Ed went and got drunk the rest of the day at the Café Surf and was dragged home in the dark by his former gambling partners from the Dunes Motel. There, he found Sandra Shen waiting for him with the fishtank under her arm. The old men laughed and blew on their hands to indicate scorching. “You in trouble now, my man!” they predicted. All that night, pale white motes flickered in the dark in Annie Glyph’s old room; then, later, on the dunes outside. Next day he woke exhausted aboard The Perfect Low. He was alone, and the ship was warming for take-off. He felt the hum of engines through her frame. He felt the tremble in the tips of her fins. The oily preflight roll of the dynaflow drivers came up to him from somewhere below and the hair rose on the back of his neck for the millionth time because he was alive in this place and this time, and leaving it all only to find something else out there.

Always more. Always more after that.

The little freighter shook with the excitement of it too. She balanced herself carefully on a column of flame and in her own tubby fashion hurled herself skyward.

“Hey Ed,” came Sandra Shen’s dry voice a minute or two later. “Look at this!”

The New Venusport parking orbit was full of K-ships. Pods and superpods stretched away as far as Ed could see, hundreds of them, in restlessly layered and shifting formations. They dipped in and out of local space, extruding weapons, as suspicious of one another as animals, hulls simmering gently in a bouillabaisse of particles. They shimmered with navigational fields, defensive fields, fields for target acquisition and ordnance control, fields which shed everything from soft X-rays to hard light. Local space miraged and twisted around them. They were hunting without moving. He could almost hear the poisonous throb of their engines.

War! he thought.

The Perfect Low, receiving clearance, edged between them and out of the lot.

28
Sparks in Everything

After the argument with Anna, Michael Kearney dressed and took the rental car into Boston, where he drank beer and caught Burger King before it closed, after which he sped deliberately up and down the coast road, driving in and out of thick white pockets of fog while he ate a bacon double cheeseburger with fries. The ocean, when you could see it, was a silver strip far out, the dunes at the south end of the bay heaped up black against it. Seabirds cackled on the beach even in the dark. Kearney parked the car, cut the engine, listened to the wind in the grass. He made his way down through the dunes and stood on the damp sand, stirring with the toe of one shoe the bands of tide-sorted shingle. After a moment, he had the impression of something huge sweeping in across the bay towards him. The monster was returning to its beach. Or perhaps not the monster itself, but whatever lay behind it, some condition of the world, the universe, the state of things, which is black, revelatory and, in the end, a relief—something you don’t want to know but are perversely glad to have confirmed. It swept in directly from the east, directly from the horizon. It passed over him, or perhaps into him. He shivered and turned away from the beach, and trudged back up the dunes to the car, thinking about the woman he had killed in the English Midlands, where their idea of a dinner-table game was to ask: