LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'You're already lost,' Billy Anker said. 'I admire that you stole a K-ship,' he went on quickly: 'Who wouldn't? But you're lost, and you aren't finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You're doing the wrong thing. You know?'

  'How come you say these things?' she shouted. 'How come you make me feel bad like this?'

  He couldn't answer that.

  'What's the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I'm not a refund kind of guy?' She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn't his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I don't know you well enough to say that.'

  'No,' he said.

  'I was wrong,' she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn't fill. 'It was wrong of me.'

  She had to be content with a shrug.

  'So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you're clearly so proud of.'

  'Take this ship deep,' he said. 'Take it to the Tract.'

  'I don't know why I'm talking to you, Billy Anker.'

  He laughed.

  'I had to try,' he said. He said, 'OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.'

  She laughed.

  'Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?' He went on anyway.

  Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

  Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

  No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the 'affected area' and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. 'Containment' was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.

  After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and-especially-navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

  The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

  K-tech was born.

  'So?' said Seria Mau. 'This is not news.'

  She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. 'None of this is news to my life,' she said. 'You know?'

  'I know,' said Billy Anker. He went on:

  'EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, "We don't make the wars," and then have "terrorists" killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.' He grinned. 'But here's the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip's generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they're adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can't build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.

  'Do you understand? We don't have a technology here. We have alien artifacts: a resource mined until it ran out.' He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. 'This may have been one of the last of them,' he said. 'And we don't even know what it was for.'

  'Hey, Billy Anker,' she said. 'I know what it's for.'

  He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.

  'K-tech has run out,' he repeated.

  'If that's a good thing, why are you so pissed off?'

  Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.

  'Because I found a whole planet of it,' he said.

  Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.

  'Ten years ago,' he said, 'I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn't alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called "science" from some piece of junk he'd salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.' He laughed softly. 'A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn't.'

  'How?'

  Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.

  'I went down it,' he said.

  She stared at him. 'But… ' she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.

  She said: 'Didn't you care?'

  He shrugged. 'I wanted to know,' he said.

  'Billy Anker-'

  'Oh, it's no way to travel,' he said. 'It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it's like- ' He examined his damaged hand. 'Who knows what it's like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can't describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can't give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?' The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himsel
f; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. 'I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?'

  She couldn't.

  She thought: If you can't stop yourself trying to attract people this way, Billy Anker, it's because you have no self-esteem. We want a human being, all you dare show us is the lack of Hearts. Then suddenly she realised who he reminded her of. The ponytail, if it had still been black; the thin dark-skinned face, if it hadn't been so tired, so burned out by the rays of distant suns: neither would have looked out of place at the tailorshop party on Henry Street in downtown Carmody, in the soft humid night of Motel Splendido-

  'You're one of Uncle Zip's clones,' she said.

  At first she thought this would shock him into saying something new. But he only grinned and shrugged it off. 'The personality didn't take,' he said. A complex expression crossed his face.

  'He made you for this.'

  'He wanted a replacement. His entradista days were over. He thought the child would follow the father. But I'm my own man,' Billy Anker said. He blinked. 'I say that to everyone, but it's true.'

  'Billy -'

  'Don't you want to know what I found?"

  'Of course I do,' she said. She didn't care one way or another at that moment, she was so chilled by his fate. 'Of course I do.'

  He was silent for a time. Once or twice he started to speak, but language seemed to fail him. Finally he began:

  'That place: it butts up against the Tract so tight you can practically hear the rush and roar of it. You fall out the wormhole, toppling end over end, all your control systems redlined, and there it is. Light. Deep light. Fountains, cascades, falling curtains of light. All the colours you can imagine and some you can't. Shapes they used to see through optical telescopes, in the old days back on Earth. You know? Like gas clouds, and clouds of stars, but evolving there in human time in front of you. Building and falling like surf.' He was silent again, looking inside himself as if he'd forgotten she was there. Eventually he said: 'And you know, it's small, that place. Some used-up old moon they sent down the wormhole for their own purposes. No atmosphere. You can make out the curve of the horizon. And bare. Just white dust on a surface like a cement floor…

  'A cement floor,' he whispered. 'You hear the K-code resonating in it like the sound of a choir.' He raised his voice. 'Oh, I didn't stay,' he said. 'I wasn't up to it. I saw that at once. I was too scared to stay. I could feel the code, humming in the fabric, I could hear the light pour over me. I could feel the Tract at my back, like something watching. I couldn't believe they would drive a wormhole through to somewhere so insane. I grabbed a few things-just like the old prospectors, the first few things I saw-and I got out of there as fast as I could.'

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Haends package.

  'That was one of them,' he said. After a moment he shivered. 'I got the Karaoke Sword off the moon, but it was a long time before I could go anywhere. We just hung there in the wash of light. Even the ship felt a kind of terror. I couldn't make myself enter the wormhole again. A wormhole is a lottery. It's a one-shot thing, even for a man like me. In the end I took absolute navigational fixes-fixes from the standing gravity wave, also fixes I was less certain of, from the anisotropy of the whole universe-to find out where I was. Then I came back the long way round, by dynaflow. I was broke, so I got together a few of the things I'd found, and sold them on. It was a mistake. After that I knew everyone in the galaxy would want to know what I knew. I hid up.'

  'But you could find the place again,' said Seria Mau. She held her breath.

  'Yes,' he said.

  'Then take me there, Billy Anker. Take me to that planet!'

