A street preacher proclaiming hate in the name of love: You're all going to hell, every one of you. The wages of sin is death! The wages of sin is death! Ye must be born again! Ye must be born again!

A lovers' argument: she accusing him, he defending himself, he moving from defence to offence, she thrown momentarily back, she rallying with a strong counterattack, he gaining strength for a countercounteroffensive.

A conversation between two thirteen-year-old girls, a complex, utterly banal exchange of agreed allusions, themes, and references quite opaque to anyone outside their social orbit.

A drunk's monologue, projected on the inside of his skull in full Technicolor by the Cinema Nostalgique, of an encounter with a ghostly policeman.

A business man's oaths and imprecations as he waits for a long overdue wife to return from shopping, gathering in vehemence; then, when she finally appears, the stunning hypocrisy of his glad-to-see-you-have-you-had-a-nice-time-darling greeting.

A madwoman from a mad land reciting memorised pages from the telephone directory in a voice of prophetic hysteria.

"This is just a start," Elliot says. "I have this grand dream of remixing reality: you have this computer program, see, that's constantly scanning worldwide television, radio, and telecommunications, stealing samples and then mixing them down to rhythm tracks generated by a subroutine. I use a lot of computer-generated rhythm tracks; most dance music is seventy, eighty percent computer-generated. What I want to do is to take the human element out entirely to make it more human, you understand what I mean? I want the abilities of a computer to contain and express the diversity of what it means to be human. Reality, the twelve-inch version. The Happening World, Club Mix. I get invited to a sound-system party and I just plug in the computer and give them this happening world at five hundred watts per speaker. The people who go to these parties, they just want dance music as a means of escape, something to stuff their heads full of Ecstasy to, or whatever, and let the dope and the music toast their neurons. Me, I want to use dance music to explore. I want it to be dangerous, radical. I want dancing to be political."

"The politics of dancing?" Enye asks.

Elliot looks at her as his muse rolls, sated, from him and withdraws into her divine cloud of unknowing.

"You what?"

She breaks into the dead amusement arcade through a skylight. The rotted, paint-blistered wood yields with only the faintest cry to her crowbar. It is not as great a drop as she has feared. Her red Reeboks hardly make any sound. She drags a retired one-armed-bandit across the pitted linoleum floor and stations it beneath the skylight. She may have to leave the way she entered. She cannot resist one pull, for the sake of all those fat copper pennies she slid down all those chromium gullets in all those childhood amusement arcades. The mechanism has jammed solid. Three lemons, the final payout.

It is a strange contact, the pulse of mythoconsciousness in this seaside town huddled behind its breakwaters and shingle beach against winter; a variable star in her neural constellation, at times so dim and wan as to be virtually imaginary, again, an actinic flare of nova light burning out from among the closed-down arcades and hot dog stalls and rain-washed promenades. Its variable nature and its distance from the mass of phagus activity ranked it low on the list of priorities. Now it had worked its way to the top by dint of Enye having removed all contacts more interesting than it.

She had not been surprised to find this closed-season arcade where she had rolled her pennies as a child the focus of the mythoconscious contact. As she sat in the Citroen listening to Nielsen symphonies and dripping gobbets of Thousand Island dressing onto the upholstery from the burger she bought from the sole late-night eatery on the storm-lashed seafront, she had found herself submerging into cotton-candy reverie. Days when the sun seemed brighter, hotter, cleaner than the sun that shines upon this dog-end decade; days when mothers wore slacks and fathers wore sandals and rolled up their trouser legs, and kiddies wore shorts and white knee socks and babies wore sun bonnets. Days when the souvenir shops unself-consciously gloried in their curious hybrid of naive vulgarity and patriotism. Dirty postcards cheek-to-cheek with pictures of Padre Pio bleeding all over the revolving display rack. Flags of all nations on little wooden sticks to deck the ramparts of your sand Versailles.

Rain had speckled the windshield, washing away the sand castles of other decades. Dead neon, peeling paint, swags of faery lights rattling in the wind driving the cold black breakers onto the shingle shore, graffiti felt-markered on green-painted seats and shelters. The entropy of the heart. When the teenage crew of the solitary late-night burger bar rolled down the shutters, leaving the memory of dirty grease in the morning air, she had made her move.

