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dichroic swell of King George’s Sea. They didn’t build Te Deum, nor Herschel City, nor Harlequin. Didn’t have to. They grew these stained-glass slum-gardens like mushrooms on a dead log. Salted the sea with a confetti of exotic hydrocarbons and up they sprung: unpredictable, enormous, disorganized—unless you dig an anemone’s sense of feng shui. That’s all they are. Anemones as hard as a man and as big as his ego. They only look like casinos or banks or dancehalls. Just the littlest bit alive, but nothing to lose sleep over.
    If you have any sleep to lose. I like the idea of sleep, myself. Sounds like a nice place to visit.
    So there I was, on Caroline Street, the hairiest street in the rowdiest city on the snowball. A good place to get forgotten. I was unshaved, unwashed, unslept, unwell, profoundly unsober, and had thus achieved all my aims in life. I had on the only suit I still owned under my jacket, a conservative raisin-coloured number with a chartreuse tie. And gloves, always gloves, even if the cold didn’t slap me around like a whining brat, always gloves. I have a trunk of leather gloves lined with fleece and hydrostatic furpack. Yeah, leather. My only luxury. None of that brownfalse rubbish they say is just as good. Made special on Mars, where you gotta bat away steers like bottle flies. I need them thick, but they’re never thick enough.
    It was a suit fit for a job interview, though I hadn’t let one of those get near me in years. I didn’t think I could manage a conversation longer than How much? anyway. I can’t stomach a man telling me what to do and when to do it. That cog got banged up good in me. The one that lets normal folks say, Yes, sir; right away, sir , and mean it. And then get the business done for the sirs of the world, right away, on the double-quick.
    And yet. I wasn’t on Caroline Street to scare up a woman or to sell my cufflinks for a lump of af-yun or put the last of my emergency protein fund on the ammonite races. I was calling on a million quid. A job. Gainful employment. A gig particularly suited to my extremely specific talents and Historia Calamitatum . If you lined up all the soul-choking jobs a body ever dreamed up, neat as a chorus line and twice as hungry, this’d be about the last dame I’d wanna take round the floor. And yet.
    Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees. Frankly, the roosters can’t even get their heads on straight round here. The sun, such as it is, comes up every seventeen hours on Uranus. It’s hard on the poultry. Still, I probably woulda made it, despite all my efforts to black out before the hour struck Cinderella, if the Astor hadn’t put up a midnight show. One of those weird, off-putting studio talkies from back in the bad old days when Edison ruled the nickelodeon universe with a celluloid fist. We get a lot of that stuff out here. This is the end of the line for movie prints. It takes ten years to get them out to Uranus and once they make landfall they tend to stick. Just kind of swirl around the theatres like water down a drain till the reels break or someone steals them. If you’re looking for a flick that no one’s seen hide of for a good long howl, there’s probably one kicking round some freezer case in a Uranian cellar. Who knows where they dug this one up?
    The Astor marquee came ghosting up out of the blue brume, sickly topaz pop-bulbs and black block letters bearded with ice.
    Self-Portrait with Saturn .
    Well, fuck me sideways.
    I didn’t wanna buy a ticket. For one thing, I’ve seen it. Boy howdy, have I seen it. For another, my petty cash was feeling particularly petty that night. There’s probably a third thing. I didn’t want a ticket. I sure as hell didn’t want the booth jockey to smell my breath and wrinkle her pretty little pierced nose like her opinion kept the lights on. I didn’t wanna sit fifth row