“I didn’t volunteer,” Skeen says calmly, slowing down and reaching for her ID and licence. Niamh looks at her, as the car inches forward towards the clockwork figures of the soldiers, standing, bending, positioning their guns. She is not worried about checkpoints. Soldiers always wave surgeons go through, knowing who it is that might be stitching them back together. Talker, in the back seat with Sullivan, holding the camera bag, leans forward in alarm. Kino, who has not been listening, realises that the atmosphere has changed and turns away from the window, alarmed, to look from face to face.

“What? You didn’t volunteer?”

“Did you not know?” Skeen says, “The councils of your hospital can volunteer for you. They can claim that their work is vital but that they will make the sacrifice of putting forward someone else’s name. I bet Sneador put forward mine.”

“Where are you going?” says the soldier, poking his head and gun into the car.

“To a prayer meeting in St. Canice’s cathedral,” Skeen says. The soldier sighs and let his head sag.

“You all ask us to come here,” he says, “And now you bitch about us.”

“We didn’t ask you to come here. The government did. Have you not been watching the news?”

The soldier shrugs, sighs heavily, and touches his forehead to his forearms. He stands back, waved them on and says,

“Your fucking country, ma’am.”

They drive on.

There are about a hundred cars and vans parked in the field and when Skeen and Niamh have found somewhere to park and made their way over to the marquee, the lights are already slowly flashing. At the doors, there were six people, four of whom seem to be bouncers, and who check the visitors over for metal, and the remainder Skeen think are probably St. John’s Ambulance volunteers – this is a guess, as she has not been to a rave before. A casually dressed man is directing people from their cars towards the marquee and handing out small cards printed with a map of the interior. Niamh examines hers expertly and pointed to a small room on the second floor. It is marked in orange.

“That’s the chill-out room,” she says, “We can go there and chat. They have table service, so we can get a drink on the way up but won’t have to bother going down again.”

Skeen nods to one of the St. John’s men, whom she now saw that she recognized, and he smiles back at her. They do not wear their uniforms when they do this sort of work. She holds her arms out while the bouncer swiftly runs a metal detector over her, and she is nodded in.

The music, hypnotic and loud, is already in full flow when they arrive. Most of the people in the middle, dancing, are young, all under forty, but there are the usual eighth of sixty-ish people and the small rooms sectioned off with rigid doors of clear plastic are occupied by the seventy-ish and upwards, who spend some of the time dancing and the rest of the time gossiping. As they make their way to the steel staircase, Niamh points Grandma Moses out to Skeen, who laughs quite delightedly, as she has heard of the woman. At a hundred and eighteen, she is one of the oldest people to attend raves; her real name is Annie Corcoran. For many years a devout and obedient Catholic citizen, Annie has abandoned the Church and the government for anarchy after her husband, virulently opposed to violence, the war, and the army of the Imperial States being on Irish soil, is killed in an accident involving an army vehicle. Skeen watches Annie dance, and marvels at the elegance of the woman who still dressed in what Gummer used to call Cork Federation of Mothers of Eleven style, after the late Frank Hall. Annie’s white hair is neatly french-plaited, and only a few strands hung out of place, despite her exertions.

Skeen has now started going to raves for the same reason that the St. John’s Ambulance do, and the fire-fighters and even, it is rumoured, some renegade coppers. Always illegal raves are now, in the High Vienna style, expected to become self-imploding irregularities, that is to say, the government encourage the likelihood of death or damage being an outcome, eventually, of continued attendence at such things. Water supplies are cut off or contaminated on the grounds that people who take drugs need to be punished, and there has been a surge of contaminated drugs, some cut with powdered glass, some with phosphate, onto the market, that is later discovered to have a government source. Services like St. John’s Ambulance or rescue services are forbidden to attend emergencies arising from illegal activities, in the hope, broadly speaking, that those already in the habit of going would die off sooner rather than later and that to everyone else it became too much of a risk. Therein, as Skeen and many others knew, lay their mistake.

Skeen buys a bottle of wine at the bar and carefully threads her way through the crowd towards the chill-out room where Niamh and Kino are waiting. Sullivan is dancing and is now moving to a seat with her picture-tablet in her hand. Talker is at the bar, listening to something a man is saying to him, smiling. It is still quite empty, and they settle themselves near the window. Skeen dislikes sitting on bean bags, but all furniture and fittings have to be easily stored, easily disposed of, and easily made to look like something else, and bean bags were the most versatile. The window is clear plastic and through it they could overlook Kilkenny. The music changed and became slow, mellow, vaguely whale-like. Annie Corcoran danced like she is floating.

“Even Mum came to one of these,” Niamh says, pouring out the wine, “Though I think she really could not get over what they have become.”

Skeen laughs. She remembers that when Teacher spoke to Skeen and Lowry about her experience, she is deserted by her usual articulacy, and kept shaking her head and gesturing helplessly with her hands. It is almost as though her brain has fused and she is twitching and jumping as contradictory messages pulsated through her nervous system.

“I suppose one of her own groups has been banned?” Skeen asks, clinking her glass against Niamh’s and Kino’s, who is nodding as she swallowed.

“She’s a great joiner of clubs and starter of groups,” Niamh says, “But of course they were all scrutinised and she really couldn’t believe the things they banned. I couldn’t believe it,” she added emphatically, as though this lent tremendous weight to the situation.

“It’s the same everywhere now,” Skeen says, sipping her wine, “They really do believe that if a bunch of people get together to talk about anything except mainstream religion that it is an attempt to undermine the state.”

“Feminism leads to witchcraft, lesbianism, infanticide and divorce,” Niamh paraphrased, “And it is always us against them.”

“The government does themselves no favours, though,” Kino says thoughtfully, “By making so many people “them”. Respectable white middle-class full time mothers accustomed to frowning at The Youth of Today are understandably startled to find that they, too, are being told that everything they want to do is wrong.”

“I know. Mum used to really give out to me something rotten if she found out I went to a rave but then they banned the ICA and she used to go anyway, they’d meet in May Clavin’s house and pretend they were organizing a surprise birthday party.”

Skeen laughs. The ban on the Irish Countrywomen’s Association has not lasted long but it has caused uproar, the members even goes on protest marches, that were very well organized and provided tea for the participants. The women were nicknamed Hammerites, on the grounds that now everyone’s grandmother had a hammer. Generally speaking there was little violence associated with such protests, apart from one occasion outside Leinster house when the President of the Boora Guild was pushed to the ground by an over-enthusiastic copper as she stepped into the road to bring the teapot round to the other side, and the Treasurer from Cartylodge retaliated with a vigorous left hook. No charges were brought, though harsh words were heard between the Treasurer and the copper’s mother. The ICA got their way and the ban was lifted, but many of its members began to think twice when they heard that this or that activity has been designed anti-social or against the best interest of the country, or in breach of Federation agreements.

Sullivan and Talker join Skeen, Kino and Niamh at the table, bringing their own drinks and another bottle of wine.

“Are you really not going to do anything about being a volunteer?” Kino asks, emboldened by the wine. Skeen calmly shook her head.

“No. It would draw attention and anyway the way in which people are called up varies wildly. I probably won’t come to the head of the list.”

“But what if you do?” persisted Niamh, who is seventeen.

Skeen glanced at her and put down her glass.

“I did not want to become a hospital doctor in Dublin,” she says, “All through the years of studying medicine I saw, as clearly as one sees the edges of a building, that I would take what I has learned and I would apply it to the simplest things. I wanted to make people better but I always wanted to feel the clay under my nails. People still die of curable diseases. People still die of preventable diseases. There were no offices when I looks about me, there were the walls of real house where real people lived and died and where real medicine is needed. That is what I saw. That is not what I see now.”

Niamh says nothing for a while, but stared out of the window towards the lights in St. Canace’s Cathedral.

Kilkenny had seen dogged, vicious fighting during the Geraldine Wars, dead bodies strewn in parts on the streets, heads on pikes along the walls of the Pale. She does not even believe in nationhood and they have invited and endured the rasp of steel on bone, the soft plash of organs shattering under the force of gravity. Heartstring words like evil invited the same sound but there were no heads, with their exotic beards, piked along the King’s Highway to the president’s office in Downing Street, or anonymous schoolchildren strewn like graffiti over the lawns of the new Oval Office in Broken Falls, Alabama. Outside Kilkenny there is a castle with a hole in the door. The hole has a little shutter over it. It commemorated the rash action of one of the opposing sides in the Geraldine Wars. Sick of the fighting, and wishing to unite against a common enemy, he has stuck his hand through the door (which his men has already pierced before he called to them to stop) to shake the hand of his enemy. Startled, the enemy has not chopped the hand off, but has opened the door. Niamh imagined the men, stinking with sweat and blood and inarticulate with violence, suddenly hovering and shy, shuffling their feet and looking to their companions to know what to do in an unexpectedly social situation.

“Well, you won’t get much more real life than death,” she says to Skeen, “Speed really admires you, does you know that?”

Skeen disliked innocent directness in people she think should know better, but she tempered her words.

“Speed likes everyone.”

“He says he has to. He says he doesn’t study medicine so he has to be really nice to everyone. He says,” here Niamh frowned and looks up at Skeen, “That that is what he is there for.”

Skeen swallowed her wine. The music changed again, ethereal and light over a heavy drumbeat like trees falling.

“He means that he is what they call a support career doctor. It’s something the Brazilians invented. No one wants to pay doctors, and certainly not nurses, a proper wage. So they get graduates in other subjects, and give them a one-year fast track training and say that it is just for medical administration. But of course, they are used to prop up the whole service, some have even attended operations. It’s a miracle no one has died. He’s a bit embarrassed about it, I think, but he doesn’t want to leave.

He seemed a bit bewildered for a while but then he took on a job in police liaison.”

Niamh is surprised. Skeen lowered her voice, even though the music is now quite loud.

“You know remember when the government shut down all the charities that they says were restricting the family’s rights over its members?”

Niamh rolled her eyes and nodded. These closures has invoked a glorious, though short-lived, rebellion in her school. The new laws on subversion, which has been brought in after months of consultation, not with Ireland’s citizens, but with the advisors to the President of the Federation of Loyal Imperial States, has been so blatant, so swift and so outrageous that there has hardly been a murmur, in the same is as a stubbed toe is, initially, more painful than an amputation. A Freudian report published by a Canadian university claimed that all experiences of rape or sexual abuse were imaginary, so crises centres were chopped, and support services for children. Battered spouses were encouraged to seek solution within the family. Schools were forbidden to practice “inappropriate education”, which included sex education and secular philosophies. It is the laws on subversion that has resulted in the attempted ban of the ICA, and the successful ban on, for example, book clubs who does not submit a reading list for approval.

“Well, in order to try and sugar the pill a bit, all such closures have to be preceded by a consultation with a liaison officer, who is in their pocket. But, as with everything else, there is organised resistance. Some of these officers manage to always find a reason why the place can’t be shut, or some bit of law that means it is providing a vital service. I think Skeen is joining that club, but he’s a bit nervous.”

Skeen poured some more wine, and Niamh could see that speaking of this, even where they were, made Skeen uncomfortable. She cast about in her mind for another subject, when Skeen floored her by asking,

“How is Tom doing?”

Niamh’s shoulders sagged.

“You’d have to ask Brittle O’Brien. I’m told they make a lovely couple.”

“Oh, love,” says Skeen, and touched her arm.

“Sorry,” says Sullivan awkwardly and Niamh smiles at her. Sullivan pours wine for them all, and the man that Talker has been speaking with is leaving, he smiles when he sees Talker and briefly touches his shoulder as he passes. Wanting to change the subject, and his mind on Niamh’s ended relationship, Talker leans over to Kino as Skeen distracts Niamh by asking her about the music, and says,

“Sullivan tells me that you’ve left Rafferty?”

“You always says everything is a rebellion! Any time I disagrees with you, or da, it is, oh, Lowry’s at that rebellious stage – I’m nearly thirty, for fuck sake!”

“I just think that it is wrong, it is morally wrong, to say that you are married – and don’t curse at me, you little whelp!  – to say that you are married, but you don’t mind if your husband, if your, if he, if Tacky – “

“If he rides someone else.”

“Mind your language! In front of the child,” Bia glances protectively at Urse and glared at Lowry.

“Ma, if you think “ride” is the worst that child hears,” Lowry sighs, “Anyway I’m not trying to make you think I’m right because hey, that would never happen, I’m just telling you what happened and that it’s complicated.”

“That’s putting it mildly! What have you told Urse?”

“What happened. The truth.”

There is a short pause. This is a sticking point for Bia. She believes people should be prepared for the way life usually is, and not cosseted to the point where they either are incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, or simply refuse to do so. But she feels that Lowry’s approach to child-rearing is brutal. Urse has been introduced to the existence and basic ideologies of gender, sex, justice, inequality and responsibility from as early an age as possible, Bia has had difficulty bringing herself not to pretend that Santa Claus existed. She theoretically accepts Lowry’s oft-repeated statement that childhood is a necessary prelude to adulthood, not a sacred state to be ridiculously prolonged. Every time she encounters manifest evidence of the difference between the way she brought up her children and the way Lowry is bringing up Urse, Bia feels as though she is being personally criticized. She knows Lowry doesn’t know this and that too annoys her. She distantly feels that Lowry, her daughter and now a mother, should have guessed.

“And how is she going to get the hang of this great idea of yours about it being alright to have made a commitment and still play the field, without breaking hearts and getting a name for herself?”

“Ma I am not saying that it does not matter,” Lowry says loudly, “I am just saying that it is not the worst thing in the world that one human being can do to another.”

“That’ll be why you are raging about the consequences,” her mother says dryly.

“If you think I am raging because he got someone else up the duff you’d better hope he never lies to me or talks about me behind my back.”

Bia opens her mouth, and shuts it again.

Lowry’s grandmother has been married the year she turned twenty. Her husband, Fintan, is a morally upright young man, who never so much as looks at another woman during the years of his courtship of and marriage to Lowry Mangan. However, a few years after the marriage she discovered that he is prone, when in company, to tell his friends things about his wife that she has told him in confidence. He would speak about her as though she is not present. Though the things he recounted were of a mild and sometimes affectionate nature, and though she knew Fintan meant no malice towards her, this habit of his turned her against him. She resented the fact that she was welded to a man who is an inappropriate recipient for confidences, however innocent, never before given. She is ceaselessly aware that he could never be fully loyal to her any more than he would be loyal to a pet – fond of, responsible for, but not loyal to. She missed him when he died over fifty years later but she has never quite been able to forgive him for that betrayal.

