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'Look, wall, there are some people chasing us.'

'I am aware of that. They are all properly dressed.'

'Yes, but they're trying to kill us.'

'Nonsense.'

'Yes, they are.'

'Colour people' said the wall with imperious pride, 'do not try to kill one another.'

'These aren't from Colour: they're from the Centre.' There was a pause, while the computer evaluated this claim. 'Look at their wrists' I added plaintively, 'Lilac cufflinks. They're ACIA.'

'I see' the wall said eventually and more quietly. 'Have you done anything wrong?' 'No' I said, and there was a long pause. 'Well we can't have that. Bloody can-do smartarses.'

I was a bit surprised, had not realised that anti-Actioneer sentiment ran quite so high amongst the Neighbourhood's computers, but greatly relieved. The siren cut out, and the wall faded instantly to black. A block away, both aircars turned into the street, moving fast.

'Step close to me' said the wall. Alkland was transfixed by the sight of the cars, now only sixty yards away. I grabbed him and pinned him up against the wall, and then stood close myself.

The two cars drew slowly down the street towards us, driving abreast. In each car the two ACIA agents took one side of the street each, staring hard.

'We're going to die' opined the Actioneer quietly.

I didn't feel confident enough to contradict him. Not having a large and noisy sign pointing at us was a start, but I didn't see how it was going to tip the balance. Closer and closer the cars came, until I could see the tiny red flashing light on the dashboard of the one in front. It was flashing so rapidly that it was almost constantly lit. They must have known that they were virtually on top of us, and I couldn't understand how they couldn't see us.

The cars stopped when they were exactly level with where we stood, flattened against the wall, and I held myself tensed, ready to go for my gun. I wouldn't have stood a chance, I knew, but what else can you do in situations like that? Exactly. So you go for your gun.

The moment stretched, elongated, burst, and then, amazingly, the cars slowly started to move on.

'Maybe they're in the street behind.'

'No way, look at the light, man.'

'Well they're not here, are they?'

'I guess not. Okay, take us round. Kinip: do a U-turn and go round the other way.'

'Gotcha.'

The car in front cruised down to the end of the street, while the other rotated on the spot and zipped down to the corner. Alkland and I let out staggered breaths simultaneously, and I stepped away from the wall and looked at him.

'How the -' I started, and then I saw. From two yards away I couldn't see Alkland. The street computer had turned the wall we'd been up against into a huge mural, a riot of pulsating colour. The swirl passing behind Alkland exactly matched the colour of his jacket. A long splash at head height was the same colour as his skin except at the top, where it shaded into the grey of his hair. I took another step back, shaking my head. We'd been as good as invisible. 'Wall?' I said admiringly. That was flash.'

'No problem,' it said. 'Now move'

I took Alkland's arm and dragged him across the street.

'Gosh,' he said, staring back at the fading colours.

'Yeah.'

We stumbled down the steps. At the bottom is a small dark courtyard, an old, old place. I'm a bit of a connoisseur of places like that. There aren't many like it in Colour, or anywhere in fact.

Unchanged in hundreds of years, and largely unvisited, it's like a path back to the past.

Lyric crap aside, it's also a path to Sound. I got Alkland to take his clompy shoes off, told him not to make a sound until I said he could, and we scampered off into the darkness.

Flickering light, the soft hum of electrics turning and running, the steady rocking warmth of movement, the quietness of a deserted public place at night and the dryness of tired eyes. Through and past and over and through again, the outside just a dark tunnel flecked with blurred smears of artificial light. I half sat and half lay on the mono's bristly seats keeping half an eye on the fitfully sleeping Actioneer, and half an eye on myself.

We lost them. I don't know if they even made it into Sound, if they realised that's where we went. I took a twisted path through the silent streets, doubling back, feinting, and left the Neighbourhood at the least expected angle, also the angle that would take us where we were going.

To muted colours and grey pebbles endlessly made cold by the ebb and flow of heavy water. Seagulls, floating Ms of noise against watercolour clouds and low diffuse sunlight. To the coast, to the absolute graveyard of the past, the place where it was most clearly dead because it was still there, and you could see how dead it was.

