LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

'Hush,' said Annie Glyph. 'Hush, Ed.'

  'I remember things I haven't seen,' Ed cried out.

  He clung to her, listening to her heart, which beat thirty times a minute or less. It was always there to reclaim him, that huge dependable heart, to fetch him out of the standing wave of his own terror. On the down side, it soothed him almost instantly back into unconsciousness, where one night the dream moved on and he was the one place he didn't want to be. Inside the house. He saw stairs. 'Waraaa!' he shouted, ambushing his sister in the hall. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner. It was too late to help. He looked into his sister's face, full of some rage he couldn't name. He ran away, shouting.

  'After she left, our father stood on the kitten,' he told Annie next morning. 'It died. He didn't mean that to happen. But that was when I made up my mind I'd leave too.'

  She smiled. 'Travel the galaxy,' she said.

  'Fly the ships,' he said.

  'Have all the pussy you could find.'

  'That and more,' Ed said with a grin.

  He sat for a minute after Annie had gone to work, thinking:

  That was the black kitten I remembered, then: but there was more to it than that. Before the sister went away. He thought he saw a river, a woman's face. Fingers trailed in water. A voice saying delightedly but far off:

  'Aren't we lucky? Aren't we lucky to have this?'

  We were all together then, Ed thought.

  Ed did his first show in a tuxedo.

  Thereafter, for obvious reasons, he would favour a cheap blue boiler suit made of easily washable fabrics: but the first time he was resplendent. They built a cramped little stage for him, between 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney Looking Into a Monitor in 1999' and 'Toyota Previa with Clapham Schoolchildren, 2002', lighting it with racks of antique coloured spots and some careful holographic effects designed to maintain the theme. In the centre of the stage Ed had the bare wooden chair on which he would sit while he used the fishtank; also a microphone as old as the lights.

  'It won't actually be connected to anything,' Harryette said. 'We'll handle the sound in the usual way.'

  The hermaphrodite seemed nervous. She had fussed around all afternoon. She specialised in stage management, and was always describing how she had worked her way up to it from being an ordinary stagehand. It was Harryette who had insisted on the tuxedo. 'We want you to seem commanding,' she said. She was proud of her ideas. Privately, Ed thought they bordered on the fatuous. With her shaved head, live tattoos and thatch of reddish armpit hair, he thought she was the least appealing of Sandra Shen's manifestations. He kept wanting to say, 'Look, you're a shadow operator, you could run on anything. So why this?' but he couldn't find the right moment. Also he wasn't sure how an algorithm would take that sort of criticism. Meanwhile he had to listen to her explain, as she indicated the tableaux on each side of the tiny stage:

  'We site ourselves on the cusp like this to exploit suggestions of impermanence and perpetual change.'

  'I can see we'd want to do that.' Ed said.

  He didn't see why they had to have the hologram backdrop of the Kefahuchi Tract, shimmering away behind the stage as if projected on a satin curtain. But when he asked Harryette about it, she changed the subject immediately, morphing into Sandra Shen and advising him: 'What you've got to recognise, Ed, is that they want you dead. All prophecy is a sending-on-before. The audience need you to be dead for them.'

  Ed stared at her.

  On the night, he wasn't sure what the audience wanted from him. They filed into the performance space in a kind of rustling hush, a broad sample of New Venusport life. There were corporates from the enclaves, dressed in careful imitation of the tableaux in the offstage shadows; geeks and cultivars from Pierpoint Street; little perfect port prostitutes smelling of vanilla and honey; rickshaw girls, tank addicts, eight-year-old gun punks and their accountants. There were quite a few New Men with their pliable-looking, etiolated limbs and inappropriate facial expressions. They were quieter than a circus audience ought to be, they had bought less food and drink than Ed had expected. They were ominously attentive. They didn't look as if they wanted him dead. He sat on the wooden chair in his tuxedo in the coloured spotlight and stared out at them. He felt hot and a bit sick. His clothes felt too tight.

  'Ah,' he said.

  He coughed.

  'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said. Rows of white faces stared at him. 'The future. What is it?'

  He couldn't think of anything to add to that, so he bent forward, picked up the fishtank, which had been placed on the floor between his feet, and set it on his lap. Ed's duty was to see. It was to speak. He had no idea if prophecy was entertainment or a service industry. Madam Shen had not been clear on that.