“What is the point of teaching anyone moral behaviour if all they are going to do is adapt and change it?” Bia rallies.

“What is evolution but adaptation? Are you going to pretend that you approach everything just the same way as your mother? Maybe if she had had greater freedom she would have has a different outlook on life.”

“If you had had the hard life she has you might have believed in God and not be so keen to think this life is the only one you have.”

“I’m not obliged to save the phenomenon! If god can’t exist unless people have lives that are shadows of their potential then god should bow out. It is too high a price.”

“But you are still mad at Tacky.”

“There’s the pieces to be picked up, and the practicalities. That happens regardless of your ideology.”

“The gap between real life and the idea is where most people come a cropper. That’s why they turn to God.”

“A deity is a crutch, an imagined bridge that teaches nothing. Secular philosophies are the administrative structures between ideologies and real life.”

They stay the night, bickering, at Bia’s house. They has been going to drive home and Bia says nothing to dissuade them, but places upon the table a bottle of red wine that she has had for a few years. Since it has been sent from Australia a week after the fuck-you speech delivered by the Australian president, it has caused untold problems at customs and Bia says she thinks it only appropriate that Lowry should have some. So they have bacon for dinner (as happily Urse has not yet worked out the relationship between Bia’s herd and the dinner table) and after Urse is safely asleep, Bia, Tacky and Lowry have the wine.

The day after Bia found out about her partial grandchild, Skeen takes one of her rare days off work so that she can meet Brehon Locke to talk about Teacher. Niamh is still staying with her and they were both going to see Teacher, so Skeen thinks it would be better for everyone if Skeen’s presence is a friendly rather than official one. Afterwards they has arranged to meet Brehon for lunch, though Niamh is not yet ready to return home.

Brehon is now secretly relieved. He is having great difficulty with his other children who are dealing with their distress by analyzing who is to blame and the favourite at the moment is Niamh. Brehon misses her, which surprises him. He is not much of a philanthropist; he does not mind other people being around but he does not like to have to interact with them for extended periods of time. He likes them to be there, when they were congenial, he likes to drop in and out of the conversation and games, and his family seem to have become accustomed to it. But Niamh is always more demanding. It is difficult to be in her company without interacting, she always wants to know things, to find out how people and things work. In that is she is undeniably her brother’s sister. Remote now in Nietzsche, which Brehon fervently hoped would be a brief phase, Alan (who is rather hoping that his nickname would become Reader, or perhaps Thinker) wants to follow every think from its font to its coffin and both have a bone-hard relentlessness in pursuing their themes – Alan his enquiries in the theoretical field and Niamh firmly in the here and now. Brehon finds it extraordinary that it is Niamh who still believed in God and Alan who does not, though even Alan does not have the neck to tell Teacher. Brehon worries that Niamh will become hardened and lose her sense of humour through a constant pursuit of the political. He has not noticed that it is in fact Alan who could not look upon the idiosyncrasies of the world without ensuring that his expression befitted one who has had the veil lifted from his eyes and that their oldest sister Tracey expects to be able to boss everything out of existence. Brehon is relieved to see that Niamh is looking better and less traumatized. He is especially relieved to see that she actually looks happy to see him. He asks her how Teacher has been.

“She seemed better,” Niamh says, “Less dozy. But she is completely bewildered about what happened. She doesn’t understand why she is under arrest.”

“Do we know exactly what happened, what she does do?”

Niamh is still sensitive about this so Skeen, who has discussed it with Niamh, and has watched illicit footage taken by a surveillance officer and given to her anonymously, answers instead.

“Teacher is beside one of the protesters who is known to the police,” she says, “a member of a group called Freedom Strike.”

“Yes,” Brehon says impatiently. He has heard of them and thinks that anyone ought to know if they joined groups with names like that that they were bound to get into trouble.

“The police has already sprayed the crowd with CD gas and this man got it in his eyes. He couldn’t see where he is going. When the police charged the crowd, this man collided with them and they stunned him. He fell against them and they are claiming it is assault on a police officer. They dragged him off, he resisted, and they batoned him. Teacher intervened.”

Skeen has a low voice and uses a plain tone. This is a feature she has honed over the years. She is so aware that by inclination she is nervy and anxious that she hates to think she might be communicating this anxiety when she is dealing with people professionally. Bad enough to tell them that they has some complication in their insides -  before the war Skeen has specialised in intestinal surgery – but to tell them in a shaky voice would make their condition worse. So she developed this mellow, unmoveable tone, and polished it like a piece of walnut. Brehon does not find it reassuring, but sinister. He can hardly believe what she is saying but that in itself should not alarm him. He is conscientious about reading a wide spectrum of newspapers and listening to broadcasts from many different channels so that he could not be accused of narrow-mindedness. He is accustomed to hearing these sorts of accusations against the police, of provoking the crowd so that they could charge, false accusations of assault or resistance, the innocence of troublemakers. But delivered in Skeen’s familiar, professional tone, he finds it too difficult to make the kind of mental readjustments he usually makes. There is no room in her tone or in what she says for hints of left wing cover-ups, provocation of the police, the deliberate and gleeful irresponsibility of the press, noses high for a decent story, leaving out the facts of context. Brehon is familiar with the ways in which the police, merely following the latest guidelines on crowd control, adapted from the Belgian police and requiring active identification and separation out of troublemakers, could be portrayed as brutal. Skeen’s voice, long accustomed to presenting unpalatable medical facts, does not lend itself to contradiction, however silent. Brehon feels sick.

After her father leaves, Niamh waits in Skeen’s office while the surgeon goes to have her paperwork finished off. Engrossed in her Patrick McCabe book, Niamh’s attention moves very slowly away from the bleak pages to the raised voices in the hallway, but once alerted to the row, she closes the book and listens closely. She is at once surprised that it is Skeen, and not surprised that Skeen’s superior is enraged.

“This is agrees,” Skeen speaks very calmly, “This is a declared policy. We can’t –“

“This is the nonsense that you and that half-witted legal mate of yours concocted to take revenge on me!”

Mr. Sneador is red and bright-eyed, and is beginning to hitch his belt, which is a sign that he is at the end of his tether.

“You overestimate yourself,” Skeen says, “Our resources are already over-stretched and would not accommodate time spent attempting revenge on anyone. It is the logical conclusion of the procedures you yourself initiated.”

As always happened, Niamh has begun to notice, if anyone is in difficulty with a more senior colleague who is known to be a quisling, other doctors and nurses began to drift into the hallway. In a moment, she guesses, someone unimpeachable will come along. They will stand either beside Mr. Sneador or slightly apart, equidistant between them. On cue, a man of about thirty comes sauntering around the corner, his white coat billowing languidly behind him, a sheaf of papers in his hand, tapping a ball point pen on his teeth. He looks up and smiles.

“Mr. Sneador. Hello. Good to see you, sir. Dr. Coyne, this is most fortunate, Mrs. de Rocca has asks to see you as a matter of urgency.”

Dr. Siwale, having hurried to the spot for the same purpose is now in Mr. Sneador’s line of vision and has to do something to suggest she has a genuine reason to be there, so she swerves into Skeen’s office. With Mr. Sneador’s beady eye upon her, she holds out her hand to Niamh and says,

“I hope you don’t mind, Dr. Coyne has been called away unexpectedly.”

Niamh, having spent a few days with Skeen, stands up and shakes hands, assuring the surgeon, now closing the door on Mr. Sneador’s suspicious face, that this does not cause a problem. Having seen that Niamh has played along, Dr. Siwale assumes she does not need to explain herself. Instead she just says,

“Thanks. Sneador’s on the war-path.”

“Has Skeen done something?”

Dr. Siwale snorts and pours some tea for them both.

“We’ve all done something, we can’t help it since they will change the rules more often than their underwear. Skeen, however.”

Dr. Siwale shakes her head and laughs.

“Mr. Sneador is great. He really thinks that his enemies will wear black and have scars and funny accents and will dodge around looking like gangsters. He cannot understand Skeen. It is like showing to him a pink banana.”

Niamh sips her tea.

“Dr. Keane, who is behind him with the files, is much worse though, she suspects everyone of everything.”

“That must be exhausting.”

“No, she knows how to delegate the intangible just as well as the tangible. She tries to make everyone superstitious, make them think that if they do not find someone to take any blame that is about to fall, it will fall on them. They will be wearing rabbits’ feet and guarding against the evil eye. The woman is a disgrace.”

Dr. Siwale sighs and rubs her face into her hand.

“It’s the videos. We knew they would be trouble, that’s why Skeen does it. But he won’t give up.”

“What are the videos of?”

Dr. Siwale, bleary-eyed, look at Niamh blankly, as though she has forgotten Niamh is not a medic. Then she says,

“You have heard of the MD Group? Moral Doctors Group? Well, Sneador, not being a doctor is not a member, but he is clinging very tightly to the coat-tails of Mr. Brady, who is the chairman of MDG.”

Niamh’s face brightens.

“Has this anything to do with that abortion video?  Jo Morris’s video of the operation? They showed us that in school, they made us watch it. THey showed us an interview with her too – she was one of those Warp World artists, they’re all barking.”

“Did you watch the video?”

“No. A bunch of us – well, a small bunch – refused. We got suspended.”

“I’m glad to hear it. The Councils of the various hospitals had a joint meeting and set up yet another funded committee to talk about it – though for some reason they seemed incapable of meeting in this country, they always have to meet someone who is in Italy or one of the Imperial States, somewhere hot. The result is that in this hospital, in most hospitals, anyone who wants an abortion has to watch the video. As well as get the father of the foetus to sign the consent form. They say it made sure that the woman makes an informed choice.”

“That’s outrageous!”

Dr. Siwale sighs again.

“What is outrageous is that it is only one of many things. Unmarried fathers have no rights of access now and never get custody, even in that Rimbauld case where the mother was mad as a puck goat. Almost all of the state funded schools have changed the make-up of the governing bodies, overwhelmingly male, white, middle class. Don’t get me started. I don’t know if Skeen’s approach is right, but I find myself in the position of supporting her because I cannot support those who are against her.”

“What does she do?”

“I worked it out with a lawyer,” Skeen says briskly, slipping into the room and heading for the teapot, “That if watching a video of the prodedure is to inform the choice of women having surgery to terminate a pregnancy then it is a necessary procedure for all surgery. Anyone having an operation has to watch the procedure before it happens.”

“Skeen knows that I do not think that that is good for the patient.”

“And Sleeper knows that neither do I but if the patients in the future are going to get a service from us they have to help us now. Sneador is only involved because Tony Fletcher had to watch his stomach stapling operation before it happened and he had a heart attack. He didn’t die,” she adds quickly.

“The rate of heart attacks among people who are undergoing cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment and having varicose veins removed has gone right up,” says Heather Siwale, “It’s remarkable. I hold to my reservations, I do not think it is good for the patients even where it is elective and it is immeasurably distressing for patients and their relatives where it is an absolute medical necessity. But of course Sneador and his ilk do not care about the fate of the patient and only noticed what Skeen has done when their friends and money-men became patients and objected. Sneador hates Skeen.”

The anesthesist leaves, and Skeen tells Niamh that she would be another half an hour if Niamh doesn’t mind waiting. Niamh does not mind; they are going out that evening and she is looking forward to it. She has never been to a rave with a surgeon before.

Shortly before Skeen is due to return there is a knock on the door and the young man who rescued Skeen from Mr. Sneador comes in.

“My name is Speed McGuire,” he says, smiling, but worried, “Is Skeen about?”

“She will be back in ten minutes,” Niamh says.

Speed is the same height as Niamh but trim and muscular. He wears a black suit, with a white coat over it, and still carries his sheaf of papers. Niamh, still reeling a little from what she has been told, blurts out,

“You protected Skeen because of the videos?”

Speed is startled and glances behind him, then nods.

“I have to leave this with her – can you make sure she gets it? I have to go and meet Sneador and some others but it’s really vital that she gets this.”

Niamh holds out her hand and he gives her the papers. He smiles briefly at her and then leaves. Niamh looks at the paper. It is a photocopy of a list, hastily done, crooked, the toner in the printer is running out. There are dozens of names, but one – Margaret Ellen (Skeen) Coyne – is circled. It is a list of doctors volunteering to go into the conflict zone.

“He came to the canteen,” Lowry says, and Kino’s heart goes out to Ridley, as much for the available refreshments as the likely conversation.

“He is not what I expected. Not even a little bit. I tried to make him feel guilty,” Lowry says, realising that it is true, “You know, broken homes, teary children.”

Sullivan and Kino look at each other, each aware that Tacky and Lowry were still together and that it would take a lot more than parental hanky-panky to squeeze a tear from the robust Urse.

“Asks him how he’d feel if someone is pregnant by his husband.”

Lowry stops there, an unwelcome emotion swelling up.

“What did he say?” Sullivan asks wisely and Kino glanced at her in irritation.

Lowry shrugs, stared determinedly out of the window.

“He said, How would I know. He said, I’ve never has a husband. Well, except yours.”

Kino stares at the blank quarkerscreen. Her nose throbbed. Sullivan is examining her fingernails. When they think they could control themselves, they look at each other and then, wildly, look at Lowry, who already has tears in her eyes. They laugh till their eyes were red.

Ridley rang Lowry and they meet again, this time at an Information Recycling Unit derisively known as the Pump in the Dump. All of the libraries are obliged to recycle books but this obligation has changed in tone since two years before the start of the Imperial War, when the government of Ireland took its mandate, not from the people, however plain, of Ireland but from the International Advisory Council of the Imperial States. Librarians are no longer able to manage their collection; this change in approach is spun as “relieving specialist staff of onerous decisions better made centrally,” and instead they are obliged to focus on more mechanical tasks and production of volumes of audit reports; this in turn is spun as “enabling a transparent interface with stakeholders.” Authors and publishers of all books are obliged – or “entitled” – to provide a copy of the book to one of a number of central copyright libraries, who are obliged to accept them. To help librarians decide which books were relevant to their collecting policy, all libraries are given an ever-increasing list of books which are no longer required, that is, books which are, in effect, banned. Every three months, Lowry made a trip to the Pump overlooking Rush beach, taking with her the books due for destruction.

