LIGHT

New Venusport, the recruiting brochures said: Planet of choice.

The warren took up an entire block, bounded by the docks on two sides, the waste lot of some old industrial accident on a third, and on the fourth Straint Street, the western boundary of the garment district.

Inside, it was always lighted, but only by the hologram cha

'Well, this is home,' said Tig Vesicle.

Ed Chianese, shaking with tank withdrawal, looked around.

'Nice,' he said. 'It's nice.'

Inside the rooms, there would always be eight or nine people doing something, you couldn't quite tell whether it was cooking or laundry. Sometimes there would be more. They had a smell about them that was hard to describe: it was like ci

Eventually Tig Vesicle stopped uncertainly, in a cubicle that looked like all the others.

'Yes. This is home,' he said.

Staring vaguely into a hologram up in one corner of the cubicle was a woman who looked just like him.

'This is Neena,' Tig Vesicle said. 'She's my wife.'

Ed looked down at her. A big grin came over his face.

'Hey,' he said. 'I'm pleased to see you, Neena. You got anything to eat?'

They had a cheap stove in every cubicle. The New Men ate a kind of noodle soup. (Sometimes there were objects in it that resembled ice cubes, only lukewarm and bluish.) Ed was in their warren four weeks. He slept on the mattress on the floor, like everyone else. In the day, when Tig Vesicle was out in the city-moving some AbH here, a little bumped-up speed there, trying to avoid the Cray sisters-Ed watched the holograms and ate the food that Neena cooked. Most of that time passed slowly. He was in withdrawal. It was painful: also, real things were very distant a lot of the time and the simple weirdness of being among New Men made that worse. He kept trying to remember who he really was. He could only remember the fictional Ed, an assembly of diamond-clear events that never happened. The afternoon of the third day he was there, Neena Vesicle knelt down next to him where he sat on the mattress.

'Is there any way I can help?' she: said.

Ed looked up at her.

'You know, I think there is.'

He reached up and put his hands either side of her ribs, and with a little sideways pressure tried to get her to kneel over him. It took her a moment to understand what he was suggesting. Then, awkward and serious, she tried to comply. 'I'm all arms and legs,' she said. She hardly smelled at all until he touched her. Then a kind of thick sweetness rolled out from her. Every time he touched her somewhere new, one of her legs would jerk, or she would catch her breath and exclaim at the same time, or shiver and half curl up. She looked down at Ed's hands, raising the cotton dress to her waist.

'Oh,' she said. 'Look at you.' She laughed. 'I mean me.'

Her ribs articulated in a way he couldn't quite understand.

Later she said, 'Is that all right? We go the wrong way for you. A bit the wrong way.' She hissed. She wiped one hand upwards, over her face, across her skull. Is that all right?'

Tank withdrawal was in the bone. It was cellular, organic. But it was also a kind of separation anxiety. It was the sustained scream of wanting to be back in a lost world you had loved. Nothing was a cure, but sex helped. Twinks on withdrawal were desperate for sex. It was like morphine to them.

'That's good,' Ed said. 'Ah, yes. That's fine.'

The four weeks he was in the warren, everyone imitated him. Had they ever been so close to a human being before? What exactly did that mean to them? They came to the cubicle doorway and looked in at him with a kind of sombre passivity. A topical gesture of his, a ma

'Open up a little more,' she would suggest, or, 'Now me in you,' then laugh. 'I mean, you in me. Oh God. Oh fuck. Fuck.'

She was perfect for him because she was stranger and even harder to understand than he was. After they finished she lay there awkwardly in his arms, said, 'Oh no, it's nice, it's quite comfortable.' She said: 'Who are you, Ed Chianese?' There was more than one way to answer that, but she had her preferences. If he said, 'I'm just some twink,' she actually looked angry. After a few days he felt himself returning from the tank. He was a long way away, and then he was closer and it was the voices of withdrawal which had retreated right to the edge. He began to remember things about the real Ed Chianese.

'I've got debts,' he explained. 'I probably owe everyone in the universe.' He stared down at her. She stared back for a moment, then looked away suddenly, as if she hadn't meant to. 'Shh, shh,' he said absently. Then: 'I guess they all want to collect off me or fuck me over. What happened in the tank farm was over who got first fuck.'

Neena put her hand over his.

'That's not who you are,' she said.

After a minute he said: 'I remember being a kid.'

'What was that like?'

'I don't know. My mother died, my sister went away. All I wanted to do was ride the rocket ships.'

Neena smiled.

'Small boys want that,' she said.

THIRTEEN

Monster Beach

Kearney and A

'Try and imagine,' he had once said to A