From living with himself, Antoyne knew that to be true. Later, when Liv had gone back up to the control room, he rolled over, puked a little, washed up in the corner sink and stared around the cabin at Irene’s scattered underwear: party semiotics in action. The little action cube of her was playing on repeat, sounding scratchy and cheap and far away. In his head he heard her real voice say, ‘It was a lovely world,’ and then: ‘Antoyne, you got to lose me.’ After he cleaned up, he took himself down to the main hold, where he leaned in the doorway and said:

‘So.’

‘Hey,’ Ed acknowledged. He was wiping his fingers on an oily rag. ‘It’s the pizza guy! What do I owe you?’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Very funny.’

‘It’s—’ Ed clicked his fingers ‘—Fat Anthony. Right?’

‘That was years ago. They don’t call me that any more.’ He stared at Ed. ‘What the fuck have you done to yourself this time?’ he said.

Ed grinned. ‘This? I’m not sure. Like it? I picked it up in the Tract.’

‘I heard you were there.’

‘Fat Anthony, you should go too, while you can.’ Ed said he couldn’t think of a way to describe it. It was the big achievement. In there it was eleven dimensions of everything. ‘The entities who run it, they’re all charisma.’ They were over everything, having fun. ‘Fat Anthony, it’s just so fucking different in there. You know?’

‘If it’s that good,’ Antoyne pointed out bleakly, ‘why didn’t you stay?’

‘Come back with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come back with me now. None of this is real when you’ve been in the Tract. Come back with me and see.’

Ed could sell you his own worst dream, caught with an unsteady camera, lit with a bad light. Juice or jouissance, it was always a plunge into something, with a default to the epic, from which, very often, only Ed returned. For a moment Antoyne wondered what decision he would make. Then he said:

‘Why would I do that to myself, Ed?’

The universe went on. Nova Swing ploughed across it, creaking under her own internal stresses. Antoyne cleaned up his act, weaning himself off the peppermint ice over a dog day afternoon. He folded Irene’s underwear and put it away, and in place of that desperate shrine to her constructed another, using the things she salvaged from Perkins Rent. He burned incense there but within days heard her voice telling him not to be a jerk. ‘You make your own life in this life, Antoyne.’

Ed Chianese, meanwhile, spent his time in the hold, working on the mortsafes. Entities came and went while he was down there. Some looked like angels, some looked like operators. You didn’t want to be close enough to tell the difference.