He reached down more carefully, and this time it rubbed against his hand. Its sides were trembling and emaciated, its head as sharp as an axe, its eyes bulging with opposites—distrust and relief, fear and gratitude. Kearney picked it up and held it close to his chest.

He fondled its ears, called the female cat’s name, looked around hopefully. There was no response.

“I know you’re here,” he said.

Kearney turned the lights out and sat down on Tate’s credenza. He thought that if the female got used to him being there she would eventually come out from wherever she was hiding. Meanwhile, her brother ceased to tremble and began instead to purr, a clattering rumble, disjointed, hoarse as machinery. “That’s a bizarre noise,” Kearney told him, “for an animal your size.” Then he said: “I’d imagine he called you Schrödinger in the end. Is that what he called you? Is he that dull?” The cat purred a moment more then stopped and stiffened suddenly. It peered down into the pile of wrecked equipment and burger cartons.

Kearney looked down too.

“Hello?” he whispered.

He was expecting to see the female, and indeed, there was a whitish flicker down near his feet; but it wasn’t a cat. It was a quiet spill of light, emerging like fluid from one of the ruptured displays and licking out across the floor towards Kearney’s feet. “Jesus!” he shouted. He jumped up. The male cat made a panicky hissing noise and squirmed out of his arms. He heard it hit the floor and run off into the dark. Light continued to pour out of the broken screen, a million points of light which shoaled round his feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into the shape he most feared. Each point, he knew—and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that—would also make the same shape. “There is always more,” Kearney whispered. “There is always more after that.” He threw up suddenly: staggered away, bumping into things in the dark, until he found the outside door.

It hadn’t been rage that made Tate destroy the equipment; it had been fear. Kearney ran into the street without looking back.

17
The Lost Entradas

Human beings, hooked by the mystery of the Kefahuchi Tract, arrived on its doorstep two hundred years after they got into space.

They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.