  'Why don't I get my face in this?' he suggested.

  Silver eels streamed out of him, something leaking out of his life, and Ed leaking after it like a current of warmer water in a cold sea. That night was no different to any other experience in the fishtank, except perhaps for an added, gluey distance to everything he saw. Everything in there was an effort that night. He woke up on the spaceport concrete perhaps an hour later. A salt night wind was blowing. He felt sick and cold. Annie Glyph was kneeling by him. He had the feeling that she had been there for some time. That she was prepared to wait however long it took. He coughed and heaved. She wiped his mouth.

  'There,' she said.

  'Jesus,' said Ed. 'Hey,' he said. 'How was I?'

  'It was a short show. As soon as you put the fishtank on your head, you had some sort of spasm. That was what it looked like.' Annie smiled. 'They weren't convinced,' she went on, 'until you got out of the chair.' He had got out of the chair, she told him, to stand facing the audience for maybe a minute in the shifting light, during which time he trembled and slowly pissed himself. 'It was a real twink moment, Ed. I was proud of you.' After that some muffled sounds came out of the smoky-looking substance in the tank. He shrieked suddenly and began trying to wrestle it off his head. Then he passed out and fell his length into the front row of the audience. 'They weren't happy, and we had some problems with them after that. You know, they were corporates who had paid for special seats and you were sick on their good clothes. Madam Shen talked to them, but they seemed disappointed. We had to drag you out the back way.'

  'I don't remember that.'

  'It didn't look much. You spoilt your tuxedo, rolling about in your own piss.'

  'But did I say anything?'

  'Oh, you told the future. You did that all right.'

  'What'd I say?'

  'You talked about war. You said things no one wanted to hear. Blue babies floating out of wrecked ships in empty space. Frozen babies in space, Ed.' She shivered. 'No one wants to hear that kind of thing.'

  'There isn't any war,' Ed pointed out. 'Not yet.'

  'But there will be, Ed. That's what you said: "War!"'

  This meant nothing to Ed. After he had passed the part with the eels, instead of seeing his childhood in the house with the grey roof, he had watched himself step off his first rocket ship-a tubby little dynaflow freighter called the Kino Chicken-on to the parched soil of his first alien planet, with a broad sixteen-year-old leer on his face. The monkey was on his back. He was grooving on concepts of infinite travel and empty space. Always more. Always more after that. He stood at the top of the cargo ramp and shouted, 'Alien planet!' Never regret anything, he promised himself there and then. Never go back. Never see them again, mothers, fathers, sisters who abandon you. It was no distance at all from that position to the death of Dany LeFebre which had hurt him so bad. It all led so inevitably from the Kino Chicken, through hyperdip, to the twink-tank.

  He told Annie Glyph this, as they walked back across the concrete to her room.

  'I had another name then,' he said.

  Suddenly he thought he was going to be sick again. He crouched down and put his head between his knees. He cleared his throat. A
nnie touched his shoulder. After a bit he felt better, and was able to look up at her. 'I let those people down tonight,' he said. She made him see, the way she always did, that massive calm patience of hers. He threw himself against it because it was what he had.

  'If I'm predicting the future,' he said desperately, 'why do I always see the past?'

  TWENTY-TWO

  Persistent Entities

  It was late. People hurried in and out of the restaurants and cinemas, heads down into the wet and windy night. The trains were still running. Michael Kearney zipped his jacket up. While he walked, he got on his cellphone and made an effort to raise Brian Tate, first at Tate's home, then at the Sony offices in Noho. No one was answering-although at Sony a recording tried to lure him into the maze of automated corporate response-and he soon put the phone away again. Anna caught up with him twice. The first time was at Hammersmith, where he had to stop and buy a ticket.

  'You can follow me all you like,' Kearney told her. 'It won't help.'

  She gave him a flushed, obstinate look, then pushed her way through the ticket barrier and down to the eastbound platform where-the light of a malfunctioning fluorescent flickering harshly across the upper half of her face-she challenged him: 'What good's your life been? Honestly, Michael: what good has it been?'

  Kearney took her by the shoulders as if to shake her; looked at her instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind.

  'You're being ridiculous. Go home.'

  She set her mouth.

  'You see? You can't answer. You haven't got an answer.'

  'Go home now. I'll be all right.'

  'That's what you always said. Isn't it? And look at you. Look how frightened and upset you are.'

