Imps got the wrong end of this; felt hurt. ‘Hey, I was careful to ask you things! You claimed you don’t remember!’ But she was already sailing away again, banking white and narrow against the absolute arc of the vacuum. ‘Are we having our first quarrel?’ Imps called after her. The reply arrived too faint to hear, as if she had slipped out of more than local space.

After she found the dead man, the assistant stayed on at Sharp Cuts for an hour, unsure how to proceed. Once or twice she got up from George’s side to look between the window-boards into the street. Eventually she made a call to Epstein the thin cop. She didn’t want him too close to the problem, she said, but she could do with some help. Epstein said it was fine with him, but he had heard she would soon run out of favours elsewhere. The uniform branch arrived to disperse the morning drinkers and extinguish the Cadillac fire. A little later, they towed the shell.

‘I loved that engine,’ she said absently.

The fourth floor at Uniment & Poe sent her a new vehicle from the motor pool. She loaded George into the front seat and drove him across the city to her room by the rocket port in GlobeTown. ‘It’s not much of a car, this one,’ she told him as they passed The Church on the Rock. ‘Look at the church, George.’ Each turn they went round, George’s upper body sagged to one side or the other. In the end she was driving with one hand and using the other to prop him up. Though moving a corpse about was nothing much for a person like her, it was at least something to do. It was something you could throw yourself into. ‘George, you’re too easy to carry,’ she laughed. ‘You should eat more, really. Do less drugs.’ She bore him up two flights of stairs and laid him on her bed. Then she took his clothes off, washed him with a damp towel, paying attention to the clots round his armpit, and got him under the covers. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see?’ George lay there collapsed-looking and stared at the ceiling.

Down in the street, someone was playing Ya Skaju Tebe in a minor key, with pauses a fraction too drawn out. It was sentimental for the people, music for giving things up to, wartime music. Starliners, now converted to troopships, came and went at the port, rays of coloured light pouring off them to wheel across the assistant’s walls, leaving small active patches of ruby-red fluorescence which crawled about like living tattoos. Three kinds of psychic blowback lit George’s thin face, one after the other, and for a moment it looked as if he might say something despite being dead.