While Ridley emptied boxes of books into the incinerator, he planned the points that he needed to make to Lowry. Ridley is determined that nothing having its fount and origin with him, let alone something that is making him happy, would generate fear. He has lived in Dublin for twenty years, and has worked with Tacky at The Factory since his arrival. As a refugee he is not permitted to have a full-time job. He and Tacky has become friends quickly, and he has a strong affection for him, though he is not in love with him and does not want him to himself. He is accustomed to frugality, he has never been rich, but in Ireland he has stability and with that he feels capable of coping with anything.

Lowry re-appears from the book-lined underground cavern, red in the face, and sweating lightly, even in the cold. She folds up the bags in which she has carried the banned books, and stuffs them into her pocket.

“Here, let me do this now,” she says, taking a pile of dog-eared historical romances from Ridley’s hands and flinging them into the incinerator. She has no idea how to start the conversation so she blurted out,

“So where are you from?”

“Clanbrassil Street,” says Ridley, rather more waspishly than he intended. He has lived, worked, paid taxes, prayed, in Ireland for longer than he has lived in his home country.

“Originally,” says Lowry tightly, “Where are you from originally? You doesn’t get that fecking accent in Clanbrassil street.”

“Well, I’m not called Hitabu for nothing,” says Ridley

“Oh,” says Lowry, and then dropped the handfuls of detective novels she is holding, looks at Ridley and says more strongly, “Oh! Clanbrassil Street it is, then.”

With almost immediate effect Lowry is able to see Ridley as a complete human being, rather than either as an amorphous colleague of her husband or as a threat. Ridley has escaped, at the age of eleven, from a notorious war in a country on the brink of famine and ecological disaster, and has endured the refugee camps, the tiresome belief that Africa is a singe corrupt unit racked by tribal warfare, the uncomfortable position of being a mascot for liberals who enunciated every word clearly to him, the daily fear, that lasted for years, that somehow his past will rise from the grave and become his present. For the first time since Tacky broke the news to her, Lowry has something she could use to measure the scale of the event. Ridley finds Lowry relaxing because she understood immediately why Ridley says he is from Clanbrassil Street, where he has a spotless flat and neighbours he met on the way to Mass, and not from the overturned city streets of Trasudech, where he lived with vermin, assault and a threshold of fear he could now hardly contemplate.

Like the hospital’s public areas, the studio in which Sullivan is working has a coating of smart-sand, an electronic material which can be programmed to become whatever it is the programmer seeks. The hospital is pre-programmed so that the plaster covering its walls are cameras, constantly recording. The studio has a few basic programmes already written in, so that it is easy for Sullivan to test out where to hang the paintings and how much space she needs for the installation, she can always find a hammer or an easel wherever she happens to be standing. She is accustomed to smart-sand, as are most adults, but Lowry’s child Urse still finds it fascinating and loves programming new things. Sullivan does not mind that Kino  wants to baby-sit Urse in the studio for the afternoon, she digs out some equipment that Urse can play with, but Sullivan can not understand the child’s repetitive delights. It would distress Sullivan to repeat something the way Urse does, to make a formula of every encounter and investigation. Talker, who likes the company of children and has done enough babysitting to face the tedium with equanimity, is an instant hit with the critical Urse because he knows some codes that are simple enough for her to follow but new enough to occupy her. She makes an elephant with wings, two surprisingly elegant herons and what Talker can only identify as a rugby forward and then she makes what is always her party-piece, a very good pig. This, she tells him, is because her grandmother Nolan keeps pigs and Urse and her parents have to go to see Bia Nolan next week.

“They have to tell Grandmother Nolan that I am going to have half a sister or brother,” she says, sounding very pleased with the prospect.

“Just the half, then?” Talker says, accepting the cup of tea that Kino  brings to him, “Are you renting the other half out?”

“No, it’s because it’s only Tacky is the father but Lowry isn’t the mother,” Urse explains, and Kino  says quickly,

“Urse, I don’t think that they want you to be telling everyone.”

“Mammy is raging at him,” Urse goes on, ignoring Kino’s words but taking a biscuit in one hand and a coloured pencil in the other, “Because it is alright she says for him to have sex with someone else besides her but there isn’t supposed to be complications.”

“Urse,” says Kino very sternly and Talker says,

“Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this.”

Urse looks at him in surprise.

“But everyone will know because the baby will be black like Ridley and Lowry isn’t black and neither is Tacky.”

Urse concentrates on chewing her biscuit and Kino  miles awkwardly at Talker.

“I told Lowry she should repress Urse a bit more.”

“I told daddy that if he thinks Mammy is mad at him that he should wait and see what Grandmother Nolan says about it,” Urse says brightly.

“This is your grandmother who keeps pigs?” Talker says, hoping to change the subject.

“Yes, the one we have to go to next week to tell her that Tacky has sex with a man called Ridley and that Ridley’s going to have a baby.”

Talker looks at Kino who shrugs helplessly.

“I don’t understand,” Urse starts again, “How it happened. I didn’t think men could have babies. Can you have a baby?”

“I can’t but some men can. Now, I think we have exhausted the baby conversation,” Talker says, a little impatient that Kino has not distracted Urse. He picks up a pencil and resignedly slides onto the floor.

“Now if you stop telling me about your parents’ sex-life and instead show me how to draw as good a pig as yours I will show you how to program the smart-sand to make a unicorn.”

Urse presses the remains of her biscuit into Talker’s nearby hand and concentrates on meeting his bribe.

Grandmother Nolan does not take it at all well.

“What’s this I hear about half a grandchild?” she demands, when they has been in her house fifteen minutes. Lowry looks reproachfully at her daughter, and Bia Nolan looks reproachfully at hers. Urse looks shifty, remembering belatedly that Lowry has told her not to breathe a word of the news till she is given permission.

“She didn’t tell me,” Bia lies immediately, “I’m your mother, I know everything.”

When he is excused from his duties of spying on his fellow-citizens, Bailiff Patrick is expected to spend time monitoring the border between Muinbeo and the rest of Ireland. Bailiff does not know enough about physics to know why Muinbeo exists. He has been told that it is an instance of Calabai-Yau space, which he does not understand and he pictures the country as being like a moth’s wing – smooth and monolithic at first glance but, if seen under a microscope, in fact constructed of many tightly packed layers, and one of these layers worked loose, creating Muinbeo, with its pagan deities, its druids, its werewolves. Generations ago, as the Pharaonic Empire grew in strength and arrogance, its beady eye is drawn to Muinbeo because the then-president of Ireland could not issue a reassurance to the Southern State Party (from which Louisiana is even then trying to slip away) that Muinbeo and its outrages to the SSP’s version of Christianity does not exist. The county came to the Pharaoh’s attention again when the Empire declared its intention of facilitating genealogical research for the future by taking charge of all the sources of such information in Western Europe and bringing them to the no longer United States. The Empire, it claimed, is better placed to take care of the parish registers, the tithe maps, the Domesday Book. Most of the Outland, including the foot-shuffling Taoiseach, say no in various diplomatic terms and Muinbeo sent a telegram to the Pharaoh which read you have your shite. When the Empire realised that the rising discs of pale lilac and blue that appeared over the skies once every two lunar months is what physicists called a temporal eclipse, which meant that Muinbeo could see into what they called the Outland, the Empire insisted that Muinbeo, who has previously refused to allow the Empire use its airspace, be invaded. This invasion of the county failed, uniquely because the army could not find it. Consequently, the rising price of protection by the Empire now included spying on Muinbeo which Bailiff is happy to do because he knows that the Muinbeons know that he is doing this and it is as easy for him, pursuing this line of surveillance, to give as it is to receive. Most of the equipment purchased by the Irish government, including the best quality of smart-sand now used, is provided by Muinbeo and Bailiff has quite a good working relationship with a number of officials in that temporal and physical off-shoot of Ireland. Tonight, because it is a full moon, he monitors the urban surfing.

The day after Teacher’s arrest and hospitalization, her husband Brehon came back from France where he has been interviewing a witness for a corruption case he is prosecuting in Dublin. He is distressed that Niamh refused to come home with him, almost more distressed by her refusal than by the fact that his wife, under arrest, has not yet regained consciousness. Skeen thinks him abrupt and heartless. She rather tightly explains to him that Niamh is shocked and under a lot of strain. She has, Skeen says, been terrified by the events of the march and feels guilty twice over. In the brutal light of the possibility that her mother might not recover, Niamh could recall little else except obsessive detail about the last row she has with her mother. Teacher has says that she would not in a million years go on a protest march, and has tried to forbid Niamh. Niamh, who not only openly defied the ban but also has heavily criticized her mother for her attitude, now feels it is entirely her fault that Teacher has even been there. Brehon does not understand more than a third of what Skeen has says but he does not want to argue because it is clear that Niamh is distraught and is not going to be helped by being dragged home. He wondered if this is a girl thing, that is why Niamh feels better in the company of a woman she barely knew than her own father. He is annoyed with himself for thinking this and more annoyed because he could not persuade himself that it is not true. Irritated, Brehon rings Gummer Bowen, his dentist, inviting him to meet him for a drink, feeling awkward doing so because Gummer used to be married to Skeen, and Brehon both disapproves of divorce and does not want to upset Gummer, whom he likes, by mentioning Skeen. As it happened, Gummer is not available for drink. Instead he asks Brehon to be his driver and Brehon, who almost never gets the chance, agrees enthusiastically. He slips a small device into his pocket and makes his way nonchalantly to O’Looney’s pub near Christchurch.

When he has realised some years ago that the way in which his wife approached life is not a temporary arrangement, Gummer had been devastated. He thinks now that it is partly his fault. He has assumed that Skeen would expect her medical career to plateau, and he should have made sure his assumption is correct. He still believed it is mostly her fault; if her work is more important to her than any other relationship then she should not have married. His sister Gardener says that this blame he apportioned to Skeen is in fact also his. Anyone with an eye in their heads could see that Skeen is dedicated, utterly, to her work. She hasn’t kept it a secret. If someone says they wanted to marry her, might she not expect that they does so knowing where her devotions lay? She is talented and dedicated, why would he wish her to be different? If she is a man, Gardener ended, unpacking shopping bags with a vindictiveness that reminds him of his mother, he wouldn’t have expected it, would he?

“But she isn’t a man,” Gummer has said, and refused to talk to Gardener about it again. The best he can do regarding Skeen is to reach a state where he can speak of her as she is, rather than as a failure of what he has wanted. He has learned to be grateful for the years they have had together, rather than blaming them both of the remaining years alone. He is not always alone but his affairs now, though they have their moments, are half-hearted. Gummer quails at the think of the amount of effort that would go into knowing anyone as intimately, if not as well, as he has known Skeen. He feels a lot older than thirty-nine.

He is glad to hear from  Brehon Locke. He finds the company of men more relaxing than that of women. Most of the women he knows endlessly pin nerve-endings to lighted screens to determine the genesis and evolution of emotional formations. They want to talk about the minutiae of relationships and this endless excavation of souls wearies him.

Once both Gummer and Brehon have set their BluLobe devices, Bailiff can see them. Brehon is the driver, the reader of the urban map who tells the surfer where to turn, where there is a low bridge, a gap in the line of buildings, that there is a spybot, a plane, an Ichari approaching. Urban surfing is developed by lycans, the werewolves in Muinbeo, who can not go out during the full moon and instead created a cyber environment where they could run wild. Usually there is some target for the game, some spurious goal or destination, but essentially, they surf the buildings and streets simply for the sake of surfing, for the opportunity to act without thinking, to respond without analysis. This, Brehon guesses is why Gummer enjoys it so much. Gummer once says he hated the fact that everyone feels obliged to explain and justify what they do and who they are. There is no point, he says, Where you can just say, I am me and not a variation on a theme.

So skilled is Gummer at this surfing that he can hold a conversation with Brehon while still following his instructions, his thinks compartmentalised so competently that Bailiff can easily read the two lines of think.

Brehon chats at first about innocuous things like the weather, and his cases, and made only the most passing of comments about the war because he is aware that most of his outer circle of friends were against it. So to even mention what has happened to his wife brings Brehon into waters he does not normally voluntarily enter so he finds himself saying in an uncharacteristic blurt:

“I found out today that Teacher is on the march on Saturday.”

He has the slightest hesitation before the word “march”, as another man might hesitate before saying “breast” or “prostitute”.

“She was hit by a police officer,” he says, “She’s under arrest. The doctors say she will be okay but she is still under arrest.”

“Christ,” says Gummer, leaping from the top of the National Museum and bounding over the rooves of the neighbouring shops. He says,

“Is she alright? Teacher?”

“It sounds like the strangest thing,” Brehon says, as though someone is likely to include him in the blame, “Teacher and Niamh must have been right up near the front of the march, where – apparently – the first clashes with the police happened. Teacher had rung Niamh to say –“

Here Brehon starts to laugh. Teacher has been trying to arrange a meeting with Niamh. It is so like her; in the middle of the largest turnout of protesters since about 1798, Teacher is ridiculously organized. This amuses him and the fact that he an recount something so typically Teacher relieves him immensely. There is something recognizable in the distorted mirror of what she has done.

“She managed to meet up with Niamh and, eh, Tom,” Brehon goes on, “But then Teacher started pushing ahead. She – this is so stupid, so unlike – sorry, anyway, Niamh says her mother is getting all very exercised about the journalists and the cameras and she started pushing ahead. God knows  – yes, well, anyway. Something happened, trouble-makers started throwing stuff at the police.”

Gummer is frightened by people like Lowry. He will not seek out conflict. He has been brought up to look on certain activities as a social duty and, along with his parents and siblings, goes on the kinds of marches and demonstrations that were not expected to see trouble. Even at that, he has been on the edges often enough to know what people like Brehon meant by “something happened.” The police provoked a heightened crowd, and someone in the crowd responded, throwing things – sometimes domestic missiles flung at the reinforced shields but often just spitting or shouting – thus giving the police the excuse to crash the crowd.

“It isn’t even like she knew this chap,” Brehon says, “Some chap, just some chap there in the street, getting himself into trouble, kicking at the police. Niamh says he has already been knocked down, they has already hit him, and they were trying to, to, to take him in. And he is resisting of course and Teacher – well. She tried to pull him away or something, presumably she will explain herself when she wakes up.

“You get used to things,” Brehon says, “To people, to the things you have to say to them. I can hardly bear to go and see Teacher, I am so angry with her. But that’s the truth of it. After all this time I expect, I deserve, to know what to expect.”