As I sat wearily, too tired to sleep, my body warm with the carriage's heating and the back of my head cold against the window, I tried to take stock, to assimilate. The thru-mono would take us all the way there. We didn't have to change again, all we had to do was sit. By morning we would be near the coast, near the next bit. All I had to do was sit, and listen to my aching back.

I thought about the recent days, and trawled the hours for anything else I might have forgotten, anything that might be important. I came up with only two things. Someone had tried to get in touch with Snedd, almost certainly to find out about Stable. It might be ACIA, it might not. Also, someone had tried to kill me at the Stable wall. It might be ACIA, it might not.

Not rapier-like precision analysis, but it would have to do. When something starts, you have to take things at face value for a while, because you don't have any reason to do otherwise. Catering for every eventuality all the time just slows you up. As time goes on, you get a context, you come to understand how things are weighted, learn to predict and suspect more accurately. Things become less linear, more fragmented, and control becomes a fantasy. An all-important fantasy, but a fantasy all the same.

I thought about Zenda. I knew she'd be able to play her part, so long as things stayed under control. When they get out of control, though, there's nothing you can do but react, and I hoped I'd be back by the time that happened. Maybe you think I haven't been too impressive so far, and perhaps you're right. I could defend myself, say it isn't easy, reacting all the time, running all the time,

but I won't, because that's not the point. The point is too deep, too personal, and too small to explain. The point is not for spectators. Nothing that's important, really important, looks impressive, because it only means something to the person that does it. Staying alive, for example, not dying: it looks so easy, but sometimes it's almost too difficult to be borne.

I thought about Ji, and Shelby, and Snedd. Alone, awake in the cruising carriage, surrounded by night and sleep, I thought of them and wished them well. I wrapped my thoughts up neatly, finished them, put them to bed. I wanted them in order, for sleep, as they say, can be very like death. It can be death itself, in fact.

I was not going to sleep tonight. Someone had to watch over Alkland, and wake him from such dreams as might come. Someone had to play hero, had to know that little bit more, had to be that tiny step ahead that keeps the story moving. And always, in my life, that someone is me. I'd like to sleep sometimes, watched over. I'd like to feel that someone guards my dreams and is there ready to touch my hand and help me. I'd like to be the one who reaches out to be comforted, to be loved, the child stretching for the embrace of a sun it knows will be for ever warm. But it can't be like that. Why? You'll see, perhaps. If it's relevant.

So I wasn't going to sleep that night, nor the next day. But tomorrow I would dream.

What you have to understand is that sometimes things are the way they seem. By that I don't mean that they aren't the way they might be thought to be, beneath what you see, necessarily, what I mean is that. . . Christ: I'll start this again.

Sometimes, things are not the way they seem. You look at something and it seems straightforward, and you think you understand it, and it's only later you realise that the truth is different.

Okay: no prizes for observation so far.

Sometimes, on the other hand, you look at something and you know already it's not the way it seems. You know because you understand what you're seeing, you're aware of the context and you realise that appearances are being deceptive.

But sometimes, and this is the important sometimes, that's wrong.

Sometimes, when you think you're being deceived, you're not. Sometimes things are the way they look, however surprising that may be. And sometimes that can make all the difference in the world.

Let me put it another way. Why does a journey always seem quicker coming back?

* * *

At eight o'clock the next morning we were standing on the front in Eastedge Neighbourhood, looking out onto the sea. There was no one around, no one but a few wheeling seabirds and us, and no sound apart from the gentle crash of waves and, in the distance, someone playing the piano.

Alkland flipped out. I've come here quite often down the years, sometimes because I had to, like today, more often just to be here. I've seen the sea before, really seen it. I've stood in front of it and come to terms with it, vast dark heaving bastard that it is. Alkland hadn't. Like most people these days, he knew it existed, he knew what its chemical properties were, but as to what it was ...

'It's, ah, it's very big, isn't it?' he said, eventually. I nodded. I don't know why, but I find it difficult to talk properly in front of the sea. It makes me go all epigrammatic and oblique.