She slides open a lathe and glass door, enters the main body of the arcade, a long room filled with the discarded corpses of arcade games. There is enough light from the promenade for her to make out the names on the cabinets: Astroblaster, Shark Hunt, Penny Falls, Torpedo Run, Wheel of Fortune, Derby Day, The Drunkard's Dream-she remembers that one, ghosts appearing out of barrels, trapdoors, at windows while pink elephants wheeled across the background, all for a penny-Space Invaders I, Space Invaders II. Pinball machines; an art form in themselves, tail-fin pink Thunderbirds, Caesar's Palace hostesses winking lewdly. Space Bimbettes in bikinis and goldfish-bowl helmets wedged into the armpits of men in scarlet tights, silver boots, and improbably bulging crotches far more threatening to the marauding aliens than the mix/blend/whip/puree ray pistols in their hamlike fists. Her parents had never allowed her to play pinball. The prerogative of Bigger Boys. She pauses, turns, scans the room with her Shekinah sight. This is the heart of the enigmatic contact.

"Hello?" She unsheathes the swords slung across her back. Rain rattles on the windows.

A video game click-buzzes to itself. "God, don't do that."

But the power is off. She remembers noticing that as she came in. The games are all plugged into the ceiling sockets, but the master isolator is up. The power is off.

One by one the dead arcade games flash and hum into restored life. Old fluorescents flash and wink, the pinball machines chatter their counters down to zero and rattle their buffers. The video games awaken in a dawn chorus of buzzing, of buzzings, zarpings, beepings, and growlings. Somewhere, a sailor in a glass case shakes his shoulders and laughs maniacally. Sparks fly from the old "Electric Chair," smoke rises from the jerking mannequin's ears. Penny Falls shoves log jams of outmoded currency toward the brink.

Enye advances through the arcade, swords held in the stance of Gedan No Kame. Around her screens light with video explosions, glowing red torpedoes lurch toward their targets, wheels of fortune spin, plastic racehorses gallop.

Something.

Behind a cabinet. She turns to face it. Again-the briefest flash of something, low, scurrying, scuttling. A dart of motion. She cries out, rubs, her right ankle. Pain, like a whiplash or a cigarette burn. She sees it clearly for one instant on top of a game cabinet, a small, glowing gremlin shaped out of neon. It looks nothing more and nothing less than an archetypal Space Invader. She cuts with the katana but it is gone. She winces. Her neck stings. A second Invader crouches on top of a Teletennis cabinet, it spits a bolt of electricity at her. Enye barely parries with her tachi blade.

"T!" The creature leaps, too slow, too slow. The swinging blade of the katana smashes it into a puffball of bathroom pink fluorescence. Dozens now, on every vantage, spitting out their tiny shock bolts. Too many to parry; each hit is a sear and puff of scorching fabric and flesh. She retreats, they follow through, hopping from cabinet to cabinet. She sees one tearing itself free from a screen, annihilates it, but it is liking killing wasps. There are always too many of them. She takes refuge behind an Astro-tank 2000 cabinet. There is a smell of burning, of electricity, as the cabinet absorbs fire. The laughing sailor in its glass cabinet regards her with a malevolent eye. Ceases in midlaugh. Turns its head toward her.

"Bet you never met one like me before," it says. Mickey Mouse gosh-golly-wow voice. An Invader leaps down from the top of Enye's cover, releases a bolt. Enye yelps, swears. The tachi flies from her hand, spins across the scabby linoleum. She sucks the burn on her left hand. The Invader leaps to attack again. The katana catches in it midair.

"How you like this arcade game, sunshine? This one shoots back. Adds a whole new dimension of excitement, wouldn't you say?" says the Mickey Mouse matelot. "Tell me, gorgeous, how's it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?"

"Spare me the cliches," Enye says, rolling to retrieve her sword. As she hoped, the thick fabric of her parka protects her from the hail of bolts. She takes fresh cover as a wave of neon Invaders overrun the Astro-tank 2000 game. The laughing sailor tracks her with his head.

