LIGHT

'Is that what you want? Me to kill you?'

'No!'

'Then what?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Just please fuck me properly.'

It was awkward for both of them. A

'God,' he said experimentally. 'You're so wet.'

'I know. I know.'

The TV chirped almost silently to itself in the gloom above them. Ads passed across its screen, to be replaced by the logo of some science cha

'Sparks,' she whispered. 'Sparks in everything.'

Kearney, hearing this, opened his eyes and got off her in terror. He grabbed up the chefs knife, then stood with it for a moment, naked and uncertain. 'A

'Sparks. Sparks in everything… '

When A

Out on the beach the air was already bright, agitated. Kittiwakes swooped and fought over something in a clump of tidewrack. Up on the dunes A

'Michael!' she called.

Only the cries of the gulls.

She hugged herself against the cold breeze off the ocean, then walked back to the cottage, where she cooked eggs and sausages and ate them hungrily. 'I haven't felt so hungry,' she said to her own face in the bathroom mirror, 'since… ' But she couldn't think what to add, it had been so long ago.

She waited for him for three days. She walked on the dunes, drove into Boston, cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. She ate. Much of the time she just sat in a chair with her legs curled up, listening to the afternoon rain on the window and remembering everything she could about him. Every so often she switched the TV on, but mostly she left it off and, staring at it thoughtfully, tried to picture the things they had done the night he went.

On the morning of the third day she stood at the door listening to the gulls fighting up and down above the beach. 'You won't come back now,' she said, and went inside to pack her things. 'I'll miss you,' she said. 'I really will.' She disco

She locked the beach house door and put the bags in the BMW. One last look along the dunes. Up there, with the wind taking her breath away, she had a clear memory of him at Cambridge, twenty years old, telling her with a kind of urgent wonder, 'Information might be a substance. Can you imagine that?'

She laughed out loud.

'Oh, Michael,' she said.

TWENTY-NINE

Surgery

The shadow operators flew to Seria Mau from all parts of the ship. They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain. They abandoned the portholes, next to which they had been biting their thin, bony knuckles. They emerged from the software bridges and fakebook archives, the racked hardware on the smart-plastic surfaces of which they had lain undistinguishable from two weeks' dust in her father's house. They had undergone a sea change. Gossip rustled between them, bursts of data flickering like silver and random colours-

They said: 'Has she-?'

They said: 'Dare we-?'

They said: 'Is she really going out with him?'

Seria Mau watched them for a moment, feeling as remote as space. Then she ordered:

'Cut me the cultivar you have always wanted me to have.'

The shadow operators could scarcely believe their ears. They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors' Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math. They dried it out and eyed it critically. 'You'll look very nice, dear,' they told it, 'if you just wipe the sleep from your blue eyes now. Very nice indeed.' They brought it to the room in which she kept the Dr Haends package.

'Here she is,' they said. 'Isn't she lovely? Isn't she charming?'

'I could have done without the dress,' said Seria Mau.

'Oh but dear: she had to wear something.'

It was herself, twelve years old. They had decorated her pale hands with spirals of tiny seed pearls, and turned her out in a floor-length frock of icy white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped in cream lace. Her train was supported at each corner by hovering, perfect, baby boys. She stared shyly up at the cameras in the corners, whispering:

'What was relinquished returns.'

'I can do without that, too,' said Seria Mau.

'But you must have a voice, dear-'