Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life, had, by the age of eight, already made Kearney vulnerable to the attentions of the Shrander. It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the willow, just as it had sorted the stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its attentions had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal water, or felt something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks. Dragons were expressed as the smoke from engines, while the mechanical parts of the engines themselves turned over with a kind of nauseous oily slowness, and Kearney woke to find a rubber thing soaking in the bathroom sink.

The Shrander was in all of that.

5
Uncle Zip the Tailor

Much of the halo is burnt-out stuff, litter from the galaxy’s early evolution. Young suns are at a premium, but you can find them. Still running on hydrogen, they welcome the human visitor with an easy warmth, like the mythic hostelries of Ancient Earth. Two days later, the White Cat popped out next to one of them, switched off her dynaflow drivers, and parked herself demurely above its fourth planet, which had been named, in honour of its generous facilities, Motel Splendido.

Motel Splendido was as old, in terms of human habitation, as any other rock on that quarter of the Beach. It had a tidy climate, oceans, and air no one had fucked up yet. There were spaceports on both its continents, some of them public, others less so. It had seen its share of expeditions, fitted out, kitted up and despatched under the deracinating glare of the Kefahuchi Tract, which roared across the night sky like an aurora. It had seen, and still saw, its share of heroes. Gold diggers of 2400AD, they risked everything on a throw of the dice. They thought of themselves as scientists, they thought of themselves as investigators, but they were really thieves, speculators, intellectual cowboys. Theirs was the heritage of science as it had defined itself four hundred years before. They were beachcombers. They went out one morning with their lives all washed up and returned in the evening corporate CEOs heavy with patents: that was the typical trajectory on Motel Splendido: that was the direction of things. As a result it was a good planet for money. One or two puzzling artefacts lay quarantined in its deserts, which had themselves not been deserts until the escape forty years before of a two-million-year-old gene-patching programme someone had picked up on a derelict less than two lights along the Beach. That had been the big discovery of its generation.