The assistant went to the control room door, looked up and down the passageway outside, as if she might find what was needed out there. When you touched things in a rocket like this, your fingers came away slick with the generic talc of other worlds. ‘I see the three of you in the Straint Street bars,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get on so well together. Two or three nights a week you’ll find me down there. Since Aschemann vanished, those bars are my responsibility.’ She had depended on Aschemann. His ghost, which lived among the shadow operators clustered in the ceiling corners of her office, was less use. Most of the time it was just a face. It often seemed to be warning her against something. ‘He taught me to look inward, at places like the Tango du Chat; then, in places like this, outward at the stars. I can never make my mind up what it is I see.’ In the end she found a pink cellular blanket at the foot of the command couch. It smelled as if someone had wrapped an animal in it. ‘Be sure and ask Fat Antoyne to dial me up over this Toni Reno problem. I’m always available, always interested in the things you do.’

She drew the blanket tenderly up over Liv Hula’s body. ‘Warmer now?’ she said; and, pausing at the door before she left, ‘A space captain like you can afford nicer pants than those, honey.’

The assistant thought of herself as someone unafraid to meet her own eyes. She looked into them every day but did not necessarily see anything there. She had her predictable circuit, at work or leisure. Mid-day, she could be found walking between the booths at Preter Coeur, where she knew by heart the fighters, the cutters, the chops; they were like an old-time collection of ‘stamps’ or ‘cigarette cards’ to her. Early mornings she parked her big pink repro car on the Saudade Lots, where the event site bled into its own aureole and something large but not quite visible could often be sensed repositioning itself in the rags of mist. In the evening it was the bars on Straint or the tank farm on C-Street – or she sat in her GlobeTown room, looking in the mirror, watching rocket-port physics crawl over the walls and trying out names for herself.

She tried ‘Sekhet’, she tried ‘Sweet Thing’. She tried ‘Roses’, ‘Radtke’, ‘Emily-Misere’. She tried ‘Girl Heartbreak!’ and ‘Imogen’.

She tried ‘L1 Dominette’.

She looked in the mirror and said: ‘She is too pretty not to get married.’

7 England Calling

SEVEN

England Calling