"This is Annie," Alice said, coming in behind her.

"Oh boy, you don't look good," the Annie told Paulie. Between the three of them they manhandled DeRaad out of there; it took further effort to get him into the rickshaw. Alice Nylon sat on Vic's knee. Vic sat crushed in next to Paulie and tried to work out what sort of situation he was in. He wished he had handled Edith Bonaventure a little better, because perhaps her father's book would have told him more about Paulie's condition. He wondered if he was about to make another mistake.

"I can't believe this is Paulie DeRaad," the rickshaw girl said after a mile or two. "I mean, is he dead?"

"Turn left into Voigt," Vic told her.

"Hey, forget I asked."

"Are we there yet?" said Alice.

Nothing much had changed in the room off Voigt Street. The smell was still bad. Paulie, who had woken up again as soon as they got close, caught it from twenty yards away. His head went up and his nostrils dilated. He stood passively enough on the steps outside, while Vic struggled with the door and the rickshaw girl clopped away into the night of the noncorporate hinterland, but you could tell he was interested.

If Paulie was interested, so was the boy inside. When they got in the room, he had dragged himself off the bed and pressed himself into a corner. He was naked. He watched them with a soft smile while his hands made shy, pushing motions in Paulie's direction. Paulie smiled too. The boy's whole body shivered once, from head to foot: under the filth it had a clear, waxy look, and it had contracted in on itself a little as if something had been used up inside. "I don't want you," he said in that three-toned voice which sounded more like electronica chords than anything human. A few bright motes trickled out of one eye. Suddenly he made a break for the door, but Paulie reached out and caught his upper arm. The force of the boy's lunge swung them both around. "Hey," Paulie said, as if to himself, "naughty, naughty." They tottered for a moment, clutching at one another, then fell on the bed, where they lay winded and face-to-face. Paulie got a wide gentle smile on his lips and laid his cheek close to the boy's; he whispered something. The boy looked up at the ceiling emptily at first, then he started smiling too.

Vic had no idea what was happening.

"We've got to stop this!" he said.

Alice didn't think there was any need. "Paulie won't hurt him now," she said. "Look. They're friends."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Vic said.

The situation remained like that for perhaps two minutes, then the boy's face got a light in it exactly as if someone had switched on a lamp inside his skull. His mouth opened slowly and light poured out over the room and all over Paulie DeRaad, as bright and fierce as the radiation that took his skin off all those years ago. It was a light you could hear. It had organ values. It issued from the boy's mouth but reflected so instantly off the walls that it seemed to come from everywhere else too. Vic and Alice covered their eyes but they could still see the light unabated, and they thought they could feel heat though no heat was there. Then it had passed, and the room was quiet and dark again, and the boy on the bed was just a Point kid lying confused and naked in his own filth and tangled clothes. Paulie DeRaad lay next to him with his eyes staring open, screaming at his old friend Vic:

"You fuck! You fuck!"

"Paulie, I-"

"It's daughter-code, Vic. You fucking unprofessional fuck, you brought me a daughter and I'm walking around dead!"

He wasn't walking around at all. Paulie was lying there on his back immobile except for some of his face, mostly the eyes and mouth. His eyes were popped out with the effort of holding something at bay. His jaw was clenched so hard his voice sounded as if it came down a bad datapipe from some location in the parking orbit. You could hear his teeth crack. His hands plucked at his clothes. "This isn't me," he said. "Am I me?" He laughed suddenly. It was the distinctive DeRaad laugh, they heard it from CorCaroli to Motel Splendido, wherever there were difficult times to be had. "Hey! Vic! Like the old days!" This thought seemed to relax him. He sighed and turned to face the boy; code began to pour t out the boy's mouth like cold tapioca. Vic and Alice pulled them apart. The boy convulsed, rolled away, curled up in a foetal position, held a murmured conversation with himself in three different voices. By then Paulie DeRaad was unconscious again. He had managed to get some of his clothes off and his bare arms had the same waxy pliable look as the boy's.

"This was such a fucking mistake," Vic said. "We should take him back to the club."

Alice shook her head.

"Leave it with me," she said. "He needs to be in his own place now. I don't want the Semiramide crowd to know about this."

"I can't tell what you're thinking, Alice."

Alice smiled vaguely. "I'll take care of him for now," she said. Her eyes were inturned and he realised that she had dialled someone up. Just because Alice was eight didn't mean she was bad help: the contrary was true, or she wouldn't be Paulie DeRaad's best little girl. She was already on it. She was making arrangements. "Yeah," she said, "ten minutes, Map Boy. Back of Voigt. By the way, a rickshaw won't do it. Hey, don't try to fuck me with that. And don't come in," here she gave a flat little chuckle, "unless you ain't got enough problems of your own. Yeah, yeah, fuck off, I heard it all before." She joked a little more with Map Boy, then her eyes refocused and she said, "You still here, Vic? To be honest I don't need you around now." Serotonin shrugged and went to the door. He was halfway out when she called:

"You'd better know how to sort this out, Vic."

It was two a.m. by then, and he felt peripheral to everything, especially Paulie. DeRaad always thought of Vic as one of his contemporaries. Though nothing could be further from the case, there being twenty years in it as far as Vic knew, Vic had always understood this as a compliment he might one day deserve-as though in Paulie's book you could be elected to a generation particularly favoured by craziness and poor judgment. At the beginning of their relationship Vic had been flattered, but for some years now he had no intention of ending up like Paulie or any of Paulie's friends. It complicated his position that he found himself responsible for a bad turn in Paulie's life.

The streets were deserted, and a thin salty mist in the air would be rain by morning. Vic stood undecided for a minute at the corner of Voigt and Altavista; then, rather than go back to the Semiramide Club, turned up his coat collar and took himself off to Straint Street and Liv Hula's bar, where he found Liv herself yawning on one side of the zinc counter, while, from the other, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar made halting conversation.

At about the same time, in his office across the city, Lens Aschemann, a man who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the aged Einstein, was informing his assistant:

"Just from its surface you know when water is deep. As a child you learn to interpret the colour, the movement, the way the light plays on it." Hard orange street light played on Aschemann's surfaces; while his shadow operators, unused and unloved, moved uncomfortably in the corners of the room. "We have a species need," he went on, "to make estimates like that. By implying everything that isn't there-not just in the case itself but in the world the case seems to have some relation to-crime awakes in the detective a similar need.

"Do you understand? No. Well then, think about it, while I go see my friend Emil Bonaventure."

"I'll drive you," the assistant offered.

"A man can't visit his old friend without bringing the police along?" Aschemann asked. He waved his hand dismissively. "Take the night off," he instructed. "Go home, wash your hair."