There were no more attempts at communication. The White Cat fled through empty space, while her pursuers hung back like cunning hounds. It was no easier to work out what to do.

Meanwhile, Billy Anker filled the ship. He did the most ordinary things in too large a way. Seria Mau, drawn and repelled at the same time, watched him carefully from the hidden cameras as he washed, ate, scratched his armpits sitting on the lavatory with his pressure-suit down round his knees. Billy Anker smelled of leather, sweat, something else she couldn't identify, though it might have been machine oil. He never took off his fingerless glove.

Sleep was no consolation to him. Dreams lifted his top lip off his teeth in a frightened snarl; in the mornings he looked at himself askance in the mirror. What was there to see? What kind of inner resources could he have, with such an indifferent start in life? Invented and set in motion as an extension of his own father, he had flung himself into the void as a way of validating himself. He had done that mad thing among many other mad things, and got so worn out by them he crept away and spent ten years putting himself back together, while war came closer, and the big secrets got more remote instead of less, and the galaxy fell apart a little more, and everything strayed that bit farther from being fixable -

Give it all up, Billy Anker, she wanted to urge him. Live for the big discovery and you only feed the fat man inside. Also he profits from everything you find. She wanted to beg him:

'Give it all up, Billy Anker, and come away with me.'

What did she mean by that? What could she mean? She was a rocket ship and he was a man. She thought about that. She watched ever him while he slept, and had her own dreams.

In Seria Mau's dreams, which played themselves out as inaccurately as memories in the extended sensorium of the White Cat, Billy Anker knelt over her, smiling down endlessly while she smiled up at him. She was in love, but didn't quite know what to want. Puzzled by herself, she simply exhibited herself to him in a daze. She wanted to feel the weight of his gaze, she realised, in a room full of light, on a summer afternoon. But a kind of shadow version of this event dogged her imagination and sometimes made things seem absurd-it was cold in the house, there was food cooling on a tray, the boards were bare, she was so much smaller than him; all she felt was embarrassment and a kind of uninspired chafing. In an attempt to discover how she should act, she ran footage of Mona the clone's companions in the days before she blew them out the airlock. From this she learned to say, with a kind of angry urgency, 'I want to do it. I want to fuck.' But in the end Seria Mau had no interest in being penetrated; indeed, she was rather upset by the absurdity of the idea.

Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, 'I'm committing suicide.'

'Come away now dear and eat,' the shadow operators said listlessly.

'I mean it,' Mona threatened.

She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and-over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa -told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.

She asked him if he could fly the White Cat.

Billy Anker didn't seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.

'What life's that, kid?' he said vaguely.

Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. 'This is where I live,' Mona informed him the next day: 'And this is where you live.'

She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth's deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn't need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, 'Jesus!' in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.

Seria Mau followed these domestic encounters with a kind of amused tolerance. It was like having pets. Their antics could often hiring her out of her recurrent cafards, ill-humours and tantrums where the White Cat's hormonal pharmacopoeia could not. She was reassured by Mona and Billy. She expected nothing new of them.

All the more surprising then, four or five days out of Redline, to catch them together in Mona's bedroom.

The lighting mimicked afternoon leaking through half-closed blinds somewhere in the temperate zones of Earth. An atmosphere of cinq а sept prevailed. There was a dish of rosewater by the bed for Billy Anker to dip his fingers in if he started to come too soon. Mona wore a short grey silk slip, which was up round her waist, and lots of lip colour to make it look as if she had already bitten them. She had hold of the chrome bedhead in both hands. Her mouth was open and through the bars her eyes had a faraway look. One breast had come free of the slip.

'Oh yes, fuck me, Billy Anker,' she said suddenly.

Billy Anker, who was curved over her in a manner both protective and predatory, looked younger than he had. His forearms were long and brown, corded in the yellow light. His unbound hair hung down round his face; he still had on his fingerless mitt. 'Oh, fuck me through the wall,' Mona said. This gave him pause; then he shrugged, lost his inturned look and carried on with what he had been doing. Mona went pink and gave a fluttering, delicate little cry. That was the last straw for Billy, who after a series of spasms groaned loudly and slumped over her. They slipped apart immediately and began to laugh. Mona lit a cigarette and let him take it from her without asking. He sat up against the bedhead with one arm round her. They smoked for a while then Billy Anker, casting around for something to slake his thirst, drank the rosewater from the bedside dish.

Seria Mau watched them in silence for a moment or two, thinking, Is this how he would have been with me?

Then she took control of the human quarters. She reduced the temperature by tens of degrees. She brought up the lights until they had the glare of hospital fluorescents. She introduced disinfectants into the air-conditioning. Mona the clone threw her arm across her eyes then, realising what must have happened, shoved Billy Anker away from her. 'Get off me before it's too late,' she said. 'Oh God, get off me.' She scrambled out of bed and into the corner of the room, where she clung with both hands to the nearest fixed object, shaking with fear and whispering, 'It wasn't me. It wasn't me.'