“But you could find the place again,” said Seria Mau. She held her breath.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then take me there, Billy Anker. Take me to that planet!”

He looked down at his hands, and after a time shook his head. “It’s important we don’t lead them there,” he said. “You can see that.” He held up his hand to forestall her arguments. “But that’s not the reason. Oh, I’d take you there despite them, because I can tell how much that package means to you. Between you and me and the White Cat, we might lose them on the way—”

“Then why not take me? Why?”

“Because it’s no place for you or me.”

Seria Mau walked her fetch away from him and through a bulkhead. Billy Anker looked surprised. The next time he heard her voice, it was the ship’s voice. It came from all around him. “I see right through you, Billy Anker,” she said. She tut-tutted mildly. “All this talk about leaving the Beach, and you’re too scared to swim.”

He looked angry then stubborn. “That’s no place for human beings,” he insisted.

“I’m not a human being!”

He smiled. His face lit up softly and shed the years, and she saw he was his own man after all.

“Oh yes you are,” he said.

21
War

Ed Chianese continued his training as a visionary.

Madam Shen liked to work in the Observatorium, preferably among the tableaux themselves. She had a personal fondness for “Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999.” Ed, made nervous by the fixed gazes and untrustworthy expressions of the two ancient scientists, felt more comfortable in the front office, or the bar at the Dunes Motel.

His tutor remained unpredictable. Sometimes she came as herself; sometimes as the receptionist with her Dolly Parton tits and Oort Country chat; sometimes as an ill-tempered hermaphrodite carnie called Harryette who wore black singlets to show off the points of her little breasts, often teaming them with colored spandex tights which bulged alarmingly at the crotch. Sometimes she didn’t come at all, and Ed could go back to throwing dice on the blanket. (Though now he had begun to lose regularly. You forfeit your luck when you start trying to see the future in this life, the old men told him, cackling dutifully as they sheafed up his money.) Whoever she came as, Sandra Shen was short. She wore short skirts. She smoked the short local cigarettes of tobacco and bat guano, oval in cross-section, acrid in use. He tried to think of her as a human being: never got to know her well. She wasn’t young anymore, he was certain of that. “I’m tired, Ed,” she would complain. “I’ve been doing this too long.” She didn’t say what, though he took her to mean the Circus of Pathet Lao.