The door slid closed, then open again. Ed’s head protruded, lower down than you would expect.

‘Let’s talk soon,’ he said.

‘Don’t let’s bother,’ said Liv, who thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the hold behind him. ‘Just fuck you, Ed,’ she shouted.

No reply.

‘And fuck your stories. Fuck that you know more than us, and our lives are suddenly part of some weird deal of yours. Our friend is dead, also what you did to this ship is a fucking big inconvenience to us.’

The worst thing wasn’t that so much of him was missing, or that the remainder looked like a display of half-cooked meat in an outdoor market at the end of the day. It wasn’t even that he seemed to be only partly aware you were in the room with him. It was that thirty years had passed. Over distances like that, people drive themselves without much deviation towards the simplest expression of what they are. In the meantime you grow out of them. The only feature Ed retained was the weak grin he got when he knew you had found him out. At the Venice Hotel, and for a month or two afterwards, she had interpreted that expression as a measure of how nice he was. Since then, she could see, he had let it become a substitute for raising his game. Why hadn’t she expected that?

She went back to the crew quarters and explained the situation. ‘Listen Antoyne,’ she said, ‘we have to get him out of here.’

Antoyne, who smelled strongly of Black Heart, would only grunt. As Irene had often predicted, new things are bound to happen to anyone in the end; but Antoyne was bad with any kind of reversal. He had lost weight except over the upper abs, where, in a matter of days, the ice-cream diet had seated itself in a carcinomatic-looking lump. ‘Ed’s not the man we knew,’ she said. In fact the problem was the reverse of that. Ed – who walked out on Liv because she beat him into the France Chance photosphere; who left Dany LeFebre to die down on Tumblehome; who, when he got as sick of himself as everyone else had, spent fifteen years in the twink tank lapping up some mystery shit the immersion media churn out for kiddies – was exactly the man they knew. ‘Antoyne, wake up! He’s not human any more. He has some plan, it takes no account of us or anyone. Wake up!’ Antoyne opened his eyes and considered Liv for a moment with the beginnings of an interest. Then he belched, turned away and began to weep. After that, recent experience told her, no amount of shaking would get his attention.

‘Antoyne, you useless fucker,’ she told him.