Ed Chianese looked down at the woman, and she looked up at him. There was something so wrong with her face. From one angle it looked beautiful in that oval, high-cheekboned oriental way. Then she turned it, or Ed altered his angle on her, and it seemed to blur and shift into a yellow and wrinkled old age. It was the same face. There was no doubt about that. But it was always moving, always blurred. Sometimes it was old and young at once. The effect was extreme.

“How are you doing that?” Ed whispered.

Without taking his eyes off her he extended a hand towards Tig Vesicle. “Give me the gun,” he said.

“Why?” Vesicle said. “It’s mine.”

Ed said carefully: “Give me the gun.”

The woman got out a little gold case, which she opened, and took from it an oval cigarette.

“Do you have light?” she said. “Ed Chianese?”

She stared up at him, her face blurring and shifting, blurring and shifting. A sudden flurry of sleet went round them both, hot orange sparks off the anvil of circumstance. Ed took the Hi-Lite Autoloader out of Tig Vesicle’s hands and fired it point-blank.

“Right between the eyes,” he would say later. “I shot her point-blank, right between the eyes.”

Nothing happened for a moment. She continued to stand there, looking up at him. Then she seemed to disassemble herself into a stream of tiny, energetic golden motes, which poured away from the point of impact to join the sparks of the rain. First her head dissolved, then her body. She burned away quite slowly, like a firework consuming itself to make light. There was no sound at all.

Then Ed heard her voice, an echoing whisper.

“Ed,” she said. “Ed Chianese.”

The street was empty again. Ed looked down at the gun in his hand, and up from the gun at Tig Vesicle, who was staring into the sky, his face tilted so that rain fell into his open mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” Ed said.

He put the gun away and they both began to run. After a minute or two, Ed stopped and leaned against a wall. “I’m not up to this,” he said. “Are you?” He wiped his mouth. “I hate the fucking dry heaves.” He looked dizzily up at the stars. They were like sparks, too, rushing and pinwheeling across the sky to coalesce, just above the warehouse roofs, into the roseate blur of the Tract. This reminded Ed of something he had been meaning to ask. “Hey,” he said. “What planet am I on?”

Vesicle stared at him.

“Come on,” Ed said. “Be fair. Anyone can have a problem with that.”

New Venusport, Earth’s original outpost in the halo: