"You can finish up here," she told Hygiene.

She drove herself back to the uptown bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. There she ran nanocam footage of the other big unsolved mystery in her career.

This impeccable record, assembled by the vanished detective himself and projected across the walls by his shadow operators, left no one the wiser. In the year after the death of his wife, Aschemann had continued his investigation of the Neon Heart murders. All the details were there. They summed to zero. He watched, he asked questions and took names, he went by the gates of the noncorporate port and smelled the money and the violence in the air. He went from bar to bar. ("At one time or another," he told the cameras, with the impish, inturned smile his co-workers had begun to recognise, "all brave men have seen the sky through bars.") He had himself driven to and from the Bureau every morning and afternoon in a pink Cadillac roadster, 1952. He sat in his office with his feet on the green tin desk, and wrote letters to women, and to Prima. Had he killed her? Was he the Tattoo Murderer? The fact was, the assistant thought, he didn't know, any more than she did. All he knew was what Saudade wanted from him: that he be a detective, and have some plan for how that worked. That year, and every year after, he was like a man reassembling himself-not as something new, but not entirely in his own image either. His sense of guilt dated from Prima's death. But his sense of discontinuity dated from marrying her in the first place.

"All crimes," she remembered him advising, "are crimes against continuity-continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity."

She sighed.

"Switch this off," she ordered.

Not yet midnight. It was too soon to visit the tank farm on C-Street. The office blinds were down, admitting erratically pulsed strips of neon light, rose-pink and a lively poisonous blue. The furniture smelled of authentic furniture polish. Every so often the assistant said something into her dial-up. Or the shadow operators fluttered close, murmuring, "If you could just sign this, dear." Or they pulled themselves about on the desk in front of her like grounded bats, through the jumbled papers and stripes of neon, hoping that she would notice them. Data ran down the inside of her arm. It was her office now. She had a major escape to deal with. She had operations of her own. She could wait another hour before she made her next move. She could wait another hour after that. But she was restless and didn't know what to do this minute. Damp winds chased wastepaper across the intersection outside, to where a lost blonde stood in her short white dinner frock, smiling vaguely at the deserted pavement and holding both her shoes in one hand.

Another month passed, the Nova Swing completed her refit. They had port authority approval. They had a new paint job. They had a company name, Bulk Haulage, thought up after hours of numb effort by Antoyne; and a corporate mission statement which Irene discovered written on her heart, "Aim to the Future." They had hot new upgrades in the drive train. Early one wet autumn day, with rain lashing across Carver Field, Liv Hula heated up the rocket engines, swallowed the pilot interface with the usual combination of optimism and self-disgust, and with Antoyne strapped in the second chair, went all-out for the parking orbit.

"Shit," she was saying five minutes later, her voice issuing eerily from the ship's speakers. "It works."

"Isn't that something," agreed Antoyne.

They stared out at space a moment, then at each other in wild surmise. Space! Tests on the infrastructure showed what they already knew. "It's a tub but it actually works!" Scared and elated, anxious, yet somehow secure in their professionalism, they scuttled for home, where they found Irene the Mona looking pale but happy in rose-pink pedal-pushers, refreshing her make-up from her little shiny red urethane vanity case Antoyne remembered so well. "So does it work?" she wanted to know. During the take-off, she admitted, she sat in the administration building bar with a White Light sundae and didn't even dare watch. "But I saw the flash went over everything. You lit up the rain, I got to say that. I had my legs crossed for you."

"I can't believe it works," Liv Hula said.

After that, they lived in the ship, all three of them, and made frequent baby steps like this, little journeys into space. Though they had their differences of viewpoint, Liv and Irene got on well together, as long as they could manage Antoyne in their different styles. Antoyne was content to be managed. In the end, it was what he was used to, although he wouldn't admit that to the Mona. There was always something to talk about. Antoyne and Irene talked about their personal development and aspirational goals. Irene and Liv talked about the importance of self-presentation. Liv and Antoyne talked about Vic Serotonin, who had in so many senses brought about their present business venture.

"I always got involved with people stronger than me," Antoyne told Liv. "In the end you would have to say it was a pattern. But it can work out well."

Liv shuddered.

"People like Vic are too strong for everyone around them."

But when she repeated this opinion to Irene, it received only a sniff. "Vic Serotonin was as weak a man as I ever saw," the Mona stated firmly. "Trust me, I seen a few of them." She laughed. "And fucked them all," she added, "disincluding Vic himself."

This conversation occurred about thirty thousand miles off-planet. Without they took her off the beach, Antoyne said, and into the surf, everything was known about the Nova Swing that could be known. So now they were going to switch on the Dynaflow drivers for a nanosecond or two and see if she survived that blatant challenge to physics. But before they could do that, they had to fly through this huge secret-looking region of derelict ships they found themselves in. Cutting arcs flared as bright as pSi engines, through a smart fog of nanotech like ionised gas. Tugs were pushing and pulling the enormous rusty hulks about. It was a region of activity stretching away like a shell round the whole planet, an expanding wavefront a thousand, two thousand miles deep. Irene stared out the porthole. She knew human beings a little, she said, and that was hard enough because there were so many of them to know; but she would never cease to be surprised about the endless wonders you saw up here in space.

"What are those things?" she whispered to herself.

"The quarantine orbit," Liv Hula told her, "gets bigger every day."

Straint Street: Edith Bonaventure knocked out Liv Hula's old zinc bar and had a small stage built where it used to be. The floor was ripped up and replaced with black and white tiles. A contractor fixed her some wall panels of faux mahogany in a warm burnt-orange shade. Edith dispensed with the ceiling fans and fitted chandeliers in their place. She had a new bar manufactured from one long block of artfully melted glass, backlit glass shelves behind.

With the change of theme she wanted light. The theme was Edith. It was all of Edith's memorabilia, with which she could now experience a different, much more certain, much more creative relationship. Light was everywhere, gilding the keyboard ivory of fifty or sixty accordions in their deluxe presentation cases lined with every shade of pink from salmon to neotony; glittering as off shallow water from clear resins over maroon and ginger met-alflake finishes; spiking the corner of your eye with reflections and interference patterns of otherworldly weirdness. There were silver buckles on every strap to catch it, and brass-plate rocket ships craftsman-tacked to silky alien wood finishes: but chrome shooting star emblems predominated.