“Always more,” he heard someone say. “Always more after that.”

He threw up suddenly. The entity calling itself Sandra Shen had begun to assemble itself in front of him.

Whatever she was, she had energy. First she presented as Tig Vesicle, with his shock of red hair, eating a Muranese fish curry off the end of a throwaway plastic fork. “Hi, Ed,” he said. “The fuck we are! You know?” But that didn’t satisfy her, so she got rid of it and presented as Tig’s wife, half-naked in the gloom of the warren. Ed was so surprised he said, “Neena, I—” Neena got whipped away immediately and was replaced by the Cray sisters. “Dipshit,” they said. They laughed. Between each version of herself, Sandra Shen filled up the control room with sparkling motes of light, like one of her own tableaux, “Detergent Foam in a Plastic Bowl, 1958.” Finally she firmed up as the Sandra Ed first met, walking briskly along Yulgrave towards him in the blowing snow—a small, plump, oriental-looking woman, her gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh, her perfect oval face shifting constantly as she exchanged youth and yellow old age, her eyes sexy and fathomless with the charisma of something never human.

“Hello, Ed,” she said.

Ed stared at her. “You were all of them,” he said. “None of that was real. You were everyone in that part of my life.”

“ ’Fraid so, Ed.”

“You’re not just a shadow operator,” he guessed.

“No, Ed, I’m not.”

“There was no Tig.”

“No Tig.”

“There were no Cray sisters.”

“Theatre, Ed, every moment of it.”

“There was no Neena . . .”

“Hey, Neena was fun. Wasn’t Neena fun?”

Ed couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt more used and manipulated—more self-disgusted—than at any point in his life before. He shook his head and turned away.

“Painful, isn’t it?” said Sandra Shen.

Ed told her: “Fuck off.”

“That’s a disappointing attitude, Ed, even for a twink. Don’t you want to know the rest of it? Don’t you want to know why?”

“No,” Ed said. “I don’t.”

“It got your head in the fishtank, Ed.”

“Another thing,” he said. “What was all that about? What was happening to me in there? What was that stuff I had to put my head in? Because, you know, it’s disgusting to do that, day after day.”

“Ah,” said Sandra Shen. “That was me. I was always in there with you, Ed. You weren’t alone. I was the medium. You know? Like the proteome in the twink-tank? You swam to the future through me.” She smoked her cigarette meditatively. “That’s not quite true,” she admitted. “I misled you there. I was training you, but not so much to see the future as be it. How’d you like that idea, Ed? Be the future? Change it all. Change everything.” She shook her head, as if this was a bad day for explaining herself. “Put it another way,” she tried. “When you applied for this job, you said you flew every kind of ship but one. What’s the only kind of ship you never flew?”