LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  He watched Seria Mau's fetch sniffing around in the rubbish at his feet and said:

  'In its day this shit took me some weird places.'

  'I can imagine that,' said Seria Mau.

  'Hey, if it's good enough it's good enough.'

  'Billy Anker, I'm here to tell you the Dr Haends package doesn't work.'

  Billy looked surprised; then unsurprised.

  A sly expression came to his face. 'You want your money back,' he guessed. 'Well, I'm not known-'

  '-as a refund guy. I know. But look, that's not-'

  'It's policy, babe,' said Billy Anker. He shrugged sadly, but his look above that was comfortable. 'What can I say?'

  'You can say nothing and listen for once. Is that why you're alone here with all this historical stuff, because you never listen to anyone? I didn't come here for a refund. If I wanted that I could have it from Uncle Zip. Only I don't trust him.'

  'Fair point,' admitted Billy Anker. 'So what do you want?'

  'I want you to tell me where you got it from. The package.'

  Billy Anker pondered this.

  'That isn't usual,' was his reply.

  'All the same it's what I want.'

  They regarded one another evenly. Billy Anker tapped the fingers of his good hand on the arm of his acceleration chair. In response the screens in front of him cleared, then began showing planets. They were big. They came in fast towards the viewer, swelling and blooming like something live then diving left and right in the moment they disappeared. They were layered with swirling bands of cloud, magenta, green, dirty brown and yellow.

  'This is footage I took,' said Billy Anker, 'on a sweep through here just after they discovered it. See how complex this shit is? And the people who built it didn't even have a sun to work with. They towed a brown dwarf into place and torched it up. They knew how to do that so it became a kind of star doesn't fit on any sequence we're aware of. Then they brought in these eight gas giants, along with sixty smaller planetary objects, and injected Redline into the most complex artificial gravitation alley anyone ever saw. Some kind of resonance libration did the rest.' He considered this. 'These guys weren't hobbyists. That operation alone must have taken them a million years. Why do you start a project like that, never finish it?'

  'Billy Anker, I don't care.'

  'Maybe you just get bored and drift away. There's another thing, though, and it's this: if you can do all that, if you can muster the psychic energy to do all that just to build some kind of scientific instrument, how fucking serious is what you're looking for? You ever think of that? Why these people bothered to spend their time like this?'

  'Billy -'

  'Anyway: as a result of that and other important aspects of its history, this system is a particle-jockey's nightmare. Interference, as the fakebooks say, is common. So that's probably why our previous connection broke down. Do you think? Which I regretted because I was enjoying it so much.'

  He killed the screens and looked down at Seria Mau's fetch.

  'Tell me how you stole the White Cat,'he invited her.

  The control room of the Karaoke Sword smelled of hot dust. The monitors ticked and cooled, or switched themselves on suddenly in random patterns. (They showed the Redline surface, an eroded mesa here, a ruined structure there, nothing much to tell between the two; they always came back to the South Polar Artefact, dimly observable in its wastes of radio-snow.) A flickering light went across the control room walls, which had original hieroglyphs on them similar to ancient Earth civilisations. Billy Anker absently rubbed his right hand as if to alleviate the pain of his missing fingers. Seria Mau knew that she had to give something to get something, so she let the silence draw out, then said:

  'I didn't. The mathematics stole it.'

  Billy Anker laughed in disbelief.

  'The mathematics stole it? How does that come about?'

  'I don't know,' she said. 'How do I know? It put me to sleep. It can do that. When I woke up we were a thousand lights from anywhere, looking down at the halo.' She had woken from the usual disturbing dreams- though in those days they did not yet feature the man in the top hat and tails-to find herself nowhere. In her tank, she shivered at the recollection. 'It was empty space,' she said. 'I had never been in empty space before. You have no idea. You just have no idea.' She remembered only dislocation, feelings of panic that really had nothing to do with her situation. 'You know,' she said, 'I think it was trying to show me something.'

  Billy Anker smiled.

  'So the ship stole you,' he said, more to himself than her.

  'I suppose it did,' she admitted.

  'Oh,' she said, 'I was happy enough to be stolen. I was sick of EMC anyway. All those "police" actions in the Free Trade Zones! I was sick of Earth politics. Mostly I was sick of myself… ' This made him look interestedly at her, so she stopped. 'I was sick of a lot of things which aren't your business.' She struggled to formulate something. 'And yet if the ship stole me, you know, it had no agenda. It hung there. It just hung there in empty space for hours. After I had calmed down, I took it back into the halo. We were running flat out for months. That was when I really deserted. That was when I made my own plans.'

  'You went rogue,' said Billy Anker.

  'Is that what they say?'

  'You play for anyone who pays.'

  'Oh, and that makes me so different from all of you people! Everyone has to earn a living, Billy Anker.'

  'EMC want you back. You're just an asset to them.'

  It was Seria Mau Genlicher's turn to laugh.

  'They'll have to catch me first.'

  'How close are they to that?' Billy Anker asked her. He waggled the fingers of his good hand. 'This close. When you came in here, my systems had a look at your hull. You were in an exchange of top-end ordnance not long ago. You have particle scouring from some kind of high volume X-ray device.'