“And violent emotion is not what you expect.”

Brehon feels better now that he has got this off his chest. He knows that Skeen thinks him heartless because he could not hide the fact that he is angry. He is silent for a while, concentrating on reading the land ahead of Gummer. Then, when Gummer is on a clear run over the houses lining O’Connell Street, he says,

“Niamh wouldn’t come home. She wanted to stay with, eh, Skeen actually. She’s funny about it. It isn’t like she’s even angry or something at me. But she won’t come back.”

Gummer says something innocuous, he does not have any children and does not know how to advise Brehon. He is silent in his turn but alongside his decisions – a long jump but should make it, Brehon has seen a paraglider, take refuge in burnt out cinema – Bailiff can read a disjointed but quite clear line of thought. It is an old memory, twenty or thirty years old. It is a relative, probably a brother, of Gummer, a traffic accident. Gummer and probably his sister were sent to stay a few days with their father’s relatives, two women, who lived two doors down, but Gummer has refused to return when, a few days later, his father comes to collect them. Gummer stayed with his aunt for almost two weeks. The boy’s death and Gummer’s divorce are side by side, presumably then the worst thing that have ever happened to Gummer and both things make him think of meteorites. It is only now, when he is not answering Brehon that Gummer thinks a coherent line of think arising from his cluttered memories of his aunt’s vivid, flower-filled house – he has not wanted to return to normality. He does not want to dress the days up to look like real life, or what he has known as real life. He wanted there to be no doubt about any of this, and staying in the relative chaos of Frieda’s house is a way of making sure that no-one is trying to cover anything up. He is making sure he has enough room for the grief and dread that he feels. He wondered if he shared some similarity with Niamh. But he does not know how to offer any of this to Brehon, and the danger of having to do so passes when Brehon says,

“The moon will be over the edge of the church shortly and there are some lycans in there. Turn left and left again.”

But Gummer moves too late, a group of adolescent lycans pour down the side of Findlater’s church, and Gummer ducks back into the building he has just vacated, waiting. The lycans race, hooting and howling, up the centre of O’Connell street.

Bailiff should really be moving on, investigating other surfers, see if there is anything subversive to be read into the scenes set up. But there never is, the lycans just want to let off steam, want to give impatient, hormone-driven juvenile lycans somewhere to exhaust their energies when they were trapped indoors by their biochemicals. Gummer is hunched in an upper room beside a broken window, waiting for the lycans to be gone. Brehon is remembering when Teacher told him she was pregnant. Bailiff guesses that the conjunction of the remembrance of their engagement and the phrase old-fashioned referred to one or both of them in regard to sex but once in the midst of what must have been the most adventurous glitch in their life, they begin to let their hair down and the result is that by the time they got to Australia, she iwa three months pregnant. There is a fast, random series of possibilities, all the potentials that Brehon can see they could have made into reality. They might never go home. They could have kept going, stopping here and there to get work and having their babies and holding hands in rainstorms. The coast of Ireland appears in heavy outline, the deadline for their return coming closer and knowing what he knows of Brehon and Teacher Bailiff guesses that both of them changed back to what they always has been. Does either of them regret it, he wonders. Can they even tell whether the couple they have become when they were abroad is an aberration or whether it is the one sight in an unfogged mirror? Once home, Teacher’s pregnancy, which once out of their usual context has seemed merely an instance to be accommodated, just something that happened, seems to have become a terrible bind and a thing now to be dreaded. His friends are warning him about being trapped and tricked, Teacher’s family are panicking in case the neighbours found out. They marry quickly. Then Teacher has to him she has miscarried and even Bailiff, accustomed to intruding on people’s lives, looks briefly away from the screen when Brehon recalls this, recalls her face, how she has been silently shattered, the ruinous tenderness he feels towards her. The shock of what she has now done disturbed his gravity and his usual anchors were adrift but he also feels as though he knew something like this would happen. Bailiff watches sympathetically as Brehon tries to reconcile two feelings, like trying to drive two magnets together; the simultaneous certainty that he loved her and the outrage of feeling tricked; finding he still means a promise he made when, like a child bride, he did not understand it.

As soon as the car is parked, Kino  scrambles out and breathes deeply, because she is car-sick, and she runs up the hill. Talker follows and catches up. Sullivan locks the doors and follows. Kino reaches the uneven wall at the back of the cliff and leans her elbows on it, stretching to look out at the black oily sea. Patrol boats bob, their lights veering lazily north and south, swayed by the busy revving and turning of private boats, leaving and returning, travelling, smuggling, fishing. A few miles out to sea the usual skeleton swarm of Unit helicopters hang over Bull Island, waiting to catch the refugee boats coming in and the escapees going out. Kino  wonders about Ridley Hitabu and has he ever tried to pass unnoticed through the waterway between Bull Island and the mainland. Talker stands beside her in the narrow niche,  and Kino answers his questions – Bull Island, Ireland’s Eye, Lambay Island. Sullivan’s noisy breathing and heavy footsteps grew closer. Talker stands back and pulls himself nimbly up onto the flat top of the wall, sitting cross-legged so that Kino  and Sullivan can fit into the niche. The heat from Sullivan’s arm and shoulder warm through Kino’s coat.

Sullivan’s profile looks oddly harsh, even though she retains a faint smile, in the garish light of the sea vessels. Her thick hair blows back in the airy ice, as black and shining as the sea. Her markings look like gaps in her face as though she is flickering out of existence, like an Emperor’s Eye. She folds her arms and rested her chin on them, staring, smiling out to sea as though waiting to spot a ship for her to discover the world.

Kino  says,

“Why did you tell Skeen you were coming back to Ireland but you didn’t tell me until you were practically here?”

Sullivan is taken aback and does not answer for a moment. She is about to feign ignorance, firstly of what it is she has told Skeen but not Kino, secondly of why it could be of any significance, and thirdly, of any understanding of her own motives. This third element always also requires a declaration of being exhausted to the point of confusion. In the light of what has happened to Teacher, she suddenly does not have the stomach for her own deceit. Talker is listening with interest and has guessed what choice Sullivan is sifting through in the silence after Kino  speaks. Having interviewed several friends and ex-lovers, and having not always behaved well himself, Talker knows that this adoption of ignorance as a particular brand of treachery has ended several of Sullivan’s relationships in what is to her a very convenient way; that is to say, the brutal amputation she wanted performed on her soon-to-be-ex is of necessity performed by the victim, who found themselves corralled and orchestrated and unable to do anything else.

“I was embarrassed,” she says, feeling, mistakenly, that she has nothing to lose, “You helped me leave. I doesn’t think you could take me seriously if I came back again.”

“Why did you come back?”

Sullivan laughs awkwardly, wishing she has says nothing, or lied. Even in the dim light she is blushing. She turns her back on the sea.

“I seem to have created a monster,” she says, “I created someone I have to be and I don’t seem to be able to do it anymore.”

Kino  twists around and stares in some amazement at Sullivan. She looks up at Talker, sitting with his legs crossed and his eyebrows raised. Sullivan turns away and stared at the sea, the bobbing vessels, the whole world she could not see.

“Moscow,” Kino  says, to give herself some time, and out of pity for Sullivan, “Aquarius.”

“Moscow,” Sullivan sighs in relief. She stretched up, looking at the sky, trying to find the right star.

“Okay, fine, got you. Northern Star. Moscow.”

The sky is quite black and the stars brilliant and silver. Sullivan quickly trots from the Northern Star to the tip of Orion’s Belt, to the first stars in the Ursa Major constellation. She travels so much that she has the advantage over Kino in this part of the game because Kino only knows the flight Timetables and the connexions from reading schedules and looking at flight paths on the Internet. Sullivan has used most of them. Kino  has the advantage when they go from star to star. The hours that Sullivan has spent on planes, Kino  has spent sitting on the tops of high hills and the balcony of Isolde’s Tower or the upper floor of the lightship her uncle has lived in, making her way, step by step, through the constellations. They stay at Howth Head for ninety minutes, till they are all freezing and exhausted. This combination is familiar to Kino  and Sullivan. It recalls nights spent in similar pursuits from the belfry of an abandoned church in Italy, and from a small hut in the Tatras, and it recalls three summers spent working on farms over Western Europe, when they worked night shifts and staggered him on their bicycles, drunk with tiredness and the cold dark night. Both of them are left now with a generic feeling of familiarity. This hysterical coldness, this ridiculous laughter, this intense privacy, this game. This is what they expected of each other, and has virtually forgotten about. Talker watches them.

Shivering, they shuffle hastily back to Sullivan’s car. From the boot of the car Sullivan retrieves some food she has thrown in, not knowing how to be helpful when setting off to drive Skeen to the hospital. Talker and Kino  both drink whiskey and Sullivan drinks coffee. They set off again, without reference to her passengers Sullivan drives them to Blessington, and they stand looking into the reservoir. On such a clear night they can see quite far up and down the coast, and Talker climbs down as close to the water has he can get. The water levels are only in recent years beginning to build back up, and Kino  says it will be a long time before the fishing is back. Talker looks sad but she does not like to ask why. They return to Dublin on the empty roads, past the indifferent patrol soldiers just as the dawn begins to rise. Kino  looks anxiously at Sullivan and realises that Sullivan is also worried, driving as fast as she safely can on the winding, empty roads. But they are still outside the city walls when the day turns blue and gray and inevitably the Ichari begin to scour the skies.

“Sorry,” Sullivan says into the rear-view mirror, “We’re a little late.”

Talker looks past her then whips around in the seat, craning to see the sky. He is pale and this frightens Kino; she twists backwards too, grasping Talker’s hand, watching the sunroof for a silhouette, which appears as Sullivan slows for a traffic lights.

“Sullivan,” says Talker.

Sullivan jams down the accelerator and the car shrieks away. Talker is sick with fear, white-faced and sweating, unable to move. He is staring out of the side window at the houses and shops of Dublin bowling by as Sullivan speeds through the empty streets, because he is so rigid with fear he can not even turn his head. Every night since the radio studio was bombed he has woken from a recreation of it. A Imperial Army stealth-jet had dropped a bomb in the vicinity, the station building had been shaken apart, Talker had kept talking until his soundman starting making cut-throat gestures at him, and they both made their way, with a sense of unease, of unreality, rather than of mortal danger, just as parts of the building began to fall away to dust. The station had been virtually empty at that time of night, no-one was hurt, and the station crew, with Talker, had hurried up the street to where the bomb had hit to help pull survivors out from the rubble. Talker heard the night-porter beside him whimper, and he followed the man’s gaze upwards. Eleven Ichari, flying flat and low like a skein of swans. Every night since then Talker awakes at the same point, their escape by the sound engineer driving into the reception hall of Barts and the London Hospital, leaving the car to be decimated by the weary Ichari while the occupants fled to the mortuary; Ichari never followed the scent of death. Talker was unconscious from loss of blood by the time his friends had found a doctor to stitch him up.

No such drama is needed now, though  Sullivan will get a speeding ticket. Unusually for such impromptu trips, it is otherwise well timed and by the time their eyes are gritty and their yawns successive, they were in the driveway of Sullivan’s house. Despite her earlier protests, Kino  does not hesitate to follow Sullivan into the chilly house and dash to a radiator while Sullivan worked her charm on the heating system. Talker staggered a little and asks for directions to Drumcondra so he could get back to his hotel but agrees without demur when Sullivan says he could sleep on the sofa. Kino  kept her coat on and is still shivering even when Sullivan brought out a vast hand-knitted coat and wrapped it around her. This, and a mug of tea kept Kino  going till the heat started to soak into the room. Talker helped Sullivan empty the car; though the whiskey has been in her house since before the war so strictly speaking is not contraband, they hid it under the sink just in case. Kino  says nothing about the winking lights on the answering machine nor the slightly guilty look Sullivan has when she listened to the messages. That is quick, Kino  think, without further comment. 

Outside Sullivan’s house is an unmarked car and in it is the eighth Unit officer.

“Let me drive youse home.”

They are walking very slowly out of the hospital through the grounds towards the car park.

The entrance to the A&E is on the far side and at that distance, the ambulance and police sirens sound romantic, something from a film or a novel. It is bitterly cold. The sky is black and completely cloudless. Bare trees are dotted through the grounds of the hospital and Kino  walks with her head back, looking through their skeletal fingers at the black sky and the brilliantly pale stars. She only stops when Talker takes her shoulders in his fingertips and steers her away from falling over a rubbish bin.

“I can’t go home now,” she says, “I can’t live with Rafferty.”

Talker and Sullivan look at each other and something about the dart of her eyes suggests to Talker that this statement is stimulating to Sullivan, though whether due to the possibility of sex or romance, whether it is alarm or simply the fact that she does not like Rafferty, he can not say. They reach the road and begin the long walk to where Sullivan has been able to park her car. The road is mayhem. There is a path the width of an ambulance but everywhere else distressed relatives and friends have abandoned their cars and bikes as close to legal as they could. The road is cluttered with cars and bikes, scooters, even mini-buses. A few Dublin Transport buses have been abandoned, drivers and passengers alike disembarking and fleeing into the hospital. A police car is on its side in someone’s garden, burned out. An elderly woman is smashing the remaining windows, bawling as she wielded her weapon. Above, there are helicopters and a small fleet of police gliders, which elicit a small scream from Talker, who at first glance thinks that the paragliders are Ichari, the Ichari being far more common in England.

“You can stay with me,” says Sullivan. Kino  shakes her head.

“Where do you want to go, then?”

Sullivan is very tired and it makes her impatient. This is not like being tired when she chooses to be so, when being sandy-eyed and hollow is in itself part of something she is creating. This exhaustion, here, with Kino, with a witness, is something she has no control over; neither the cause nor effect could she manipulate. Kino  turned her head angrily.

“To Moscow,” she says.

It is a nightmare to get out of the city centre. Kino  falls asleep while Sullivan is talking to her. The windscreen is bright and fractured with overhead street lights, the lights of stalled or empty cars, the torches of pedestrians, the police, the army. The police are patrolling and the soldiers hovering aggressively, members of the Social Order Unit swell in and out of the shadows. Civil Defence people are forcing traffic to maintain the clear path for ambulances and for the paramedics’ motorcycles. Sullivan rests her cheek against the fingers of her closed hand, her elbow supported by the window beside her. She probably should not be driving and her tiredness makes the repetitious arcs of torches irksome, but soporific. She closes her eyes briefly then, afraid she would fall asleep, opens them again and looks at Kino. Kino  is sitting perfectly upright, except her head is hanging down on to her chest as she sleeps. Kino  is soberly dressed in the greenish steel-grey regulation clothes, and that suited her. Sullivan smiles suddenly, and feels an unexpected rush of affection for Kino, solemn faced and shorn-headed, her neat and upright posture, her folded hands, and then that almost childish slumping asleep in company. Talker, in the back seat, is rummaging through notes and photographs that he carries with him. Abruptly he slaps the file shut and puts it down on the seat, rubs his hands over his face.

