LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'I was wrong,' it said. 'Do you see? There?'

  'I see,' said Seria Mau. 'I see the fuckers!'

  It was EMC. There was no need for signature diagrams or fakebooks. She knew them. She knew their shapes. She even knew their names. A pod of K-ships-coms shrieking with fake traffic, decoys flaring off in several dimensions-flipped themselves down the Redline gravitational alley along a trajectory designed for maximum unpredictability. Second-guessed from instant to instant, this appeared in the White Cat's sensorium as neon, scripted recursively against the halo night. The Krishna Moire pod, on long-distance ops out of New Venusport, comprised: the Norma Shirike, the Kris Rhamion, the Shannon Kier and the Marino Shrike, and was led by the Krishna Moire itself. In they came, their crosslinked mathematics causing them to constantly exchange positions in a kind of randomised braid or plait. It was a classic K-ship ploy. But the centre thread of the plait (though 'centre' was a meaningless term in these circumstances) presented as an object Seria Mau recognised: an object with a weird linked signature, half-Nastic, half-human.

  As they roared down upon her, the White Cat flickered and fluttered, miming uncertainty and perhaps a broken wing. She vanished from her orbit. The pod took note. You could hear their sarcastic laughter. They assigned a fraction of their intelligence to finding her; bored on in. Seria Mau-her signature dissembled to mimic that of an abandoned satellite at the Redline L2-needed no further evidence. Her intuition was operating in fourteen dimensions too.

  'I know where they're going.'

  'Who cares?' said the mathematics. 'We're out of here in twenty-eight nanoseconds.'

  'No. It's not us. It's not us they want!'

  There was a prickle of white light in the upper atmosphere of Redline as mid-range ordnance, despatched into the dynaflow before the raid began, popped out to engage Billy Anker's nominal complement of minefields and satellites. Down on the surface in the streaming rain, the Karaoke Sword began to wake up to its situation, coms reluctant, engines slow to warm, countermeasures half-blind to the day: a rocket with a ten-year hangover, entering Seria Mau's sensorium as a pained, lazy worm of light.

  Too slow! she thought. Too old.

  She opened a line, 'Too slow, Billy Anker!' she called. No answer. The entradista, tapping in a panic at the arms of his acceleration couch, had dislocated his left index finger. 'I'm coming down!'

  'Is this wise?' the mathematics wanted to know.

  'Disconnect me,' said Seria Mau.

  The mathematics thought.

  'No,' it said.

  'Disconnect me. We're a side-issue here. This isn't a battle, it's a police raid. They've come for Billy Anker, and he doesn't have a clue how to help himself

  The White Cat reappeared 200 kilometres above Redline. Ordnance burst around her. Someone had predicted she would come out there and then. 'Oh yes,' said Seria Mau, 'very clever. Fuck you too.' Tit for tat, she cooked off a high-end mine she had slipped into the path of the incoming pod. 'Here's one I prepared earlier,' she said. The pod broke up, temporarily blinded, and toppled away in several directions. 'They won't forgive us for that,' she told her mathematics. 'They're arrogant bastards, that team.' The mathematics, which was using the respite to normalise her relationship with the White Cat, had no comment to make. The ship's sensorium collapsed around her. Everything slowed down. 'In and out now,' she ordered. 'Quick as we can.' The White Cat pitched over into entry attitude. Retrofire pulsed and flared. Outside, the colours of space gave way to weird smears; reds and greens. Seria Mau airbraked relentlessly in the thickening atmosphere, letting speed scrub off as heat and noise until her ship was a roaring yellow fireball across the night sky. It was a rough ride. The shadow operators streamed about, their lacy wings rippling out behind them, their long hands covering their faces. Mona the clone, who had looked out of a porthole as the ship stood on its nose, was throwing up energetically in the human quarters.

  They breached the cloudbase at fifteen hundred feet, to find the Karaoke Sword immediately below them. 'I don't believe this,' said Seria Mau. The old ship had lifted itself a foot or two out of the mud and was turning hesitantly this way and that, shaking like a cheap compass needle. A fusion torch fired up at the rear, setting nearby vegetation alight and generating gouts of radioactive steam. After twenty seconds, its bows dropped suddenly and the whole thing slumped back to earth with a groan, breaking in two about a hundred yards forward of the engine. 'Jesus Christ,' Seria Mau whispered. 'Put us down.'

