‘I came a hundred light years to hear that.’
‘Things are tough all over,’ the old man said. He threw the dice, which fell Vegan Snake Eyes, the Levy Flight, the Tower of Cloud. ‘Closed half a century next Thursday,’ he reflected. ‘But you want a drink with me, there’s a bar across the way.’ She laughed.
‘That’s your dream, buy drinks for a woman from another world?’
‘Everyone has to have a dream,’ he told her, ‘and it’s true you look a lot like mine.’
He had run this office, he said, through the whole of the lanthanides boom. ‘A man called Renoko had it before me. It was as good as owning a mine, but less work. Our lives were different then.’ He rested his elbows on the counter and arranged the dice in a high-scoring line. The whites of his eyes were curded with age; his hands, big and soft with their crumpled knuckles and nicely-kept nails, were never still. ‘They were mambo days, but I don’t need tell you that.’
‘I’m looking for a ship,’ the assistant said.
In reply, he took a green cardboard box off a shelf and emptied it in front of her. Hundreds of dice — some alien, some human, some single, some in pairs — rattled and bounced across the counter. All colours and materials, from bone to ruby plastic, they glittered with buried lights and embedded physics. He passed his hands above them and suddenly it was nothing but win. They were all the same way up. ‘What we lose is ourselves,’ he said, sweeping the dice back in the box then spilling them out again. ‘I seen luggage and pictures. A parcel of rusty knives. Once a thing that looks like a shoe but I find it’s alive. I took delivery of lost kiddies, lost coats, lost antiques including, as you see, these dice of all kinds.’ He shrugged. ‘A rocket ship’s too big for this office.’
The assistant put her hands over his and held them still.
‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ she urged. ‘Black Heart rum is the drink I like, and I take my time over its burnt sugar flavours. That ship I’m after’s called the
The old man looked at her.
‘Wait here,’ he said.
‘Lost dice,’ she called after him: ‘Unlucky for the finder!’
She waited ten minutes then twenty.
Behind the counter he kept it neat: just the box on the shelf, the yellowed waybills on the wall. Everything was very clean. There was a locked back room; there was a back door, opening on to fresh views of the Kunene Economic Zone. When he didn’t return in half an hour, the assistant went out and walked around calling, ‘Hello?’ Intense afternoon light threw shadows across the empty avenues between the buildings. At the end of one silent perspective the rare earth hills revealed themselves; at the end of another, the cracked cement of the landing field. She was in a maze: silent and static, self-similar in all directions, with the air of temporary habitation made permanent by the forces of commerce and psychic decline. ‘Hello?’ Confused by the sameness of things, her tailoring began to hallucinate objects bigger than the spaces they occupied: she switched it to standby. A few minutes later the old man crossed an intersection fifty or sixty yards in front of her. He was pushing some long, heavy, tubular object, leaning into its weight as if into a strong wind. She could hear him groaning with the effort.
When he caught sight of her, he gave a little skip of fear.
‘I am not Renoko!’ he called.
His shirt billowed out behind him. By the time she reached the intersection he had vanished: thereafter she only ever saw him at a remove, dwarfed by the maze, his attempts to run producing comical slow-motion. Eventually, a muted wailing noise rose, as of a painful incident at the most distant edge of the landing field; in the same moment, she rounded a corner to find him hanging eight feet above the ground, revolving in a slow, loose double loop. His white cap was missing. He was smiling. He was dead. Whatever he had been pushing was gone.
Lost and found, the assistant thought.
A voice in her ear whispered, ‘Hi, my name is Pearlent and —’
Her chops came back up in a rush. The context blurred. The assistant smelled target chemistry, tailored kairomones characteristically sweet and rank. A monster like herself, something fixed up by cutters with an adolescent view of the future, it darted away in front of her in random evasion patterns: stinking of HPA hyperactivity; emitting frequencies she could detect but not produce — 27 to 40 gHz, some kind of local surveillance medium; and uploading in an unfocused FTL scream to destinations she couldn’t guess. They duelled between the buildings, thirty or forty seconds without coming to terms. When the assistant paused to listen, the creature froze and shut down its systems; otherwise it stayed in the shadows, kept up the momentum, entered one structure even as it seemed to exit from another, smashing down a door whilst bursting out of a sidewall twenty yards away in a suspended explosion of clapboard fragments. It was faster than her. It was angrier. It had made no attempt to identify or engage her. Instead it seemed to be engaged in an argument with itself. Eventually she gave up. Listened to its footfalls thud and rage away into the distance, where the tilted wrecks of space ships— victims as much of commodity prices as of the high-energy astrophysics out in Radio Bay — sank into badland sediments laced with unexposed ore. The creature spurted off between them, churning up plumes of rotten earth until it vanished, two or three kilometres off, into a line of low hills. Not running away, she thought, so much as struggling to contain its own responses. She went back to the corpse.
The sun beat down. Along the avenue, loose asbestos panels banged in the permanent four o’clock wind. The old man lay on the warm air — one arm outstretched, opposite leg bent, as if demonstrating how to swim sidestroke — leaving a faint blissful wake. He was a little higher up now. His smile had secretive qualities, and he seemed to be straining his eyes to look over his shoulder. Two or three dice floated around his head. In addition he’d attracted an advertisment, which, blown fifty miles from some promateur image-safari in the edges of the twilight zone, swooped and fluttered in counterpoint to his lazy, horizontal figure-of-eight. ‘Amid the perpetual shadows of the terminator,’ it was informing him when the assistant arrived, ‘technical challenge abounds for amateur and professional alike: but to those most in harmony with its subtleties, Kunene Golden Hour is first choice for all the haunting, sometimes disturbing moods we most love.’
R.I. Gaines remained a mystery to her.
‘Skull Radio,’ he had told her, ‘brings down most of the major vibes.’ But when she looked into the device he’d left her, it was like looking in a cheap souvenir. He hadn’t told her how to work it. Her shadow operators discovered nothing. ‘We’re happy to help, dear, of course we are,’ they said: but if Gaines was a name, no one had used it since 2267, the year their kind of records began. ‘So happy to help,’ they said. Meanwhile, EMC was a firewall; it was imperturbable. No other agency claimed him. He was a man with the dress sense of another age. He walked through walls. The assistant sat on the bed in her room and held up the radio at eye level. The little baby skull stared back at her, nested in red lace and drifting sequins.
‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Hey!’ the radio said excitedly, in R.I. Gaines’s voice.
Next, it folded open in some way so that it contained her — though she could still feel it like a solid object in her hands. She heard a kind of music. Sequins floated out of the skull’s mouth and through the assistant into her room, where walls and floor absorbed them. It was a process. Gaines swam into view shortly afterwards. He seemed nervous. She couldn’t quite see what was going on behind him, but she had the idea it was happening in a very large space. ‘Hey!’ he said again.
He said he was a little busy right then.
‘Something happened,’ the assistant told him. Skull Radio, reaching out along the airwaves, running on all the base inconsistencies of the universe, warmed to flesh heat in her hands. The baby seemed to be looking at her now. More of it was in view at the back of the box. It was less bony than she liked, a fat little baby’s body hanging into the box with its legs open. ‘Do you know about this thing called Pearlant?’
There was a long silence. ‘Jesus,’ Gaines said.
She told him about the Toni Reno case, and how the
‘Christ Jesus,’ he accused the assistant, ‘is there more to you than meets the eye? Let me ask you: what are