“I am taking it,” he says, “That Kino  here is the model for those dancer pictures?”

Sullivan looks into the rear-view mirror. Talker is staring back at her chin.

The series of paintings that has drawn Sullivan to the attention of Ruiz were abstracts based on what Sullivan called the absence of plants; the images cohered around the shapes between flowers she drew. Ruiz, by then almost at his century and a leader of his genre for decades, has been struck by the confidence of her work, but saw that without discipline she would quickly be seduced by her taste for symbol. He offered to teach her, she accepted and the first thing he told her to do is to not use blue for a year. You must learn choose a colour with greater care than you choose who or what you put into your mouth, he said. It is a commitment, it is irrevocable and you must never use a colour because you have a gap you need to fill. You are creating a reality, not saving a dinner-party by opening a flash bottle of wine. The first series of paintings she produced while being taught by Ruiz also takes their tight form from absences but absences of people, spaces not filled by dancers.

“I was sent to school in the Outland,” she says, “And I met Kino  there, the first class we were in together is music. I had wanted to learn ballet but I was going to be too tall. And I wasn’t very good at it. But Kino  refused to learn. She says it is because it is alien to anything else she normally does.”

“And you I expect think that that is the best reason to do anything,” Talker says dryly. Sullivan, unexpectedly, laughs.

“I did, yes. But be fair, I was only about thirteen. Kino’s reasoning fascinated me, and I don’t even think it is really true. Everyone moves.”

“What is her point then? That she only moved to get from A to B and not to express things?”

“Exactly, that is exactly it. Kino  takes – she still takes – the view that you should only do things that can be followed to their logical conclusion.”

“Christ on a crutch. How does she get out of bed in the morning?”

Sullivan shrugs. Talker says,

“I wonder what it is to which Rafferty is the logical conclusion.”

He is not expecting an answer, and instead he cups his hand to the window and peers out, trying to see what is happening around them. Sullivan has also always wondered about the explanation for Rafferty, but she has never asks, knowing that the accusation of jealousy might be around the corner.

“Were you her lover?” Talker asks, squinting against the light from the paraglider, watching the crowd turn and twist like a shoal of fish.

“She helped me run away from home.”

Talker lowers his hand, and Sullivan sees a gap in the traffic which, if she moves quickly, will get them out of the gridlock and mean that they can take the coast road. She plunges the car forward and as they gain more space she opens the roof the car so that Talker can stand up and see what is going on. The wind is cutting and makes his eyes and nose stream but he likes the steely cold and the mild sense of danger. He is relieved and regretful at leaving the scene of the riots behind him but his responses, mental and physical, are slower than are needed for that sort of journalism. He can hear Sullivan still speaking to him but he does not catch everything she says, which he supposes is deliberate. She was seventeen when she ran away from home but either she does not hear his shouted question or he does not hear the explanation. She had not known how to approach the practicalities of the situation and Kino was the only one she cold ask – it is probably the only occasion in her life when she has requested help and if it had not been for Kino  she still does not know what would have become of her. Sullivan speaks on a little more, feeling braver because she knows that Talker can barely hear her.

Leaving home was the first and last time that Sullivan has done something because it needed to be done. As the thought occurs to her now, her mind slips smoothly on to the next groove: except in art, but the space seems quite empty. Some echo of the emotion of that night jangles all these years later and this startles Sullivan, like a twinge in an excised nerve. She has rarely feels that sort of abandoned pain again and she can recall as though it were happening now the leaden feel in her eyes as she drooped her head against Kino’s shoulder, whispering to her, the smell of Kino’s hair, the light reassurance of her skin, her fingers, her sibilants. Sullivan is shocked by remembering this. She looks at Kino  sleeping, from the side of her eye she can see part of the journalist, Talker’s long legs swaying with the movement of the car. The road finally opens up completely and Sullivan speeds up. Kino  wakes.

“Where’s your da, love?”

“I tried to ring him in France,” Niamh says, “But there’s no free bands available.”

Lowry looks at Tom who, unable to bear this crass intrusion, looks way. Skeen comes back.

“Your mother is being looks after by Dr Siwale,” she says, “So you can ask her for details. But she is going to be fine. She has a broken arm, concussion, a fractured shin bone and internal bruising.”

Niamh looks unconvinced. After a moment, Skeen says,

“She fell very awkwardly, apparently. She hit her head on the pavement. The paramedics always put a brace and supports on anyone with that sort of injury, just in case. She is not seriously injured.”

“Broken – she has – it sounds badly injured to me!” Niamh says loudly.

“She is badly injured, but not seriously.”

Tom leans forward.

“See, darling?” he says, rubbing Niamh’s back. She looks at him, without responding. He puts his arms around her, angular and light as though she is being embraced by a spider. He leans his patchy chin on her plump shoulder, looking out from behind her at Skeen, Lowry, Kino  and Sullivan. He has on what Sullivan later calls a bruised look, as though they were ganging up on him and his girlfriend and they has nothing to protect them but their profound love.

As soon as she hears the unmistakable ululation of the police siren, Skeen hurries in search of Dr. Siwale. When the police arrive, they get the usual response. They are officers from the newest scion of Special Branch, the Social Order Unit. Those who are likely to be asks questions instantly adopt expressions of obedient solicitude and everyone else grumbles and scowls. The officer in charge has a list in his hand and seems to know where he is going to ask his questions. Some voices are raised in protest but are quelled. No-one in Niamh’s vicinity look at each other, as though in some superstitious way they will thus prevent drawing the Unit’s attention. But inevitably they come.

“Alison Gemma Locke, otherwise Teacher Locke?”

No-one says anything. The officer looks around. The relentless hospital lights glinted on the smoky visor. Behind the officer were seven other Unit members, all visored, all in the Teflon uniforms that rippled like a second skin, all with the regulation weapons. Usually the Units were five men and three women though it is often hard to tell. The officer on this occasion has a taste for tight uniforms and is clearly a man, four of the others – given that the spring-loaded batons made more men swagger than women – were men, and two were women. The last officer could have been either; Sullivan and Skeen guessed female, the others guessed male. This figure touched the officer’s elbow with great delicacy and raised its baton very slightly towards Niamh. In one hand it held a sheaf of paper, which Kino  could se were the familiar black and white print outs of police footage close-ups of faces. She recalled Rafferty enthusing about the new cameras brought in from the Imperial States that could focus so quickly it could record a useable image even of a running figure. He has dismissed, with the pained expression of one overburdened with fools, all arguments about privacy and misuse of power. He pointed out, as though it answered all objections, that the Italian police used them. As the officers move closer to Niamh, everyone stands up.

“Niamh Mairead Locke?”

Even the officer takes a step or two back. Niamh propels herself forward, her hands outstretched, going for the eyes, even under the visor. Tom reaches out his hand momentarily, then withdraws it, putting it over his mouth instead. Both the officer and two of the Unit reach for their batons Skeen lunges forward at the same time, grabbing Niamh in one hand and pulling out a syringe with the other. Sullivan, being nearest, also lunges forward, between Niamh and the officers, and grapples with Niamh who, certain that she would be arrested, is determined to take some flesh under her fingernails. Skeen raises the syringe and brings it down into Niamh’s back, pinching her to make her cry out. Skeen says to the officer,

“She is in shock, don’t start with me. I have just sedated her.”

She glowered at the officer, and is relieved that Niamh has the good sense to remain utterly silent. Sullivan has her arm around Niamh, twisting her arm up her back. Skeen knows, though the others do not, that when the hospital is refurbished, every area accessible to the public is coated in pre-programmed smart-sand, but she also knows that it is of poor quality so that there is a reasonable chance that the picture would be blurred and the sound distorted. There is a pause for a few seconds, and then the whole Unit turns at the sound of Dr. Swill’s heels on the hard linoleum.

“There is no point even trying to ask me,” says the Doctor, striding past. The officer stands in her way.

“We need to speak to Teacher Gemma Locke.”

“Well you shouldn’t have beaten her senseless then, should you?” snaps the doctor, trying to dodge to one side, but the officer grabs her elbow and drags her with him. Kino  watches Tom slip quietly away, fishing his mobile phone out of a pocket as he does so. Talker watches Skeen rustle Niamh out of one of the unofficial exits of the hospital. Sullivan and Lowry remain nearby in case Dr. Siwale needed witnesses; Lowry because she has done enough union work to know what she needed to remember, and Sullivan because she knew that her non-regulation clothing made her look rich and foreign. But nothing happens. Once the Unit have shaken Dr. Siwale around a bit and shouted at her, they let her go, and stand together in a small huddle, seven officers communicating in muffled whispers and curt grunts. The eighth officer stands a little to one side, looking at Sullivan.

It had taken three and a half hours to get from Dublin Airport to Talker’s hotel in Drumcondra, even given that the taxi-driver is local and knew a lot of short-cuts, which meant it would take all night to get to Sullivan’s house near Harcourt Street. The man they were sharing the taxi with was making oleaginous attempts to hit on with Sullivan, so in an attempt to ice him, Sullivan switched on the taxi’s television, and within two moments she and Talker both wished she had not. The news reporter is leaning forward slightly, speaking very earnestly to her audience. The man in the taxi revealed himself to be a journalist too.

The bomb that has fallen on Dublin a week ago, and the hundred and forty dead, has made the country boil over. There were demonstrations every day. Several of the television stations has suspended broadcast because news-readers refused to read the statement, written by the Pharaoh of the Imperial States and signed by him and the Irish President, on the bombing; these reporters were still on strike and no sign of negotiation. The journalist laughs in loud disbelief at their actions.

“We’re journalists,” he has brayed, as though this is a difficult idea, “We report the news. We don’t make it.”

A shaky camera showed a young protester hanging a sign around the neck of a statue of Parnell, matching photographs followed of identical signs, reading Thus far and NO FURTHER, around statues of O’Connell and Larkin. The journalist in the taxi sighed loudly and shook his head, all sad wisdom, but grew angry when he saw footage of members of the Dáil and the Senead being pelted, as they now regularly were, by a hostile crowd. Sullivan remembers a phone call from Lowry, and the growth in the number of coppers in the country since National Service has been introduced and joining the police force is a way of avoiding it. These new coppers, she has read undercover in Amsterdam, were left with the job of protecting politicians since more senior officers think it beneath their dignity to return home every day spattered with glue, urine, ashes, stout and vinegar.

“Nothing but troublemakers,” he has says vindictively, “They don’t understand what is going on, they don’t see anything of the big picture, they just want to cause trouble and make themselves look important. Does you see those hooligans climbed onto the roof of Aras an Uachtarain with a fucking balloon?”

As though on cue, the television showed the balloon in question. It is filled with helium and has been fashioned to represent the Pharaoh. Protruding from his rear, like an unfinished twin, is the Taoiseach.

“Nothing but gurriers, anarchists the lot of them. No analysis.”

Sullivan has untucked a superior smile that she kept for such occasions when she is angry enough to scream.

“I read quite an interesting article recently,” she says, sounding as foreign as she could, “Which surveyed those in opposition to the Accord. It says that people feels that neutrality is the only thing that meant Ireland does not have to be a political whore. Without money or industry, and without neutrality, Ireland could have no role but that of pawn. An unofficial colony.”

The journalist has choked in rage.

“Ireland has been independent since 1922. The first country to leave the British Empire since America. It is neither a colony nor a pawn.”

“And these independent states were achieved by people who were doubtlessly called gurriers, terrorists, and worse in their time,” Sullivan snapped, hating herself for being cross. Her heart is thumping, and she changed the subject quickly so that she would not feel the shaking side-effects of adrenaline.

“The survey that I read is written by a journalist, by one of your own profession,” she has says, “How can two journalists hold such different opinions if you both merely report, not create, the news? How can you even pretend that we have anything like all the information, with the Empire imposing Imperial Archivists on us to invent everything, past, present and future?”

“And I suppose you support those so-called Aristotles, then,” snarls the journalist, “That nutter archivist in Vienna that immolated himself? These people who claim to be ordering and rescuing the world’s information from the digital Dark Ages?”

The journalist has disembarked at the top of Collins’ Avenue and slammed the door behind him and Sullivan lunged forward and switched off the news, as though expelling a miasma. The taxi has stopped again, and she could see the journalist stalking off, chin and paunch out, coat flapping despite the cold. The taxi-driver slid back the grille.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she has says, “I was listening in on your conversation. You were damn right.”

Sullivan almost protested – it is an aberration, an accident, I have no opinions. But then she takes a second look at the driver. The taxi-driver apologised for the length of time that it is taking to get anywhere, and the conversation between the three of them slipped into a better gear. After half an hour, when they has travelled less than a quarter of a mile, Sullivan asks if there is an hotel anywhere near, since Harcourt Street is now as likely tonight as Tír na nOg, and she would rather be sitting chatting somewhere more comfortable than the back of a taxi. The taxi driver pointed at a right hand turn.

“If we turn off here, I can take youse to the Autobahn, it’s an hotel and usually has rooms going and it has a decent pub downstairs. I’ve no chance of getting another fare tonight; I might as well join you in a pint. I live about ten minutes away from there, round the corner from the hotel.”

The pub, like O’Looney’s, is an undeclared rebel bar, meaning just that they had adulterated all the spy-ware and had installed software that created information loops if anyone was wearing surveillance. They had had a nasty moment a few years ago when a customer came in apparently just wearing a television lens in their left eye. The nano-recorder that the woman, an Imperial intelligence soldier, had had installed when they began work as a spy created a severe information loop and the lens, recorder and eyeball had all imploded. Everything is quiet this evening, and the taxi-driver is pleased to meet Sullivan but even more pleased to meet Talker. It is Talker who mentions the World Catalogue.

            “It was very foolish of the Imperial Censors to ban it,” he says, “At first everyone just thought that it was a renegade curator, you know just someone who couldn’t leave all that information lying around without trying to put some kind of structure on it. When they banned it of course everyone took an interest. Everyone started thinking that it had something to do with the emergence.”

