For half a day the assistant stared out the portholes of the shorthauler Puit Puit Maru, watching dynaflow hallucinations stream past like weed life underwater  and telling herself, ‘I don’t like to travel. I don’t like these cheap seats.’ No one sat near her. The Kunene Port Authority had never heard of the Nova Swing. But the name FUGA-Orthogen seemed familiar to them, and some of the heritage industries still brought machinery in from off-planet: so, because  they  were  overworked  and  underappreciated,   and because after checking her identity not even the police wanted to sit near her, they sent her to the hinterland.  There – away from the lightmeter resorts and fuck safaris, towards the unmoving day where landscape began to dissolve in layers of violet and bony grey under  the inhospitable  glare of late afternoon  – the old Kunene Economic Zone had shrunk to a line of semi-derelict processing plants running thirteen thousand miles north to south, coalescing here and  there  into  poverty towns with names like Douglas or Skelton. Fifty years before, at the height of the lanthanides boom, many of these places had featured a rocket field all their own, and it was on one of these the assistant now found herself, the shuttle she came in on a rapidly-fading  line of ionisation  in clear teal skies.

Administration was an eight-acre lot, thick with low-rise accommodation.   Blue and  white  striped  awnings  creaked  in  the wind. Heavily blistered signs advertised commodities  long past. All seemed deserted: but at reception in a single storey structure reprising  the  moderne  suburban  carport  of 1959, the  assistant found a short, skinny old man wearing golf cap, box-cut shirt and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers, idly throwing Entreflex dice on the polished wooden counter. A thousand faded bills of lading were pinned upon the wall. A switched-off sign read:

PERDIDOS E ACHADOS

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘we’re closed.’

‘I came a hundred  light years to hear that.’

‘Things are tough all over,’ the old man said. He threw the dice, which fell Vegan Snake Eyes, the Levy Flight, the Tower of Cloud. ‘Closed half a century next Thursday,’ he reflected. ‘But you want a drink with me, there’s a bar across the way.’ She laughed.

‘That’s your  dream,  buy  drinks  for  a woman  from  another world?’

‘Everyone has to have a dream,’ he told her, ‘and it’s true you look a lot like mine.’

He had run this office, he said, through  the whole of the lanthanides  boom. ‘A man called Renoko had it before me. It was as good as owning a mine, but less work. Our lives were different then.’ He rested his elbows on the counter and arranged the dice in a high-scoring line. The whites of his eyes were curded with age; his hands, big and soft with their crumpled knuckles and nicely-kept nails, were never still. ‘They were mambo days, but I don’t need tell you that.’

‘I’m looking for a ship,’ the assistant said.