30
Radio RX-1

In the days that followed The Perfect Low wove her way across the halo. She was all bustle, her hull crowded to capacity, a warm, smelly node of humanity flying in the teeth of the vast Newtonian grin of empty space. A sense of purpose prevailed. Status-conscious and competitive at close quarters, the carnies were always dissatisfied with their accommodation, always, moving children and livestock from one part of the ship to another. Ed pushed his way up and down the packed companionways for a couple of days; then took up with an exotic dancer called Alice.

“I’m not looking for complications,” he warned her.

“Who is?” she said with a yawn.

Alice had good legs and bright expressionless eyes. She lay with her elbows on his bunk, staring out the porthole while he fucked her.

“Hello?” he said.

“Look at this,” she said. “What do you make of this?”

Out in the vacuum, eighty metres from the porthole, hung an object Ed recognised: a mortsafe maybe fifty feet in length, brass-coloured, and decorated with finials, groins and gargoyles, its blunt bow shaped like a head melted and streamlined by time. It was one of Sandra Shen’s aliens. They were never loaded aboard The Perfect Low. Instead, the day the circus left New Venusport they took off too, each firing some weird engine of its own—something that produced a mist of blue light, or curious slick pulses of energy that presented as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth—and giving new meaning to the words “containment vessel.” Since then, they had followed the ship with a kind of relentless ease, flying lazy, complex patterns around its direction of travel, circling it when it lay at rest like aboriginals in the night in ancient movies.

“What do they want?” Alice asked herself. “You know? I wonder how they think.” And when Ed only shrugged: “Because they aren’t like us. Any more than she is.”

She turned her attention to the world they now orbited, which could be seen—if you craned your neck a little and pressed your face up to the porthole—as a long bulge limned by its own atmosphere.

“And look at this dump,” she said. “Planet of the Damned.”

She was right. The Perfect Low’s course was, in circus terms, as unrewarding as it was unpredictable. From the start they had avoided the halo moneypots—Polo Sport, Anais Anais, Motel Splendido—in favour of nightside landings on agricultural planets like Weber II and Perkins’ Rent. Few performances were given. After a while, Ed noticed the ship’s complement getting smaller. He never got the hang of what was going on. Sandra Shen was no help. He would glimpse her off in the distance, mediating an argument between carnies: by the time he had pushed his way towards her, she had gone. He knocked on the control-room door. No answer. “If I’m not doing shows,” he said, “I don’t know why you made me train so hard.” Ed went back to his bunk and sweaty engagements with Alice while the dark matter trailed its weakened fingers down the hull outside. “Another lot went last night,” she would say morosely after they had finished. The ship got emptier and emptier. The next time they landed, Alice went, too.