Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. “I can’t feel it near me,” he admitted. “For once. Perhaps I won’t need them.” He put the dice slowly back in the bag. “In Grove Park,” he said, “in your flat, in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.”

“How would I know?” she said indifferently. “Perhaps I was sick of looking at them. Perhaps I thought it was high time. Michael, what are we doing here?”

Kearney laughed. “I’ve got no idea,” he said.

He had run three thousand miles, and now the fear was abating he had no idea why he had come here rather than anywhere else.

Later the same afternoon they moved into the apartment of a friend of his in Morningside Heights. The first thing Kearney did there was telephone Brian Tate in London. When there was no answer from the research suite, he tried Tate’s house. It was the answer service there, too. Kearney put the phone down and rubbed his face nervously.

Over the next few days, he bought new clothes at Daffy’s, books at Barnes & Noble, and a laptop from a cheap outlet near Union Square. Anna shopped too. They visited Mary Boone’s gallery, and the medieval Cuxa Cloister at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s branch in Fort Tryon Park. Anna was disappointed. “I expected it to look older, somehow,” she said. “More used.” When they ran out of other things to do they sat drinking New Amsterdam beer at the West End Gate. In the brown heat of the apartment at night, Anna sighed and walked about fractiously, dressing and undressing.

11
Machine Dreams

Billy Anker’s location, as disclosed to Seria Mau by Uncle Zip, was several days down the Beach from Motel Splendido. Little would be required in the way of navigation until they encountered the complex gravitational shoals and corrosive particle winds of Radio Bay. Seria Mau checked her supercargo into the human quarters then found herself with nothing left to do. The White Cat’s mathematics took over the ship and sent her to sleep. She was powerless to resist. Dreams and nightmares leaked up from inside her like warm tar.