"Shaped charges," it says. "Kind of cute, don't you think? My own little army of phaguses. Of course, they're not terribly robust, but they make up in numbers what they lack in individual durability."

Enye raises the katana to smash the glass cabinet and its occupant into nothingness.

"I wouldn't waste your time," says the sailor. "I'm Little Mr. Everywhere, aren't I? The Ghost in the Machine, I like to think of myself. The Faery of the VDU. Today, video games, tomorrow the banking networks, next week the defence systems. Well, you've got to dream, don't you?"

"I cannot believe," says Enye, breaking from cover behind a flickering dance of steel and electricity, "that the Mygmus ever stored a memory like you." She backs toward the wall, trying to make her way to the sliding doors. She has an idea. The sailor's face rezzes up on an Asteroid's screen.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. Each generation generates its own mythologies, its own gods and demons, its own imps and sprites. I am merely a response to the collective unconscious of the times. But seriously, gorgeous, have you ever considered that these creatures of the Mygmus you are battling with such zeal and determination, I must admit, might not be the hopes and fears of your so-called adversary, but your own fears and hopes, reflected back at you? Pluck out the beam from your own eye before you cast out the mote from your brother's, and all that. It's worth thinking about, you know."

"Ya!" Enye plunges the katana through the screen. The tube detonates in dust and flying glass.

"Temper, temper," says the taunting Mickey Mouse voice from a Wurlitzer jukebox. Invaders advance, formed up into ranks and files, once over each other like tiny musketeers. The death of a thousand cuts. Each tiny burn, each tiny shock might be no more than an irritation, but multiplied a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times... Seared, scarred, half-blinded. Enye cuts her way toward the glass door. Shaped charges. Ghosts in the machine. Bolt after bolt strikes home as she pulls tall cabinets around her and the junction box.

"Where is it where is it where is it." She traces the power main, down, along. There. The fuse box. She hammers at the catch with the hilt of the tachi until the box fails open. She rips out the ceramic fuses, casts them away behind her. Disconnects the computer from the katana. A power bolt strikes the back of her neck like a whip. Tiny neon ghosts appear around the edge of her barricade, over the tops of the cabinets, squeezing between the black fabric-covered boxes. The air smells of sweat and ionisation. She jams the multiway connector into the open contacts of the master fuse.

The death cry of the phagus is terrible as silver lightning blazes from cabinet to cabinet, through every wire and microprocessor and neon of its silicon nervous system. Glyphs flock and storm like birds. Where they intersect Invaders, both are destroyed in a silent blossom of light. Enye holds the connector to the fuse box until there is silence and darkness absolute in the dead arcade. The dead videos seem like tombstones, the Wheels of Fortune and Penny Falls and pinball machines strange mausoleums. Wincing, she heaves herself onto the old fruit machine and out into the rain and the cold. Only the Lords of the Gateway remain. Most cunning of phaguses, so deeply absorbed into the life of the world she has not yet been able to pluck their signature from the sky signs. But she will. Soon.

According to the instructions, you pass the little plastic wand through your stream, place it in the indicator unit, and wait four minutes.

Four minutes, that's two hundred forty seconds counting at one hippopotamus two hippopotamus that's a long time and an awful lot of hippopotami (a veritable stampede, do hippopotami stampede, are there ever anything like two hundred forty of them in one place at any time?) damn, cloud-gathering again, she's missed the four-minute mark, will that matter, will that make a difference; no, no matter, no difference; it's blue, bright blue. Blue as the most incredibly blue thing you can think of. Bluer.

She slumps onto the toilet seat in her street-riding clothes.

"Goddamn you, Saul Martland. You finally got what you wanted from me."

The woman who calls herself Marie, the one who was once a disaffected housewife for whom the daily barrage of Snap, Crackle, and Pop grew too much, hears her voice and looks into the cubicle. One glimpse is enough.

