LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'One thing I remember, I had a cat. That was when I was a kid.'

  'Yeah? What colour was that?'

  'It was black,' Ed said. 'It was a black cat.'

  He could make a clear mental picture of the cat, juggling with a coloured feather in the hall. For twenty minutes it would put its whole heart into whatever you offered-paper, a feather, a painted cork-then lose interest and fall asleep. It was black and thin, with nervous, fluid movements, a pointed little face and yellow eyes. It was always hungry. Ed could make a clear mental picture of the cat, but he couldn't remember anything about the family house. Instead he had a lot of tank memories, which he knew weren't real because of their shiny completeness, their perfection of structure. 'Maybe there was another cat too,' he said: 'A sister.' But on reflection he knew that wasn't true.

  'We're here,' Annie said suddenly.

  The rickshaw stopped with a jerk. Ed, thrown back out into the world, stared cluelessly around. Fences and gates, dripping with condensation, rattled in the onshore wind. Behind that, a chilly strip of concrete stretched away into saltmarsh and sand dunes, where an encrustation of cheap, sea-soured wooden hotels and bars could be seen.

  'Where's this?' he said. 'Shit.'

  'The customer doesn't give a destination, I bring them here,' Annie Glyph explained. 'Don't you like it? I'm on a percentage from the circus. See? Over there.' She drew his attention to a distant cluster of lights, then, when he seemed unimpressed, gave him an anxious look. 'It's not so bad,' she said. 'They got hotels and stuff here too. It's the noncorporate spaceport.'

  Ed stared over the fence.

  'Shit,' he said again.

  'I get a percentage to bring in trade,' Annie said. 'I can take you in if you like.' She shrugged. 'Or I could take you on somewhere. But you have to pay for that.'

  'I'll walk,' Ed said. 'No money.'

  'No money?'

  He shrugged.

  'Not much of anything,' he said.

  She stared at him with an expression he couldn't interpret.

  'I was dying out there,' she said. 'But you took time over me. So I'll run you back to the city.'

  'The fact is,' Ed admitted, 'I got nowhere to be, either. No money. Nowhere to be. No reason to be there.' He could see her trying to process this. Her lips moved a little as she looked at him. He understood suddenly that she had a good heart, and that made him feel anxious on her behalf. It made him feel depressed. 'Hey,' he said. 'So what? You don't owe me anything, I enjoyed the ride.' He looked her immense body up and down. 'Your action is good.'

  She stared at him puzzledly; then down at herself; and then, across the chain-link fence and the rattling gate in the wind, at the circus by the shore. 'I keep a room over there,' she said. 'See those lights? I bring in custom, they let me have a room. That's the deal I have with them. You want to stay there?'

  The gate rattled, the sea air got a little colder. Ed thought about Tig and Neena, what happened to them.

  'OK,' he said.

  'In the morning you could ask for a job.'

  'I always wanted to work in a circus.'

  Opening the gate, she looked at him sidelong.

  'Kids do,' she said.

  The room was hardly bigger than she was, with cheap fibreboard walls that creaked and gave in the sea wind. The walls were off-white, with a couple of loose shelves. There was a toilet and shower in a translucent plastic cubicle in one corner; an induction-oven and a couple of pots and pans in another. She had a futon rolled up against the wall. It was as bleak and transitional a space as you liked, smelling of oil-fried rice and sweat. Cafй йlectrique sweat. Rickshaw-girl sweat. But she had some things of her own on the shelves, which was more than most of them could say. She had two spare Lycra outfits, three old books, and some tissue-paper flowers.

  'It's nice,' Ed said.

  'Why lie?' she said. 'It's shite.' She indicated the futon. 'I could make us something to eat,' she said, 'or maybe you'd just like to lie down?'

  Ed must have looked reluctant.

  'Hey,' she said. 'I'm gentle. I never hurt anyone yet.'

