“Goodbye,” she called down.

She rose suddenly, faster than even Dr. Haends’s eyes could follow. Her shadow passed over him briefly and vanished.

After she had gone, he stood there for a time, between the empty K-ship and the remains of the physicist Michael Kearney. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t seem to settle. He bent down and picked up the dice Michael Kearney had brought to that place. He turned them over thoughtfully; put them down again. “That was tiring,” he said to himself. “They can be more tiring than you think.” After a while, he allowed himself to slip back into a shape he was more comfortable with, and stood there for a long time looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract, a small pudgy thing with a huge curved bone beak and a maroon wool coat with food stains down the front, which shrugged and said to itself:

“Well, the rest is yet to do.”

33
Ed Chianese’s Last Throw

The Perfect Low emerged from her journey down the wormhole. Her engine wound itself down then broke up into its component parts. She seemed to consider her options for a minute or two, then made off busily through local space, to arrive a little later above an asteroid in full view of the Kefahuchi Tract.

Ed Chianese sprawled in the pilot seat with his mouth open, breathing heavily. Except that one hand rested on his genitals, he resembled The Death of Chatterton; and if he was dreaming it didn’t show. Looking down at him with an expression in her eyes both maternal and ironic, stood a small oriental woman in a gold cheongsam split to the thigh. She lit a cigarette, smoked it between shakes of the head. Her eyes never left him. You would have said, if she had been a real woman, that she was trying to work him out.

“Well, Ed. Time to get on,” she said eventually.

A few whitish motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. “You know, we should have music for this,” she said. “Something measured.” She raised her hand. Ed was lifted gently out of his seat by the gesture and propelled at a walking pace to The Perfect Low’s nearest hatch; which, when opened, evacuated the atmosphere from the entire ship. Ed, too. He seemed unaware of this event, which was perhaps to the good. A little later he lay in the air—perfectly horizontal, legs together, hands folded on his chest as if for burial—two or three feet off the surface of the asteroid.

“Nice,” said Sandra Shen. “You look nice, Ed.”

She tilted her face to the glare of the Tract, against which could dimly be seen the shape of The Perfect Low.

“I shan’t need you anymore,” she told it.

The ship manoeuvred for a second or two, the aliens in their mortsafes visible briefly in intermittent bursts of torchlight. Then they fired up the Purple Cloud again and were gone.