  'It was no "exchange",' said Seria Mau. 'I was the only one who fired.' She laughed grimly. 'They were gas in eighty nanoseconds,' she claimed, hoping it was true.

  He shrugged to show that though he was impressed he would not be deflected from the issue.

  'But who were they? They're on to you, kid.'

  'What do you know?'

  'It's not what I know. It's what you know, which you're trying to deny. It's all over you. It's in the way you speak.'

  'What do you know, Billy Anker?'

  He shrugged.

  'No one can catch the White Cat!'she screamed at him.

  At that moment Mona the clone walked out from among the hieroglyphs on the wall of Billy Anker's control room. Her fetch, a smaller and cheaper version of herself, flickered like bad neon. It was wearing red fuck-me pumps with five-inch heels, a calf-length latex tube- lime green-and a bolero top in pink angora wool. Its hair was done up in bunches with matching ribbon.

  'Oh, hi, sorry,' she said. 'I must have pressed the wrong thing.'

  Billy Anker looked irritated.

  'You want to be more careful, kid,' he advised her. She gave him a casual up-and-down, then ignored him.

  'I was trying to find some music,' she said to Seria Mau.

  'Get out of here,' said Seria Mau.

  'I just can't work this stuff,' the clone complained.

  'If you don't remember what happened to your friends,' Seria Mau reminded her, 'I can show you the footage.'

  The clone stood biting her lips for a moment, outrage struggling in her expression with despair, then tears ran down her face and she shrugged and faded slowly away into brown smoke. Though he must have wondered what was behind it all, Billy Anker watched this performance with a studied lack of interest. After a minute he said to Seria Mau:

  'You changed the name of the ship. I'm interested why.'

  She laughed. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Why do you do anything like that? We hung there in the dark, the ship, the mathematics and me. There was nothing to orient ourselves by except the Tract-faint, distant, winking like a bad eye. Suddenly I remembered
the legend the original space-captains had, when they first used the Tate-Kearney transformations all those hundreds of years ago to find their way from star to star. How in the long watches of the night they would sometimes see, inside their navigational holograms, a ghostly vision of Brian Tate himself, toppling through the vacuum with his white cat on his shoulder. That's when I chose the name.'

  Billy Anker stared at her.

  'Jesus,' he said.

  Seria Mau fetched up on the arm of his chair.

  'Are you going to tell me where you got the Dr Haends package?' she said, staring into his eyes.

  Before he could answer, she was pulled away from the Karaoke Sword and back to the White Cat. Soft, persistent alarms filled the ship. Up in the corners, the shadow operators were wringing their hands.

  'Something is happening here,' the mathematics said.

  Seria Mau turned restively in the narrow volumes of her tank. What limbs she had left made vague, nervous motions.

  'Why tell me?' she said.

  The mathematics brought up the signature diagram of an event five or six hundred nanoseconds old. It presented as faint grey fingers knotting and unknotting against spectral light: 'Why does this always look like sex?'complained Seria Mau. The mathematics, unsure how to answer, remained silent. 'Choose a new regime,' she ordered irritably. The mathematics chose a new regime. Then another. Then a third. It was like trying on coloured spectacles until you saw what you wanted. The image flickered and changed like ancient holiday snaps in a slide projector. Eventually it began to toggle regularly between two states. If you knew exactly how to look into the gap between them you could detect, like weakly reacting matter, the ghost of an event. Two AUs distant, deep in a band of hot gas and asteroidal rubbish, something had moved and then become still again. The nanoseconds spooled away, and nothing further happened.

  'You see?' said the mathematics. 'Something is there.'

  'This is a difficult system to see in. The fakebooks are clear on that. And Billy Anker says-'

  'I appreciate that. But you do agree that something is there?'

  'Something's there,' admitted Seria Mau. 'It can't be them. That ordnance would have melted a planet.'

  She thought for a moment.

  'We'll ignore it,' she said.

  'I'm afraid we can't do that,' the mathematics told her. 'Something is happening here and we don't know what it is. They slipped away, like us, just as the ordnance went off. We have to assume this is them.'

  Seria Mau thrashed in her tank.

  'How could you let this happen!' she shrieked. 'They were gas in eighty nanoseconds!'

  The mathematics sedated her while she was still speaking. She heard herself dopplering away into silence like an illustration of some point in General Relativity. Then she dreamed she was back in the garden, one month before the first anniversary of her mother's death. Damp spring now reigned, with Earth-daffodils in the beds beneath the laurel bushes, Earth-sky pale blue between towering white clouds. The house, opening its doors and shutters reluctantly after the long winter, had breathed the three of them forth like an old man's breath. The brother found a slug. He bent down and poked it with a stick. Then he picked it up and ran about with it, going, 'Yoiy yoiy yoiy.' Seria Mau, nine years old, dressed carefully in her red woollen coat, wouldn't look at him, or laugh. All winter she had dreamed of a horse, a white horse which would step so delicately! It would come from nowhere and after that follow her everywhere she went, touching her with its soft nose.

  Smiling sadly, the father watched them play.

  'What do you want?' he asked them.