"Please, don't go telling everyone," Enye says. But they know already. Pheromones, hormones, ketones, esters; chemical semaphore. One by one they come into the women's room, fold themselves as best they can into the cramped space. All of them, even gum-ruminating, ethnic-hatted Omry.

"Jeez, Enye, sorry..."

"Have you told him yet?"

"Are you going to tell him?"

"Are you going to get married?"

"How long you going to keep working?"

"What you going to do with it?"

"Hey, like we're here, don't ever forget that..."

She'd skipped a period, like a faulty typewriter, hah hah, old joke, outmoded and outworn; it's word processors now and they don't miss a thing. And now everything is cast into the air to hang like dust. Her job with the courier company, her ability to maintain her apartment, her relationship with Saul, and Elliot, and, most important, most devastatingly, the hunt for the Lords of the Gateway. All changed, changed utterly. Changed terribly. The biological clocks are running. She has a strictly limited amount of time to find and destroy the Lords. She imagines she can feel the cells of the thing inside her dividing and re-dividing and re-re-dividing.

That last time. It must have been. But she was on progesterone. Unless the progressive doses of Shekinah she had taken to heal the scarred membrane of mythlines between Earth and Mygmus had tampered with her hormone balance. Suppositions, probabilities, improbabilities. The undeniable reality is that she is pregnant.

Out on the bike that day she feels appallingly self-conscious, as if her womb is made of glass.

As she is signing out that evening (how early the dark is drawing, how short the days) there is a polite, solicitous clearing of a throat behind her, of the kind only made by someone who is shy of a task they have been given. Sumpta, the girl who is the resting actress, hands a fat brown envelope to Enye.

"We, all the girls, us all, we talked among ourselves, you know, and we thought, we thought, in case you want to... you know, we thought this might help."

The fat brown envelope contains a fat wad of soiled bank notes.

Until receiving the fat brown envelope from the hand of Sumpta, she had not thought of abortion.

She turns off the tape before it is one-third played through. Haydn's disciplined, measured harmonies are thin and trivial to her tonight, like so much tinsel. They have never sounded like that before. She snatches the cassette from the desk, rips out metre after metre of brown oxide tape; rips and rips in anger and frustration as she tries to break it and the tape just reels out endlessly through her fingers, yielding, infuriatingly.

At school it had always been the fat girls, the ugly girls, the stupid girls who got pregnant, the girls who knew they could not get a man any other way, who knew their only contribution to society was a few squirts of woman-juice in the gene pool, the ones with short short skirts and bare legs in winter, yet, in those few weeks before their mothers took them out of school, went around smirking and self-satisfied as if pregnancy had endowed them with some final and absolute authority over the thin girls, the pretty girls, the smart girls.

Smart girls pretty girls thin girls do not get caught. Smart girls pretty girls thin girls do not have stand-up quickies behind discos, or in the backseats of Fords. Smart girls pretty girls thin girls say no, and when the time does come to say yes, smart girls pretty girls thin girls know all about contraception.

Smart girls pretty girls thin girls have futures.

She had not loved him. She had only wanted his presence to prove how little she needed it.

She imagines what will happen if she calls him. His shock. The stunned stammer that he lapses into when in the past she has surprised him. The shock will turn into guilt, into concern, into responsibility. Now she can hear his voice enfolding her like a winter quilt; it's our responsibility now, let me take care of you, let me look after you, let me be a father to your child, a good father, a caring father, a loving father, let's be a family together, all together, locked away from harm in the protective circle of my arms, from anything and everything that would harm you or the baby.

Lord! No!

She lies on her bed, stares at the ceiling, listening for the perhaps real, perhaps imaginary synchronicity of heartbeats.

If not Saul, then who? She lists the men she cares about most in the world. Jaypee? As strange to her as an amputated limb would be. Elliot? Too unworldly; like seducing an angel. Mr. Antrobus? She would terrify him; a wedge of assertive female sexuality thrusting into his carefully ordered world of Greek temples and Ionian sunsets.

If not these, then who?

The answer surprises her.

She lifts up the bedside telephone, punches digits.

"Hi. It's me. Yes. Listen, can I come and see you?"

