"This is a good deal for me," Edith said, after some thought.

"You could move in as soon as you liked."

"One thing," asked Edith, "does he come with it?" They laughed, and Edith counted out money on the zinc counter, and she left, and that was how it was done. Ten minutes later, without thinking once, Emil Bonaventure's daughter, a property developer with no coherent plans that would limit her increasing sense of vision, had made her way to the site end of Straint. There she stood for a long time, watching the sunlight shift towards red-which everyone knows is a measure of the speed at which things get away from you-and thinking about Emil. It was the first time she had ever been there. She was jealous, but puzzled too. This was what he had enjoyed all those years: adventures in broken houses and factories, heaps of rubble like streets bombed in a war; rusty road signs like signals from your own unconscious; acres of empty concrete reaching away to standing waves of fog, atmospheric lensing and other forms of optical confusion. A lot seemed to be going on there, but it was hard to make out. She could hear music, as of a fairground. Then a second sunset appeared, great wheeling bars of light flashing alternately purple and green like a cartoon drawing.

"Do you expect me to believe that?" Edith said.

After Edith Bonaventure left, Liv felt too light for comfort. She washed glasses, just to have her hands in warm water. She stared at the money on the bar. Then she counted it again. She sheafed it up into two piles, carried the larger pile over to one of the corner tables and placed it carefully on the tabletop.

"So now I am all the way in," she told Antoyne Messner.

Antoyne took his turn at counting the money. When he had finished, he didn't look as pleased as she expected.

"Hey, it's real," she assured him.

He knew it was real, he said.

"Then is something the matter, Antoyne?"

He'd come around every afternoon since they looked at the ship together, sometimes with the Mona on his arm, sometimes without; but it wasn't like the old days when he caned it night after night with Vic Serotonin. Antoyne said less than he used to; and if his mood was generally more stable and energetic, his lows arrived lower. He drank more. His leather flight jacket grew shabby, his chinos oil-stained. He was always on dial-up, saying something like, "Jesus Christ, Andrei, this was supposed to be a favour." Now he turned sideways on his chair and looked away from Liv for a few moments to compose himself. He looked back, and toyed with his glass, which had a quarter of an inch of his cocktail left in it. However low that drink got in a glass, however often you swirled it around, smart molecules built into the mixer ensured it was still made up of precise pink and yellow layers. The planets where Antoyne had spent his time, that was the height of sophistication. He drank it and made a face.

"I can't fly no more," he admitted. "I was going to tell you all along."

He thought about when he rode the Dynaflow ships, and all the places he saw then, and the things he saw on them. Gay Lung, Ambo Danse, Waitrose Two and the Thousand Suns: he had scattered himself like easy money across the Beach stars and down into Radio Bay. He had gone deep in those days. Surfed the Alcubiere warp. Owned one rocket after another; for want of imagination he called them all the Kino Chicken. Smuggled this and that. Kept one step ahead of both EMC and the rogue code from his own navigational systems. But in the end he failed at looking after himself, which men like Antoyne often do, and on Santa Muerte inhaled something that deviated both his septum and his sense of where things were. That was it for being a sky pilot. That was it for believing yourself indestructible. What the hell, he had always tried to think, until he wound up in Saudade as Vic Serotonin's gopher: nothing keeps. He was surprised to find himself blinking when he tried to think it now.

"Host the feel for it."

Liv Hula studied Antoyne for a minute or two. Then she got up from the table and made him put his pilot jacket on.

"Come with me," she said.

Ten minutes later they stood on Carver Field, in a mild wind and gathering greenish twilight, with the Halo stars coming out, sharp actinic points at the top of the sky, where their ship, the tubby curves of which now gave back a bargain brass glitter to the scattered halogen lights of the port, stood almost ready to fly. Antoyne put his hands in his pockets. He shrugged.

"So why are we here?" he said.

"To enjoy this heap of shit you had us buy."

Liv took his hands between both of hers. She made him look in her eyes and understand what she meant. "Antoyne," she said, "I dialled up Irene to meet us here. Later we can get a drink, the three of us, we can celebrate how our lives will soon move on from what they were. You can explain these stupid old-fashioned engines to me one more time. But for now, look up in the sky. See that red giant there? That's McKie, fifteen lights out. We can go there. Or we can go there, to American Polaroid. Or there, You're Worth It. We've got a ship. We can go anywhere now in these million stars!"

"Do you think I don't know places?" he replied, "or the names of them?"

"The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you." Antoyne tried to pull away from her, angry that she should express such an intuition, even in the middle of an empty field where no one but Antoyne could hear; even though it was only what everyone knew about him already. "I always understood that," she said. She kept his hands between hers a moment more. Then she let go, because it came to her that they had already left Saudade a hundred light-years behind them anyway. When she looked up at the ship again, it was black and comforting against the afterglow. "In the end, Antoyne, what does it matter to you?" she said.

"Because it means I am not anyone any more."

"None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard."

Antoyne stared at her, and then past her. His eyes lit up.

"Hey," he said, "here is Irene now."

Site Crime accountants had followed the money from the back office of the Club Semiramide to a room off Voigt Street, one of the many DeRaad bolt-holes they were rinding and closing daily.

Voigt was full of vehicles and flashing lights. Fire-teams had been deployed. Code jockeys worked on the locked, reinforced door. Quarantine and Hygiene were also in attendance, represented mainly by midrank uniforms, exchanging precedence issues by dial-up while they waited with simulated patience for the action to begin. It was the usual scene, except that a tall, heavily tailored young woman with a forearm datableed had overall charge of the operation. They all knew who she was, but no one trusted her, or understood how she had advanced herself so far so quickly. Since the debacle out on the Lots, they were uneasy working with Site Crime anyway, but their body language and hers confirmed they had no choice.

The lock proved to be mechanical, which no one knew how to finesse. They blew the door off instead.

The teams went in looking confident but feeling nervous. No one wanted to be first at the scene of a big escape. In the event, they were too late. Something weird had happened here, but now it was over. How you would describe it was this: the room stank. It was the same smell, rank and fatty, you got in a quarantine facility, but reduced because it had settled into the fabric-the bare floor, the bed and its foul grey sheets like a disordered shroud, the white walls with their freight of dried human secretions and undecod-able graffiti. The room was vacant, but only just. The Site Crime people all understood this. It was a category of fact they were familiar with. Something had lived here until very recently, but how you described that something-or what you understood by the term "lived"-was very much up to you. If you had been able to stand there twenty-four hours ago, they knew, you might have seen the composite entity formerly known as "the Weather" leave its hiding place for the last time. The door would have unlocked itself without agency, then closed and locked itself again. There would have been silence outside, except perhaps for the strong, calming sound of summer rain, children laughing and running for shelter, the bang of a door further down Voigt. Those sounds would have had, for a second, too sharp an edge. The woman with the datableed checked out the graffiti. She consulted the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of her forearm. She shook her head thoughtfully.