It was mid morning, and already two fat cops were pulling a convulsed rickshaw girl from between the shafts of her vehicle. She was flailing about like a foundered horse, cyanosing round the lips as everything went away from her and got too small to see. Street Life was playing on her personal soundtrack, and café électrique had blown up another determined heart. Entering Pierpoint about halfway along its length, Vesicle found there were no numbers on the buildings, nothing he could recognise. Should he walk right to get to the high numbers, or left? He felt a fool. This feeling segued smoothly into panic, and he began changing direction repeatedly in the teeth of the traffic. In consequence he never moved more than a block or two from the side street by which he had entered. After a while he began to catch glimpses of the Cray sisters themselves, holding court outside a falafel parlour as they waited for their rents. He was certain they had seen him. He turned his face away. The job had to be finished by lunch, and he hadn’t even started. Finally he went into a restaurant and asked the first person he saw where he was, to discover that this wasn’t Pierpoint at all. It was a completely different street. It would take hours to get where he was supposed to be. It was his own fault. He had started out too late in the day.

Vesicle woke from this dream weeping. He couldn’t help but identify with the dying rickshaw girl: worse, somewhere between waking and sleeping, “rents” had become “tears,” and this, he felt, summed up the life of his whole race. He got up, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and went out into the street. He had that oddly jointed look, that shambling look all New Men have. Two blocks down towards the Exotic Diseases Hospital, he bought a Muranese fish curry, which he ate with a wooden throwaway fork, holding the plastic container close under his chin and shovelling the food into his mouth with awkward, ravenous movements. Then he went back to the tank farm and thought about the Crays.

The Crays, Evie and Bella, had started out in digitised art retroporn—specialising in a surface so realistic it seemed to defamiliarise the sex act into something machinelike and interesting—then diversified, after the collapse of the 2397 bull market, into tanking and associated scams. Now they were in money. Vesicle was less afraid of them than awed. He was star-struck every time they came in his shop to pick up the rents or check his take. He would tell you at length the things they did, and was always trying to imitate the way they talked.