Above them, streaks of violet ionisation went across the face of the gas giant. There was a great whistling thud of displaced air; then another; then a vast emerald fireball somewhere in orbit, as the White Cat began to defend herself against what must be the attentions of the Krishna Moire pod. Suddenly, Seria Mau was half up there with her ship, half down here with Billy Anker. Alarms were going off everywhere along the continuum between these two states, and the mathematics was trying to disconnect her fetch.

“Leave me!” she cried. “I want to stay with him! Someone must stay with him!”

Billy Anker smiled and shook his head.

“Get out of here, kid. That’s Uncle Zip up there. Get out while you can.”

“Billy Anker, I brought them down on you!”

He looked tired. He closed his eyes.

“I brought them down on myself, kid. Get out of here. Take it deep.”

“Goodbye, Billy Anker.”

“Hey, kid—”

But when she turned to answer, he was dead.

I fell for it, she told herself in despair. All the fucking and the fighting. Despite everything I promised myself, I fell for it too.

Then she thought: Uncle Zip! Terror dissolved her, because she had so underestimated that fat man, how intelligent he was, how galaxywide. She had been in his hands from the moment she began to deal with him.

What would she do now?

24
Tumbling Dice

“If I’m predicting the future, how come I always see the past?”

When Ed asked Sandra Shen that question, she was no more help than Annie Glyph. All she did was shrug lightly.

“I think we need practice, Ed,” she said. She lit a cigarette and gave her attention amusedly to something in the corner of the room. “I think we need to work harder.”

Ed never could decode that distant look of hers. If anything, she seemed pleased by the débâcle in the main tent. It filled her full of energy: her other projects languished, and she was around on a daily basis. She kicked the old men out of the bar of the Dunes Motel. He came in and found her fitting it out with equipment of her own, which she was bringing in at night in unmarked crates. This stuff was uniformly old. It featured cloth-covered electric cable, Bakelite casings, dials across which tiny needles rose and fell. There was some kind of amplifier that worked by valves.

“Jesus,” he said. “This is real.”

“Fun, isn’t it?” Sandra Shen said. “Four hundred and fifty years old, give or take. Ed, it’s time we began to work together on this. Put our heads together. What I need to do is fasten these straps round your wrists . . .”