LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  It was a raw Monday afternoon. Rain had emptied the streets east of Tottenham Court Road.

  The research suite-an annexe of Imperial College orphaned recently into the care of free market economics-was entered through a bleak, clean basement area with a satin-finish nameplate and newly blacked iron railings. A few streets further east it would have housed a literary agency. The ventilators were open and noisy, and through the frosted glass windows Kearney could see someone moving about. The faint sound of a radio filtered out. Kearney went down the steps and punched his access code into the keypad by the door. When it didn't work, he pressed the intercom button and waited for Tate to buzz him in. The intercom crackled, but no one spoke at the other end, and no one buzzed.

  After a moment he called, 'Brian?'

  He pressed the buzzer again, then held it down with his thumb. No answer. He went back to street level and peered through the railings. This time he couldn't see anyone moving, and all he could hear was the sound of the ventilators.

  'Brian?'

  After a moment, he assumed he had been mistaken. The lab was empty. Kearney turned up the collar of his leather jacket and walked off in the direction of Centre Point. He hadn't got to the end of the street when he thought of phoning Tate at home. Tate's wife picked up. 'Absolutely not here,' she said. 'I'm glad to say. He was out before we woke up.' She thought for a moment, then added dryly: 'If he came home at all last night. When you see him tell him I'm taking the kids back to Baltimore. I mean that.' Kearney stared at the phone, trying to remember what she was called or what she looked like. 'Well,' she said, 'in fact I don't mean it. But I will soon.' When he didn't answer she said sharply, 'Michael?'

  Kearney thought her name was Elizabeth, but people called her Beth. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Beth.'

  'You see?' said Tate's wife. 'You're all the same. Why don't you just bang on the fucking door until he wakes up?' Then she said: 'Do you think he's got a woman in there? I'd be relieved. It would be such human behaviour.'

  Kearney said, 'Look, hang on, I-'

  He had turned round just in time to see Tate come up the steps from the suite, pause for a moment to look both ways, then cross the street and walk off at a rapid pace towards Gower Street. 'Brian!' called Kearney. The phone picked up the tone of his voice and began squawking urgently at him. He broke the connection and ran after Tate, shouting, 'Brian! It's me!' and, 'Brian, what the fuck's going on?'

  Tate showed no sign of hearing. He stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. By now it was raining heavily. 'Tate!' shouted Kearney. Tate looked over his shoulder, startled, then began to run. By the time they reached Bloomsbury Square, which was where Kearney caught up with him, they were both breathing heavily. Kearney grasped Tate by the shoulders of his grey snowboarder jacket and swung him round. Tate made a kind of sobbing gasp.

  'Leave me alone,' he said, and stood there suddenly defeated with water pouring down his face.

  Kearney let him go.

  'I don't understand,' he said. 'What's the matter?'

  Tate panted for a bit, then managed to say: 'I'm sick of you.'

  'What?'

  'I'm sick of you. We were supposed to be in this together. But you're never here, you never answer your phone, and now bloody Gordon wants to sell forty-nine per cent of us to a merchant bank. I can't deal with the financial side. I'm not supposed to have to. Where have you been for the last two weeks?'

  Kearney gripped him by the forearms.

  'Look at me,' he said. 'It's all right.'He made himself laugh. 'Jesus, Brian,' he said. 'You can be hard work.' Tate watched him angrily for a moment, then he laughed too.

  'Look,' said Kearney, 'let's go to the Lymph Club and have a drink.'

  But Tate wouldn't let himself be won over that easily. He hated the Lymph Club, he said. Anyway he had work to do. 'I suppose you could come back with me,' he suggested.

  Kearney, permitting himself a smile, agreed that this would be the best thing.

  The suite smelled of cats, stale food, Giraffe beer. 'Most nights I'm sleeping on the floor,' Tate apologised. 'I don't get time to go home.' The cats were burrowing about in a litter of burger cartons at the base of his desk. Their heads went up when Kearney walked in. The male hurried up to him and fawned about at his feet, but the female only sat where she was, the light making a transparent corona out of her white fur, and waited for him to come to her. Kearney passed his hand over her sharp little head arid laughed.

  'What a house of prima donnas,' he told her.

  Tate looked puzzled. 'They've missed you,' he said. 'But look here.'

  He had prolonged the typical useful life of a q-bit by factors of eight and ten. They cleared the rubbish from around the credenza at the back of the room and sat down in front of one of the big flatscreen displays. The female cat prowled about with her tail in the air, or sat on Kearney's shoulder purring into his ear. Test results evolved one after the other like puffs of synaptic activity in decoherence-free space. 'It's not a quantum computer,' Tate said, after Kearney had congratulated him, 'but I think we're ahead of Kielpinski's team, as of now. Do you see why I need you here? I don't want Gordon selling us down the river just when we can ask anybody for anything.' He reached out to tap the keyboard. Kearney stopped him.

  'What about the other thing?'

  'What other thing?'

  'The glitch in the model, whatever it was.'