  She was right. She enfolded him with care. Her olive skin, with its faint down of hair, had a strange strong smell, like cloves and ice. She touched him softly, protected him from her convulsions by coming somewhere deep down inside herself, and gently encouraged him to batter against her as hard as he wanted. When he woke in the night, he found she had curved round him with awkward consideration, as if she was not used to someone being there. The tide was in. Ed lay and listened to the sea roll the stones about in the undertow. The wind hissed. It was soon bluish dawn. He felt the circus begin to wake up around him, though he didn't yet know what that might mean for him. Annie Glyph's tranquil downer breath, the rise and fall of her huge ribcage, soon sent him to sleep again.

  In a time like that, who needed a circus? The halo was a circus in itself. Circus was in the streets. It was inside people's heads. Eat fire? Everyone was a fire-eater. Everyone had geek genes and a story to tell. Sentient tattoos made everyone the Illustrated Man. Everyone was high on some flying trapeze issue of their own. It was the flight into the grotesque. The tusked cultivar on Electric Avenue, the twink curled foetally in the twink-tank: whether they knew it or not, they had asked and answered all the questions the universe could support for now. They were their own audience, too.

  The only thing you couldn't be was an alien, so Sandra Shen kept a few of those. And prophecy was still popular, because no one could quite do it yet. But in the face of the uniform grotesque, the Circus of Pathet Lao had been forced to look elsewhere for the cheap thrill at the heart of performance, and-through a series of breathtaking acts of the imagination devised and sometimes acted in by Sandra Shen herself-present the vanished normal.

  As a result, Ed Chianese's age was able to define itself as the cultural opposite of 'Having Breakfast, 1950'. It could thrill to 'Buying an Underwired Bra at Dorothy Perkins, 1972', or 'Novel Reading, early 1980's', and snigger over the perverse 'A New Baby', and 'Toyota Previa with West London School Children', both 2002. Most extraordinary of all-perched as it was so exactly on the historical cusp-was the astonishing 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Computer Monitor, 1999'. These gemlike tableaux-acted out behind glass under powerful lights by the clones of fat men about to have heart attacks on a Zurich metro platform, anorexic women dressed in the Angelino sport-fuck wear of 1982-brought to life the whole bizarre comfortingness of Old Earth. Such desperate fantasies were the real earners. Like fairy godmothers they had blessed the Circus at its inception, funded its early whirlwind travels across the halo, and now supported its declining years in the twilight zone of New Venusport.

  Success is often its own downfall. People weren't coming to watch any more. They were coming to get their own ideas. They weren't content to spectate the vanished past; they wanted to be it. The retro lifestyles emerging from the corporate enclaves had less historical accuracy than a Shen tableau but a softer, more buyable feel. The look was 'Dress Down Friday'. It was the Erickson phone and an Italian wool sweater worn across the shoulders with its arms knotted loosely in front. Meanwhile, at the radical edge, a gene tailor and ex-entradista from Motel Splendido was reputed to have made himself over as the exact replica of a Victorian music hall star, using actual DNA.

  In the face of competition like that, Madame Shen was thinking of moving on. But there were other reasons for that, too.

  You go too deep, you expect to get burned. There isn't any way around that. Ed dreamed of a dipship breaking up in slow motion in the photosphere of a G-type star. The dipship was Ed. Then he dreamed he was back in the twink-tank but the tank world had come apart and he could already hear voices from every cupboard, every corner, every pretty girl's petticoat. Then he woke with a start and it was full day, and he could hear the sea one side of the dunes and the circus on the other. He found two vegetable samosas wrapped in a slip of greaseproof paper, also some money, together with a note which read: Go see t
he receptionist about work. Annie Glyph's handwriting was as careful and literate as her way of having sex. Ed ate the samosas, looking comfortably around the little room, with the marine light falling into it and the sea air filling it. Then he crumpled the paper, took a shower to get the blood off him, and went out.

  Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao, occupied a two-acre concrete site on the boundary of the noncorporate spaceport.

  The Observatorium, housed in a series of bizarre pressure tanks and magnetic vessels, took up less than a quarter of this; while the Circus itself was contained in a single building the curves and volutes of whose composite construction had been designed to resemble a carnival tent. The rest of the compound was living quarters. All exactly what you would expect-weeds, salt-streaked alloy siding, blistered paint, old carnie holograms with no memory of themselves as human, which, faded but energetic, woke into life as you passed, pursuing, hectoring, cajoling. Everyone who worked here would be like that-lively but disconnected. Ed felt like that too. He had to walk across the whole site to find the front office, which was in another clapped-out wooden building, greyish white under a faulty neon sign.

  The receptionist wore a blonde wig.

  It was big hair, platinum hair, piled high and sold cheap. In front of her she had a holographic terminal of a type with which Ed was unfamiliar. This resembled an old-fashioned fishtank, in which he thought he discerned now and then a stream of bubbles, a fake clamshell open on a miniature mermaid. The receptionist was like a mermaid herself. Older than she looked, she sat demurely beneath her hair, a small woman with a personal sense of humour and an accent he could not place.

  When Ed explained his purpose the whole thing took on a curiously formal air. She asked him for his details, which except for his name he made up. She asked him: what he could do. That was easier.

  'Fly any kind of ship,' he boasted.

  The receptionist pretended to look out the window.

  'We don't need a pilot momentarily,' she said. 'As you can see, we're on the ground.'

  'Sunjammers, deep freighters, star ships, dipships. I've been there,' Ed went on, 'and flown it.' He was surprised how close to the truth this was. 'Fusion engines to dynaflow drivers. Some stuff I never knew what it was, Earth controls bolted onto alien equipment.'

  'I'm sympathetic,' the receptionist said. 'But is there anything else you can do?'

  Ed thought.

  'I rode navigator on Alcubiere ships,' he said. 'You know, the big ones that bunch reality up in front of them as they go? It's like a ruckle in cloth.' He shook his head, trying to visualise the Alcubiere warp. 'Or maybe not like that at all. Anyway, space gets wrenched, matter gets wrenched, time goes out the window with everything else. Close into the ship you can just about survive it. The navigators surf that part of the wave. They go out in EVA pods and park in the warp, trying to see what's next. One thing they can see from there, it's their lives flushing away in front of them.'

  He felt bleak now when he talked about it. 'They call it the bow wave,' he explained.

  'The kind of jobs we have-' the receptionist began.

  'You see some weird shit as a navigator. It looks like all these silvery eels, under the sea. Migrating. It's some kind of radiation, that was how it was explained to me, but you don't see it as that. Your life kind of leaks away as eels under the sea, and you watch it go. Afterwards,' Ed said, 'you can't work out why you'd do a job like that.' He looked at his hands. 'I surfed that wave and a few others too. Anyway, I can fly any kind of rocket. Except K-ships of course.'

  The receptionist shook her head.

  'I meant,' she said, 'can you do anything like stack crates, clean up after animals. That kind of work.' She consulted the terminal again and added: 'Or prophecy.'

  Ed laughed. 'Pardon?'

  She regarded him evenly.

  'Telling the future,' she explained, as if to someone who didn't know the word but was bright enough to learn it.

  Ed leaned forward and looked into the terminal.

  'What is going on in there?' he said.

  Her eyes were a confusing colour. Sometimes it was jade, sometimes the green of a salt wave; sometimes, somehow, both at once. There were dots of silver in her pupils which seemed ready to break up, drift away. Suddenly, she switched off the terminal and stood up as if she had to be somewhere else and had no more time to talk to Ed. Standing up, she seemed taller and younger, though some of it was shoes and she still had to look up to make eye contact. She wore a pale denim jacket with cowboy pockets and patterns of rhinestones, and a black patent-leather tube skirt. She smoothed the skirt across the front ofher thighs and said: 'We're always on the lookout for a prophet.

  Ed shrugged. 'I was never interested in that,' he said. 'With me it was more a question of not knowing the future. You know?'

  She gave him a sudden warm smile.

  'I imagine it was,' she said. 'Well, talk to her. You never know.'

  'Talk to who?'

  The receptionist finished smoothing her skirt then went to the door. Her back swayed, balancing the big hair. This gave her an interesting gait, Ed thought, for an older person. Curiously enough, he seemed to remember that walk. He followed her out and stood at the top of the steps, shading his eyes. It was full morning now. Maritime light was spraying up off the naked concrete, maritime light and heat to daze and irritate the unwary.

  'Talk to who?' he repeated.

  'Madam Sandra,' she said, not turning round.

  For some reason this name made him shiver. He watched the receptionist walk away across the site towards the Circus of Pathet Lao in its blinding white carnival tent.

  'Hey! So where do I find her?' he called.

  The receptionist kept walking.

  'Madam Sandra finds you, Ed. She finds you.'

  Later that morning he stood on the dunes looking out to sea. The light was harsh and violet. Little red-throat lizards scuttled through the marram at his feet. He could hear saltwater dub basslines, bumping away in some cocktail lounge further down the access road. In front of him a faded sign on a tilted wooden post in the sand announced 'Monster Beach'. You couldn't tell which direction it was pointing, but Ed thought it was straight up. He grinned. Beats me, he told himself; but he was thinking less of the beach sign than of the elusive Sandra Shen. He was hungry again. On his way back to Annie Glyph's room, he heard some sounds he recognised issuing from the bar of the deserted Dunes Motel, a clapboard box in a weedy oyster-shell lot a little apart from the motel itself.

  Ed stuck his head round the open door, out of the frying light and into the cool gloom inside, where he found three skinny old men in white caps and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers too big for them, throwing dice onto a blanket on the floor.

  'Hey,' said Ed. 'The Ship Game.'

  They looked up at him without interest, down again immediately. Their eyes were like dark brown studs, the whites curded with age. Neat stained moustaches. Skin coffeed by sunlight. Thin big-veined hands which looked fragile but weren't. Lives lived out slower and slower, steeped in the preservative of Black Heart Rum. Eventually one of them said in a soft, distant voice:

  'You to pay to play.'

  'It's the narrative of capital,' Ed agreed, and reached in his pocket.

  The Ship Game-

  Also known as Entreflex or Gobetween, this full-on collision of jacks and craps-with its hair-trigger jargon, its bone pieces like dead men's knuckles, its twelve coloured characters nobody really knew the meaning of any more-was endemic. It was galaxy-wide. Some said it arrived with the New Men, aboard their flagship the Remove All Packaging. Some said it originated on the ancient trundling sublight ships of the Icenia Credit. It was a pastime which had seen many forms. In the present one, an ironic subtext to everything that happened in empty space, the characters, and the names the players gave them, were supposed to represent the notorious N = 1000 Engagement, an early human/Nastic encounter during which, face
d by the sheer number of events and conditions in fight-space-so many ships, so many dimensions to misappropriate, so much different physics to hide behind, so many nanosecond strategies in operation at once-the EMC admiral Stuart Kauffman abandoned the Tate-Kearney transformations and simply threw dice to decide his moves. Ed, who saw it less as a subtext than a source of income, had played the game all his adult life, the first ship he stowed away on to the last ship he jumped. The soft voices of the old men filled the bar.

  'Give me an overend.'

  'You don't want no overend. You fucked.'

  'So tell me now, what you think to that?'

  'I think you double-fucked.'

  Ed laid down his money. He smiled across the blanket and bid Vegan Snake Eyes.

  'That get you in the water,' acknowledged the old men.

  He blew on the dice-they were heavy and cool to the touch, some smart alien bone that would leach the heat of your hand, the energy of motion, to change the characters as they fell. They scattered and tumbled. They jumped like grasshoppers. Symbols fluoresced briefly- interference patterns, ancient holographies blue, green and red- as they passed through a slanting bar of light. Ed thought he saw the Horse, the Tract, a clipper ship in a tower of cloud like smoke. Then the Twins, which gave him a sudden shiver. One of the old men coughed and reached for his rum. A few minutes later, when money began to change hands, there was a brusque but reverent air to each transaction.

  Ed was at the circus for several days before anything happened. Annie Glyph came and went in her shy, calm way. She seemed pleased to see him at the end of her shift. She always had something for him. Always seemed a little surprised to find him still there. He grew used to her huge body moving behind the plastic shower curtain. She was so careful! Only at night, when she sweated out the cafй йlectrique, did he have to move away in case he got hurt.