LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'There's a mist coming up over the river.'

  After that there was quite a long pause. Kearney heard two or three small movements, as of someone removing a book from a shelf; then an intake of breath. 'Listen to this-' Sprake began, but fell silent immediately. When Kearney came out of the kitchen, the street door was open and the apartment was empty. Two or three books lay on the floor, surrounded by torn-out pages which looked like wings. On to the empty white wall above the sofa, in a bright parallelogram of sodium light, something outside was projecting the shadow of an enormous beaked head. It looked nothing like the head of a bird. 'Christ,' said Kearney, his heart beating so hard he could feel it rocking his upper body. 'Christ!' The shadow began to turn, as if its owner, hanging in the air two storeys above a street in Chiswick, two in the morning, was turning to look at him. Orworse, as if it wasn't a shadow at all.

  'Jesus Christ, Sprake, it's here!' Kearney shouted, and ran out of the apartment. He could hear Sprake's footsteps thudding on the pavement somewhere ahead of him; but he never caught him up.

  Central London, 3 a.m.

  Fractals spilled across icy blue displays, developing into something that resembled the jerky frame-by-frame slow motion of a much earlier medium. Brian Tate rubbed his eyes and stared. Behind him, the suite was dark. It smelled of junk food, cold coffee. The male cat was sniffing about in a litter of discarded polystyrene cups and burger cartons around Tate's feet. The female sat quietly on his shoulder, watching with a kind of companionable complicity the mathematical monster unspooling across the screens in front of them. Every so often she dabbed out a paw, mewing impatiently, as if to draw Tate's attention to something he had missed. She knew where the action was. Tate took off his glasses and put them on the desk in front of him. Even at these speeds there was nothing to see.

  Or almost nothing. At Los Alamos, bored-though he would never have admitted it to anyone-by the constant talk about physics and money, he had spent most of his free time in his room, switching restlessly from TV channel to TV channel with the sound turned down. This led him to think about choice. The moment of choice, he thought, could be located very exactly as one image flickered, broke and was replaced by the next. If you levered things apart, if you could get into the exact moment of transition, what would you find? Entertaining himself with the fantasy of an unknown station- something more watchable than reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer-transmitting into the gap, into the moment of choice, he had tried to record a series of channel changes on the VCR and play them back in stop-frame. This had proved to be impossible.

  He reached back to stroke the cat's ears. She evaded him, jumped down on to the floor, where she hissed at the male until he retreated under Tate's chair.

  Tate, meanwhile, picked up the telephone and tried Kearney's home number. There was no answer.

  He left another message.

  EIGHT

  The Tailor's Cut

  When Uncle Zip heard Seria Mau say the words 'Dr Haends', he sat perfectly still for a fraction of a second. Then he shrugged. 'You should bring it back,' he repeated. This was his idea of an apology. 'I'll be generous to you.'

  'Uncle Zip? Do you know a Dr Haends?'

  'I never heard of him,' said Uncle Zip quickly, 'and I know every tailor from here to the Core.'

  'Do you think it's military?'

  'No.'

  'Do you think it's modern?'

  'No.'

  'So what can I do?'

  Uncle Zip sighed. 'I already told you: bring it back to me.'

  Seria Mau felt reluctant. She felt as if some other avenue should open up for her at this point. She said:

  'You've lost your credibility here-'

  Uncle Zip threw up his hands and laughed.

  '-and I want to meet this guy, this Billy Anker.'

  'I should know better than to argue with a fetch!' He stared at her, still amused but suddenly alert. 'First off, Billy Anker is not known to be a guy with a refund policy,' he said quietly. 'In addition, he is my guy, not yours. Thirdly, he is not a cutter. You understand? What do you think you'd get from him, young woman, that you won't get from me?'

  'I don't know, Uncle. Something. I don't know what. But you aren't telling me what you know. And I have to start somewhere.'

  He stared at her a moment longer, and she could see him think.

  Then he said, in a throwaway voice: 'OK.'

  'I've got money.'

  'I don't want money for this,' said Uncle Zip. 'When I think about it this could work out for all of us. Even Billy.' He smiled to himself. 'I'll give you Billy as a favour. Maybe you'll do me a favour sometime down the line.' He waved one hand dismissively. 'It won't be much, no problem.'

  'I'd rather pay.'

  Uncle Zip got gracefully to his feet.

  'Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth,' he advised her flatly. 'Take my deal, I'll let you in on Billy's whereabouts. Maybe also his present ambitions.'

  'I'll think about it.'

  'Hey, don't think too long.'

