"Hey, Paulie," he said.

Among Paulie DeRaad's bolt-holes he kept an apartment on the top floor of Beddington Gardens, a system-built beachside tower in retro-Socialist chic circa 1965AD, its cracked curtain walls accurate down to the wads of newspaper the original contractors had used as separators in place of cement. A bald rectilinear space with inset lighting, its window a single sweep of glass taking in the full curve of the bay to Suicide Point, the apartment was furnished and styled moderne, with the wet bar at one end and at the other racks of what resembled faux-wooden TV consoles from the historical times, connected to the FTL routers by which Paulie kept abreast of his interests up and down Radio Bay.

White carpet was fitted throughout.

Alice had brought her boss there two days before, and she had been looking after him ever since. She made what food she knew how, mainly ordered-in falafel and brownies, but Paulie wasn't interested in eating. She mixed him drinks from the wet bar, but, inexplicably, Paulie wasn't drinking. When he was asleep she wiped his forehead with a cloth, or stood up on tiptoe to admire his possessions. She liked best the white singlets and underpants he kept nice and clean in a drawer, which she buried her face in when she first found them, but only looked at thereafter in case she spoiled them. The rest of the time she spent talking to the Semiramide people, intercepting problems, cleaning house across the city, trying to gauge how panicked everyone was. "He's all right," she told her friend Map Boy, who, because he wasn't one of that crowd, she could open up to a little. "On the other hand you don't want to get close to him. I'm cautious about it. You know?"

The brief spells Paulie was awake, he didn't pay her a lot of attention, uplinking instead with his offworld contacts. Nothing much came of this, so to start with she was relieved Paulie got hold of Vic. She stayed in the pipe in case either of them needed her, but with a hope that the conversation would take the weight off her. That was a short-lived hope, because when Vic said, "Hey, Paulie," all Paulie replied was:

"Don't hey me. Who are you to hey me, you cheap fuck?"

Vic told Paulie he should steady down.

DeRaad gave a thick laugh. "Can you believe this?" he asked Alice Nylon. Whatever else was wrong with Paulie, he remained sharp enough to know she had stayed in the pipe with him. Security was always first things first with Paulie. She said:

"I can't believe this, Paulie, no."

When he heard Alice's voice, Vic sounded relieved. "How are things going?" he asked her.

"You don't fucking talk to Alice," Paulie shouted, "while I'm still here. You fucking talk to me." No one could afford for things to develop further in that direction, so there was a silence on all sides. "Cheap fuck," Paulie said into it, not to Alice or Vic but maybe, given his present situation, to himself. Then he went on in a calmer voice, "What are you doing to help me, Vic? I'm hiding from my own people. I'm sick. I'm losing trade. It's in me, Vic. I feel it there, I hear it trying to talk to me. They say 'Shit it out,' but when I can't have a bowel movement that's great advice. Meanwhile what are you doing to help?"

"Paulie, I don't know how to answer that."

It was easy to appreciate the position Vic found himself in.

Paulie had lost perspective on things, Alice could see that-she was still his best girl, but it was easy to see he had lost his perspective on things.

"If I brought you a daughter," Vic was saying, "that's the risk you always knew you took." Alice could feel him searching around for something else to say, but in the end he only added, "I'm running a client in tomorrow from the Baltic Exchange, just after dawn. Maybe I'll find something in there to help you," and all three of them knew what that was, speaking of shit. There followed another silence, then Paulie DeRaad said, "Vic, you're fucked with me," and broke the connection.

"Alice?" he called. "Are you still my best bet?"

"You know I am, Paulie."

"So set me up a pipe to Lens Aschemann. I got some information for him."

The first night they were at Beddington Gardens, Paulie had screamed for four hours solid in his sleep while lights seemed to crawl up his own arms and into his mouth. Next day, he sent her to Voigt Street to fetch the sick kid he kept there, who had started all this and who had radioactive blood or whatever. When she got back, which took all morning with the kid stinking and throwing up and falling out the rickshaw and wandering off into shopping malls singing to itself while its face shone with an exultation Alice did not envy, Paulie had rigged up a curtain to divide the main room in half. From then on he passed his time behind that with the kid and wouldn't let her come through, or look at him again. They had a chemical toilet in there. She had to pass things round the curtain to the two of them. She did once see that the bed was slick, and they were slick too, with something which resembled a clear resinous liquid. Maybe they spewed up this stuff and that's why Paulie wouldn't eat the food she made him. After perhaps eight hours a smell started to fill the room; also, since Paulie went behind the curtain something was wrong with his voice. It started out each sentence with thick tones, as if it was far back in his throat or he had been eating Roquefort cheese; then halfway through it jumped an octave into a music kind of sound. Alice knew that sound. She didn't like it.

"He's here now," she told Paulie when the police detective came on. This time she stayed out of the pipe. You never knew what operators Site Crime might be running in there.

Perhaps an hour before Paulie called Vic, certainly not more, Lens Aschemann could have been found walking briskly along the Corniche to the Cafe Surf, where, instead of entering the Long Bar and occupying his customary seat in the corner, he took shelter in the darkness under the condemned pier behind the building, tapping his foot to the faint jazz music that leaked out into the night, until he saw Antoyne Messner approaching him along the beach.

"So," he called. "A nice night, Fat Antoyne."

"It's just Antoyne," Antoyne said.

He looked doomed and sodden, as if someone had recently pushed him in the sea. The foldaway rainwear ballooning up around him in each gust only partly covered his royal blue suit. The night's weather had pursued him from bar to bar, The World of Today to The Breakaway Station, lacquering his hair across his reddened face: every time he went in somewhere, the rain eased off; every time he decided to move on, it got worse. Now he stopped short of the pier and, eyeing its pitted cast-iron supports, said, "I won't come under there, thanks." And, failing to take heart from the detective's smile: "I been walking up and down for hours in case I missed you."

"This was the time we agreed."

"I was never good with time. I got anxieties around it." The rain lashed at him suddenly. To avoid it he stepped without thinking into the shadow of the pier.

"You see?" murmured Aschemann, as if Antoyne had proved something to him. "It's not so bad." They contemplated the junk that had gathered beneath the pier, too heavy for the sea to move; then the line of rusty barbed wire and barely discernible fluorescence at the eastward extent of the event site itself.

"Are you afraid of it, Antoyne?"

"I don't care about it one way or the other."

Aschemann pretended to give this some consideration. "I thought I saw something move over there," he said. "Just before you arrived." He couldn't quite decide if it was the kind of movement you would expect from, say, a rag, or a bit of wastepaper tumbling briefly across mottled sand; or whether it was more animate than that. "Everyone cares about it," he said. "Otherwise, what would we talk about?" Antoyne shrugged. Aschemann struggled to light his pipe, then gave up and suggested that, since nothing was happening now, they go into the Long Bar. "It would be warmer there, we could get that cocktail drink you introduced everyone to." But Antoyne didn't want to be seen in the Cafe Surf.