He pulled some things out of a desk-drawer. Among them was a little discoloured leather bag which contained the dice he had stolen from the Shrander twenty-three years before. He put his hand inside. The dice felt warm against his fingers. Kearney shivered over a sudden clear image of the woman in the Midlands, kneeling on a bed and whispering 'I want so much to come' to herself in the middle of the night. To Tate, he said: 'I might have to go away for a while.'

'You've only just come back,' Tate reminded him. 'We'd get on quicker if you were here more often. The cold gas people are on our heels. They can get robust states where we can't: if they make any more progress it's us who'll become the backwater. You know?'

'I know.'

Kearney, at the door, offered him the white cat. She twisted about in his hands. Her brother was still looking at the empty display.

'Have you got names for them yet?'

Tate looked embarrassed.

'Only the female,' he said. 'I thought we could call her Justine.'

'Very apt,' Kearney admitted. That evening, rather than face an empty house, he called his first wife, Anna.

TWO

Gold Diggers of 2400 AD

K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher was up in the halo with her ship, the White Cat, trolling for customers.

Up there, a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky, trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter. Seria Mau liked it there. She liked the halo. She liked the ragged margins of the Tract itself, which everyone called 'the Beach', where the corroded old pre-human observatories wove their chaotic orbits, tool-platforms and laboratories abandoned millions of years previously by entities who had no idea where they were-or perhaps anymore what they were. They had all wanted a closer look at the Tract. Some of them had steered whole planets into position, then wandered off or died out. Some of them had steered whole solar systems into position, then lost them.



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