  'I want this slug!' cried the brother. He fell down and kicked his legs. 'Yoiy yoiy.'

  The father laughed.

  'What about you, Seria Mau?' he said. 'You can have anything you want!'

  He had lived by himself all winter, playing chess in his cold room upstairs, with his hands in fingerless mitts. He cried every lunchtime when he saw Seria Mau bringing the food. He wouldn't let her leave the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and made her look into his hurt eyes. She didn't want that every day of her life. She didn't want his tears; she didn't want his garden, either, with its patch of ashes and its smell of loss among the birch trees. The moment she thought that, she did want him, after all! She loved him. She loved her brother. All the same, she wanted to run far away from them both and sail the New Pearl River.

  She wanted to go right up into some space of her own, clutching the mane of a great white horse whose gentle breath would smell of almonds and vanilla.

  'I want not to have to be the mother,' Seria Mau said.

  Her father's face fell. He turned away. She found herself standing in front of a retro-shop window in the rain.

  Hundreds of small items were on display behind the steamy glass. Every one of them was false. False teeth, false noses, fake ruby lips, false hair, X-ray spectacles that never worked. Old, corrupt stuff made of tin or plastic, whose only purpose was to become something else the moment you picked it up. A kaleidoscope that blacked your eye. Puzzles which, taken apart, would never go back together. False-bottom boxes that laughed when they were touched. Musical instruments which farted when you blew in them. It was all false. It was a paradigm of undependability. In the middle of all the other objects, in pride of place, lay Uncle Zip's gift-box with its green satin ribbon and its dozen long-stemmed roses. The rain stopped. The lid of the box lifted a little of its own accord. A nanotech substrate like white foam poured out and began to fill the shop window, while the soft bell chimed and the woman's voice whispered:

  'Dr Haends? Dr Haends please. Dr Haends to surgery!'

  At this there came a light but peremptory tap on the inside of the glass. The foam cleared, revealing the display to be empty but for a single item. Against a background of ruched oyster satin stood a piece of stiff white card, on which was reproduced the crude and lively drawing of a man in black top hat and tails, caught preparing to light an oval Turkish cigarette. He had shot his cuffs with a flourish. He had tamped the tobacco on the back of his long white hand. Frozen in that moment, he was full of elegant potential. His black eyebrows made ironic arcs. 'Who knows what will happen next?' he seemed to be saying. The cigarette would vanish. Or the magician would vanish. He would tip back his hat with the end of his ebony cane and fade slowly into nothing while the Kefahuchi Tract slithered across the ruched satin void behind him like a cheap Victorian necklace and the streetlight flashed-ting!-off one of his white, even, incisor teeth. Everything would vanish.

  Beneath this image, in bold art deco letters, someone had printed the words:

  DR HAENDS, PSYCHIC SURGEON.

  Appears twice nightly.

  Seria Mau woke puzzled, to find her tank flooded with benign hormones. The mathematics had changed its mind. 'I believe after all that we're alone,' it said, and left for its own space before she could comment. This compelled her to call up the relevant displays and give them her attention.

  'Now I'm not so sure,' she said.

  No reply.

  Next, a line opened from the planet below.

  'So what happened here?' Billy Anker wanted to know. 'One minute you're talking, the next you aren't?'

  'This interference!' said Seria Mau gaily.

  'Hey, well, don't do me any favours,' he grumbled. Then he said: 'You want to know the history of that package, maybe I'll help. But first you got to do something for me.'

  Seria Mau laughed.

  'No one can help you with your dress-sense, Billy Anker; I want to say that from the start.'

  This time it was Billy Anker who broke the connection.

  She sent down her fetch. 'Hey, come on,' she said, 'it was a joke. What do you want me to do?'

  You could see him swallow his pride. You could see he had his own reasons to keep her attention. 'I wanted you to come with me,' he said. 'See some things on Redline, that's all.' She was touched, until his voice got that note she already recognised. 'Nothing special. Or only
as special as everything else we know out here on the edge-'

  'Let's go,' she interrupted. 'If we're going.'

  In the end, though, there wasn't time to do that. Alarms chimed. The shadow operators flew about. The White Cat went up to full readiness. Her battle clocks, reset to zero, began to count off in femtoseconds, the last stop before the unknowable realtime of the universe. Meanwhile, she diverted fusion product into engines and ordnance and began, as a precautionary spoiling measure, to flicker in and out of the dynaflow at random. From this behaviour, Seria Mau judged they were in an emergency.

  'What?' she demanded of the mathematics.

  'Look,' it recommended, and began increasing the connections between her and the White Cat until, in important ways, Seria Mau became the ship. She was on ship-time. She had ship consciousness. Processing rates ramped up by several orders of magnitude from the paltry human forty bits a second. Her sensorium, analogued to represent fourteen dimensions, echoed with replicas of itself like a cathedral built in 'brane-space. Seria Mau was now alive in a way, in a place-and at a speed-which would burn her out if it lasted for more than a minute and half. As a precautionary measure the mathematics was already sluicing the tank proteome with endorphins, adrenalin inhibitors and warm-down hormones which, operating at biological speeds, would take effect only after any encounter was finished.