Because it was the last summer day anyone expected ever to see (global climatic change due to underarm antiperspirant and soft toilet tissue were going to shift the climate to approximately that of the Mosquito Coast), Mr. Antrobus had dared to bless it with the bare skin of his legs and arms. Enye was already too hot, iced coffee notwithstanding, draped on her sun lounger, at the constantly-pushing-up-the-shades-that-are-sliding -down-my-nose-on-account-of-the-sweat-and-the-oil phase when Mr. Antrobus came wading through the rampant hollyhocks with his deck chair under his arm like a refugee from the Hope and Glory days. Net curtains twitched at neighbouring windows; prurient thoughts about what an old man, Proclivities notwithstanding, was doing with a girl like her in a swimsuit like that. She peered over her shades at the watching windows, slowly ran her tongue with unspeakable lewdness around her lips.

It had been a heady, hallucinatory summer, an illusion of heat haze and dazzle. Enye was no longer certain how much of her life was diurnal and tangible, how much nocturnal and illusory. Advertising copywriter by day; romancer of Saul Martland by the long summer evenings; by the short summer nights, street samurai, Knight of the Chromium Lotus, battling on the edge of reality. Oh come on... The bizarre parameters of her life had crept over her with such stealth that she had not before thought to question them. City Terrorised As Drug-Crazed Swords-woman Stalks Streets By Night. In the heat of the last day anyone expected ever to see of summer, it strained her disbelief further man she was willing to suspend it.

As ever, Mr. Antrobus looked stuck with his crossword. Normally she would have helped him; she had the gift of instantaneously solving anagrams in her head, which Mr. Antrobus did not always appreciate; he enjoyed stuckness as a spiritual grace, in the manner of Buddhist monks. Today she had a question she wanted to ask him that he could not answer, for it was a trick question, meant for herself, a question she could only truly answer herself.

She put down her copy of a magic-realist novel that had earned its author a death sentence for blasphemy.

"Mr. Antrobus. Do you think the world has gone mad?"

He answered immediately, as if it was a question he had been waiting all his life to be asked.

"The world has always seemed mad as people get older. Mad, and getting madder. Whether it actually is or not I don't know. It looks mad, but then it has always looked mad; any sanity it has ever seemed to have it had only because we were at the time equally mad. Why do you ask?"

"It just seems to me that people are acting as if they no longer understand the rules on which their lives, their society, their world is built; as if there are no longer any rules, no longer any foundations. Or, as if the rules have been twisted by an outside agency so that evil is strong and therefore good and good weak, and therefore evil. As if the world has been possessed, lost its soul."

"Now that is a different question altogether. Has the world lost its soul, is that what you are asking me? Has the world been possessed by a dark spirit? Is there a Satan? Is God dead, or merely gone away? My answer would be to say that if it seems that way it is because the world has lost its present. We don't enjoy the present moment anymore-we don't savour the pleasure of being. The present is just a tiresome intervention between where we were and where we want to be, a thing that comes between us and our desirable futures. What impatient creatures we have become, always wanting to be where we are not yet, to become what we are not yet. We are not content to be present where we are. Becoming is everything, being is nothing. We have forgotten the Sacrament of the Present.

"I first learned of the Sacrament of the Present from an old Greek Orthodox monk in the monastery near the town where I was stationed on Kos. I used to go up to the monastery a lot; we had bicycles. The people of the town gave us their bicycles as a token of thanks for their liberation. Such grand and generous people, the Greeks; now they are folk who know what it is to live in the present. They said the olive trees around the monastery were the oldest on the island, older than the monastery itself, they said, older than the coming of Christianity to the island. Certainly, the shade, the peace, was deeper under those olive trees than anywhere else I have ever known. Why did I go up there? I don't know. Perhaps I felt the need to be absolved of something. Perhaps I needed to know from God whether the love from which I suffered was right or wrong. Can you understand that? The monks came to recognise me; they let me walk in the cloisters and spend time in the chapel-the eyes of those Greek icons, like the eyes of God Himself. Beautiful, beautiful eyes. I used to sit for hours in the dark and the cool of the chapel, gazing on the frescoes.

