It lasted a minute, maybe two. The lights seemed to flutter up into the softly glowing region where the rickshaw ads blossomed out of the air. Then lights and ads together poured back down into her face, which received them like a dry sponge soaking up tears. Her left leg contracted, then kicked out galvanically. 'The fuck,' she said. She cleared her throat and spat. Pushing into the mud with her feet and hands, she got herself and the rickshaw upright. She shook herself and stared down at Ed. Steam was already coming up off the small of her back into the cold night. 'Nothing like that ever happened to me before,' she complained.

'You were dead,' Ed whispered.

She shrugged. 'Too much speed. I can fix that with more speed. You wanna go somewhere?'

Ed got up and backed away.

'No thanks.'

'Hey, climb in, man. It's free. You got a ride.' She looked up at the stars, then slowly around at the waste ground, as if she wasn't sure how she came to be there. 'I owe you, I can't remember why.'

It was the weirdest ride Ed ever had.

2.30 a.m.: the streets were deserted, silent but for the steady soft slap of Annie Glyph's feet. The shafts moved up and down as she ran, but the cab had a chip to damp the effect of that. To Ed it was like gliding and being motionless, both at once. All he could see of the rickshaw girl was her massive lats and buttocks, painted with electric-blue Lycra. Her gait was an energy-saving shuffle. She was designed to run forever. Every so often she shook her head, and an aerosol of sweat sprayed up into the cab's soft corona of advertising light. The heat of her streamed around him, so that he was insulated against the night. He felt insulated from everything else too, as if being Annie's passenger allowed him to withdraw from the world: take a rest from its mysteries.

When he admitted this, she laughed.

'Twinks!' she said. 'Rest is all you fuckers ever do.'

'I had a life once.'

'They all say that,' Annie advised him. 'Hey,' she said. 'Don't you know not to talk to the rickshaw girl? She's got work to do if you ain't.'

The night ran past, the garment district flowing into Union Square and then East Garden. EMC adprop was everywhere. 'War!' announced the hologram hoardings: 'Are you ready?' Annie turned briefly on to downtown Pierpoint, which was as deserted as if the war had already happened. The tank parlours and chopshops were all closed. Here and there some loser drank Roses whiskey in an empty bar while a cultivar in an apron wiped the bartop with his dirty rag and pondered the difference between life and the semblance of it. They would be like that 'til dawn then go home, still wondering.

'So what did you do, this other life you had?' Annie asked Ed suddenly. 'This, "I wasn't always a twink" life of yours?'

Ed shrugged.

'One thing I did,' he began, 'I flew dipships-'

'They all say that.'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'We don't have to talk.'

Annie laughed to herself. She hung a left off Pierpoint on to Impreza, then another at the corner of Impreza and Skyline. There, she had to pull hard into a half-mile grade, but her breathing barely altered. Hills, her body language implied, were the small change of life to a rickshaw girl. After a while, Ed said:

'One thing I remember, I had a cat. That was when I was a kid.'

'Yeah? What colour was that?'

'It was black,' Ed said. 'It was a black cat.'

He could make a clear mental picture of the cat, juggling with a coloured feather in the hall. For twenty minutes it would put its whole heart into whatever you offered-paper, a feather, a painted cork-then lose interest and fall asleep. It was black and thin, with nervous, fluid movements, a pointed little face and yellow eyes. It was always hungry. Ed could make a clear mental picture of the cat, but he couldn't remember anything about the family house. Instead he had a lot of tank memories, which he knew weren't real because of their shiny completeness, their perfection of structure. 'Maybe there was another cat too,' he said: 'A sister.' But on reflection he knew that wasn't true.

'We're here,' Annie said suddenly.

The rickshaw stopped with a jerk. Ed, thrown back out into the world, stared cluelessly around. Fences and gates, dripping with condensation, rattled in the onshore wind. Behind that, a chilly strip of concrete stretched away into saltmarsh and sand dunes, where an encrustation of cheap, sea-soured wooden hotels and bars could be seen.

'Where's this?' he said. 'Shit.'

'The customer doesn't give a destination, I bring them here,' Annie Glyph explained. 'Don't you like it? I'm on a percentage from the circus. See? Over there.' She drew his attention to a distant cluster of lights, then, when he seemed unimpressed, gave him an anxious look. 'It's not so bad,' she said. 'They got hotels and stuff here too. It's the noncorporate spaceport.'

Ed stared over the fence.

'Shit,' he said again.

'I get a percentage to bring in trade,' Annie said. 'I can take you in if you like.' She shrugged. 'Or I could take you on somewhere. But you have to pay for that.'

'I'll walk,' Ed said. 'No money.'

'No money?'

He shrugged.

'Not much of anything,' he said.

She stared at him with an expression he couldn't interpret.

'I was dying out there,' she said. 'But you took time over me. So I'll run you back to the city.'

'The fact is,' Ed admitted, 'I got nowhere to be, either. No money. Nowhere to be. No reason to be there.' He could see her trying to process this. Her lips moved a little as she looked at him. He understood suddenly that she had a good heart, and that made him feel anxious on her behalf. It made him feel depressed. 'Hey,' he said. 'So what? You don't owe me anything, I enjoyed the ride.' He looked her immense body up and down. 'Your action is good.'

She stared at him puzzledly; then down at herself; and then, across the chain-link fence and the rattling gate in the wind, at the circus by the shore. 'I keep a room over there,' she said. 'See those lights? I bring in custom, they let me have a room. That's the deal I have with them. You want to stay there?'

The gate rattled, the sea air got a little colder. Ed thought about Tig and Neena, what happened to them.

'OK,' he said.

'In the morning you could ask for a job.'

'I always wanted to work in a circus.'

Opening the gate, she looked at him sidelong.

'Kids do,' she said.

The room was hardly bigger than she was, with cheap fibreboard walls that creaked and gave in the sea wind. The walls were off-white, with a couple of loose shelves. There was a toilet and shower in a translucent plastic cubicle in one corner; an induction-oven and a couple of pots and pans in another. She had a futon rolled up against the wall. It was as bleak and transitional a space as you liked, smelling of oil-fried rice and sweat. Cafй йlectrique sweat. Rickshaw-girl sweat. But she had some things of her own on the shelves, which was more than most of them could say. She had two spare Lycra outfits, three old books, and some tissue-paper flowers.

'It's nice,' Ed said.

'Why lie?' she said. 'It's shite.' She indicated the futon. 'I could make us something to eat,' she said, 'or maybe you'd just like to lie down?'

Ed must have looked reluctant.

'Hey,' she said. 'I'm gentle. I never hurt anyone yet.'

She was right. She enfolded him with care. Her olive skin, with its faint down of hair, had a strange strong smell, like cloves and ice. She touched him softly, protected him from her convulsions by coming somewhere deep down inside herself, and gently encouraged him to batter against her as hard as he wanted. When he woke in the night, he found she had curved round him with awkward consideration, as if she was not used to someone being there. The tide was in. Ed lay and listened to the sea roll the stones about in the undertow. The wind hissed. It was soon bluish dawn. He felt the circus begin to wake up around him, though he didn't yet know what that might mean for him. Annie Glyph's tranquil downer breath, the rise and fall of her huge ribcage, soon sent him to sleep again.