  He looked down at his hands, and after a time shook his head. 'It's important we don't lead them there,' he said. 'You can see that.' He held up his hand to forestall her arguments. 'But that's not the reason. Oh, I'd take you there despite them, because I can tell how much that package means to you. Between you and me and the White Cat, we might lose them on the way-'

  'Then why not take me? Why?'

  'Because it's no place for you or me.'

  Seria Mau walked her fetch away from him and through a bulkhead. Billy Anker looked surprised. The next time he heard her voice, it was the ship's voice. It came from all around him. 'I see right through you, Billy Anker,' she said. She tut-tutted mildly. 'All this talk about leaving the Beach, and you're too scared to swim.'

  He looked angry then stubborn. 'That's no place for human beings,' he insisted.

  'I'm not a human being!'

  He smiled. His face lit up softly and shed the years, and she saw he was his own man after all.

  'Oh yes you are,' he said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  War

  Ed Chianese continued his training as a visionary.

  Madam Shen liked to work in the Observatorium, preferably among the tableaux themselves. She had a personal fondness for 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999'. Ed, made nervous by the fixed gazes and untrustworthy expressions of the two ancient scientists, felt more comfortable in the front office, or the bar at the Dunes Motel.

  His tutor remained unpredictable. Sometimes she came as herself; sometimes as the receptionist with her Dolly Parton tits and Oort Country chat; sometimes as an ill-tempered hermaphrodite carnie called Harryette who wore black singlets to show off the points of her little breasts, often teaming them with colored spandex tights which bulged alarmingly at the crotch. Sometimes she didn't come at all, and Ed could go back to throwing dice on the blanket. (Though now he had begun to lose regularly. You forfeit your luck when you start trying to see the future in this life, the old men told him, cackling dutifully as they sheafed up his money.) Whoever she came as, Sandra Shen was short. She wore short skirts. She smoked the short local cigarettes of tobacco and bat guano, oval in cross-section, acrid in use. He tried to think of her as a human being: never got to know her well. She wasn't young any more, he was certain of that. 'I'm tired, Ed,' she would complain. 'I've been doing this too long.' She didn't say what, though he took her to mean the Circus of Pathet Lao.

  Her moods were as unpredictable as her appearance. One day, pleased with his progress, she would promise him a show of his own-'A main tent show, Ed. A real show'. The next she would shake her head, throw away her cigarette and say in a voice of professional disgust:

  'A kiddie sees better futures than you. I can't sell them this.'

  One afternoon at the Dunes she told him, 'You're a true visionary, Ed. That's your tragedy.'

  They had been working for perhaps an hour, and Ed, slumped in one corner so tired he thought he could feel himself slipping down through the floor, had prised the fishtank off his head for a breather. Outside, the seabirds croaked and wheeled over the beach. Harsh violet light fell between the slatted louvres and sliced Sandra Shen's emerald green cheongsam into the uneasy colouration of some jungle predator. She lifted a shred of tobacco from her lower lip. Shook her head.

  'It's my tragedy too,' she admitted. 'Mine too.'

  If Ed had hoped to learn something from her about the process itself, he was wrong. She seemed as confused by it as he was.

  'What I want to know,' he said, 'is what my head's in.'

  'Forget the tank, Ed,' she said. 'There's nothing in there. That's what I want you to understand: nothing there at all.' When she saw how this failed to reassure him, she seemed at a loss. Once she said, 'Never forget: with prophecy you find your own heart at the heart of it.' Finally she recommended: 'You've got to duck and dive in there. It's a full-on Darwinian environment. You've got to be quick to bring back the goods.'

  Ed shrugged.

  'That so doesn't describe the experience,' he told her.

  He really didn't know what happened to him when his head was in the fishtank, but he knew it wasn't anything as twitchy or aggressive as that. He thought that was her temperament showing. As a description it revealed m
ore about her than it did about prophecy. 'Anyway,' he told her, 'direction was always the difficulty with me. Speed was never a problem.'

  He added, for no reason he could see: 'My dreams have been bad lately.'

  'Things are tough all over, Ed.'

  'Thanks a lot.'

  Sandra Shen grinned at him. 'Talk to Annie,' she advised. A few white motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. Unsure whether this was menace or a joke, he put his head back in the tank so he didn't have to watch. After a moment he heard her say:

  'I'm sick of selling the past, Ed. I want to start on the future.'

  'Do I say anything when I'm in here?'

  The more he worked with the fishtank, the worse Ed's dreams became.

  Space, but not empty. A kind of inchoate darkness wrapped over itself like the bow wave of the Alcubiere warp but worse than any of that. The cold water of a meaningless unsalted sea, the information supersubstance, substrate of some universal algorithm. Lights which shivered and writhed away from him in shoals. This was the work Sandra Shen had given him, prophecy, or the failure of prophecy, nothing revealed, a journey that went on forever, then stopped quite suddenly to leave him looking down on things from above.

  Bits and pieces of landscape, but notably a house. There would be some damp countryside, a pretty old railway station, hedges, a field tipped up at an angle, then this house, dour, four-faced, made of stone. There was a sense that these items had assembled themselves only a moment before. But that they were-or had been-in some sense real, he had no doubt. He always approached the house from above like that, and from an angle, as if arriving by plane: a tall house with a roof of purple grey slate, Flemish gables, extensive gloomy gardens in which the laurels and lawns were always wintered. White birch trees grew a little way away. It was often raining, or misty. It was dawn. It was late afternoon. After a moment or two, Ed found himself entering the house, and at that point he was woken up by the tail end of his own despairing cry.