It's partly being in Eastedge that does that, too. As we walked slowly along the front, the strong breeze wrapping our clothes round the front of our bodies, I saw that the Neighbourhood had changed not at all since I'd last been there. It looks like a ghost town, which is what it is. Eastedge is big, covering about fifty miles of coastland, yet only about twenty people live there. No one comes here, and they haven't in over a hundred years. We've turned our back on the sea, turned our back on that huge churning storm of uncertainty: we don't need it any more, have no use for it. The buildings along the front are still in a reasonable state of repair, because nobody has the energy to come this far to vandalise a dead town. What would be the point? The shops and restaurants, genteel crumbling hotels and rotting jetties, they wait out the decades by themselves, watching the tides and the passing years, left well behind in time with nothing but dissolution in front of them, the fading palaces of yesterday's world.

See what I mean? I'll try to snap out of it.

'It's a bit spooky, actually,' Alkland said, dragging his eyes away from the sea to take in the peeling storefronts and windswept and deserted street. 'Doesn't anybody live here any more?'

'A very few, mild cranks and lunatics for the most part. We're going to visit one of them now.'

'Are we?' The Actioneer sounded dubious. 'Why? And where's that piano coming from?'

We were getting closer to the source of the music. It was actually rather beautiful in an eerie way, small fragments of a melody of calm melancholy. As we passed one of the bigger restaurants on the other side of the street I thought I saw a flicker of movement deep within, but didn't go to check. The people here are easily frightened, and I liked the music.

'We're going to visit him because he has a plane.'

'Ah. I wondered why we'd come all this way.' After an untroubled night's sleep the Actioneer didn't look any healthier, but he certainly seemed more chipper, in a tired sort of way. 'Are we leaving the country or something?'

'Yes' I said. 'And no. We're not going in the plane. He is.'

'I see' he replied, and then frowned. 'No, I don't. What are we doing, then?'

'Staying here.'

'What?'

I knew that sooner or later I was going' to have to try to explain the next bit to Alkland, but wanted to hold off for the time being. If he didn't have much time to think about it, it would be easier for me. Or less unbelievably difficult, anyway.

'Trust me.'

'Hmm' he said, but he left it at that.

Two hours later we were sitting in the Dome. The Dome used to be the big hotel on the strip, the place where you came if you had a tremendous amount of money and wanted to make that fact absolutely clear to everyone else. Short of carrying a large sign, the best way of saying, 'Hey look: I have more cash than I possibly know what to do with' was to check into the Dome for a couple of weeks.

But rich people have become very serious, it seems, and now those people are hanging out in Brandfield and Cash Neighbourhoods, playing golf. Being rich doesn't look like as much fun as it used to be. In the old days you got rich, and then stopped working and concentrated very hard on having a very good time in very expensive ways. Now people get rich, and then just work harder to try to become even richer.

Sometimes they play golf. That's it, apparently. Doesn't sound like a bundle of laughs to me, but there you are.

We were sitting in the Dome's dining room, which is a room about a hundred metres square still littered with the occasional chair and table amidst the dust and debris. The room is at the centre of the hotel, and has no windows. That's important.

Finding Villig had been easy. He lives in a kind of one-man shanty town on the beach. He started off in the old changing hut there, but over the years has added lean-tos and extensions and bits and pieces until now it covers the beach from road to sea in a strip about twenty yards wide.

For reasons known only to himself, and probably not even to him, Villig has built his 'house' in such a way that the roof is only about four feet off the ground. Inside is a series of chambers and tunnels and dens, and you have to get around by crawling on your hands and knees. Leaving the Actioneer outside, to his relief, I found one of the several entrances and burrowed in towards the centre.

It took a while to find him, but Villig was in. He's always in. If I didn't come and stir up his nest with a stick every now and then he would probably have taken root by now. Once I'd found him I crawled towards what serves as the kitchen and made a pot of Jahavan Stupidly High Strength Coffee. Don't ever drink that stuff, by the way: it makes foolish and unhelpful thoughts feel like a state of transcendental bliss. Drinking Jahavan Stupidly High Strength makes you realise why alcoholics drink so much. It's only in Villig's kitchen because I put it there.