  While he sat, he had balanced his accordion on his powerful thighs. Now he took it up, and got the straps back over his shoulders, and squeezed out a long introductory chord. 'What's money anyway?' he said. 'Money isn't everything. I go down to the Core, it's five hundred light years of money. Money all the way. They got entire planetary systems designated FTZs. They got women with two days' training, sweating out lousy little do-it-yourself splicing kits, what for? So their kids can eat. Oh, and so Earth kids can get a legal patch at a factor five mark-up. Break the seal on the code and give themselves metabolic collapse on a Saturday night. You know what those corporates say?'

  'What do they say, Uncle Zip?'

  'They say, "Money has no morality," in these voices make you want to puke. They're proud of it.'

  It was 2 a.m. in Carmody, and the Kefahuchi Tract glittered across the sky as bright as Uncle Zip's accordion. He played another chord, and then a series of brash arpeggios that rippled one into the next. He puffed up his cheeks and began to stamp his feet. One by one, his audience slipped back into the parlour, giving weak apologetic grins to Seria Mau's fetch. It was as if they had been waiting somewhere down Henry Street, some bar not far down, for the music to start up again. They brought bottles in brown bags, and this time one or two shy women were with them, casting glances out of the side of their eyes at Uncle Zip then looking quickly away again. Seria Mau listened to another song, then let herself fade into brown smoke.

  On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade: cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis. Every afternoon his shop was full of nervous mothers-to-be, designing their baby to have genius. 'Everybody wants to be rich,' he would complain. 'I made a million geniuses. Also, everybody wants to be Buddy Holly, Barbra Streisaid, Shakespeare. Let me tell you: no one knows what those men looked like.' It was barely illegal. It was all, as he said, a bit of fun. There was only so far he could go. It was the modern equivalent, he said, of a kiss-me-quick hat you bought on Labour Day. Or maybe that old kind of tattoo they had back then. In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He cut alien DNA. He didn't care what he cut, or who he cut for as long as they could pay.

  As for his audience, they were cultivars: every one cloned-even the shy young women in the black tube skirts-from his own stemcells, deep-frozen insurance he took out the day he went to Radio Bay. They were his younger self, before he found his Dig secret, come to worship twice-nightly at the shrine he had made of his success.

  Motel Splendido turned, nightside up, beneath the White Cat. From the parking lot, Seria Mau stared down. Carmody appeared like a sticky, abbreviated smear of light the colour or extent of which you couldn't be sure, on its island in the curve of the southern ocean. She dawdled her fetch along its mag
ically lighted streets. Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matt plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and oyster satin. Down by the ocean, transformation dub, saltwater dub, pulsed from the bars, the soundtrack of a human life, with songs like 'Dark Night, Bright Light" and others. Human beings! She could almost smell their excitement at being alive there in the warm black heart of things among the sights. She could almost smell their guilt. What was she looking for? She couldn't say. All she could be sure of was that Uncle Zip's hypocrisy had made her restless.

  Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars-the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner-they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice they pawed and fought pantomimically and tossed folding money at one another, laughing and snuffling.

  'Hey,' they said when Seria Mau fetched up. 'Here, kitty kitty!' There was nothing they could do to her. She was safe with them.

  It was like having grown-up brothers. For a moment or two they threw the dice at blinding speed. Then one of them said, without looking up: 'You don't get bored, being not real that way?'

  They couldn't play for laughing at that.

  Seria Mau watched the game until a bell rang softly on the White Cat and drew her away.

  As soon as she was gone, two of the shadow boys turned on the third and cut his throat for cheating, then, overcome by the pure existential moment, cradled his head in the warm golden light as he smiled softly up at nothing, bubbling his life out all over them like a benediction. 'Hey you,' they comforted him, 'you can do it all again. Tonight you'll do it all again.'

  Up in the parking lot, Seria Mau sighed and turned away.

  'You see?' she told her empty ship. 'It always comes to this. All the fucking and the fighting, it all comes to nothing. All the pushing and the shoving. All the things they give each other. If for a moment I thought-' Could she still cry? She said, apropos of nothing: 'Those beautiful boys in the sunlight.' This made her remember what she had said to the Nastic commander, out there in the shadow of his stupidly big ship. It made her remember the package she had bought from Uncle Zip, and what she intended to do with it. It made her recall Uncle Zip's offer. She opened a line to him and said:

  'OK, tell me where this Billy Anker guy is.' She laughed, and, mimicking the tailor's manner, added, 'Also his present ambitions.'

  Uncle Zip laughed too. Then he let his face go expressionless.

  'You waited too long for that free offer,' he informed her. 'I changed my mind about that.'

