"Give me a bottle of Black Heart to go," she suggested to the barkeep; then, "in fact, why don't I drink it here."

"It's your party," the barkeep said.

Later she asked him if he thought she was too old to get a smart tattoo. Still later, unable to remember his answer, she found herself on the sidewalk in front of an Uncle Zip outlet two doors down.

Uncle Zip the gene cutter had turned out to be his own most successful product. Years after his mysterious disappearance in the Radio RX-1 wormhole, you found an Uncle Zip franchise, maybe two or three of them, on every Halo planet. You found the man himself on a stool inside, sweating with his own energy, a fat clone with a sailor's mouth who'd tailor you by day then-well known to be the patron saint of the piano-accordion-play his music all night. His cuts were still fresh and new. He was cutting for EMC, he was cutting for the glitterati and the common man alike; he was cutting, they said, for alien beings. He was nationwide, all the way to the Core. If there was a religion of the Beach stars, Uncle Zip was its theologian, because he showed you how you could always change and move on, how you never needed to be an old-fashioned fixed entity, with all the gravitational penalties that might incur. Uncle Zip was tender to you, as he was tender to everyone, in that if you hurt you could stare in his window, the way Edith was staring now, and see liquid new possibilities for yourself in a thousand drifting holograms which looked as beautiful as boiled sweets, or ancient postage stamps glowing in the true colours of dragonfly and poison dart frog. You just had to have them! You could be Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and sit cute and hungover on Gregory Peck's lap wearing his pyjamas. You could be Princess Diana and sing like a Bronx nightingale at the fatal Kennedy fundraiser in your see-through Givenchy gown. You could go missing from your own life as someone no one ever heard of, by courtesy of DNA pulled at random from a prison hulk at Cor Caroli. You could go half alien, or, it was rumoured, whole hog. You could have the cheapest smart tattoo (known traditionally as a Fifteen Dollar Eagle); or you could get neural chops complex enough, and comprehensive enough, for a management position in the supply-side sex economy of Radio Bay. Whatever you chose, the almost spiritual light spilling out of Uncle Zip's window suggested, you would come out not just new. You would come out someone else and go far away.

Edith shrugged.

She stood there a moment, asking herself if she had truly worn her heart on her sleeve in this life. No answer came. "You had your turn at being new," she told herself. She felt good. She felt like going home and saying to Emil, "When you named the daughter-code after me, you were wrong. While a daughter is all of those things you implied, she's none. She is what comes out of you, why do you need to go in the site to look for her?" But when she found him waiting up for her like any father, in the blue darkness of his room, what she actually said was:

"It's raining again."

Across the bed lay scattered the remaining volumes of his journal. All of them were open, some flat and broken-spined, some with their yellowing pages fanned out stiffly in the streetlight. Smart diagrams in sharp bright reds and greens. Minute brooch-like maps which would speak when you knew the code for them. Directions to places that shifted and vanished twenty years-or twenty seconds-ago, if they could ever really have been said to be there at all. So much of it put together after the fact, which as everyone in this life knows is far too late. Emil's eyes were inflamed from trying to read his own history written this way, caked at the corners, deeper-set than when she left the house. Over the last two days, he had developed a small growth on one eyelid. It was fantastically delicate, convoluted and infolded like petals of flesh, and in some lights resembled a rose.

Edith sat down on the edge of the bed with her elbows on her knees. She felt tired now.

"So read me something you wrote," she said.

"You read. Half a lifetime is in there, I can't even understand my own handwriting. Here, you can read this."

"H. claimed to have made a drawing in Sector Three. Expected [illegible] but got more. A rolling, endless landscape of tall grass. In the foreground, lying in the grass in front of a bench, something that looked partly like a woman partly like a cat. Though it seemed immobile at first, H. said it was slowly changing from one shape to the other. H. said he was 'struck silent' by the potential of this. He was 'full of a tranquil sense of his own possibilities.' Cat a kind of ivory-white colour."

As she read, Emil's face became loose and unfocused, like a face seen at the bottom of a stream. Eventually she saw he was crying. She put down the book and, taking his hands in hers, brought them together so he would be in touch with himself for once. "Are you entradistas always as brave as this?" she said. Emil tried to smile, then something caught his attention, some flash of light on the walls too quick for Edith to see, and she knew he was back in there, with his plans falling apart before he had a chance to put them into practice. He said:

"I dreamed of Vic. I dreamed that Vic came back."

"You never dream, Emil."

Vic Serotonin and his client spent their third night site-side in an abandoned cafeteria. It was in a curious state. Loops of power cable had been dragged out of the walls by some event you could only describe as visceral, while at the same time the stainless steel ranges and glass-fronted food cabinets remained intact and spotlessly clean. Snow fell steadily from near the ceiling, below which, for a couple of hours around midnight, the body of a child about eight years old materialised, wrapped in a crocheted shawl so that only its face was visible. The snow never reached the floor. Elizabeth Kielar stared up at the child and would not look away. He was careful with her after that. In the morning, sun poured in through the knocked-out windows. Vic woke up and found her kneeling in the middle of the black and white tiled floor staring into a flat clear trickle of water. At first she seemed fine. "Look! Look!" she called excitedly. "Fish!" There were smudges of dirt on her face, but her smile was radiant. "Two tiny fish!" By the time Vic joined her, the sun had gone in, so all he saw in the water was his own reflection. It seemed tired, and under some strain, and its hair had turned grey. He looked away before anything else could happen to it.

"That's nice," he said.

"Do you think we can drink this?"

"If you're thirsty, drink the water I brought in. Nothing here is what it seems."

"After all, the fish drink it."

"The fish," Vic explained, "aren't fish."

"I used that water to wash myself. If you fuck often you have to stay clean." She shrugged. "When one fish turns the other turns with it. Did you know that everywhere in the universe shoaling is controlled by the same very simple algorithms?"

Vic stared at her, unsure what to say next.

It was a difficult morning. Though he tried to persuade her, she wouldn't eat anything. Before they could leave, the child was back, wrapped tightly in its shawl, spinning this way then that below the ceiling like a chrysalis in a hedge. Elizabeth crouched as far away as she could get from it, and when he tried to put his arm round her, bit his hand. It was behaviour he recognised from their previous trip. The sensible thing would be to leave her and try to make his way back to Saudade, but they were too far in, and he had broken too many of his own rules. Without personal goals, he was at the mercy of whatever had driven her into the site.

"You must be careful of me, Vic. I'm not really here."

Vic stood up, rubbing his hand. "Where are you, then?" he said.