Her name was Inge. He took her to Brown's and, at her request, to a film called Black Cat White Cat by Emir Kusturica. She had long hands, an irritating laugh. She was from another college. 'Look!' she ordered. He leaned forward. Cards spilled across the old chenille tablecloth, fluorescing in the late afternoon light, each one a window on the great, shabby life of symbols. Kearney was astonished.

'I've never seen this before,' he said.

'Pay attention,' she ordered. The Major Arcana opened like a flower, combining into meaning as she spoke.

'But it's ridiculous,' he said.

She turned her dark eyes on him and never blinked.

Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he couldn't say how. Then, waiting for a train to King's Cross the following morning, he identified a relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was-or seemed-random, the sequence of destinations was-or seemed-determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each journey, but-in honour of the metaphor, perhaps-they would always be made by train.

He tried to explain this to Inge.

'Events we describe as random often aren't,' he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and deal. 'They're only unpredictable.' He was anxious she should understand the distinction.

'It's just a bit of fun,' she said.

She had taken him to bed eventually, only to become puzzled when he wouldn't enter her. That, as she had said, was the end of it as far as she was concerned. For Kearney it had turned out to be the beginning of everything else. He had bought his own Tarot-a Crowley deck, its imagery pumped up with all of that mad old visionary's available testosterone-and every journey he undertook after that, everything he did, everything he learned, had drawn him closer to the Shrander.

'What are you thinking?' Anna asked him after they landed in New York.

'I was thinking that sunlight will transform anything.'

Actually he had been thinking how fear transformed things. A glass of mineral water, the hairs on the back of a hand, faces on a downtown street. Fear had caused all these things to become so real to him that, temporarily, there was no way of describing them. Even the imperfections of the water glass, its smears and tiny scratches, had become in some way significant of themselves rather than of usage.

'Oh yes,' said Anna. 'I bet you were.'

They were sitting in a restaurant on the edge of Fulton Market. Six hours in the air had made her as difficult as a child. 'You should always tell the truth,' she said, giving him one of the haggard, brilliant smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.

'What were you really thinking?'

'I was wondering how to get rid of you,' Kearney said.

She laughed and touched his arm.

'That's not enough of a joke, really, is it?'

'Of course it is,' Kearney said. 'Look!'

A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna, delighted, clutched Kearney's arm. 'We're inside a Tom Waits song,' she exclaimed. The more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took out the leather bag that contained the Shrander's dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned back away from him in her chair.

'If you throw those things here,' she said, 'I'll leave you to it. I'll leave you on your own.'

This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.

Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. 'I can't feel it near me,' he admitted. 'For once. Perhaps I won't need them.' He put the dice slowly back in the bag. 'In Grove Park,' he said, 'in your flat, in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.'

'How would I know?' she said indifferently. 'Perhaps I was sick of looking at them. Perhaps I thought it was high time. Michael, what are we doing here?'

Kearney laughed. 'I've got no idea,' he said.

He had run three thousand miles, and now the fear was abating he had no idea why he had come here rather than anywhere else.

Later the same afternoon they moved into the apartment of a friend of his in Morningside Heights. The first thing Kearney did there was telephone Brian Tate in London. When there was no answer from the research suite, he tried Tate's house. It was the answer service there, too. Kearney put the phone down and rubbed his face nervously.

Over the next few days, he bought new clothes at Daffy's, books at Barnes Noble, and a laptop from a cheap outlet near Union Square. Anna shopped too. They visited Mary Boone's gallery, and the medieval Cuxa Cloister at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's branch in Fort Tryon Park. Anna was disappointed. 'I expected it to look older, somehow,' she said. 'More used.' When they ran out of other things to do they sat drinking New Amsterdam beer at the West End Gate. In the brown heat of the apartment at night, Anna sighed and walked about fractiously, dressing and undressing.

ELEVEN

Machine Dreams

Billy Anker's location, as disclosed to Seria Mau by Uncle Zip, was several days down the Beach from Motel Splendido. Little would be required in the way of navigation until they encountered the complex gravitational shoals and corrosive particle winds of Radio Bay. Seria Mau checked her supercargo into the human quarters then found herself with nothing left to do. The White Cat's mathematics took over the ship and sent her to sleep. She was powerless to resist. Dreams and nightmares leaked up from inside her like warm tar.

Seria Mau's commonest dream was of a childhood. She supposed it to be her own. Oddly lit but nevertheless clear, the images in this dream came and went, framed like archaic photographs on a piano. There were people and events. There was a beautiful day. A pet animal. A boat. Laughter. It all came to nothing. There was a face close to hers, lips moving urgently, determined to tell her something she didn't want to hear. Something was trying to make itself known to her, the way a narrative tries to make itself known. The final image was this: a garden, darkened with laurel and close-set silver birch; and a family, centred on an attractive black-haired woman with round, frank brown eyes. Her smile was delighted and ironic at once-the smile of a lively student, rather surprised to find herself a mother. In front of her stood two children seven and ten years old, a girl and a boy, resembling her closely about the eyes; the boy had very black hair and was holding a kitten. And there, behind the three of them, with his hand on her shoulder and his face slightly out of focus, stood a man. Was he the father? How would Seria Mau know? It seemed very important. She stared as deeply into the photograph as she would stare into a face; while it faded slowly into a drifting grey smoke which made her eyes water.

A further dream followed, like a comment on the first: