music and voices of Workers’ Playtime, Woman’s Hour or Journey Into Space, everything they once had played. A fog of small consumer goods. All the rubbish of a life, or someone else’s life.

Anna Waterman née Selve stopped a pace or two before the summerhouse door. She tilted her head and listened.

‘Hello?’ she said.

She said: ‘Oh, what is it now?’

Everything was very calm and quiet and smelling of the hotel bathroom when she stepped inside and began to fall. She let go of the computer drive in surprise. At the last moment, James the black and white cat darted between her legs. All three of them, the woman, the animal and the data, fell out of this world together. Glare and dark, strobing into sudden silence and things switching off busily, up and down the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

23 Heart Sounds & Bruits

TWENTY THREE

Heart Sounds & Bruits

MP Renoko – that mysterious software entity which, people said, was all that remained of Sandra Shen’s Circus – had returned lately from an inspection of major Quarantine orbits all over the Halo.

He was tired but happy. With these visits, interesting but necessarily clandestine, his contribution was complete. The cargo in place, the client settled in the hold of the ship they called the Nova Swing, his part in things coming to an end, he took a last walk down by the sea, a mile along from the circus ground on South Hemisphere, New Venusport. Away from motel and beach-bar it was all spray and sunshine, the water booming in on a steep shore strewn with rocks the size of white goods, where sunbathing men and women lay like lizards staring blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them. The huge waves, MP Renoko said, might have been in a hologram for all the notice they took of them.

‘You wonder,’ he added, to the ghost by his side, ‘why they have so little common sense.’