  'Ah,' said Tate, 'that. Well, I did what I could with it.' He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney's shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney's shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.

  'What do you make of it?' said Tate. 'Kearney?'

  Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:

  'It's probably an artefact, then.'

  'That's what I thought,' said Tate. 'There's no point going any further with it.' He laughed. 'Except maybe to amuse the cat.' When Kearney didn't rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:

  'Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.'

  'Sprake,' said Kearney.

  'That's what I said.'

  Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.

  'Did he take anything?' He indicated the monitor. 'He didn't see this?'

  Tate laughed.

  'You're joking. I wouldn't let him in. He walked up and down in the area, swinging his arms and haranguing me in a language I didn't recognise.'

  'His bark's worse than his bite,' Kearney said.

  'After the second time, I changed the door code.'

  'So I noticed.'

  'It was just in case,' said Tate defensively.

  Kearney had met Sprake perhaps five years after he stole the dice. The meeting occurred on a crowded commuter train passing through Kilburn on its way to Huston. The walls of the Kilburn cutting were covered with graffiti, explosions of red and purple and green done with deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes bulging like damp tropical fruit, effec
ts of glistening surfaces. Eddie, Daggo, Mince-less names than pictures of names. After you had seen them everything else became oppressive and dull.

  The platform at Kilburn was empty but the train stopped there for a long time, as if it was waiting for someone, and eventually a man pushed his way on. He had red hair, pale hard eyes, and an old yellow bruise across the whole of his left cheek. He wore a belted military surplus coat with no jacket or shirt underneath it. Though the doors closed, the train remained still. As soon as he got in, he rolled a cigarette and began smoking it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other passengers. The men stared at their polished shoes. The women studied the mass of sandy hairs between his pectoral muscles; they exchanged angry glances. Though the doors had closed, the train remained where it was. After a minute or two, he pulled back his cuff to consult his watch, a gesture which revealed the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. He grinned, and indicated the graffiti outside.

  'They call it "bombing",' he said to one of the women. 'We ought to live our lives like that.' Instantly she became involved with her Daily Telegraph.

  Sprake nodded, as if she had said something. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and examined the flattened, porous, spittle-stained end of it. 'You lot, now,' he said. 'Well, you look like a lot of self-satisfied bullies.' They were corporate IT workers and estate agents in their mid twenties, passing themselves off with a designer tie or a padded shoulder as dangerous accountants from the City. 'Is that what you want?' He laughed. 'We should bomb our names on to the prison walls,' he shouted. They edged away from him, until only Kearney was left.

  'As for you,' he said, staring interestedly up at Kearney with his head at an odd, bird-like angle on his neck, and dropping his voice to a barely audible murmur:

  'You just have to keep killing, don't you? Because that's the way to keep it at arm's length. Am I right?'

  The encounter already had the same edge of unease-the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding-many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. But at the time Kearney still considered himself as a kind of apprentice or seeker. He still hoped to gain something positive. He was still trying to see his retreat from the Shrander as accompanied by a counter-trajectory-a movement towards it -from which something like a transformational encounter might yet proceed. But the truth was that, by the time he met Sprake, he had been throwing the dice, and making random journeys, and getting nowhere, for what seemed like a lifetime. He felt a flicker of vertigo (or perhaps it was only the train starting up again, to drift, slowly at first then faster and faster, towards Hampstead South) and, thinking he was going to fall, reached a hand out to Sprake's shoulder to steady himself.

  'How do you know?' he said. His own voice sounded hoarse and threatening to him. It sounded disused.

  Sprake eyed him for a second, then chuckled round at the occupants of the carriage.

  'A nudge,' he said, 'is as good as a wink. To a blind horse.'

  He had slyly removed himself as Kearney reached for him. Kearney half fell into the woman hiding behind the Daily Telegraph, righted himself with an apology, and in that instant saw how good the body is at making metaphors. Vertigo. He was in flight. Nothing good would ever come of this now. He had been falling from the moment the dice came into his hands. He got off the train with Sprake, and they walked off across the noisy, polished concourse and out into Euston Road together.

  In the years that followed they developed their theory of the Shrander, though it contained no elements of explanation, and was rarely articulated except by their actions. One Saturday afternoon on a train to Leeds, they murdered an old woman in the draughty space between the carriages, and, before stuffing her into the toilet cubicle, wrote in her armpit with a red gel pen the lines, 'Send me an eon heart/Seek it inside.' It was their first joint effort. Later, in an ironic reversal of the usual trajectory, they flirted with arson and the killing of animals. At first Kearney gained some relief, if only through the comradeship-the complicity-of this. His face, which had taken on a look so hollow he might have been dead, relaxed. He gave more time to his work.

  But in the end, complicity was all it turned out to be. Despite these acts of propitiation, his circumstances remained unchanged, and the Shrander pursued him everywhere he went. Meanwhile, Sprake took up more and more of his time. His career languished. His marriage to Anna ended. By the time he was thirty, he was sclerotic with anxiety.