            “It’s said now that the Dans Culottes are heavily involved with it,” says the taxi-driver, whose name is Jarvey, “The Duchess of Rutland started off peer-reviewing the wiki-pages, and was even able to go on doing it after she was put in prison – well, at least …”

There was a moment of silence while none of the three mentioned that the Duchess had continued to peer-review the wikis only until they moved her from prison to the detention centre off the Florida coast, after which she had never been heard from again. More than one corpse retrieved from the Everglades had been tentatively identified as that of Honoria Glossop-Frye.

            “But in any event,” Jarvey starts up again, “When the International Council on Digital Historiography discovered that all the electronic information was creating emergence, and at the same time the World Catalogue was banned, of course everyone thought that the Catalogue knew something about it.”

            “But the Catalogue was being produced long before they said that,” Sullivan objects, “The Cry in the Abyss was about a year afterwards – it must have been because it happened at the Old World Faithful conference on registration of ichthyrines. It was broadcast live and the power surge shorted all the electricity supplies between Paris and the Duchy of Mecklenberg.”

            “I remember it being like something out of Day of the Triffids or something,” Talker says, “Watching bureaucrats and Imperial delegates talking very slowly and in polysyllabic sentences with fifteen sub-clauses and then – whoosh – all these random images suddenly appearing, sound distorted, playing that weird, weird music. I would give anything to have been there, to know what it was like to go through an information emergence.”

            “Everyone there was told to pretend it hadn’t happened, to say it was a fault in the transmission and that they saw nothing,” Sullivan says, and snorts, “And they tried to arrest Jean James for saying that the governments had all been warned that any complex system starts creating its own patterns and so it would be with digital information.”

            “All those ones and zeros,” says Jarvey, finishing her pint and looking around for the floor staff, “All that left-over information from lossless compression, all drifting around and coming together to make something altogether new.”

            “A sort of information primordial soup,” Talker says, “Scary.”

Sitting in a pub drinking stout seemed as good an end to the evening as could be expected and to lighten the tone, Sullivan explains what her exhibition is about and Talker could see the taxi-driver’s mind ticking over, so the offer of the security camera tape the next morning, which Sullivan has taken to indicate a working-class person’s thrill at being involved, however tangentially, in the production of art, Talker rather guessed meant that the taxi-driver has an agenda and her appearance at the studio the next morning is flattering to Sullivan but of little surprise to Talker.

Talker gives the disc to Sullivan and she introduces him to her friend Kino  Quin who has come to help her. The first thing Talker notices about Kino  is that her face is mashed with bruises on one side, and he wonders if the shortness of her hair is a medical necessity. They shake hands, she speaks softly, Sullivan says she will affix one of the canvasses and perhaps then Kino  might help her with the projector. While Sullivan is busy Talker is reading through his notes and flicking through the pictures, and Kino  belatedly realises that Talker is the reality-show journalist. He confirms this without much interest, but then the possibility of who she might be occurs to him and he looks at her again.

“Rafferty didn’t do that did he?”

Rafferty is a bit of a toad but Talker, who has met him several times, does not peg him as a wife-beater. Kino  smiles with the less colourful side of her face and confirms that Rafferty has indeed lost his temper, and has hit her with a pan. She shakes her head carefully and remarks that Skeen is quite furious with her when they got to the hospital.

“I’m not following,” Talker says, “Who is Skeen and why does she blame you because your boyfriend hit you so hard you has to go to hospital?”

“It is Rafferty they were admitting,” Kino  says apologetically, “I broke three of his ribs with a candlestick.”

She says this so softly, and he is so accustomed to thinking of Irish accents as lilting that he cannot quite understand her words, and is bewildered by the incongruity. She is so accustomed to English accents like his formulating liberal responses that she is not expecting it when he says,

“I almost said good for you. But if Rafferty has broken three of your ribs I would have been outraged.”

Kino  is so encouraged by this that she sits down, something to Talker’s dismay as he is quite busy, and explains that that is almost exactly the conversation she has had with Skeen and Lowry, fundamentally picking apart their different interpretations of the single assertion that violence is wrong. When she has finished her thankfully short outline, he says,

“I think I agree with Skeen. What the hell kind of name is Skeen?”

“Her name is Breda but she’s called Skeen because she’s a surgeon. Like you’re called Talker because – well you do a lot of talking. What is your name originally?”

“None of your business,” he says curtly, and sees from the corner of his eye that she is looking at his face-tattoos but these will mean nothing to her because he is not a native.

“Skeen, scian, means knife,” she adds, having forgotten that he would not know, “I think I agree with Skeen too, even if only because while it might true what Lowry says that putting up with violence permits it to continue happening, it is also true that I doesn’t have to hit him quite so often. And I could perhaps have used a smaller candlestick. But you know – well you might know – you know if someone has a habit that really annoys you and instead of that meaning you are resigned to it, it actually means that you are worked up about it even before it happens? I knew that if I just hit Rafferty a box he would be planning on describing it at some point as kittenish.”

“So he’s driving you nuts even when he isn’t saying it?”

Kino  looks doubtful.

“Yeah. That can’t be good, can it? I mean, it isn’t even like we has been rowing about something of supreme importance.”

Sullivan’s voice disturbs them, to Talker’s relief as he is just about to ask Kino  why she has been fighting with Rafferty, and they both get up. Sullivan has put up a vast canvas and along one side of the wall beside it she has pinned an entire Tarot deck. She has to go up a ladder to do this and as Kino  and Talker join her she is setting up a row of stools in front of the canvas. Kino  takes the ladder and disappears into the projection room. By the time the crisp blue light begins to shine Skeen has joined them and been introduced to Talker, her habitual assumption that the ending of her marriage is the ending of any romantic potential in her life meaning that her indifference to Talker’s response to her is quite sincere. They tell each other what they do for a living and Skeen adds that she is expecting to meet Teacher Locke at the studio. The images flicker on to the canvas, being played slowly. Talker watches Sullivan watching the images and he is surprised that, after ten or fifteen minutes, Sullivan’s expression has lost all expression of creativity or concentration, and she merely looks slightly preoccupied. He has wondered if she would be able to forget her company. The film stops and starts and replays and her signal and she moves expertly up and down the length of the canvas, on the floor or on the stools as required, making sweeps with a charcoal stick and a laser light every now and then. Talker and Skeen are so intent on watching the single and random lines begin to clot together into a coherent form that they do not notice Lowry joining them until Talker steps back onto her foot.

After an hour’s concentrated work, Sullivan stops, and waves her hand so that Kino  stops the tape. She walks away to the other end of the studio and paces a bit, then she comes back, smiling at them. Just as she looks at her watch, some of the television crew start bringing out food and Sullivan looks like a faintly embarrassed fairy-godmother as she waves her friends towards the non-regulation imported goods. Holding a spring roll in one hand, Talker picks up the remote control and switches  on the television.

Rafferty, bearing his bruises bravely, is reporting. He is standing, black hair ruffled by an evil November wind running down the Liffey, his blue eyes glittering in the light of the camera, and the flashes and explosions behind him. Sullivan looks at Kino, as though she has never seen her before, while Rafferty speaks of the violence, the drums and the shattering bottles, the provocation of the police.

Lowry finds her words burnt in her mouth under Rafferty’s transition from irritating photographer to apologist, as smooth and wrong as a hernia’d gut, from theoretical objectivity to the unspeakable wisdom of conformity. The protesters, he says, were in the main peaceful but there is – Skeen mouthed the inevitable words as he spoke them – a HARD CORE OF ANARCHISTS, LEFTISTS AND TROUBLE-MAKERS. The police has retaliated and HAS ENDURED A RELENTLESS HAIL OF MISSILES. In order to PRESERVE THE SAFETY OF THE MAJORITY the police has begun to arrest the TROUBLEMAKERS who have, of course, RESISTED ARREST.

An image flashes onto the screen of the police with shields, helmets, spring-loaded batons, tear-gas and stun-lasers. The cameraman aimed at some scattered rocks and a bottle along the line of a makeshift barricade by Bachelor’s Walk, and the camera just caught, before Rafferty stepped into view, a devastated civilian, bleeding and shaking and saying to anyone who would listen Where’s Joe? The five watching the television re stunned, and even Lowry, a more outspoken critic of the Empire in general and the war in particular, feels a cold douse of fear. This never happens here. It doesn’t happen in Dublin. It happens in Derry, in Milan, in Gothenburg, in Peterborough, in Seattle, but not in Dublin. Rafferty goes on, the first statistics for the arrested, the wounded, the dead.

“Christ,” says Sullivan, opening some water, her hands shaking, “Civilian dead. Christ.”

She gives a small scream and the bottle slides and slams on the table when Skeen’s pager rings. Skeen takes it out and  stands and looks at it for a moment, as though she has found a mermaid in her pocket. She switches off Rafferty’s earnest tones and with the smallest hesitation, opens the pager. Lowry stands with her hand over her mouth. Talker is watching the first uncensored reaction he has seen in Sullivan, the rapid blinking, the reaching for Kino’s hand.

“Dr. Cantwell speaking.”

She says nothing for ninety seconds. Then she thanks the caller and snaps shut her pager. She stares at it and takes the bottle that Sullivan offers to her. She says,

“Teacher is on the march. She is hospital under arrest.”

Tacky and Lowry, having collided and staggered back from the revelation of his impending fatherhood, step back into the ring on the night that Sullivan arrives. The second round is the news that Ridley has decided that he is not going to abort the foetus, and that Tacky’s family is going to expand, at a slight slant. Apart from anything else, this has the very practical complication that Tacky is going to have to stump up his half of the cost. This allowed Lowry to use virtually her only weapon – Tacky’s primary responsibilities were to Urse. While his willie might be his own to do with as he will, their bank balance, unstable due to the conflict, is not.

Unlike other wars, supplies are not rationed during what the Irish euphemistically call the current conflict; the rations apply to the suppliers. Using shops and approved markets can get a person anything that they might need, other than petrol, but they cannot choose their source because this is how the Empire can guarantee the support of the superindustries, by guaranteeing the trade. There is no regulation of the superbusinesses, because private individuals own the battery farms of chickens, the crate-farms for pigs, the coffin-farms for the pickers of tea and cocoa-beans and the law has been wangled so that their right to produce in this way is one of their human rights. Anyone who wishes to consume without excessive exploitation, and anyone wishing to eat meat which is not also bristling with smartdust,  must do so on the black market and these markets, expected by governments to be hot beds of seething rebellion are closely watched by representatives of the Department of Trade, Alliance and Security.

In an upper room over what used to be Mother Redcap’s Market there is a permanent watching post established so that the traders and buyers on the Thomas Street Market can be watched. It is not quite well funded enough so while the security officer, Bailiff Patrick, could watch the queue carefully he could not hear the conversation which rather, so he irritably told his senior officers, defeated the purpose. His superior, clutching her hair and trying not to let her voice soar so high that only dogs could hear her, gave him what the Imperial Office in the Phoenix Park gave to her – intelligent software that is supposed to be able to read emotions. After a day trying to use this software, in which Bailiff is told confidently that the traffic lights were pre-menstrual, he spent an evening contemplating resignation and the following weekend jerry-rigging an avatar to read lips. Now he watched the pictures while the electronic voice monotonously recited the words.

The tall, thin man, bulked up in layers of clothes and wearing a woollen hat with ear flaps is clearly having a row with the bundle of coats beside him. It looks vigorous and subdued, but to no avail, a number of the people in the queue ahead and behind them were clearly joining in. The avatar recited flatly,

Is that why you’re mad at me? The practicalities?

It is not. Bailiff can tell she is yelling. The practicalities. I said non-monogamy is acceptable, I didn’t say you could unravel my whole fucking life.

Lowry there are consequences to everything. You can’t make compartments. You can’t say you do this but the consequences are a completely different matter.

What’s he after doing to you, love.

A woman behind them in the queue is leaning in, looking into Lowry’s face. She wears a headscarf; Bailiff has always disliked headscarves but with the icy wind he can guess is tearing down Thomas Street he would have worn a bag on his head if he has been there. The angry woman’s face is as purple and chapped as their interlocutor’s but her face is scrunched up and upset, whereas the older woman looks like nothing added light to her day so much as the chance to queue in the bitter twilight cold at an illegal market to buy some banned free-range meat.

Nothing says the cross woman.

Is it you he’s after getting pregnant or someone else?

Bailiff can see the man and the woman both blush, and guesses that it is in the hope that the woman would leave the matter alone when her curiosity is satisfied that the younger woman murmurs discreetly,

Someone else.

The woman reaches up and clipped the man’s ear, hard. He yelps in shock and claps his hand over the woollen earflaps of his cap.

You dirty beggar.

The younger woman covers her eyes. A third woman leans in.

What are you at, Tracey.

He’s after getting someone else pregnant, and his missus is upset.

Little fecker.

Bailiff wonders if the newcomer is related to the quick-handed woman, there is something similar in their faces.

If you can’t hold your drink you should stick to good Liffey water

It isn’t like that

The younger woman turns to him, away from the camera, so that avatar can not see what she is saying. The man lowers his head and shifts uncomfortably. Bailiff guesses he is being asks for details. But they are interrupted.

He didn’t do it by himself, though, where’s your one?

She’s not involved, Martin, it’s your man and his missus is having the row. Concentrate, like a good lad.

Can you afford it?

Well, no. It is an accident.

The man turns back to the woman, to continue his explanation. The avatar can not see him speaking so remains serenely silent. Bailiff’s vivid imagination conjures up scene after possible, though highly unlikely, scene, far more exotic and romantic that Tacky’s actual explanation of how his section of the factory goes on a summer’s-end picnic to the Martello Tower when Lowry is away at her mother’s house because their daughter wanted to see the new piglets. He still smiles when he thinks of the day, it reminds him so much of the trips they sometimes took before the war reached its gaze so far into the country, when things other than mere survival seemed possible. They has stayed out most of the night, and Tacky and Ridley has taken a long walk together.

The queue suddenly laughs and the woman who has hit Tacky says,

The butcher says aren’t most of us accidents

How many do you have?

A woman in the queue moves so she is standing sideways to the wind and pulling her shawl into a bunch around her neck.

One

The woman opens her brown eyes wide.

Sure that’s hardly anything. Were you thinking of having any more

Well, yeah, maybe.

