'This is a difficult system to see in. The fakebooks are clear on that. And Billy Anker says-'

'I appreciate that. But you do agree that something is there?'

'Something's there,' admitted Seria Mau. 'It can't be them. That ordnance would have melted a planet.'

She thought for a moment.

'We'll ignore it,' she said.

'I'm afraid we can't do that,' the mathematics told her. 'Something is happening here and we don't know what it is. They slipped away, like us, just as the ordnance went off. We have to assume this is them.'

Seria Mau thrashed in her tank.

'How could you let this happen!' she shrieked. 'They were gas in eighty nanoseconds!'

The mathematics sedated her while she was still speaking. She heard herself dopplering away into silence like an illustration of some point in General Relativity. Then she dreamed she was back in the garden, one month before the first anniversary of her mother's death. Damp spring now reigned, with Earth-daffodils in the beds beneath the laurel bushes, Earth-sky pale blue between towering white clouds. The house, opening its doors and shutters reluctantly after the long winter, had breathed the three of them forth like an old man's breath. The brother found a slug. He bent down and poked it with a stick. Then he picked it up and ran about with it, going, 'Yoiy yoiy yoiy.' Seria Mau, nine years old, dressed carefully in her red woollen coat, wouldn't look at him, or laugh. All winter she had dreamed of a horse, a white horse which would step so delicately! It would come from nowhere and after that follow her everywhere she went, touching her with its soft nose.

Smiling sadly, the father watched them play.

'What do you want?' he asked them.

'I want this slug!' cried the brother. He fell down and kicked his legs. 'Yoiy yoiy.'

The father laughed.

'What about you, Seria Mau?' he said. 'You can have anything you want!'

He had lived by himself all winter, playing chess in his cold room upstairs, with his hands in fingerless mitts. He cried every lunchtime when he saw Seria Mau bringing the food. He wouldn't let her leave the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and made her look into his hurt eyes. She didn't want that every day of her life. She didn't want his tears; she didn't want his garden, either, with its patch of ashes and its smell of loss among the birch trees. The moment she thought that, she did want him, after all! She loved him. She loved her brother. All the same, she wanted to run far away from them both and sail the New Pearl River.

She wanted to go right up into some space of her own, clutching the mane of a great white horse whose gentle breath would smell of almonds and vanilla.

'I want not to have to be the mother,' Seria Mau said.

Her father's face fell. He turned away. She found herself standing in front of a retro-shop window in the rain.

Hundreds of small items were on display behind the steamy glass. Every one of them was false. False teeth, false noses, fake ruby lips, false hair, X-ray spectacles that never worked. Old, corrupt stuff made of tin or plastic, whose only purpose was to become something else the moment you picked it up. A kaleidoscope that blacked your eye. Puzzles which, taken apart, would never go back together. False-bottom boxes that laughed when they were touched. Musical instruments which farted when you blew in them. It was all false. It was a paradigm of undependability. In the middle of all the other objects, in pride of place, lay Uncle Zip's gift-box with its green satin ribbon and its dozen long-stemmed roses. The rain stopped. The lid of the box lifted a little of its own accord. A nanotech substrate like white foam poured out and began to fill the shop window, while the soft bell chimed and the woman's voice whispered:

'Dr Haends? Dr Haends please. Dr Haends to surgery!'

At this there came a light but peremptory tap on the inside of the glass. The foam cleared, revealing the display to be empty but for a single item. Against a background of ruched oyster satin stood a piece of stiff white card, on which was reproduced the crude and lively drawing of a man in black top hat and tails, caught preparing to light an oval Turkish cigarette. He had shot his cuffs with a flourish. He had tamped the tobacco on the back of his long white hand. Frozen in that moment, he was full of elegant potential. His black eyebrows made ironic arcs. 'Who knows what will happen next?' he seemed to be saying. The cigarette would vanish. Or the magician would vanish. He would tip back his hat with the end of his ebony cane and fade slowly into nothing while the Kefahuchi Tract slithered across the ruched satin void behind him like a cheap Victorian necklace and the streetlight flashed-ting!-off one of his white, even, incisor teeth. Everything would vanish.

Beneath this image, in bold art deco letters, someone had printed the words: 

 Seria Mau woke puzzled, to find her tank flooded with benign hormones. The mathematics had changed its mind. 'I believe after all that we're alone,' it said, and left for its own space before she could comment. This compelled her to call up the relevant displays and give them her attention.

'Now I'm not so sure,' she said.

No reply.

Next, a line opened from the planet below.

'So what happened here?' Billy Anker wanted to know. 'One minute you're talking, the next you aren't?'

'This interference!' said Seria Mau gaily.

'Hey, well, don't do me any favours,' he grumbled. Then he said: 'You want to know the history of that package, maybe I'll help. But first you got to do something for me.'

Seria Mau laughed.

'No one can help you with your dress-sense, Billy Anker; I want to say that from the start.'

This time it was Billy Anker who broke the connection.

She sent down her fetch. 'Hey, come on,' she said, 'it was a joke. What do you want me to do?'

You could see him swallow his pride. You could see he had his own reasons to keep her attention. 'I wanted you to come with me,' he said. 'See some things on Redline, that's all.' She was touched, until his voice got that note she already recognised. 'Nothing special. Or only as special as everything else we know out here on the edge-'

'Let's go,' she interrupted. 'If we're going.'

In the end, though, there wasn't time to do that. Alarms chimed. The shadow operators flew about. The White Cat went up to full readiness. Her battle clocks, reset to zero, began to count off in femtoseconds, the last stop before the unknowable realtime of the universe. Meanwhile, she diverted fusion product into engines and ordnance and began, as a precautionary spoiling measure, to flicker in and out of the dynaflow at random. From this behaviour, Seria Mau judged they were in an emergency.

'What?' she demanded of the mathematics.

'Look,' it recommended, and began increasing the connections between her and the White Cat until, in important ways, Seria Mau became the ship. She was on ship-time. She had ship consciousness. Processing rates ramped up by several orders of magnitude from the paltry human forty bits a second. Her sensorium, analogued to represent fourteen dimensions, echoed with replicas of itself like a cathedral built in 'brane-space. Seria Mau was now alive in a way, in a place-and at a speed-which would burn her out if it lasted for more than a minute and half. As a precautionary measure the mathematics was already sluicing the tank proteome with endorphins, adrenalin inhibitors and warm-down hormones which, operating at biological speeds, would take effect only after any encounter was finished.

'I was wrong,' it said. 'Do you see? There?'

'I see,' said Seria Mau. 'I see the fuckers!'