  The mathematics said it was unwilling to commit.

  'Put us down. I'm not leaving him here.'

  'You aren't leaving him here, are you?' Mona the clone called up anxiously from the human quarters.

  'Are you deaf?' said Seria Mau.

  'I wouldn't put it past you, that's all.'

  'Shut up.'

  The Krishna Moire pod, realising what had happened, swept in, fanned out into the parking orbit with a kind of idle bravado, the way shadow boys in one-shot cultivars occupy a doorway so they can spit, gamble and clean their nails with replicas of priceless antique flick-knives. They could afford to wait. Meanwhile, to move things along, Krishna Moire himself opened a line to the White Cat. He had signed on younger than Seria Mau, and his fetch, though it was six feet tall and presented itself in full Earth Military Contracts chic, including black boots, high-waist riding breeches and a dove-grey double-breasted tuxedo with epaulettes, had the demanding mouth of a boy.

  'We want Billy Anker,' he said.

  'Go through me,' Seria Mau invited.

  Moire looked less certain. 'This is a wrong thing you are doing, resisting us,' he informed her. 'To add to all those other wrongdoings you done. But, hey, we didn't come for you, not this time.'

  'I done?' said Seria Mau. 'Wrongdoings I done?'

  Outside, explosions marched steadily across the mud, flinging up rocks and vegetation. Elements of the pod, becoming impatient with the half-minute wait, had entered the atmosphere and begun to shell the surface at random. Seria Mau sighed.

  'Fuck off, Moire, and take speaking lessons,' she said.

  'You're only alive because EMC don't care about you one way or another,' he warned her as he faded to brown smoke. 'They could change their minds. This operation is double red.' His fetch flickered, vanished, reformed suddenly in a kind of postscript. 'Hey, Seria, I got my own pod now!' it said.

  'I knew that. So?'

  'So next time I see you,' the fetch promised, 'I'll let the machine speak.'

  'Jerk,' said Seria Mau.

  By this time she had the cargo bay open. Billy Anker, dressed in a vintage EV suit, was shuffling head down towards it with all the grim patience of the physically unfit. He fell. He picked himself up. He fell again. He wiped his faceplate. Up in the stratosphere, the Krishna Moire pod shifted and turned in hungry disarray; while high above it in the parking lot, the hybrid ship awaited what would happen, its ambivalent signature flickering like a description of the events unfolding below. Who was up there, Seria Mau wondered, along with the commander of Touching the Void? Who was presiding over this fumbled op? Down in the cargo bay, Mona the clone called Billy's name. She leaned out, caught his hand, pulled him inside. The cargo ramp slammed shut. As if this was a signal, long vapour trails emerged from the cloudbase at steep angles. Billy Anker's ship burst open. Its engines went up in a sigh of gamma and visible light.

  'Go,' Seria Mau told the mathematics. The White Cat torched out in a low fast arc over the South Pole, transmitting ghost signatures, firing off decoys and particle-dogs.

  'Look!' cried Billy Anker. 'Look down!'

  The South Polar Artefact flashed beneath them. Seria Mau caught a fleeting glimpse of it-a featureless gunmetal ziggurat a million years old and five miles on a side at the base-before it vanished astern. 'It's opening!' cried Billy Anker. Then, in an awed whisper: 'I can see. I can see inside-' The sky lit up white behind them, and his voice turned to a despairing wail. The pod, growing frustrated, had hit the ziggurat with something
from the bottom shelf of its arsenal, something big. Something EMC.

  'What did you see?' Seria Mau asked three minutes later, as they skulked at Redline L2 while the White Cat's mathematics tried to guess them a way out under the noses of their pursuers.

  Billy Anker wouldn't say.

  'How could they do that?' he railed. 'That was a unique historical item, and a working one. It was still receiving data from somewhere in the Tract. We could have learned something from that thing.' He sat white-faced in the human quarters, panting and wiping the adrenalin sweat off his face with his do-rag, the top half of the muddy EV suit peeled back. The shadow operators were cooing and fluttering round him, trying to fix his dislocated finger, but he kept batting them away with his other hand. 'This old stuff,' he said, 'it's all we have. It's our only resource!'

  'Where you look, you find,' she told him. 'There will always be more, Billy Anker. There will always be more after that.'

