LIGHT

Next he woke with the smell of salt in his nostrils. The great bulk of the dunes was black over him. Above that, the neck of the night with its cheap ornaments strung round it. Both of those were more comforting than the silhouette of the circus owner, the red ember of her bat-shit cigarette. She seemed pleased.

'Ed, you did so well!'

'What did I say? What happened?'

'What happened, they loved you Ed,' she answered. 'You shot right through. I'd say you were their boy.' She laughed. 'I'd say you were my boy too.'

Ed tried to sit up.

'Where's A

'A

Ed stared up at her. She was kneeling behind his head, bent over so she could look in his face. Her face was upside down to him, faint, sallow with clues. A few lively motes spilled from her eyes, blew away on the sea wind. She smiled and stroked his forehead.

'Still bored, Ed? No need to be. The circus is yours. You can name your price. We can start selling futures. Oh, and Ed?'

'What?'

'We leave in a fortnight.'

He felt relieved. He felt doomed. He didn't know how to tell A

'We have to talk.'

'Do we, Ed?'

'While we still remember each other.'

A week after he hit the jackpot, she didn't come home at all.

She was away three days. During that time, Madame Shen prepared to leave New Venusport. The exhibits were folded. The attractions were packed. The big tent was struck. Her ship, The Perfect Low, came down from the parking lot one bright blue morning. It turned out to be a tubby brass-coloured little dynaflow HS-SE freighter, forty or fifty years old, built cheap and cheerful with a pointed nose and long curved fins at the back. 'Well, Ed, what do you think of the rocket?' Sandra Shen asked. Ed stared up at the ripe-avocado geometry of its hull, blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core.

'It's a dog,' he told her. 'You want my opinion.'

'You'd prefer a hyperdip,' she said. 'You'd prefer to be back on France Chance IV, going dive for dive with Liv Hula in a smart carbon hull. She couldn't have done it without you, Ed. She went on record later, "I only pushed so hard because I was afraid Ed Chianese would get there first".'

Ed shrugged.

'I did all that,' he said. 'I'd prefer to be with A

'Oh ho. Now he can go, he can't bring himself to leave. A

'Things for you?'

It was Sandra Shen's turn to shrug. She continued to gaze wryly up at her ship. After a moment she said: 'Don't you want to know why they love your show? Don't you want to know why they changed their minds about you?'

Ed shivered. He wasn't sure he did.

'Because you stopped the war-talk, Ed, and all the stuff about eels. You gave them a future instead. You gave them the Tract, glittering in front of them like an affordable asset. You took them in there, you showed them what they might find, what it might make them. Everything's worn out down here, and they know it. You didn't offer them retro, Ed. You said it hadn't all been done. You said, "Go deep!" That's what they wanted to hear: one day soon they were going to get off the beach at last, and into the sea!'

She laughed. 'You were very persuasive. Then you were sick.'

'But I've never been there,' Ed said. 'No one has.'

Sandra Shen licked a flake of local tobacco from the corner of her lower lip.

'That's right,' she said. 'They haven't, have they?'

Ed waited for A

Ed jumped to his feet. 'Hey, A

'Ed!'

She was laughing. He heard her call his name all the way across the concrete. But when the rickshaw pulled up in front of him in a cloud of advertisements like coloured smoke and tissue paper, it wasn't A

'Hey,' he said. 'Who are you?'

'You ain't ready to know,' said the rickshaw girl. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. 'Your squeeze is in there.'

At that moment, A

'Hi Ed,' she said. 'Like it? It's called Mona.'

She looked down at herself. Looked back up at him and laughed.

'You like it!' she said.

She said anxiously: 'You do like it, don't you?' She said, 'Oh Ed. I'm so happy.'

Ed didn't know what to say. 'Do I know you?'

'Ed!'

'It was a joke,' he said. 'I see the resemblance now. It's nice, but I don't know why you did this.'

He said: 'I liked you the way you were.'

A

'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'It wasn't for you. It was for me.'

'I don't get this.'

'Ed, I wanted to be smaller.'

'This isn't smaller,' Ed said. 'It's Pierpoint Street.'

'Oh, great,' she said. 'Fuck off. It's what I am, Ed. Pierpoint Street.'

She got back in the rickshaw. To the rickshaw girl she said, 'Take me away from this fucker.' She got down out of the rickshaw again and stamped her foot. 'I love you Ed, but it has to be said you're a twink. What if I wanted to be fucked by someone bigger than me? What if that was what I needed to get off? You don't see that, that's why you're a twink.'

Ed stared at her. 'I'm having an argument with someone I don't even recognise,' he complained.

'Look at me then. You helped me when I was down, only I found out too late that being your mother was the price. Twinks always need a mother. What if I didn't want to be that any more?"

She sighed. She could see he didn't get it.

'Look,' she said. 'What's my life to you? You saved me, and I don't forget that. But I got my ideas about things. I got my ambitions, I always did. You're shipping out with Madam Shen anyway. Oh yes! You think I didn't know that? Ed, I was there before you. Only a twink would think I wasn't.