Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could react, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. “You see?” said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat’s massive array—aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull—detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. “At the moment,” the mathematics announced, “I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.”

3
New Venusport, 2400 AD

Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm on Pierpoint Street.

He was a typical New Man, tall, white-faced, with that characteristic shock of orange hair that makes them look constantly surprised by life. The tank farm was too far up Pierpoint to do much trade. It was in the high 700s, where the banking district gave out into garments, tailoring, cheap chopshop operations franchising out-of-date cultivars and sentient tattoos.

This meant Vesicle had to have other things going.

He collected rents for the Cray sisters. He acted as an occasional middleman in what were sometimes called “off-world imports,” goods and services interdicted by Earth Military Contracts. He moved a little speciality H, cut with adrenal products from the local wildlife. None of this took much of his time. He spent most of his day on the farm, masturbating every twenty minutes or so to the hologram porn shows; New Men were great masturbators. He kept an eye on his tanks. The rest of the time he slept.

Like most New Men, Tig Vesicle didn’t sleep well. It was as if something was missing for him, something an Earth-type planet could never provide, which his body needed less while it was awake. (Even in the warmth and darkness of the warren, which he thought of as “home,” he twitched and mewled in his sleep, his long, emaciated legs kicking out. His wife was the same.) His dreams were bad. In the worst of them, he was trying to collect for the Cray sisters, but he had become confused by Pierpoint itself, which in the dream was a street aware of him, a street full of betrayal and malign intelligence.