  'Nevertheless, everything I learned, I learned from that thing.'

  'And what did you learn, Billy Anker?'

  He tapped the side of his nose.

  'You'd like to know,' he said, laughing as if this assertion showed how sharp and clean his intuition was. 'But I won't tell.' He was a beachcomber, with all the tidal scouring of the personality that implies. His big discovery shored him up. He had to believe she would be interested in whatever tacky insight into the nature of things he thought it gave him. 'I can tell you what EMC want, though,' he offered instead.

  'I know that already. They want you. They followed me all the way from Motel Splendido to find you. And here's another thing to think about: the Moire pod wanted to try me out. They think they're good enough. But whoever's in that other ship wouldn't let them, in case you were caught in the crossfire. That's why Krishna Moire bumped your artefact, Billy. He's pissed at his superiors.'

  Billy Anker grinned his sly grin.

  'And are they good enough?' he said. 'To try you out?'

  'What do you think?'

  Billy Anker contemplated this answer with approval. Then he said, 'EMC don't want me. They want what I found.'

  Seria Mau felt cold in her tank.

  'It's it on board my ship?' she said.

  'In a manner of speaking,' he acknowledged. He made a gesture meant to take in all of Radio Bay, maybe even the vast sweep of the Beach itself. 'It's out there too.'

  EIGHTEEN

  The Circus of Pathet Lao

  Some hours after he shot Evie Cray, Ed Chianese found himself on the waste ground behind the New Men warren.

  It was pitch black out there, lit with oddly angled flashes of white light from the docks. Occasionally a K-ship left its slip on a vertical line of fusion product, and for perhaps two or three seconds Ed could see low hummocks, pits, ponds, piles of broken engineering objects. The whole place had a smell of metal and chemicals. Vapour drifted out the yards like a ground mist. Ed was throwing up again, and the tank voices were back in his head. He dumped the guns in the first pool he came to. A life like his, and finally he had killed someone. He remembered boasting to Tig Vesicle:

  'Once you've done all the things worth doing, you begin on the things that aren't.'

  A little smoke came up from the pool, as if there was more in it than water. Shortly after he got rid of the guns, he came across an abandoned rickshaw. It loomed up in front of him suddenly-out of context, one wheel in a flooded hole-tilted at an odd angle against the sky. Detecting his approach, advertisements crawled across the sides of its hood, coalesced as soft lights in the air above it. Music started up. A voice echoed across the waste ground:

  'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao.'

  'No thanks,' Ed said. 'I'll walk.'

  In the light of the next flare from the rocket yards, he discovered the rickshaw girl. She was on her knees, bowed down between the shafts, breathing in with a kind of hoarse whistle, letting it out as a grunt. Every so often her whole body tensed up as tight as a fist and began to tremble. Then she seemed to relax again. Once or twice she laughed to herself and said, 'Hey, man.' She was occupied with dying the way she had been occupied with life, to the exclusion of everything else. Ed knelt down beside her. It was like kneeling next to a foundered horse.

  'Hold on,' he said. 'Don't die. You can make it.'

  There was a painful laugh.

  'The fuck you know about it,' the girl said thickly.

  He could feel the heat pouring off her. He had the feeling it would rush away like that, full tilt, and then stop and never be replaced. He tried to put his arms round her to hold it in. But she was too big, so he just held one of her hands.

  'What's your name?' he said.

  'What's it to you?'

  'You tell me your name, you can't die,' Ed explained. 'It's like somehow, you know, we made contact. So you owe me something, and all that.' He thought. 'I need you not to die,' he said.

  'Shit,' she said. 'Other people go out in peace. I get a twink.'

  Ed was surprised she could guess that.

  'How do you know?' he said. 'You can't know that.'

  She drew her breath in raggedly.

  'Look at yourself,' she advised. 'You're as dead as me, only it's on the inside.' She narrowed her eyes. 'You got blood all on you, man,' she told him. 'You're all over blood. At least I haven't got blood on me.' This seemed to cheer her up in some way. She nodded to herself, settled back.

  'I'm Annie Glyph,' she said. 'Or I was.'

  'Visit today!' boomed the rickshaw's advertising chip suddenly. 'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao. Also: the future descried. Prophecy. Fortune Telling. Atheromancy.'

  'I worked this city five years, on cafй йlectrique and sheer fucking guts,' Annie Glyph said. 'That's two years more than most.'

  'What's atheromancy?' Ed asked her.

  'I got no idea.'

  He stared at the rickshaw. Cheap spoked wheels and orange plastic, totally Pierpoint Street. The rickshaw girls ran eighteen hours a day for speed money, and opium money to take the edge off the speed; then they blew up. Cafй йlectrique and guts: that was their boast. All they had in the end was a myth of themselves. They were indestructible: this destroyed them. Ed shook his head.

  'How can you live with it?' he said.

  But Annie Glyph wasn't living with it any more. Her eyes were empty, and she had slumped to one side, tipping the rickshaw over with her. He couldn't quite believe something as alive as her could die. Her huge body still had the sheen of sweat on it. Her rawboned face, dwarfed by the muscles of her neck and shoulders, masculised by the inboard testosterone patch the tailor had specified as part of the cheap conversion kit, had a kind of etched beauty. Ed studied it a moment or two then leaned forward to close her eyes. 'Hey, Annie,' he said. 'Sleep at last.' At this, something weird happened. Her cheekbones rippled and shifted uneasily. He put it down to the unsteady illumination of the rickshaw ads. But then her whole head blurred, and seemed to break up into lights.

  'Shit!' Ed said. He jumped to his feet and fell over backwards.

  It lasted a minute, maybe two. The lights seemed to flutter up into the softly glowing region where the rickshaw ads blossomed out of the air. Then lights and ads together poured back down into her face, which received them like a dry sponge soaking up tears. Her left leg contracted, then kicked out galvanically. 'The fuck,' she said. She cleared her throat and spat. Pushing into the mud with her feet and hands, she got herself and the rickshaw upright. She shook herself and stared down at Ed. Steam was already coming up off the small of her back into the cold night. 'Nothing like that ever happened to me before,' she complained.

  'You were dead,' Ed whispered.

  She shrugged. 'Too much speed. I can fix that with more speed. You wanna go somewhere?'

  Ed got up and backed away.

  'No thanks.'

  'Hey, climb in, man. It's free. You got a ride.' She looked up at
the stars, then slowly around at the waste ground, as if she wasn't sure how she came to be there. 'I owe you, I can't remember why.'

  It was the weirdest ride Ed ever had.

  2.30 a.m.: the streets were deserted, silent but for the steady soft slap of Annie Glyph's feet. The shafts moved up and down as she ran, but the cab had a chip to damp the effect of that. To Ed it was like gliding and being motionless, both at once. All he could see of the rickshaw girl was her massive lats and buttocks, painted with electric-blue Lycra. Her gait was an energy-saving shuffle. She was designed to run forever. Every so often she shook her head, and an aerosol of sweat sprayed up into the cab's soft corona of advertising light. The heat of her streamed around him, so that he was insulated against the night. He felt insulated from everything else too, as if being Annie's passenger allowed him to withdraw from the world: take a rest from its mysteries.

  When he admitted this, she laughed.

  'Twinks!' she said. 'Rest is all you fuckers ever do.'

  'I had a life once.'

  'They all say that,' Annie advised him. 'Hey,' she said. 'Don't you know not to talk to the rickshaw girl? She's got work to do if you ain't.'

  The night ran past, the garment district flowing into Union Square and then East Garden. EMC adprop was everywhere. 'War!' announced the hologram hoardings: 'Are you ready?' Annie turned briefly on to downtown Pierpoint, which was as deserted as if the war had already happened. The tank parlours and chopshops were all closed. Here and there some loser drank Roses whiskey in an empty bar while a cultivar in an apron wiped the bartop with his dirty rag and pondered the difference between life and the semblance of it. They would be like that 'til dawn then go home, still wondering.

  'So what did you do, this other life you had?' Annie asked Ed suddenly. 'This, "I wasn't always a twink" life of yours?'

  Ed shrugged.

  'One thing I did,' he began, 'I flew dipships-'

  'They all say that.'

  'Hey,' Ed said. 'We don't have to talk.'

  Annie laughed to herself. She hung a left off Pierpoint on to Impreza, then another at the corner of Impreza and Skyline. There, she had to pull hard into a half-mile grade, but her breathing barely altered. Hills, her body language implied, were the small change of life to a rickshaw girl. After a while, Ed said: