"Vic, I have to know what part you're playing in this."

"Is this what you think we're doing, Paulie and me? Smuggling these people in? This has nothing to do with us!"

Aschemann shrugged. Vic stared at him angrily. No one was saying anything. Up near the ceiling, the shadow operators clung and shifted, pulling themselves one over another like a colony of bats. Grainy images began to unreel across the office wall again: Vic Serotonin was seen to enter the Long Bar, he was seen to tip his new hat back on his head, exchange a word or two with the bar-keep. He was seen to exit through the lavatories and peer across the wet sand towards the event site aureole, which the cameras rendered as a greyish luminescence. Aschemann nodded his head as if these pictures offered not simply new evidence but scienza nuova, new ways of looking at things. Then he said:

"Vic, I have to apologise. I understand now from this film that M. John Harrison you were never in the Cafe Surf, or especially out in back by the rusty wire, a stone's throw or less from the site itself, which you don't deny entering on numerous occasions-"

Vic laughed resentfully.

"I was never in the Cafe Surf until I heard you thought I was. I went to check it out. Believe me, it's the worst jump-off joint I ever saw."

The detective, impressed by the professionalism of this explanation, seemed to consider it. But whatever conclusion he came to, he put to one side, and when he next spoke it was to continue an earlier train of thought. "Suppose they are fitting in, Vic? Why? What happens to them next?" He didn't know how to answer that, so he sat there contemplating it instead. Eventually he said, "Vic, I'm not the man for this. I need your advice here."

"I'm just a travel agent."

Even as he made this claim, which neither of them pretended to take seriously, Vic suffered a raw flashback to the site, and his encounter with the artefact he would subsequently sell to Paulie DeRaad. The artefact was watching him from ten yards away. It remained nervous but it had made eye contact. Vic had taken two or three hours over the journey through the aureole and was by this time perhaps five hundred yards into the site proper, standing under a cherry tree which he knew to have been in bloom for six years. There were the usual smells, as rank as rendered fat; the usual distant animal noises. The bits of music you thought you knew. The sense you had of a voice reciting something. The sense of everything fallen away from sense. It was one of those memories that folds itself quickly out of sight; but it made Vic think, and suddenly he didn't want to be in the detective bureau any more.

"Nice to talk," he said. "Maybe we'll see each other around."

Quickly for such an old-looking man Aschemann got between Vic and the door. He clutched Vic's wrist. "Don't go, Vic," he said urgently. "There's more. I went to see Emil today, but he's gone a long way down. He's gone a long way down."

"What is Emil to do with it?"

"Vic, this footage of you can be explained to everyone's satisfaction. I can forget everything you've done. Even now."

"So what will it take for that to happen?"

"I want to go in there. I want you to guide me in there."

"Jesus," Vic said. "You're as fucked as me."

He looked into the detective's face, with its Zipped-in signature features of pouchy cheeks, shocked white hair and amiably drooping eyelids. An inexplicable excitement made the eyes watery and vulnerable; it slackened the corner of the mouth. In forty years, no one had seen through the tailoring to Aschemann, not his assistants, not his superiors, not his wife; now he disclosed himself for no reason to a cheap travel agent, in a shabby empty office in the middle of the morning, with the shadow operators curled up in the corners like dead leaves. Everything that made him the police detective, everything that had made him such a reliable antagonist when Vic met him on the street, was undermined. His obsessive commitment to Site Crime revealed itself, through one simple inversion, to be the very same obsession that had derailed Emil Bonaventure's life, or Vic Serotonin's. Vic's instinct was not to confront this understanding. Instead, he pushed past the old man and out of the office. He didn't want to know Aschemann's motives. He didn't want to know what had changed so suddenly. He didn't want to look into a psyche as weakened and visible as his own, in case the encounter reduced his freedom to act.

"Arrest me or let me go," he said. "I'm not comfortable with any of this."

"No one is comfortable," Aschemann reminded him, "out here in the Halo." He watched Vic walk away down the corridor. "You should take care from now on," he called, "in case I can't protect you from yourself." He dialled up his assistant. "Put every camera we have on him," he ordered. But the orbital component of the surveillance system, a smart fog of microsatellites sold on from some small war ten or twelve lights along the line, was down for service. "Those pSi engines burn too hot for their own ceramics," the assistant informed him. They would be out that day, she apologised, and all the next; consequently there would be a reduced service. There would be some loss of coverage. Even as he flagged down a rickshaw in broad daylight at the junction of Uniment and Poe, Vic Serotonin was becoming as invisible as his friend DeRaad.

"I thought we were arresting him," the assistant said.

"We changed our minds."

Police work, the man who looked like Einstein always tried to teach his subordinates, is an activity drained of romance yet suffused with every possible kind of mystery. It was the opposite life, he believed, to the one his wife had lived: although he knew that his ability to see himself clearly-to encounter himself as a continuity-had, quite early on in their relationship, been corrupted by his attempts to bring her into focus. Did that matter, now that he had begun to understand what was happening in the teeming epistemological gap between Saudade and the event site?

Vic Serotonin went straight from the detective bureau to the Semiramide Club, the nearest place he could think of to get a drink. It was like a warehouse at that time of the morning, with much the same ambience if you discounted the smell of high-end pheromone patches and low-end liquor. The cleaning service was in. A few people of Paulie's, disconcerted by his absence, sat around tables at the back, among them Fat Antoyne Messner and Antoyne's squeeze, Irene, who were discussing the hottest subject in the Halo at that or any other time-what they would do with their lives if they ever got off-planet. Irene could envisage herself owning a little business. She had as many ideas what that might be, she confessed, as she had smiles; but she knew just what she'd call it, however her good fortune turned out: Nova Swing. That was a name the fat man could appreciate, indeed he received it as he received all Irene's plans, with the look of someone already convinced. On his part, the suggestion was they buy a ship. Nova Swing would be as good a name for a rocket, he believed, as for a boutique; and a rocket was, whatever angle you looked at it from, a business. Antoyne would always know how to make money out of a rocket. At which Irene gripped his hand across the table and smiled with every part of her body.

"We only could get our start, Antoyne, there'd be no limit to the things we did!"

That was how Vic found them.

"Hey, Fat Antoyne!" he said, pulling up one of the many empty chairs so he could sit down. "I was just thinking of you on the way over."

This approached the truth, although what had engrossed Vic most, as the rickshaw girl plodded through her midmorning low, was his promise to Elizabeth Kielar. Now wasn't a good time to take a client into the site. On the other hand, he had no doubt that circumstances would soon make it impossible for him to go in at all. He wasn't sure which he was most afraid of: being caught in whatever operation Paulie DeRaad was running through the Cafe Surf (because now he was certain it must be Paulie's op, financed for their own purposes, perhaps, by his shadowy backers in EMC); or allowing himself to be sucked into the meltdown of psychic confusion and professional misjudgment Paulie had triggered at Site Crime. Thinking too much about this had caused Vic a crisis of confidence. That was why he was glad to see Fat Antoyne, though a moment's consideration might have changed his mind about the offer he now made.