This meant nothing to Ed. After he had passed the part with the eels, instead of seeing his childhood in the house with the grey roof, he had watched himself step off his first rocket ship—a tubby little dynaflow freighter called the Kino Chicken—onto the parched soil of his first alien planet, with a broad sixteen-year-old leer on his face. The monkey was on his back. He was grooving on concepts of infinite travel and empty space. Always more. Always more after that. He stood at the top of the cargo ramp and shouted, “Alien planet!” Never regret anything, he promised himself there and then. Never go back. Never see them again, mothers, fathers, sisters who abandon you. It was no distance at all from that position to the death of Dany LeFebre which had hurt him so bad. It all led so inevitably from the Kino Chicken, through hyperdip, to the twink-tank.

He told Annie Glyph this, as they walked back across the concrete to her room.

“I had another name then,” he said.

Suddenly he thought he was going to be sick again. He crouched down and put his head between his knees. He cleared his throat. Annie touched his shoulder. After a bit he felt better, and was able to look up at her. “I let those people down tonight,” he said. She made him see, the way she always did, that massive calm patience of hers. He threw himself against it because it was what he had.

“If I’m predicting the future,” he said desperately, “why do I always see the past?”

22
Persistent Entities

It was late. People hurried in and out of the restaurants and cinemas, heads down into the wet and windy night. The trains were still running. Michael Kearney zipped his jacket up. While he walked, he got on his cellphone and made an effort to raise Brian Tate, first at Tate’s home, then at the Sony offices in Noho. No one was answering—although at Sony a recording tried to lure him into the maze of automated corporate response—and he soon put the phone away again. Anna caught up with him twice. The first time was at Hammersmith, where he had to stop and buy a ticket.

“You can follow me all you like,” Kearney told her. “It won’t help.”

She gave him a flushed, obstinate look, then pushed her way through the ticket barrier and down to the eastbound platform where—the light of a malfunctioning fluorescent flickering harshly across the upper half of her face—she challenged him: “What good’s your life been? Honestly, Michael: what good has it been?”

Kearney took her by the shoulders as if to shake her; looked at her instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind.

“You’re being ridiculous. Go home.” She set her mouth.

“You see? You can’t answer. You haven’t got an answer.”

“Go home now. I’ll be all right.”