"Uroboros," he said, speaking the word almost dreamily. "Have you seen these things?"

"From a distance," she said.

"Are they like us?" he asked her.

"Not remotely." "What then?"

She remembered as clearly as her own name the words Jaffe had used to describe the lad, and repeated them now, for Lucien's benefit, though Lord knows it didn't help much.

"Mountains and fleas, " she said. "Fleas and mountains.

Lucien rose suddenly. "Excuse me@'

I'@ you-?"

"I'm going t@' He turned towards the bathroom, raising his hand to his mouth. She went to help him, but he waved her away and lurched through the door, closing it behind him. There was a moment's hush, then the sound of retching, and of vomit splashing into the toilet. She kept her distance. Her own belly, which was pretty strong, weakened at the smell of puke.

She look down at her vodka glass, decided she'd had more than enough, and walked out onto the balcony. She didn't wear a watch (the yellow dog had told her to bury her imitation Rolex in the desert) so she could only guess at the time. Certainly way after midnight; perhaps one-thirty, perhaps two. The air was a little chilly, but fragrant with nighthlooming jasmine. She inhaled deeply. Tomorrow she was going to have a splitting headache, but what the hell? She'd actually enjoyed telling her story, laying it out as much for her own benefit as Lucien's.

He has the hotsfor you, Raul said.

"I thought you'd gone to sleep."

I was afraid you'd do something stupid.

"Like try to fuck him?" She glanced back into the apartment. The bathroom door was still closed. "I don't think there's much chance of that tonight-2'

Or any night.

"Don't be so sure." We had an agreement, Raul reminded her. As long as I'm in here with you: no sex. That's what we agreed. I don't have a homosexual bone in my body.

"My body," Tesia reminded him.

Of course, if you wanted to sleep with a woman, I could probably stretch the point "Well you might just have to look the other way," Tesla said,

"I think my celibate phase is coming to an end."

Don't do this.

"Oh for God's sake, Raul, it's just a fuck."

I mean it.

"If you screw this up," she said, "you'll be sorry you ever got inside my head. I swear."

Raul was silent.

"Better," Tesla said, and went back inside. The shower was running in the bathroom. "Are you okay in there?" she called, but he couldn't hear her over the water, so she left him to his cleaning up and went through to the kitchen to look for something to fill her growling stomach. All she could find was a box of year-old Shredded Wheat, but it was better than nothing. She munched, and waited, and munched more.

The shower continued to run. After a couple of minutes she went back to the bathroom door, knocked and elled: "Lucien? Are you all right?"

There was still no reply. She tried the handle. The door was unlocked; the room so filled with steam she could barely see across it. His clothes were scattered on the floor, and the shower curtain closed. She called his name again, and again there was no answer. Concerned now-he must have heard her, even over the water-she grabbed the curtain and pulled it back. He was sprawled naked in the tub, the water beating on his belly, eyes closed, mouth open.

Some lover, Raul said.

"Shut the fuck up," she told him, going down on her haunches beside the tub and Lifting Lucien into a sitting position. He coughed up a throatful of watered down puke.

Very pretty.

"I'm warning you, monkey-"

That was the forbidden word: monkey-the word that always threw him into a fit.

Don't call me that! he yelled.

She didn't give him the satisfaction of a response, so he shut up. It worked like a charm every time. She turned off the shower, then gently slapped Lucien into opening his eyes. He looked at her dozily, mumbling something about feeling stupid.

"Have you finished throwing up?" she asked him.

He nodded, so she fetched a clean bath towel and did what she could to dry him off while he was lying in the tub. He wasn't in bad shape. A little skinny perhaps, but meaty where it counted most. Even though he was near as dainnit comatose, his dick swelled as she dried him, and she couldn't help but stroke it a little, which brought it to full erection. It was pretty. If he had the wit to use it well he might be fun in bed.

He was as dry as she was going to be able to get him, so rather than try to lift him out of the tub, she decided to let him sleep where he lay. She fetched a pillow and a blanket, and made him as comfortable as she could, given the cramped conditions. As she tucked the blanket around him, he murmured, "What about tomorrow?"

"What about it?" she said.

"Can we... do it... Tomorrow?"

"Well, that depends," she said. "I was thinking of heading up to Oregon@'

"Oregon... " he mumbled.

"That's right."

"Fletcher... "

"That's right." She leaned a little closer to him, until she was almost whispering in his ear. "He's up there, right? In ... in-"

"Everville."

"Everville," she said softly.

Have you no shame? Raul muttered.

She laughed, and for a moment Lucien's eyes fluttered open. "You sleep," she said to him. "We're going to take a trip Tomorrow."

The notion seemed to please him, even in his stupor. He was still wearing a little smile when she put the light out and left him to his slumbers.

Six Grillo called the body of knowledge he'd gathered over the last five years the Reef, in part because, like coral, it had grown through countless minute accretions (more often than not of dead matter) and in part because a marine image seemed appropriate for information that pertained to the secrets of the dream-sea. But of late the name mocked him. He no longer felt like the Reef s keeper, but its prisoner.

It was housed, this Reef, in the memory-banks of four linked computers, donated to Grillo's strange cause by a man in Boston, who'd asked only one thing in return for his generosity: that when Grillo finally persuaded the computers to collate all the information and spit out the answer to the mysteries of America, he'd be the one to spread the news. Grillo had agreed. He'd even believed, when the gift had first been mooted, that such a moment might one day come. He believed that no longer. The husks and shreddings he'd gathered so studiously over the years did not contain the secrets of the universe. they were worthless trash, lost to sense and meaning, and he would join them in their senselessness, very soon.

His body, which had done him good service for forty three years, had in the last six months begun a calamitous decline. At first he'd ignored the signs; put the dropped coffee cups and aching spine and blurred vision down to over work. But the pain had been too much after a time, and he'd gone to the doctor for something to control it. He'd got his painkillers, and a lot more besides: visits to specialists, mounting paranoia, and finally, the bad news. "You've got multiple sclerosis, Nathan."

He'd closed his eyes for a moment, not wanting to look at the sympathetic face in front of him, but the darkness behind his lids was worse. It was a cell, that darkness; it stank of himself. "This isn't a death sentence," the doctor had explained. "A lot of people live long, fruitful lives with this disease, and there's no reason why you shouldn't be one of them."

"How long?" he wanted to know.

"I couldn't even hazard a guess. The disease moves in different ways from person to person. It could take thirty years-"

He'd known, sitting there in that bland little office, that he didn't have three decades of life ahead of him. Nothing like. The disease had him in its teeth, and it was going to shake him until he was dead.