  If he relaxed, Sprake kept him up to the mark.

  'You still don't think it's real,' he would say suddenly, in his soft, insinuating way: 'Do you?'

  Then: 'Go on, Mick. Mickey. Michael. You can admit it to me.'

  Valentine Sprake was already in his forties and still lived at home. His family ran a second-hand clothes shop in North London. There was an old woman with a vaguely middle-European accent, who spent her time staring up in a kind of exhausted trance at the curiously wrenched space of the religious art on the walls. Sprake's brother, a boy of about fourteen, sat day in and day out behind the counter of the shop, chewing something which smelted of aniseed. Alice Sprake, the sister, with her heavy limbs, vacant heavy smile, her olive skin and faint moustache, regarded Kearney speculatively from large brown eyes. If they were ever left alone together, she sat next to him and put her damp hand softly on his cock. He became erect immediately, and she smiled at him in a possessive way, revealing that her teeth weren't good. No one ever saw this, but whatever their other limitations that whole family had a withering emotional intelligence.

  'You'd like to give her one, wouldn't you?' said Sprake. 'Give her a bit of a slippery hot one, Mikey old chap. Well I don't care, mind-' here he gave a shout of laughter '-but the other two wouldn't let you.'

  It was Sprake who took them into Europe.

  They killed Turkish prostitutes in Frankfurt, a Milanese dress-designer in Antwerp. Towards the end of what became a six-month spree, they found themselves in The Hague one evening, eating at a good-quality Italian restaurant opposite the Kurrhaus Hotel. The evening wind came up off the sea, blew sand into the square outside before it died away. The lamp swung above the table and the shadows of the wineglasses shifted uncomfortably on the tablecloth, like the complex umbrae and penumbrae of planets. Sprake's hand moved between them, then lay flat as if exhausted.

  'We're like bears in a pit here,' he said.

  'Do you wish we hadn't come?'

  '"Crespelle and ricotta",' said Sprake. He threw the menu on to the table. 'What the fuck's that about?'

  After an hour or two, a boy sauntered past outside in the twilight. He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall and twenty-six years old. His hair had been dragged back and plaited tightly, and he was wearing yellow high-waisted shorts with their own yellow crossover braces. He carried a matching yellow soft toy. Though he was slightly built, his shoulders, hips and thighs had a rounded, fleshy look, and on his face was the self-satisfied and yet somehow wincing expression of someone acting out a fantasy in public.

  Sprake grinned at Kearney.

  'Look at that,' he whispered. 'He wants you to put him in a death camp for his sexuality. You want to choke him because he's a prat.' He wiped his mouth and stood up. 'Maybe the two of you can get together.' Later, in their hotel room, they looked down at what they had done to the boy. 'See that?' Sprake said. 'If that doesn't tell you something, nothing will.' When Kearney only stared at him, he quoted with the intense disgust of the master to the apprentice:

  '"It was a mystery to them that they were in the Father all along without knowing it."'

  'Excuse me?' the boy said. 'Please?'

  In the end these promises of understanding amounted to little. While their association never quite came to seem like anything as positive as a mistake, Sprake revealed himself over the years to be an undependable accomplice, his motives as hidden-even from himself -as the metaphysics by which he claimed to understand what was happening. That afternoon o
n the Huston train he had been looking for a cause to attach himself to, the folie а deux which would advance his own emotional ambitions. For all his talk, he knew nothing.

  It was late. Candlelight flickered on the walls of Anna Kearney's apartment, where she turned in her sleep, throwing out her arms and murmuring to herself. Sparse traffic came out of Hammersmith on the A316, crossed the bridge and hummed away west and south. Kearney threw the dice. They rattled and scattered. For twenty years they had been his secret conundrum, part of the centralising puzzle of his life. He picked them up, weighed them for a moment in the palm of his hand, threw them again, just to watch them tumble and bounce across the carpet like insects in a heatwave.

  This is how they looked:

  Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor bone. But each face had an even craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think they might be made of porcelain. They might have been porcelain. They might have been ancient. In the end they seemed neither. Their weight, their solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong. Each face featured a deeply incised symbol. These symbols were coloured. (Some of the colours, particularly the blues and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination. Others seemed too dim.) They were unreadable. He thought they came from a pictographic alphabet. He thought they were the symbols of a numerical system. He thought that from time to time they had changed between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system itself. In the end, he did not know what to think. Instead he had given them names: the Voortman Move; the High Dragon; the Stag's Great Horns. What part of his unconscious these names emerged from, he had no clue. All of them made him feel uneasy, but the words 'the Stag's Great Horns' made his skin crawl. There was a thing that looked like a food processor. There was another thing that looked like a ship, an old ship. You looked at it one way and it was an old ship. You looked at it another way and it was nothing at all. Looking was no solution: how could you know which way was up? Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the symbols. He had seen Planck's constants. He had seen a model of the Fibonacci sequence. He had seen what he thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive protein molecules of the autocatalytic set.