were moving behind them where they couldn’t see. Emil and Rig and two other men tried to drag Johnnie away but he was dead before they made a hundred yards. ‘He thought it might be for measuring time in there.’
‘Not measuring, it turns out,’ Case said. ‘Manipulating. The Aleph sits here for half a million years. It has interesting physics, very different to ours —’
‘What’s new?’
‘ — but it does nothing with them until it brings Pearl here. We’re not sure if it was waiting for her, or went looking for her, or if it found her by accident.’ He gestured at the superposition state wrestling with its own deep refusal of identity in front of them. ‘Did it intend this to happen? We suspect not. What you see now isn’t the Aleph. It isn’t the woman, either. The two of them are giving rise to some third kind of thing.’
Gaines, still seeing Johnnie Izzet’s blackened faceplate and hearing the music of non-Abelian states at room temperature, made himself say:
‘Where does the cat fit in?’
For a moment, Case looked puzzled.
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Our best guess is that it isn’t really a cat. Any more than she’s really a woman. You know?’
‘I didn’t think physics did metaphors.’
‘Here’s the problem. This thing, whatever it is, has all the hallmarks of an emergent property. It isn’t complete, but it’s already self-determining. It’s already loose. It’s in the labyrinth again, operating the VF14/2b anomalies as a machine. It’s off on some downward causation adventure, separating itself from what you or I would think of as time.’
‘Why?’ Gaines said.
‘Because there’s something it doesn’t like about its own past.’
‘Reinvention never looked so hard,’ was Gaines’ opinion. He suspected you would have to have fairly low esteem to put yourself through this. ‘What if we brought the policewoman here,’ he suggested.
Case shook his head to indicate disbelief.
‘Keep me out of it if you do,’ he said. Then he laughed.
‘You know, the game has changed to such a degree I doubt anything would happen? It hasn’t asked for her since before you were last here. It’s interested in something else now.’
After they had come to an agreement, the assistant left Epstein to it and drove around the city all day in her Cadillac car. Strange forces were at work. She remembered everyone she killed, but she didn’t remember killing Toni Reno. Eventually, midnight or gone, she turned up at the Tango du Chat with George the tailor on her arm. George looked under the weather, but he allowed her to buy him several drinks and paid real attention to everything she said. It was quiet at the Tango du Chat. The music was over for the night. Edith Bonaventure, who owned the place, sat behind the bar reading one of her father’s diaries. People came in for a late drink, then when they saw the assistant — who was mixing Black Heart rum and bishopsweed, giving everyone those louche amused stares of hers — went out again without having one.
At around two thirty am she asked George:
‘Do you think a person like me can forget killing someone?’
She began to tell him all the other things she couldn’t remember about herself. For her, she said, talking to George was like talking to a doctor. It was a release. ‘Someone like you knows everything about someone like me.’
George knew nothing, except that in her present form she had come out of a chopshop tank in Preter Coeur. What he didn’t get was who else had been involved. SportCrime? EMC? Whatever she had been originally, he thought, the dice were loaded against her from that point in the story. Some bunch of charlatans had reinscribed her as a cruel joke. Fourteen-year-old coders and cut-boys, ripped on growth hormone from a native lemur species. He could imagine the smell of their fried food and
‘At birth,’ he told her, ‘this is my guess, you were already thirty, thirty-two years old?’
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘This is why I like you, George.’
Two years later, she said, after a cooling down period to see if she could still be described as human, they had allowed her on stage with all the other walking psychodramas. ‘In my case, the investigated and the investigators.’ She struck an attitude. ‘All those, George, who walk in the shadow. All those who carry a gun. First SportCrime then SiteCrime. I had a hard time adjusting, but I was soon restoring order. I was expected to do well.’ She drank some more rum. ‘George, what’s my reward?’ She grinned at him. ‘It is a wank in the twink tank. A once a week wank,’ she said. ‘It’s very upmarket.’
‘Come out of a tank, you spend your life trying to get back in one.’
She didn’t know about that, she said. ‘But you quickly see that every context has another context wrapped around it, and another one round that.’
This made her laugh restlessly. A few minutes later, she abandoned the gene tailor to his drink and went out to where the camber of the street tilted her Cadillac into the kerb, its white faux-leather ragtop slicked with fine rain. She got in, moving with the care of all those who are bagged. Started its big, reliable V8 engine and sat looking along Straint. Radio on, she thought. The night was yellow. The narrow perspective of the street phosphoresced away in front of her beneath neon signs — Strait Cuts, New Nueva Cuts, Ambiente Hotel — all the way to the Event site. She would end this night like many others, at the Event site under Kefahuchi stars, staring out across the waste lots and the lonely lovers struggling in the backs of cars just like hers, to where physics outdid even her for strangeness: enabling, for an hour, rest. Liminal zones were her forte, she had boasted to George the tailor. She was a liminal zone herself.
‘The moment I understood that, I knew I had to look for a name.’
A name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. She had tried Fortunata, Ceres, Mad Cyril and Berenice. She’d been Queenie Key, Ms Smith, The Business, Vice, Mildew, Miranda, Calder & Arp and Washburn Guitar. She had tried Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Lost Lisa, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet. She’d been Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Lauren Bacall, Avtomat and the little girl who could crack anything. She had tried ‘Frankie Machine’ and Murder Incorporated, The Markov Property, Elise, Ellis and Elissa. She’d been Elissa Mae, Ruby Mae, Lula Mae, Ruby Tuesday, Mae West and May Day. She’d been The One, The Only, The Two Dollar Radio and Flamingo Layne. For a day she had been A Member of the Wedding. Then Spanky. Then Misty. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Helen Keller, Christine Keeler, Olga Tovyevski. KM, LM, M3 in Orion. She liked ‘Sabiha Gokce’ but wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. A name is no good if people don’t know how to pronounce it. She’d been Pauline Gower, James Newell Osterberg and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Emmeline Pankhurst. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Dot Doc. Did she dare call herself, ‘The Blister Sisters’? The Best Engine in the World?
Shortly after she drove off thinking these thoughts, George exited the Tango du Chat and, leaning against a wall, threw up. He wiped his mouth, watched the Cadillac’s tail-lights grow small. He wondered if she would ever leave him alone.
TWENTY TWO
The See-Not Gate
Waking out of a foul dream to gently hectoring telephone calls from her daughter, Anna Waterman allowed herself to be persuaded into one last session with Helen Alpert.
The doctor had spent much of the morning arguing with a Citroen parts supplier in Richmond and was pleasantly surprised when her client arrived carrying take-out lattes and almond croissants for them both. Had Anna lost weight since her previous visit? Perhaps not, Helen Alpert decided; perhaps it was in fact a postural change. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Anna,’ she said, though she never drank coffee after eight in the morning.
On her part, Anna felt ashamed of herself. It was like being the one to break up a relationship. Prior to buying
