'We're landing!' said Anna excitedly.

She clutched his upper arm and stared out of the window. 'We're landing!'

In the end all the journeys had led to, of course, was the Shrander. The Shrander had been waiting for him, all along, to catch up.

FOURTEEN

The Ghost Train

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters and found them clustered round the hologram display again. This time it was showing some of the complex machinery in the White Cat's hold, being operated onsite in the middle of a desert of olivine sand and low melted-looking heaps of rock which when you studied them hard turned out to be rains.

'The guys knew how to party all right,' one of the men said. This stuff went down at twelve thousand Kelvin, maybe more, from some kind of large-scale gamma emitter. Looks as though they piped the output of a small star in here,' he said. 'A million years ago, and they were fighting over assets a million years older than that. Jesus! Will you just look at this?'

'Jesus,' repeated the female clone listlessly. 'What a fucking bore.'

They all laughed and gathered round the display. The two women, who were wearing identical shocking-pink tube skirts with a satin look, held hands behind their backs.

Seria Mau stared at them. They made her angry. It was just more flicking and fighting and shoving. All they ever talked about was profit-sharing deals, art events they had seen, holidays at the Core. All they ever talked about was the rubbish they had bought or would like to buy. What use were they to anyone, even themselves? What had they brought aboard her ship? 'What have you brought aboard my ship?' she demanded in a loud voice. They started, glanced at each other, she thought guiltily. They looked around for the source of the voice. 'Why have you brought this stuff on board?'

Before they could answer she cut away from them to her signature display. There was the K-ship, and tethered to it like a blind camel on a bit of rope was the Nastic battle cruiser. She had identified it now. She had matched its signature to the fakebooks stored in the White Cat's databanks. A front-line cruiser called Touching the Void, it was the vessel whose commander had paid her for the Vie Fuerique ambush. He had told her, 'I know where you are going.' She shivered in her tank at this memory.

'What are they doing?' she asked the mathematics.

'Staying where they are,' it reported.

'They're going to follow me wherever I go!' Seria Mau shrieked. 'I hate this! I hate it! No one can follow us, no one is good enough.'

The mathematics thought.

'Their navigation system is nearly as clever as me,' it concluded. 'Their pilot is military. He's better than you.'

'Get rid of them,' she ordered.

'You brought this about,' she accused the human beings. The men were beginning to look anxious. They were still casting little glances here and there, as if she had a real presence in the cabin with them. The two women clasped hands and whispered to one another. For now, you couldn't tell which one was the cultivar. 'Turn that thing off,' Seria Mau said. They turned the hologram off. 'Now tell me what use you are to anyone.' While they were trying to think of an answer to this, a small shudder went through the fabric of the White Cat. A moment later a bell chimed.

'What?' said Seria Mau impatiently.

'They're coming up on us,' the mathematics reported. 'Half a light in the last thirty nanoseconds. At the moment it's a soft alarm, but it could harden.'

'Half a light? I don't believe this.'

'What would you like me to do?'

'Arm the ordnance.'

'At the moment I think they're just trying-'

'Put something between us and them. Something big. And make sure it outputs in all particle regimes. I want them blind. Hit them if you can, but just make sure they can't see us.'

'A quarter of a light,' said the mathematics. 'Hard alarm.'

'Well,' said Seria Mau. 'He is good.'

'He's here. It's down to kilometres.'

She said: 'We're ninety-five nanoseconds into a disaster. Where's that ordnance?'

There was a vague ringing in the hull. Out in the flat grey void beyond, a huge flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware the White Cat's massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined. Under cover of this moment-less of grace than of raw insanity and literal metaphysics-Seria Mau cut the drivers and dropped her ship out into ordinary space. The White Cat flickered back into existence ten light years from anywhere. She was alone.

'There, you see,' Seria Mau said. 'He wasn't that good.'

'I have to say he pulled the plug before we did,' the mathematics told her. 'But I can't tell if he got the Nastic vessel out with him.'

'Can we see him?'

'No.'

'Just take us somewhere and hide, then,' Seria Mau said.

'Do you care where?'

Seria Mau turned over exhaustedly in her tank.

'Not at the moment,' she said.

Astern -if the word 'astern' can have any meaning in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions-the explosion was still dying away as a kind of hard after-image in the eye of the vacuum itself. The entire engagement had played itself out in four hundred and fifty nanoseconds. No one in the human quarters had noticed anything, although they seemed surprised that she had stopped talking to them so suddenly.

In a second, or completing, lobe of her dream, Seria Mau was in the garden again:

Weeks after the bonfire, the house was still full of it. The smoke seeped everywhere. Everything was tainted. All those old things the father had burned just came back as their own smoke, and descended on the shelves, the furniture and the window sills. They came back as a smell. The two children stood in their coats and scarves by the circle of ashes, which was like a black pool in the garden. They crept their toes up to its exact edge, and looked down at them there. They looked at each other in a kind of solemn surprise, while the father paced about in the house behind them. How could he have done that? How could he have made a mistake that big? They wondered what would happen next.

The girl wouldn't eat. She refused to eat or drink. The father looked down at her seriously. He held her hands so that she had to look into his eyes. His eyes were a brown so light it verged on orange. People would call those eyes appealing. They were full of an appeal.

'You will have to be the mother now,' he said. 'Can you help us? Can you be the mother?'

The girl ran to the end of the garden and cried. She didn't want to be anyone's mother. She wanted someone to be hers. If this event was part of a life, she didn't like it. She didn't trust a life like that. It would all come to nothing. She ran up and down the garden with her arms out to the sides making loud noises until her brother laughed and joined in, and the father came out and made her look into his sad brown eyes and asked her again if she would be the mother. She looked away from him as hard as she could. She knew how big a mistake he had made: if it's hard to get away from a photograph, it's harder still to get away from a smell.

'We could have her back,' she suggested. 'We could have her back as a cultivar. It's easy. It would be easy.'