"I'm sorry," Aschemann said.
This response caused her to return to the car, look in at him in a thoughtful way and say, "What's your name?"
"Pardon?"
"What's your name?"
"You shouldn't have to ask," he said. "Aschemann."
"And that's how your wife spoke to you, is it? Aschemann, pass the hummus, Aschemann, slide the chair over to me so I can stand on it and fetch down this bottle of dark rum. Aschemann, we're old and will die one day."
Aschemann felt hurt at this.
"It's Lens," he said.
"Well then, Lens, it's been nice. You never once asked me my name, but at least now I asked yours. I resign."
"I don't-"
"I'm in for a transfer as soon as this disaster winds itself up."
He didn't seem to hear.
"When I left Utzie," he said, "she would dial me up and say, 'People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else.'" He chuckled. "Two days later it would be, 'Cooped up with yourself twenty-four hours a day, that's life, without remission. Lens, the worst thing in the world is to be inside yourself, you don't even want to be rescued. Yet to be as happy as we were-to be so open to someone else-invites the failure of everything.'" One minute she would be phoning to tell him her plans, she was going to have a garden behind the bungalow-wallflowers, poppies, an iris modified to smell of chocolate-the next her brother had died of bowel cancer. Who died of bowel cancer since the twenty-first century? It was a choice. That whole family had disaster as a lifestyle.
"No one has to lose anyone now," Aschemann said to his assistant. "Perhaps I wanted to know what that was like. Utzie-"
"I know all about Utzie," the assistant interrupted.
Aschemann stared at her. "Who made you responsible for me?"
"You make everyone responsible for you."
He watched her walk away and get into conversation with the uniforms. They were all clustered round the dying child now, he couldn't see why. "You were a good assistant," he called after her. "What are you afraid of, that you might learn something? How could you, when you know everything already?" Then he slid behind the wheel and started the car. He was happy enough with the way things had gone. He had lost Vic, but he still had Emil Bonaventure's notebook. He thought he would drive with the roof down, it was a nice enough day. He picked up first then second gear, nice considerate changes with the unhurried old engine well below its red line. Despite that, he was soon up to fifty or sixty miles an hour. He dabbed the horn at knots of uniforms. People were beginning to shout into their dial-ups. All across the Lots, they watched with mounting puzzlement as the roadster plunged across the concrete and into the interface mist. The assistant- who, if she were honest with herself, had all along expected something like it-loaded her tailoring to its operational limits in an attempt to cut him off; but it was already too late.
Perhaps ten minutes after Vic caught up with her, Elizabeth Kielar discovered abandoned in the road a plaster mannequin meant to represent a child of five or six years old.
It was naked, bald, a greyish-fawn colour, with a sweet, strange expression, the sort of demonstration piece you saw in the window of any Uncle Zip, outfitted with a black uniform beret from some recently-glamorised interstellar war, torso crawling with colourful live pins, the proteins for which had been derived from phyllobate DNA. Its arms were jointed at the shoulders to allow movement, but otherwise its body was moulded in one seamless piece. To the best of Vic's knowledge it had been lying there for a year and a half. He had to persuade her not to pick it up. She looked mutinous, then smiled and said:
"How sad he must be that he has no genitals!"
The shadow of an unseen bird flickered across a window at the end of the street.
"Vic, let's go that way!"
"Do you know why you're here?"
She wouldn't say. It was a contest of wills. "It's safer," he tried to explain, "if you keep your expectations low." But Elizabeth was already working them in deeper by the minute, her expedient simple: if he disagreed with her she simply walked away. The further off the beaten path Vic got, the more nervous he became and the easier it was to persuade him to take another wrong turn. It was what he had always feared.
The landscape continued to change, one moment residential and deserted (though you saw women waiting expectantly at a corner in their best clothes, they were gone as soon as you reached them); the next industrial and derelict. Flares rose from something like a coking plant in the distance, but everything close at hand was fallen down and overgrown. Old separation tanks became shallow lakes, with mudbanks streaked a dark chemical maroon. Something huge passed across the sky: you winced away from its shadow, then saw it was a toy duck looking down-looking in-at you from above with its intelligent bright-blue painted eyes. It was a hypermarket of the meaningless, in which the only mistake-as far as Vic could discern-was to have shopping goals. The idea that you might map things in there in terms of your needs was what had so entrapped and confused Emil Bonaventure's generation. It was safer to learn how things worked, then assemble the portfolio of habits, behavioural tics just this side of the psychotic regime, that stood in for having a clear frame of reference and kept the travel agent from harm.
"Everything smells of sulphur," Elizabeth said. "Does it smell of sulphur to you?" She said, "Do you ever go into a building while you're here? Vic, let's go in one of these buildings! We could fuck in a building, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't you be excited by that?" He explained to her why it was a bad idea. Soon after, her mood deteriorated. She was silent for long periods, then said bitter things in a tired, desolate voice, as if she was in conversation with some ex-lover. "Don't you see," she said, "that I can't talk now? Here?" Vic hadn't asked her to talk. "The life I'm living now," she said, "the life I've been living: I wasn't like this, but now I am." She said:
"It never gets any further away."
"What?"
"That factory. You know, Vic, we walk towards it but it never gets any further away."
"You'll find that in here," he said, just to contribute.
Eventually they were driven off the streets by the rain and the approaching dark. Vic wasn't keen to enter any space he didn't know-they could so quickly become the arena of your worst expectations. But it was night as Saudade knew it, and Elizabeth was cold. She looked up into the rain, which seemed to fall towards her through layers of unsourced light, then down at her clothes. "I'm shivering, Vic," she said in a surprised voice. "Take me home now." Somehow it was the least human thing she had said all day.
Everywhere they tried was full of cats, facing into the corners, lined up along the walls, balancing on the arms of chairs, pressed together too tightly to move. Vic was relieved to find them at such densities. "It means we aren't too far in yet." The ground floor of the building he chose had no internal walls, although you could see the stub brickwork where they had been. A recent flood had left it banked with dirt, which had a packed and crusty look until you touched it, when it fell in on itself in soft wafery structures marbled with colour. There was some kind of expansion chamber fifteen or twenty feet below, through which they could hear volumes of water rushing at intervals. Otherwise it was empty but for echoes. Elizabeth listened for a moment, then nodded as if acknowledging the inevitable. "I remember snow falling very slowly," she said, "the size of coins. Into the long garden in the dark. I remember trodden snow on the pavement outside. Then I remember a street market, a dead cat in the gutter." Vic thought she was describing a process, a sequence, not the memories themselves. He put his coat, then his arm, around her shoulders. They huddled against one of the walls, as far away from the sound of water as they could get. She held his face and began kissing him, then opened her legs and guided his hand down there.