'No,' she said reasonably. 'No. Look. We have to help him.'

'Christ, Anna! Come on!'

The white cat was crying too. As Kearney watched, it turned its thin, savage little head towards him, and its tears poured out into the room like points of light. They flowed and flowed until the cat itself began to dissolve and spill off Brian Tate's shoulder like a slow glittering liquid on to the floor, while Tate rocked himself to and fro and made a noise like:

'Er er er.'

He was melting too.

An hour later they were sitting in the brightest place they could find open in the centre of London, a pick-up bar at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street. It wasn't much of a place, but it was as far away as they could get from the cold endless suburbs and those streets of decent, bulky stockbroker homes with one lighted room visible between laurels and rhododendrons. The bar did food-mainly odds and ends of tapas-and Kearney had tried to get Anna to eat something, but she had only looked at the menu and shuddered. Neither of them was speaking, just staring out into the street outside, enjoying the warmth and the music and the feeling of being with people. Soho was still awake. Couples, mostly gay, were hurrying past the window arm in arm, laughing and talking animatedly. There was some human warmth to be had by holding your glass steady in both hands and watching that.

Eventually Anna finished her drink and said:

'I don't want to know what happened back there.'

Kearney shrugged. 'I'm not sure it was actually happening like that anyway,' he lied. 'I think it was some sort of illusion.'

'What are we going to do?'

Kearney had been waiting for her to ask this. He found the pocket drive he had taken from Tate, weighed it in his hand for a moment then put it on the table between them, where it lay gleaming softly in the coloured light, a nicely designed object not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Titanium has a look to it, he thought. Today's popular metal. He said:

'Take this. If I don't come back, get it to Sony. Tell them it's from Tate and they'll know what to do with it.'

'But that stuff,' she said. 'That stuff is in there.'

'I don't think it has anything to do with the data,' Kearney said. 'I think Tate is wrong about that. I think it's me this thing wants, and I think it's the same thing that's wanted me all along. It's just found a new way of talking to me.'

She shook her head and pushed the: drive back towards him.

'I'm not letting you go anyway,' she said. 'Where can you go? What can you do?'

Kearney kissed her and smiled at her.

'There are some things I can still try,' he said. 'I've saved them until last.'

'But -'

He slid back his stool and got up.

'Anna, I can get out of this. Will you help me?' She opened her mouth to speak, but he touched her lips with his fingers. 'Will you just go home and keep this thing safe and wait for me? Please? I'll be back in the morning, I promise.'

She glanced up at him, her eyes hard and bright, then away again. She reached out and touched the pocket drive, then put it quickly inside her coat. She shook her head, as if she had tried everything and was now consigning him to the world. 'All right,' she said. 'If that's what you want.'

Kearney felt an enormous relief.

He left the bar and took a cab to Heathrow, where he booked himself on the first available flight to New York.

The airport was stunned into calmness by the late hour. Kearney sat in an empty row of seats in the departure lounge, yawning, peering out through the plate glass at the huge fins of the manoeuvring aircraft and throwing the Shrander's dice compulsively as he waited for night to turn into dawn. He had his bag on the seat beside him. He was going to America not because he wanted to, but because that was what the dice had suggested. He had no idea what he would do when he arrived. He saw himself driving through the heartlands trying to read a Triple A map in the dark; or staring out of a train window like someone in a Richard Ford story, someone whose life has long ago pivoted on to its bad side and is being held down by its own weight. All his strategies were bankrupt. They had been hollowed out years ago by a kind of persistent internal panic. Whatever was happening to him now, though, was new. It had a culminatory feeling. He was going to run again, and probably be caught this time, and perhaps find out what his life had been about. Anything else he had told Anna was a lie. She must have expected that, because just before 5 a.m. he felt her lean over him from behind and kiss him and close her thin hands over his so that he couldn't throw the dice again.

'I knew you'd come here,' she whispered.

TWENTY-THREE

Star-crossed

The commander of Touching the Void tried to contact Seria Mau by fetch.

Something was wrong with his signal, It had lost part of itself, or got mixed up with something else, some of the baroque matter of the universe, before it reached her. The fetch squatted in front of her tank for a full minute, fading in and out of view, then vanished. It was much smaller than she remembered from their previous dealings-a bundle of yellowish limbs barely bigger than a human head, crouching in what looked like a puddle of sticky liquid. Its skin had the shine of roasted poultry. She wondered if that meant there was something wrong, not just with the signal but with the commander himself. She asked mathematics what it thought.

'Contact broken,' the mathematics said.

'For Christ's sake,' Seria Mau told it, 'I could work that out on my own.'

Over the next two days the apparition reappeared at intervals of a minute or two in different parts of the ship, caught by the drifting cameras as a brief subliminal flicker. The shadow operators drove it into corners, where it became panicked. Eventually it flickered to life in front of Seria Man's tank, from which position, stabilising quickly but still too small, it regarded Seria Mau patiently from its cluster of eyes and made several attempts to speak.

Seria Mau eyed it with distaste.

'What?' she said.

Eventually it managed to say her name:

'Seria Mau Genlicher, I — ' Interference. Static. Echoes of nothing, with nothing to echo in. '- important to warn you about your position,' it said, as if completing some argument she had missed the beginning of. The signal faded, then blurted back loudly. ' — modified the Dr Haends package,' it said, and was silent again. It faded into brown smoke, moving its palps agitatedly: but if it was trying to communicate further, she couldn't hear. When it had gone, Seria Mau asked the mathematics:

'What are they doing back there?'

'Nothing new. The Moire pod has lost way a little. Touching the Void is still phaselocked to an unknown K-ship.'

'Can you make any sense of this?'

'I don't think so,' the mathematics admitted.

What does an alien think anyway? What use does it make of the world? As soon as they arrived on a planet the Nastic turned its indigenous population over to excavation projects. They wanted silos, a mile across and perhaps five miles deep. After the lithosphere was laced with these structures, the Nastic would hover by the million in the air above them, on wings which looked as cheap and brand new as a plastic hairslide. No one knew why, although the best guess was that it had religious significance. If you tried to hold more than a practical conversation with a Nastic, it began saying things like, 'The work fails only when the worker has turned from the wheel,' arid, 'In the morning, they face inward like the Moon.' The Nastic colonies, substantial in number, spread from the rim of the galaxy towards its centre, in the shape of a slice from a pie chart. The inference was obvious: they had originated from outside. That being so, no one could suggest how they had travelled the distances involved. Their own myths, in which the Ur-swarm travelled without ships at all, beating its wings down some lighted fracture in the continuum, alternately warmed and fried by radiation, could be discounted.