"Hey, Alice," Vic said. "You here to change my luck?"

Alice had backed herself up with two or three of Paulie's soldiers, their faces contorted for Serotonin's benefit into expressions of juvenile threat. She craned her neck to see what was going on in the ring, winced. "So where's your money in this sad affair, Vic?" she wanted to know; and, when he told her, shook her head, indicating professional disbelief. "Looks like we got here too late to save you from yourself," she said. Vic, meanwhile, made a gun of his fingers and aimed it at the kiddies.

"Don't do anything stupid," he warned them.

Alice sighed. "Paulie says to come with us," she informed him not unsympathetically. "He ain't in such a good mood today."

Not too far away in the crowd, Irene the Mona watched these events with a certain amusement. Her eyes were intent. Her intuitions were sharp. In the undependable light of Prefer Coeur her face looked older, and anyone who knew the original Irene-style-refugee from a planet few ever thought to tour-would have recognised her, installed there like a tectonic structure beneath the more obvious curves and planes of the Mona package. It was that Irene, perhaps, who noted how Edith Bonaventure flounced off into the crowd, only to be replaced immediately by Alice Nylon, as if those two were the single bald choice in Vic's world, the splitting point on a lonely man's journey. It was that Irene, perhaps, who thought to herself, It's easier to get into that stream than out of it, my girl; while to Fat Antoyne Messner she observed:

"Things will always catch up with Vic Serotonin."

"I got to agree with that."

At Preter Coeur he would agree with most things Irene said. He was a man of sluggish temperament, she felt bound to admit: but the fights made him put his arm around her, and buy cheap things. The fights made him want to have sex. What she liked most about sex with Fat Antoyne was how unpractised and tentative he was- how unprofessional. She could press his head to her breast after he came and he was still sprawled there panting and saying, "I'm sorry," and reassure him, "Shush, shush, I like any kind of fucking. I'm made that way." Being with Antoyne in those circumstances caused her heart to swell up warm, so that she had dreams of being one of the alpha females of Ancient Earth.

She watched Alice Nylon lead Vic away, and clutching Fat Antoyne's arm, said:

"Hey, you know, maybe Vic would help us."

"I ain't asking Vic," said Fat Antoyne.

"Well then, we'll just have to find the money another way," she told him. "Maybe we could sell something?"

"I haven't got anything."

"Everyone's got something they can sell, pet. Oh Antoyne, we'll soon be so happy and successful! But real. Wherever we go we'll stay very real and good, and make all the best decisions out there in those million stars. / heart love! we'll say. / heart my life because it's so real up there on TV!" While she counselled herself quite rightly: We will have to get him Zipped first. He can buy a package makes him look razor and quick with those hands, but sensitive too; and underneath he'll still be the Antoyne I know and love. He will always be Antoyne to me, who comes too quick and doesn't understand I can forgive that because I seen it all.

An hour later, when Alice Nylon and her punks delivered Vic to the back office of the Semiramide Club, Paulie DeRaad was sprawled in the same chair Vic had last seen him in, as if during the intervening period he hadn't moved at all, only got sick. Alice believed he had sat there for at least a day. She brought him drinks from the bar, she said, but he didn't seem as interested as usual; in fact he didn't seem interested at all. "He's not himself, you know?" she said to Vic. "Generally, you fetch him a Night Train, he'll put it down in one and crush the can that way he has against the side of his head, it's all one fluid move? Well, today he don't drink nothing. Then he wakes up suddenly and asks for you."

"How did he put that?"

"Well, he says, you know, bring that fucking fucker Vic to me," Alice recalled. "Then he's like this again. I mean," she offered, "take a look."

Paulie's legs were straight out in front of him, his head thrown back as if the chair had a headrest, which it did not but was just an ordinary uncomfortable moulded chair. His whole body was in a rigid condition. Where it wasn't the bluish colour of milk, his skin had a heavy-metal tinge particularly evident where it was ablated around his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were closed, though somehow you gained the impression they might flicker open any moment. It was hard to tell how sick Paulie was, and Paulie himself didn't help with this. He was smiling as happily as a girl. Some of those smiles were surprising, they were surprisingly sexy. It was as if Paulie wanted to share something. Sometimes he wanted to share it so much that he was practically winking. Vic Serotonin didn't care to know what it was. These weren't real smiles, he could tell: they were what you got when there was nothing left to smile for.

"Fuck it, Paulie," Vic said.

"He wakes up sometimes, we don't understand what he says."

Vic went to the office door, which he opened a crack. When he looked out into the Semiramide Club it was smoke, music and alcohol fumes, business as usual; no one was looking back in. He shut the door again. "Does anyone else know about this? Any of his EMC connexions?" Alice didn't think they did. "Let's keep it that way, then," Vic recommended. "Those assholes don't need to know, we can agree on that?" As far as she was concerned, Alice said, they could. "Good," said Vic. When he turned back to Paulie, he found Paulie had woken up and got out of the chair and was standing right in Vic's personal space, his face-pumped up with blood under the skin so it was bright red-thrust forward, his blue eyes open as wide as they would go.

"What have you done to me, you fuck?" he screamed.

Vic felt the hair go up on the back of his neck. "Jesus, Paulie," he said, "I don't know." Before he could add anything to that, Paulie had pushed him aside and was kneeling down in front of Alice Nylon.

"Are you my pretty little girl?" he said.

"I am," said Alice.

"Then give me your best smile!" Paulie cajoled her. "There! You see? You feel better already!"

He stood up again and began to lurch restlessly about the room, walking from the hips with his knees stiff. He seemed to get interested in things, then he would stop and stare at the wall and do nothing. After he had been walking around like this for a while, examining the bits and pieces he kept in the office as if trying to understand who he was, he stopped in front of a hologram of himself with the other guys who came out alive from the wreck of the old El Rayo X. They looked a little sunburned but they were all grinning broadly, still in the bottom half of their vacuum suits, giving the thumbs-up with one hand and brandishing various kinds of guns and tools with the other. "Who are these people?" Paulie asked Vic, but when Vic told him, he didn't answer. The blood had leached out of his face again. Vic looked at Alice, who shrugged.

"He ain't the Paulie we know."

Faintly, from the Semiramide Club outside, came the sound of laughter and applause. The entertainment had started in on their second set with the moderne classic Jordan V-10. Vic Serotonin thought a moment.

"Is there another way out?" he said.

"Door at the back there exits in an alley."

"Fetch his rickshaw girl," Vic told her. "Don't talk to anyone else."

When Alice had gone he went through Paulie's clothes until he found the key to the room where Paulie kept the artefact Vic had sold him. This would be an unsettling process for anyone, but Paulie stood compliantly throughout, his head tilted up slightly so he could face the hologram of himself. His eyes were closed again. A few minutes later the rickshaw girl ducked in through the back door.