Sure isn’t the woman doing most of the work for you then

I would like to have had a say

You have no say about anything else

The woman, turns her white-gold palms upwards in wonder and looks to her neighbours for agreement.

It’s the principle

A man in a grubby banin jumper under a fishmonger’s apron thwacks his cleaver down.

Principle, is it. I once told a girl that on principle I wanted people ever to tell me the honest truth. She only did it the once and I never spoke to her again.

The couple at the centre of attention are looking at each other, she does not look angry, though she is frowning, and he looks helplessly at the map of her face, trying to see which direction she is facing. The woman who hit him gives him a dig in the arm with a hard finger.

You shouldn’t be sharing your willie with the world unless you have your tubes tied

It isn’t – I isn’t sharing it with the world

The man looks mortified. He also, Bailiff notices, looks a bit shifty, looking at his wife as though they both knew a secret or an irony.

We did have good reason to think, you know, that it’d be, you know, safe.

There is another surge of laughter. Someone sings,

I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got rhythm,

I’ve got twelve kids, who could ask for anything more?

The man and woman smile at each other, cautiously.

And it isn’t like I promised to never…do it with anyone else. You know, it’s what we agreed.

You can’t change your mind now

Bailiff could see a square blonde woman shaking one of the parsnips from her seller-basket at the couple.

Now me, I am Polish, I would never agree –

Polish me arse,” says the fishmonger’s wife, You’re from Donnybrook like your parents.

I am Polish. And I would never let my husband do anything like that.

Then you may invest in some cobbler’s thread, my girl, says another blonde woman whose eyes are streaming cold water.

The vegetable woman turns bodily around to stare at the herb-seller beside her.

Sure there’s no bones broken. And now that we have you all sorted out and have started a domestic dispute on the South side, would you mind making an order before we are all famished with the cold?

The couple have not noticed that they have reached the top of the queue and the butcher, with a rude wink, asks the woman if she would like a nice bit of sausage and the herb woman says our man hardly needed encouragement, and sinks her elbow into the Donnybrook woman’s side. The exchange is passed down the queue and amid the general hilarity caused by their circumstance, the man and the woman purchases their food and make good their escape.

The studio provided to Sullivan for the exhibition she is expected to perform is quite vast, much larger than she has expected, and it takes several days for her to become accustomed to the space. The government had adapted a building on Eustace Street, not far from Wellington Quay. In previous incarnations, the building was believed to have been used for commercial storage and private residence at different points. There was some evidence also of religious use, though this was disputed, and that it had been at one point place for public showings of certain kinds of films; there was little information now about the nature of these films though a convincing argument had recently been put forward that they were simply those considered either too rude or too dull to draw a large audience. Eventually, after the building had fallen derelict, the owners had been obliged to sell, and even Sullivan is taken aback at the effort and money that had been put into the building on her behalf. The glass ceiling is restored, the antique heating system has been replaced in the background but with the original upright radiator features in place. The archaeologists who had uncovered from beneath the collapsed trees, bird bones and urban decay a previously unsuspected room adjoining the main hall have deduced that this room was in a fact a public space. Plans of the reconstruction now hang on the walls and Sullivan casts her eye over the semi-circular seating that the archaeologists and urban hindcasters (as designers who use ancient designs are known) have worked out was the norm for such places. No-one is willing to commit as to why there had been a long barrier on one side of the room; some think it was for security or storage, some think that it was here that the nightly entertainment would occur. Some speculate that this is the so-called “bar” from behind which drinks and food were served. This proposal, suggesting that the modern arrangement of melding the furniture, staff and stock of pubs in such a way that food and drink essentially materialise isextremely recent, is not a popular one. The two large theatres have been adapted as exhibition areas, and the offices on the top level, above the mezzanine floor, become Sullivan’s living area. That her acclimatization takes only days is something of a surprise, as she has thought that she would not immediately be able to work with so many strangers around her. She has also expected to take longer to get accustomed to being back in Ireland. Sullivan has lived in The Netherlands for exactly half her life, and she has been working up to dealing once more with being in her native land. She has, frankly, expected to have some time to think about it, to look at it, before plunging in but the country does not wait for her. She has travelled with Talker, taking a ferry from Den Haag to Dublin Port and they read and sleeps and ate without much reference to each other for the duration of the journey but when they got within sight of the coast they both came up on deck and stood looking, side by side. They were delayed by three hours, bobbing amongst the usual confusion of fishing boats and army vessels, ships being searched for illegal immigrants, helicopters illuminating great circles of water, spybot’s luminescent bells reflecting in fragments on the water. A lightship beam suddenly speared through the darkness and briefly caught the backs of dolphins breaching the water on their way back out to sea. Talker is working out the stars from Orion’s Belt and his jaw really does drop, his eyes popping open like a cartoon figure’s, when a few miles up the coast towards Dalkey, an Eye manifests. Talker grabs Sullivan’s arm, says,

            “I’ve never actually seen one before. I’ve only seen those blurry digigraphs people sometimes get. I’ve never seen a real Brain before.”

            “They’re called the Pharaoh’s Eye, in Ireland,” Sullivan says, smiling at him, but a bit smugly since she is surprised that Talker has never seen a real manifestation before.

            “Well, it’d be a bit of an hypocrisy to call it the Pharaoh’s Brain since, well, how do I say this? Though I suppose it might explain where it has gone.”

            “Shhh,” says Sullivan, glancing round, “You get a higher loyalty rate amongst immigration officials. Theoretically you could be refused entry for disloyalty.”

Talker looks at her in astonishment, not at the threat of bringing trouble upon himself for expressing his views but at the realisation of a fundamental difference between them. He had not realised before that he had an equivalent to her creativity; everything she saw was grist to a creative mill and everything he saw was grist to an analytical one. He would no more hold back an opinion than she would burn a painting. He feels strangely sorry for her, or sorry that he has thought so harshly of her. She says,

            “I don’t even know why they’re supposed to be called brains.”

            “They were based on something called Boltzmann Brains,” he says, looking back at the sky where the rectangular head, with the vast eyes like black holes miles wide and the vaguely human features, had been. The sky was black again but smeared with the acid green light from the artificial Eye.

            “It had to do with entropy,” she says, “Didn’t it? Something about it being more likely that we are being observed that that we are observing.”

Both of them find that their grasp on physics is a little like candyfloss, appearing to be much more substantial than it is and melting away like sugar at the first attempt to explain it to another person.

            “It’s the laws of thermodynamics, I think,” Talker says, “Where everything inclines towards chaos, a greater state of disorder. So a universe as highly ordered as ours is very strange and unlikely.”

            “That’s it – so an ordered universe might be a fluctuation in a bigger and more disordered one. And it is observed,” Sullivan spoke more slowly as her memory of this began to dance away from her, “by these Boltzmann brains.”

           ”In any event, no-one is quite sure who created the Eye,” Talker said. Sullivan is surprised.

            “I thought the Empire did,” she said but Talker shakes his head and shrugs.

            “It isn’t known,” he says, “Not for certain. Everyone was trying to discover them or invent them, to see if humans could use them to gather direct information from beyond our own universe, that when they did start appearing, naturally the Empire claimed them. I mean if the Brains – or the Eyes as you say – could not only see but retain the information and the information could be transferred, obviously this would be highly valuable to whoever controlled them. But there’s a theory that it was one of the Dans Culottes.”

            “I suppose it is one of the aristocratic traditions,” Sullivan says as the ferry’s engines roar and the boat surges forward, “Having the money and leisure to investigate all sorts of things.”

They both cheered up at the realisation that their delayed entry into the port was over but they were delayed a further hour while Sullivan’s émigré papers were scrutinized and Talker is questioned.

“The Irish really do remember everything,” he has grumbled when they were at last freed, “I know not every Englishman has had innocent reasons for wanting to come into the country but for fuck sake Cromwell’s been dead a long time now.”

“And the English really do remember nothing,” Sullivan retorted before she think, “Whose bloody fault is it that Ireland couldn’t sign the Thule Accord and were forced to let the Empire have a benign presence? Youse lot, insisting on the Border.”

He just twitches the side of his mouth at her. Then unexpectedly, he says,

            “People usually think that Ireland is like England, but smaller. In fact, England is like Ireland, but decadent.”

Sullivan is not sure how to respond; her dislike of her own defensiveness occupies her mind. She is surprised at his analysis, and simultaneously realises that she agrees with him. It is a sense of politeness, and of the need to return, as it were, the compliment, that makes her say,

            “Then Ireland has been short-sighted. Being warned of how a decline will look and copying England anyway.”

He twitches his mouth again, and says,

            “Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe your  President will do a King Charles.”

Early the following morning, Kino is in the company of the same three women as has joined her in the pub, but this time it is in the hospital. Skeen Cantwell is a surgeon in the specialist unit in the Rotunda, in its newest incarnation as a hospital again, and she directs Teacher Locke up the stairs to the second floor where she will talk about – or rather, listen to Dr. Pszczola talking about – Teacher’s mother’s medi-dome. The bio-reader at the hospital door is not functioning properly and Teacher sits for half an hour while over-worked hospital technicians try to piece the fragile organism back together again. The bio-readers that are the bane of the hospital staff’s life developed in the south of the Kwang-chow-wan Kingdom, and the ownership of the idea for the organic machine is one of the flash-points of the Imperial War. The Pharaonic Empire claimed that it has financed the work, which led to immediate counter-claims that Liberated Empire, Thule Kingdom and Remote Allies’ gold has in fact been the financial power – not even Teacher, who feels that accurate detail is her responsibility, can recall all the claims and counter-claims. Meanwhile the woman behind the organic machine died, unacknowledged, and scurrying countries like Ireland and the remaining free cantons of Switzerland have brought in the bio-readers at the request of the Pharaoh. Obliged to be depended on them, the countries spend a fortune so that the engineering companies could earn a profit on their franchise and give repairs contracts to their financial associates. Teacher maintains a bland exterior, not even fidgeting as she sits serenely waiting. After an hour, Skeen feels sorry for her and adjusts her BluLobe to an external radio-wave so that she could send a message directly to Kino to come and keep Teacher company. Kino and Lowry both turn up and sit chatting with Teacher while the technicians curse and swear freely at the reader. If it persists in refusing to recognize Teacher’s iris, they will be unable to let her speak to the doctor or let her further into the building, at least, not without causing the alarms to sound and the building have to be evacuated. After a while, Skeen joins them, and Kino wonders again if, had she been born with those cheekbones and golden-red hair as thick and straight as a pony’s mane, her life would have been different. Skeen’s tattoos were thin black lines that made an angular yet flowing pattern around her face, unlike the thicker swirls used where Kino came from, which looks like they has been inspired by the walls of Newgrange. Skeen is looking enviously at Teacher, who looks serene and immaculate. Even the regulation clothing look perfect on her, she is tall and athletically built, with no awkward curves. She wears her wavy brown hair straightened and lightened to ash-blonde, cut at the line of her jaw and her tattoos are similar to Skeen’s, though navy rather than black and not quite as angular. At fifty-three, Teacher looks ten years younger; in fact she looks younger than Skeen, who is ten years younger. Skeen has only recently realised that she does not wish to be like Teacher, a perfect product of her background, always in tune with what she has been and what she would become. Skeen merely wishes that she wanted to be like Teacher. When Skeen arrives the others are eating the items retrieved from the hospital food machine; these unappealing sandwich-based commodities are called subs, as in “containing substitute everything”. They are quite disgusting but that does not explain the look on Lowry’s face.

“I just said that she will have to find out about her, is all,” Kino says, defensively to Skeen “if she keeps the foetus it’ll be a relative of sorts, won’t it? A half-sibling for Urse?”

 “How insensitive are you?” Lowry demands. She has cut her thick hair to a length that means a quick ruffle in the morning sorts it into brown streams with no further attention, and her heavy brows make her thin face look top-heavy and intense. Her teeth always made her mouth a little crooked but annoyance has now twisted it further askew. Naturally pale, she is paler yet with tiredness and her tattooed lines stand out quite starkly black against her skin; as is common with people from the West Coast, her lines are simple waves like the shoreline but encroach further onto her face, coming almost to the edge of her gray eyes.

“I’m just assuming you never says you’d changed your mind about non-monogamy,” Kino says, quickly, and placating, “so you must have known this is a risk.”

Lowry has known Kino for many years and has never before noticed how ugly she is. Limp strands of brown hair hanging aimlessly round her pale face. She has eyes the gray of a virulent staphococcus, a clown’s mouth. Lowry has always guessed that Kino secretly disapproves of Lowry and Tacky, who are philosophically opposed to many widely accepted conventions. Kino is one to complain. Languidly living off her boyfriend, unemployed at his request, willing to pay all prices. Lowry stares at her food till the bright-edged desire to inflict pain has passed.

“You still haven’t says how – well, not how but how the situation arose,” Teacher says, mistakenly trying to deflect Lowry, “Who is she?”

“I can’t imagine you taking it this lightly if it is Brehon who’d gotten someone pregnant!” Lowry bursts out.

“I am not taking it lightly,” Teacher says, very seriously, “And I would push Brehon through an egg-slicer if he looks at another woman. But – well…I, ah, understood, ah, that, well, you and Tacky have, ah, ah, different ground rules to me.”

 Teacher ends in a rush. It is almost as embarrassing as trying to explain sex to her daughter while trying not to find out if her daughter already knew. The technicians stand back and the four women look around hopefully but the door is opening the wrong way, to let out a swift-walking man in a white coat, rather than to let anyone in. Skeen nods to the man, whom she knows, and he smiles back, says her name. Then he glances at the other women, and says hello to Lowry, before disappearing through another set of doors. Lowry hopes that the others does not notice but of course Skeen says,

“How do you know Professor Cavenagh?”

Lowry can not think fast enough, but Skeen can, and she says, her green eyes popping wide open,

“Sweet Jesus!”

She looks immediately up at the Second Sister (as the Empire insists the security cameras are called) and she steps in front of her friends, and mutters, without moving her lips,

“Professor Cavenagh is a cryptogynaecologist. If you know him, Lowry, I strongly suspect that it isn’t a woman Tacky’s after shagging.”

