Ed’s visual cortex, as excited as an ion-pair in a Tate-Kearney device, hallucinated dice emblems in that vast flicker of sky. He saw the Twins, a horse-head, a clipper ship in a tower of cloud like smoke. Beneath these emblems of chance/not-chance, the surface of the asteroid—if that was what it was—stretched away from him, mostly even, covered in a fine white dust. Here and there could be seen the remains of low rectangular structures, their foundations worn to a three-centimetre nub by unknown ablative forces originating in the Tract. Scattered around them in this entradista paradise were the shapes of smaller artefacts, their outlines blurred by layers of dust, each one worth a small fortune in the chopshop laboratories of Motel Splendido.

He tried to think of himself as an artefact.

He bent down and put his ear to the surface. He could hear the K-code not far beneath, singing to itself like a choir.

“You’re still down there,” he whispered.

“Down there and everywhere else. So what do you want to do, Ed?”

Ed got back to his feet.

“Do?”

The Shrander laughed. “I didn’t bring you here just to look at it,” she told him. “If you knew what it was costing in thermodynamic terms just to keep you alive in this—” she paused as if lost for words “—in this fabulous place, you’d blench. Honestly. No, Ed, I’d have been delighted just to bring you here, but it wouldn’t have been cost-effective just for that.”

“So,” Ed said. “What?”

“Don’t be naÏve, Steady Eddy. You can’t stay still in this life. You go on or you go down. What’ll it be?”

Ed grinned. He had the measure of her now. “You were in the twink-tank, too,” he said. He chuckled. “Rita Robinson!” he remembered. “I bet you were Rita Robinson too.” He wandered over to where the skeleton lay, knelt down in the dust and touched its brownish bones. He pulled off a strip of light-bleached rag that had adhered to its ribcage, let it fall, watched the slow gravity take it down.

“So, look,” he said. “What’s the story here?”

“Ah,” said the Shrander. “Kearney.”

“Kearney?” Ed said. “Jesus. Not the Kearney?”