  He was sitting on a stool in his front room above the shop. He had on a short-sleeve sailor suit and hat. White canvas trousers clung tight to bursting over his spread thighs. On each thigh he had a daughter sitting, plump red-faced little girls with blue eyes, shiny cheeks and blonde ringlets, caught as if in a still picture, laughing and reaching for his hat. All the flesh in this picture was lively and varnished. All the colours were pushed and rich. Uncle Zip's fat arms curved around his daughters, his hands placed in the small of each back as if they were the bellows-ends of his accordion. Behind him, the room was lacquered red and green, and there were shelves on which he had arranged his collections of polished motorcycle parts and other kitschy things from the history of Earth. Whatever you saw in Uncle Zip's house, he never let you see his wife, or gave you one thin glimpse of the tools of his trade. 'As to where the guy is,' he said, 'this is where you go… '

  He gave her the name of a system, and a planet.

  'It surveys as 3-alpha-Ferris VII. The locals-which there aren't many of them-call it Redline.'

  'But that's in-'

  '-Radio Bay.' He shrugged. 'Nothing comes easy in this world, kid. You got to decide how much you want what you want.'

  Seria Mau cut him off.

  'Goodbye, Uncle Zip,' she said, and left him there with his expensive family and his cheap rhetoric.

  Two or three days later, the K-ship White Cat, registered as a freebooter out of Venusport, New Sol, quit the Motel Splendido parking orbit and slipped away into the long night of ths halo. She had loaded fuel and ordnance. After port authority inspection she had accepted minor hull maintenance, and paid the scandalous tax upon it. She had paid her dues. At the last moment, for reasons her captain barely understood, she had taken on payload too: a team of corporate exogeologists and their equipment, headed towards Suntory IV. For the first time in a year, the lights were on in the human quarters of the ship. The shadow operators mapped and mowed. They hung in corners, whispering and clasping their hands in a kind of bony delight.

  What were they? They were algorithms with a life of their own. You found them in vacuum ships like the White Cat, in cities, wherever people were. They did the work. Had they always been there in the galaxy, waiting for human beings to take residence? Aliens who had uploaded themselves into empty space? Ancient computer programmes dispossessed by their own hardware, to roam about, half lost, half useful, hoping for someone to look after? In just a few a hundred years they had got inside the machinery of things. Nothing worked without them. They could even run on biological tissue, as shadow boys full of crime and beauty and inexplicable motives. They could, if they wanted, they sometimes whispered to Seria Mau, run on values.

  NINE

  This Is Your Wake-up Call

  Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm, but he didn't do that stuff himself, anymore than he would have filled his arm with AbH. How he looked at it was this: his life was crap, but it was a life. So the kind of porn he liked to watch was ordinary, cheap, unimmersive, holographic stuff. It was often advertised as intrusion-porn. The fantasy of it was: some woman's room would get fitted with microcameras without her knowledge. You could watch her do anything, though things would usually end with some cultivar-all tusks, prick the size of a horse-finding her in the shower. Vesicle often turned that part off. The show he watched most was syndicated from out in the halo and featured a girl called Moaner, who was supposed to live in a corporate enclave somewhere on Motel Splendido. The story was, her husband was always away (though in fact he often arrived back unexpectedly with five of his business associates, who included another woman). Moaner wore short pink latex skirts with tube tops and little white socks. She had a little clean mat of pubic hair. She was bored, the narrative went; she was agile and spoilt. Vesicle preferred her to do ordinary things, like painting her toenails naked, or trying to look over her shoulder at herself in a mirror. One thing with Moaner was this: even though she was a clone, her body looked real. She wasn't any kind of rebuild. They advertised her as 'never been to the tailor' and he could believe that.

  The other thing about her was that she was aware of you, even though she didn't know you were there.

  Could you get behind that paradox? Vesicle believed you could. If he once understood it, it would tell him something about the universe or, equally important, about human beings. He felt as if she knew he was there. She isn't a porn star! he would tell himself.

  He was dreaming this cheap, doomed, New Man dream-while Moaner herself yawned and tried on a pair of brand new yellow Mickey Mouse shorts with big buttons and matching suspenders-when the door of the tank farm banged open, letting in a gust of cold grey wind from the street, along with six or seven tiny kids. They had short black hair and tight, furious Asian faces. Snow was melting on the shoulders of their black rainslickers. The oldest was maybe eight, with lightning flashes etched into the short hai
r above her ears and a Nagasaki Hi-Lite Autoloader clutched in both hands. They spread out and began going through the tank cubicles as if they were looking for something, shouting and gabbling in gluey voices and pulling out the power cables so the tanks went on to emergency wake-up call.

  'Hey!' said Tig Vesicle.

  They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them. They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles-where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height. Cafй йlectrique had already rotted her little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then said something like:

  'Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?'

  She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.

  'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm not sure what you're saying.'

  This seemed to anger her unreasonably. 'Fortie!' she shrieked.

  Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:

  'I'm so scared I don't know whether to laugh or shit.'

  Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the street door. The girl's eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.