Before they could answer she cut away from them to her signature display. There was the K-ship, and tethered to it like a blind camel on a bit of rope was the Nastic battle cruiser. She had identified it now. She had matched its signature to the fakebooks stored in the White Cat’s databanks. A front-line cruiser called Touching the Void, it was the vessel whose commander had paid her for the Vie Féerique ambush. He had told her, “I know where you are going.” She shivered in her tank at this memory.
“What are they doing?” she asked the mathematics.
“Staying where they are,” it reported.
“They’re going to follow me wherever I go!” Seria Mau shrieked. “I hate this! I hate it! No one can follow us, no one is good enough.”
The mathematics thought.
“Their navigation system is nearly as clever as me,” it concluded. “Their pilot is military. He’s better than you.”
“Get rid of them,” she ordered.
“You brought this about,” she accused the human beings. The men were beginning to look anxious. They were still casting little glances here and there, as if she had a real presence in the cabin with them. The two women clasped hands and whispered to one another. For now, you couldn’t tell which one was the cultivar. “Turn that thing off,” Seria Mau said. They turned the hologram off. “Now tell me what use you are to anyone.” While they were trying to think of an answer to this, a small shudder went through the fabric of the White Cat. A moment later a bell chimed.
“What?” said Seria Mau impatiently.
“They’re coming up on us,” the mathematics reported. “Half a light in the last thirty nanoseconds. At the moment it’s a soft alarm, but it could harden.”
“Half a light? I don’t believe this.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Arm the ordnance.”
“At the moment I think they’re just trying—”
“Put something between us and them. Something big. And make sure it outputs in all particle regimes. I want them blind. Hit them if you can, but just make sure they can’t see us.”
“A quarter of a light,” said the mathematics. “Hard alarm.”
“Well,” said Seria Mau. “He is good.”
“He’s here. It’s down to kilometres.”
She said: “We’re ninety-five nanoseconds into a disaster. Where’s that ordnance?”
There was a vague ringing in the hull. Out in the flat grey void beyond, a huge flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware the White Cat’s massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined. Under cover of this moment—less of grace than of raw insanity and literal metaphysics—Seria Mau cut the drivers and dropped her ship out into ordinary space. The White Cat flickered back into existence ten light-years from anywhere. She was alone.
“There, you see,” Seria Mau said. “He wasn’t that good.”
“I have to say he pulled the plug before we did,” the mathematics told her. “But I can’t tell if he got the Nastic vessel out with him.”
“Can we see him?”
“No.”
“Just take us somewhere and hide, then,” Seria Mau said.
“Do you care where?”
Seria Mau turned over exhaustedly in her tank.
“Not at the moment,” she said.
Astern—if the word “astern” can have any meaning in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions—the explosion was still dying away as a kind of hard after-image in the eye of the vacuum itself. The entire engagement had played itself out in four hundred and fifty nanoseconds. No one in the human quarters had noticed anything, although they seemed surprised that she had stopped talking to them so suddenly.
In a second, or completing, lobe of her dream, Seria Mau was in the garden again:
Weeks after the bonfire, the house was still full of it. The smoke seeped everywhere. Everything was tainted. All those old things the father had burned just came back as their own smoke, and descended on the shelves, the furniture and the windowsills. They came back as a smell. The two children stood in their coats and scarves by the circle of ashes, which was like a black pool in the garden. They crept their toes up to its exact edge, and looked down at them there. They looked at each other in a kind of solemn surprise, while the father paced about in the house behind them. How could he have done that? How could he have made a mistake that big? They wondered what would happen next.
The girl wouldn’t eat. She refused to eat or drink. The father looked down at her seriously. He held her hands so that she had to look into his eyes. His eyes were a brown so light it verged on orange. People would call those eyes appealing. They were full of an appeal.
“You will have to be the mother now,” he said. “Can you help us? Can you be the mother?”
The girl ran to the end of the garden and cried. She didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. She wanted someone to be hers. If this event was part of a life, she didn’t like it. She didn’t trust a life like that. It would all come to nothing. She ran up and down the garden with her arms out to the sides making loud noises until her brother laughed and joined in, and the father came out and made her look into his sad brown eyes and asked her again if she would be the mother. She looked away from him as hard as she could. She knew how big a mistake he had made: if it’s hard to get away from a photograph, it’s harder still to get away from a smell.
“We could have her back,” she suggested. “We could have her back as a cultivar. It’s easy. It would be easy.”
The father shook his head. He explained why he wouldn’t want that. “Then I won’t be her,” the little girl said. “I’ll be something better.”
The mathematics hid them nicely. It even found a sun, small, G-type, a bit tired, but with a row of planets that gleamed in the distance like portholes in the night.
What was memorable about the system, which was called Perkins’ Rent, was the train of alien vehicles that hung nose to tail in a long cometary orbit which at aphelion was halfway to the next star. They were between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, with hulls as tough and thick as rinds, coloured a kind of lustreless grey, shaped as randomly as asteroids—potato shapes, dumb-bell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them—and every one under two feet of the sifted-down dust blown out of some predictable and not very recent stellar catastrophe. The dust of life, though there was no life here. Whoever they belonged to abandoned them before proteins appeared on Earth. Their vast nautiloid internal spaces were as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often part of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the methane seas of the system’s gas giant: but once it had been perfect.
The ghost train was the economic mainstay of Perkins’ Rent. They mined those ships like any other kind of resource. Nobody knew what they did, or how they got here, or how to work them; so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them via a subcontractor to some corporate in the Core. It made a local economy. It was the simple, straight-line thing to do. The used-up ones were surrounded by unpredictably shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. The White Cat found a snug place in one of these clouds, where the smallest individual unit was two or three times her size. She gave herself up to the chaotic attractor, shut down her engines and was instantly lost: a statistic. Seria Mau Genlicher woke up in a fury from her latest dream, opened a line to the supercargo.