"I think his name was Brother Anastasis, which means 'resurrection' in Greek. He was the only member of the community who spoke more than three words of English. I think he saw my spiritual welfare and guidance as his personal ministry. They had a wonderful spirituality in that place-silence and singing, stillness and dancing. A kind of languid grace that only comes from the deep deep practice of the presence of God.

"Presence, he said, was everything. Even then, in 1944, he said that man had forgotten the Sacrament of the Present. Too much, too high, too far, too loud. Not enough silence and stillness; too busy becoming to truly be. Not enough presence. I asked him what he meant by the Sacrament of the Present. He took me out into the olive groves that were as old as Christianity itself, made me look at those gnarled, ancient trees, and told me his answer. Those words he spoke to me I know I will never forget: A tree, by being a tree, is, and so worships God."

The last sun of the last summer beat down like molten copper into the garden. When it set that night it took part of Mr. Antrobus down with it beyond the edge of the world. For the rest of that summer, endless days of grey overcast and damp drizzle, he became oppressed by premonitions of death and judgment, as if the door to God had stood ajar before him all his life and he had not recognised it. As Enye herself remembers that last bright day, before the darkness and disease of the winter and the war against the Adversary took firm hold of her life.

Mothers know, you know.

It amuses her to see that the process of subdivision goes on. Her mother's home-the long, low bungalow behind its high wall and green wooden gates-had been built in the garden of Enye's maternal grandmother's house. Now her mother has a tiny mock-Georgian house with a French hatchback parked outside it built in her garden. She wonders, can the process go on ad infinitum?

She has read that smell is the most powerful stimulator of memory. She strips scale-leaves from the cypress hedges, rubs them in her palms, inhales. Sea gulls crying. The mournful voice of the ferries down in the harbour, slipping away to sea. Sunsets. Sunrises. Starry, starry nights. Frost on the flagstones. The surprise of waking to find the garden white with snow, the peculiar earth-sweat smell of sunburned ground returning its heat to the sky in the cool cool cool of the summer evenings. Trees. Herbaceous borders. The loom of her maternal grandmother's Victorian pile over her childhood. Cigarette smoke and steaming kitchens, forever associated with the theme tune of "The Magic Roundabout." Smells. Memories. The old house. The windows need repainting; there is a cracked panel in the glass door. The brass letter basket is new, but she knows she will have to press and press and press to get the doorbell to ring.

And the dogs will come leaping and barking and wagging their tails: Shane and Paddy's successors.

She is looking old. Small; desperately small, and vulnerable, pushing away the barking, wagging dogs. Gone the universal competence with which Enye and her brother had endowed her, perhaps it never was, and this old, terrible fallibility has always been her true complexion. She can imagine how Ewan would have thought it a sickness.

"Come in, oh come in, come in."

The house smells different, like an old woman's house. The smell puzzles Enye until she recognises that her own personal perfume, the smell of her life and presence, has leached out of the walls and the rooms and furnishings and dissolved away. There is no part of her here now, not even her smell. Tea is prepared, homemade cakes and biscuits set on polite plates while Enye pats the dogs' heads and asks them their names and if they have been good boys, as people will ask dogs, and shakes their proffered paws and tells them what good boys they are, as people will tell dogs.

"So, tell me, how is advertising, then?"

"It isn't."

"What happened?"

"I quit. Personality clash with my Creative Director. Constructive dismissal. It would have happened sooner or later. Just happened to be sooner."

"And so, what are you doing with yourself now?"

"Would you believe, I'm working for a bicycle courier company? I've got one of their cards here. Here you are, see? Keeps body and soul together, and me pretty fit."

"You thought yet about what you want to go on to do?"

"No. I don't know. Hell, Mum... dammit... no, I said I wouldn't do this, sorry... I'll be all right in a minute."

The dogs lie on their sides in front of the fire and thump their tails against the carpet.

"When's it due?"

Mothers know, you know.

"Goddamn. July. Thereabouts. I haven't been to see the doctor yet. I don't know for sure..."