Some nights, Ed went back out on the street with him. They stayed uptown, and played for small points. It was corner trade, a little here, a little there. If Tig suspected Ed was fucking his wife, he never let it show. By an unspoken agreement, they didn't mention the Cray sisters either. They didn't have much else in common, so most of the time they talked about Ed. That suited Ed. Talking helped. By his third week, thanks to Neena's generosity, he had begun to reclaim large tracts of the past. The problem was, none of them joined up. It was sudden analepsis--images, people, places, events, caught by an unsteady camera, lit with bad light. Connective tissue was missing. There was no real narrative of Ed.

"I knew some amazing guys," he began suddenly one night, in the hope that talking about it would make it clearer. "You know, really mad guys. Guys with charmed lives."

"What sort of guys ?"

"You know, all over the galaxy there are these guys who just do it," Ed tried to explain. "They're widely distributed. They're having fun."

"Do what ?" Tig asked him.

Ed was puzzled that Tig didn't already know. "Well, everything," he said. They were standing at the corner of Dioxin and Photino at the time. It was maybe half two, half three in the morning. The street was slow. In fact it was empty. The night sky was over it all with a field of stars. Off in one corner the Kefahuchi Tract glared down on them like a bad eye Not really meaning to, Ed made a gesture which took it all in. "Just everything," he said.

What it turned out was this-

From an early age, Ed Chianese had been some kind of drifter and sensationist. He couldn't remember what planet he came from. "Maybe it was even this one!" he laughed. He left home as soon as he could. There was nothing for him there. He was a big raw black-haired kid who loved cats, excited all the time for no reason, and he felt less trapped than too well looked after. He rode the dynaflow ships. He hopped from planet to planet for three years until he fell off the edge of things on to the Beach. There, he got in with people to whom life was nothing unless it looked as if you were about to lose it. This meant doing the Kefahuchi Boogie. It meant prospecting, and the entrada. It meant surfing stellar envelopes in the one-man rockets they called dipships, which were made of nothing much more than mathematics, magnetic fields and some kind of smart carbon. Not many people did that any more.

copyright m john harrison 2003