Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.

“Ten years ago,” he said, “I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn’t alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called ‘science’ from some piece of junk he’d salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.” He laughed softly. “A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn’t.”

“How?”

Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.

“I went down it,” he said.

She stared at him. “But . . .” she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.

She said: “Didn’t you care?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to know,” he said.

“Billy Anker—”

“Oh, it’s no way to travel,” he said. “It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it’s like—” He examined his damaged hand. “Who knows what it’s like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can’t describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can’t give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?” The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himself; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. “I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?”

She couldn’t.

She thought: If you can’t stop yourself trying to attract people this way, Billy Anker, it’s because you have no self-esteem. We want a human being, all you dare show us is the Jack of Hearts. Then suddenly she realised who he reminded her of. The ponytail, if it had still been black; the thin dark-skinned face, if it hadn’t been so tired, so burned out by the rays of distant suns: neither would have looked out of place at the tailorshop party on Henry Street in downtown Carmody, in the soft humid night of Motel Splendido—