Even after all these centuries, even in a civilization balancing on nanotubes and buckyballs, serviced by avatars, watched by Ichari, spybots, artificial Boltzmann brains, adulterated with smart-sand and spied upon by personal surveillance so small it can be implanted into a corneal television, it is to the Middle Ages, as they are still called, that Kino’s mind flies, at Skeen’s words. She has read tales of villagers petitioning to save the life of a virtuous she-ass led astray, trials of animals, and people accused of being witches admitting under torture to any amount of-six-legged sex. Even Teacher, bristling with diplomacy, cannot help but turn and stare at Lowry and try not to allow the phrase a beast with two backs pop into her mind. Lowry, guessing correctly what they are thinking, protests and then realises that she cannot leave it unexplained without her friends being unable to look her husband in the eye again. She sighs.

“A man. It is a man. Someone Tacky works with, a chap called Ridley Hitabu. They knew he is an hermaphrodite but…well.”

The sound of rending metal attracts their attention to where the technicians have resorted to physical violence and finally come over to Skeen.

 “Missus, if you’d all like to look the other way for two minutes.” E

veryone sees nothing of them patching into the illegal exchange and making a phone-call. All access to, and movement within, public places like hospitals is supposed to go through the server but with services out-sourced to server farms in collapsed cities in Utah, the illegal hacking with analogue is a daily occurrence. Within a few minutes Teacher is sitting in Dr. Pszczola’s office. He is almost sick with exhaustion but he shares Teacher’s iron will. He endeavours to sound refreshed and interested. He takes the phial containing the three-dimensional read-out of the latest biopsy on Teacher’s mother, taken from the remnants of her ravaged brain; a spiked ruby bead that hovered on the charged air trapped in the medi-dome that housed it. The claret-red glow and the undulating colours of the electrical halo remind Teacher of something so fleeting and meaningful that it is a few moments before she realises that the doctor is speaking to her.

“Your mother’s surgeon seems to thing that there is some improvement in the reaction to the new medication, Mrs. Locke.”

 “Yes.”

Dr. Pszczola looks at her again; very few relatives can keep to a monosyllabic answer. They inevitably tell him in lay-terms everything that he can already see in the pulsing red bead – how long the patient has been suffering, what medication has been tried, the failures, the symptoms of decline. A tine touch of blue on one side of the bead tells the doctor why Teacher has been sent but relatives always wanted to show what they has learned because they fear that they would be misled. They know that the doctor knows more but they believe that love for the patient will spot a weakness that mere medical knowledge would miss. They awake in cold sweats fearing that they would somehow fail to prise apart with their fingers the ruthless elegance of illness and the inevitability of death.

“Your mother has shown a reaction to Emotillion,” Dr. Pszczola says, and uncharacteristically turned the medi-dome so that the blue dab of recovered cells faces Teacher.

“See? The dye identifies the age of the cells. Now, your mother is just seventy, just middle aged, taking a conservative average life-span of a hundred and forty. So there has been some recovery.”

Teacher is uncertain and thinks I am making him nervous. Skeen would have added, But not enough.

 “The reason that they have sent you to me, Mrs. Locke, is that we have a unit that runs extensive tests on improvements seen in Emotillion,” Dr. Pszczola says briskly, “Tests to monitor the changes, especially with Alzheimer’s, at a far more profound level of detail than they can at the nursing home. If you agree to it, they will need your permission to move her.”

He pauses for a few seconds, waiting until he can see in Teacher’s face the prediction of looking on her mother’s fear and despair in the face of change, and then he adds,

“And give us permission to sign her on to the register. A formality, keeping track of who used the drug.”

“Of course,” says Teacher, distracted, responding, as he knew she would, automatically. Dr. Pszczola hands the medi-dome back to her and smiles her out of the office. When Teacher re-joins her friends she finds that the anger has shifted and Lowry is now trying to reassure Kino that there is nothing sinister in the fact that Skeen, now back at work, has known for months that Sullivan is returning to Ireland. The truth, if there is such a thing, about Sullivan’s role as Ireland’s major artist depends entirely on where it is described, rather like the real truth of Ireland’s role in the Dead Man’s War. A small country, with only a narrow margin of economic stability which is dependent on the robust educational level and technological abilities of its population, and, almost more importantly, upon its reputation for such robustness, Ireland manages to be both marginal and central simultaneously. In this, it is not alone; the Free Cantons of Switzerland, the four-country United African Federation, the informal association between Turkey and the Mittel-Europa countries are in a similar position of not being important or powerful enough to be thought a threat and yet still managing to be a pebble in the Pharaoh’s boot, a rock against which he stubbed the Imperial toe. Ireland’s role is described in the left-leaning newspapers in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression of a tiny but indominitable nation refusing to back down in the face of imperialist bullies, in the right-leaning newspapers in a way as to encourage distaste for the churlish, foot-shuffling action of ingrates who are happy to take what benefits are handed to them yet refuse to do their reciprocal duty. Official public debate is carried out in swingeing, brightly-coloured soundbites, billboards sprouting like beanstalks, politicians making statements of what they genuinely believe, though only at the moment of speaking, to be fact. Unofficial public debate rages across the cities’ walls and window-grilles, combatants armed with cans of spray paint and glue-laden brushes with which to paste up great sheets of papers with slogans splashed across them, or slanting lines of densely-written text. All sides hang placards from the necks of the public statues and non-combatants can follow threads of arguments that go on for days, even weeks, with claims appearing around the neck of, say, Parnell, only to be refuted by a counter-claim appearing overnight and unobserved around the facing statue of O’Connell. Politics sometimes takes to the skies, too, with laser-displays, sign-writing planes and even one dangerously jerry-rigged spybot spelling out the reasons for or against Ireland’s hunch-shouldered position. But with the illicit advent of Ichari into the skies above Ireland – illegal, as they are authorized for Celtic-Saxony air-space only but widely thought to be part of the Pharaoh’son-going search for the borders of Muinbeo – sky-space is best left in peace. Sullivan undergoes a similar dislocation. Official commentators of mainstream art scene do not dispute her talent, but are polarised when it comes to her influence – she has persistently refused to be seconded onto any of the established committees or review groups and how, they wonder, can that be normal? Could an academic be taken seriously if they refused to publish, refused to give public seminars, refused to speak at conferences? There is a second line of polarized opinion, developed in the last four or five years by artistic commentators who were unable to make a splash elsewhere, about Sullivan’s nationality – can an artist who has lived abroad for so long and who does not address national issue be regarded as Irish? Some of the side-journals, as the intermittent, badly-reproduced alternatives to the official organs are called, condemn her painting as regressive and lacking any genuine depth of emotion, while others query the need for an artist to be emotional and claim her as the most evocative commentator of the human condition in several generations. Others condemn her personally as self-obsessed and precious, others writing glowingly of her as considerate, modest and witty. Sullivan does not pretend to be so lacking in vanity that she has never read what others have said about her but is speaking the truth when she says that the only such commentator that interests her is the anonymous author of the illegal World Catalogue website. When Sullivan gets the letter confirming the arrangements for the reality television show which will follow her as she creates an exhibition analysing Ireland, she is disconcerted to read the name of the journalist in charge, and she ponders it for a minute or two. She knows Rafferty and they have never liked each other. But this she puts to the back of her mind. Rafferty is a political journalist, he is not interested in the arts and he has probably been landed with this against his will. The letter explains that a journalist will be assigned to her, which means, in her experience, a journalist with a track record in the arts and a more academic approach than Rafferty’s scoop-driven methods. She hopes that it will be the black-eyed, admiring Aoife Flynn, who is not long finished a degree in Recent Art History and who has written her dissertation on Sullivan. Sadly for Sullivan it is not Aoife Flynn and her soft figure, her trusting smile and her tendency to hook her honey curls behind her ears. It is Talker Dun, and in that selection Sullivan sees the first proof that Rafferty disliked her with far greater vigour than she has supposed. The day after the letter is received, which is a week after the conversation with Aoife, Talker Dun sends a bio-text to Sullivan’s BluLobe and asks to meet her at her house. The disadvantage to the BluLobe is that you have to answer immediately, otherwise random thinks will be transmitted instead – this having been one of the features that has made BluLobes so popular with sharp young businessers wanting more ways to prove how virile were their decision-making abilities – so Sullivan can only say yes because she does not want to start off at a disadvantage with Talker Dun. Talker is ringing on her doorbell within the hour. He is sixty-something with a slumped, dishevelled air and a mainly grumpy expression. Sullivan’s eye is sharp though and she sees that he is in fact well-tailored, even in Regulation clothing, and taller than he appears. Despite his habit of rubbing his hand over his chin as though he expected it to be bristly, he is in fact properly shaved and well-manicured, though she thinks he should make up his mind about whether his hair is long or short. She is very taken aback by his quick flick of a smile as he passes her in the hallway. Sullivan later realises that its disarming charm lies in the fact that his rare delivery of a smile is the only time at which Talker Dun looks into anyone’s eyes. When she follows him into the studio he is already walking along by the walls where she keeps her current paintings stacked, flicking canvasses back and forth.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” he says, “I’ve read your blog.”

He swiftly picks up a series of paintings and expertly handles them onto the long island where Sullivan has her painting materials. Her studio is in what used to be the kitchen of an hotel and she has retained the wooden island though removed its granite top, so the surface now is corrugated, stained with years of her work. Talker balances the works carefully so that they are not quite flat and were flattered by the diffuse natural light. He can hear her talking to him but years of dealing with all sorts of artists has left him able to easily block out their chatter if he needs to. In his experience, artists usually repeated themselves. He esteems Sullivan’s work but has never read or heard an interview with her that has not made him want to shake her.

“I take it then that these,” he sweeps his hand over the canvases, “Were done about the same time as your blog.”

He bends a little and peers at each on closely.

“In your blog you wrote of your travels,” he says, “Night-time trains exclusively, and from the sounds of it, travelling in its narrowest sense. You go to a train station, take a train somewhere – Utrecht, Horst-Sevenum, Saint-Nicholas – and then sit in the train station. I’m guessing from this picture that you just sits there, smoking. And an hour or so later, a train somewhere else – Leiden, Bruges – or back to Amsterdam. Clearly your travels does not help you much.”

With a wave of his hand he indicates an incomplete painting, an outline of Sullivan dandling a dry husk in her hand which hangs limp and marrow-white by a chair.

“Now I am not seeing here any indication of the fellow-traveller you mentioned,” Talker says, “The one that seemed to be following you.”

Such a blunt description of the encounter makes Sullivan impatient. She dislikes the fact that Talker makes her uncomfortable; he has been one of the most incisive cultural commentators in the Old World for over forty years and while she admires the fertility of the political and artistic environment in which he is seeped, she is aware that he both admires and is a stinging critic of her work. As certainly as if he had told her himself, she knows that Rafferty chose Talker in the hope that he would present Sullivan as the sum of her weaknesses. What she does not know is why Talker accepted the job.

 “It is not as crude as that,” she says, annoyed with herself for sounding irritable; she has long endeavoured to remember that the artist must observe, before she can interpret and so affect, her environment. Emotions were fog on a lens.

 “I don’t know who this person is. Or is. I am not even sure that they exist.”

Talker turns and looks in her direction. His own sleight of hand, in his crumpled jacket and sleep-deprived air, would never be reproduced in her even if, as he suspected with some discomfort, she has already astutely unpicked him already. She could never appear other than she is, her height stopping her build from looking stocky, unhindered by Regulations from wearing the old-fashioned styles and pure fibres she liked, her hair long at the front but short at the back. Her facial tattooing is dark green, vaguely pardalinus but the spots were too regular and circular, so that in some lights they made her face look detached from the rest of her head. There is a well-known portrait of Sullivan which carried on the theme from her tattooing, making the whole picture look like an Aubrey Beardsley.

“So this person just turns up and finds the train carriages that you happen to be in, and they make you mysteriously uncomfortable.”

“Not uncomfortable,” Sullivan says, remembering in time not to repeat what she has written on her blog, “She just asks questions that were unexpected. I am not usually unable to answer. She asks why to a lot of things I no longer question.”

Talker starts to hum The Gambler, a country song about a ghostly advisor he came across on an antique compact disc, and he turns away just as Sullivan realises what he meant and becomes annoyed. He assumes that this mysterious traveller is in fact a rather brooding fan who realised that one certain way to get Sullivan’s attention would be to pretend to both not know her and know her far too well. If Sullivan wished to believe it is some preternatural advisor, that is her business. He edges around to look at the last image, one that at first he thinks is unfinished but on closer inspection he realises is finished, but is very good. He knows her work well enough to read the picture fairly quickly and deciphers it as an unsettling and alarmed image of the artist worn away, disappearing, fossilizing before her own eyes, nothing but dust and residue. Sullivan joins him, looking at him examine the image. He looks around, and says to a point on her cheekbone,

“How very disconcerting for you. I would have expected to see you, in this sort of humour, wearing eighteenth century jackets and reading Baudelaire.”

Sullivan turns away crossly and he says to her back,

“I began this job a week ago. I’ve been interviewing some of your friends, some of your ex-lovers, to start to get an idea of your landscape, as it were.” S

he does not turn around but asks him to whom he has spoken. She is not surprised at his answers; the friends he would easily be able to locate, even where he cannot off-hand recall the names she recognises the description. There is only one person who would so candidly say that Sullivan’s dry spell is caused because she has ignored her own emotions for so long which she suspected from the way he says this that Talker does not believe. She wonders if he believed what Greta, her most recent ex-lover, has says about the tension between Sullivan’s beliefs about political artists and the situation unfolding in Ireland and elsewhere. Perhaps Greta has told him about the phone call Sullivan received from Lowry, after the privacy vote four years ago goes in favour of the Pharaoh’s Empire. Sullivan has almost returned home to vote, but she believed vehemently that artists should be, and the best by nature were, apolitical. She has maintained a dignified silence when Lowry rang her up to shout abuse at her, as though she personally is responsible for Ireland’s contemplation of surrendering its neutrality. But she watched the news reports of the arrival from the Pharaonic Homeland of the army, descending from their Black Hawks and their Chinooks, strapping and smiling as though the massed crowds were cheering, as though the banners actually read Céad Míle Fáilte. Talker says,

 “And I suppose that this is your compromise.”

He holds up a sketch, fire and precious metals and a hand retrieving a gem from the molten centre. He hates pictures of hands doing symbolic things. He guesses that Sullivan still maintains that being an artist excuses her from responding to the political crisis in Europe, and Ireland’s new role therein. From this hackneyed image he guesses that she also maintained that, as an artist, she should not be squeamish about the sources of her inspiration. So she could see herself reaching her hand into the molten centre of a fire to withdraw the half-hidden gem, and she could also return to Ireland.