  Kearney shrugged suddenly.

  'I'm not afraid,' he said, and walked off again.

  Her disbelieving laugh followed him down the platform. When the train came she stood as far away from him as she could in the crowded carriage. He lost her briefly in the late-night melee at Victoria, but she picked him up again and struggled grimly after him through a crowd of laughing Japanese teenagers. He set his teeth, got off the train two stops early and walked as fast as he could for a mile or so, into the light and activity of West Croydon and out into the suburban streets the other side. Whenever he looked back she had fallen further behind: but she always kept him in sight somehow, and by the time he knocked at Brian Tate's door she had caught him up again. Her hair was slicked down to her scalp, her face was flushed and exasperated; but she blinked the rain out of her eyes and gave him one of those brilliant, strained smiles, as if to say:

  'You see?'

  Kearney knocked at the door again, and they stood there in an angry truce with their luggage in their hands, waiting for something to happen. Kearney felt a fool.

  Brian Tate's house was situated in a quiet, hilly, tree-lined street with a church at one end and a retirement home at the other. It boasted four floors, a short gravelled (driveway between laurels, mock-Tudor timbering over pebbledash. On summer evenings you would be able to watch foxes sniffing about among the licheny apple trees in the garden at the rear. It had the air of a house that had been used mildly and well all its existence. Children had been brought up there, and sent on to the kinds of schools suited to children from houses like these, after which they had made careers in brokerage and then had children of their own. It was a modest, successful house, but there was something gloomy about it now, as if Brian Tale's occupancy had disconcerted it.

  When no one answered the door, Anna Kearney put down her bag and went to stand on tiptoe in the flower bed beneath one of the windows.

  'Someone's in,' she said. 'Listen.'

  Kearney listened, but he couldn't hear anything. He went round to the back of the house and listened there, but all the windows were dark and there was nothing to hear. The rain came down quietly on the garden.

  'He's not here.'

  Anna shivered. 'Someone's in,' she repeated. 'I saw him looking out at us.'

  Kearney rapped on the window.

  'See?' Anna called excitedly. 'He moved!'

  Kearney got his cellphone out and dialled Tate's number. 'Knock on the door again,' he said, putting the phone to his ear. He got an old-fashioned answer machine and said, 'Brian, if you're there, pick up. I'm outside your house and I need to talk to you.' The tape ran for half a minute then stopped. 'For God's sake Brian, I can see you in there.' Kearney was dialling again when Tate opened the front door and looked out uncertainly. 'It's no good doing that,' he said. 'I keep the phone somewhere else.' He was wearing some kind of heavily insulated silver parka over cargo pants and a T-shirt. A wave of heat came out of the door behind him. The hood of the parka obscured his face, but Kearney could see that it was hollow and tired-looking, in need of a shave. He looked from Kearney to Anna, then back again.

  'Do you want to come in?' he said vaguely.

  'Brian -' Kearney began.

  'Don't go in,' Anna said suddenly. She was still standing in the flower bed under the window.

  'You don't have to come with me,' Kearney told her.

  She stared at him angrily. 'Oh yes I do.'

  Inside, the house was thick with heat and humidity. Tate led them into a small room at the back.

  'Could you shut the door after you?' he said. 'Keep the warmth in.'

  Kearney looked around.

  'Brian, what the fuck are you doing?'

  Tate had made the room into a Faraday cage by tacking copper chicken wire to the walls and ceiling. As an extra precaution he had covered the windows with Bacofoil. Nothing electromagnetic could get into him from outside that room; nothing could get out. No one could know what he was doing, if he was doing anything. Boxes of tacks, rolls of chicken wire and Bacofoil cartons lay everywhere. The central heating was turned up full. Two standalone heaters running off bottled gas roared away in the middle of the room next to a Formica kitchen table and chair. On the table Tate had racked six G4 servers connected in parallel, a keyboard, a hooded monitor, some peripherals. He also had an electric kettle, instant coffee, plastic cups. Takeaway food cartons littered the floor. The room stank. It was immeasurably bleak and obsessive in there.

  'Beth left,' Tate explained. He shivered and put his hands out to one of the heaters. His face was hard to see inside the hood of the parka. 'She went back to Davis. She took the kids.'

  'I'm sorry to hear that,' Kearney said.

  'I bet you are,' Tate said. 'I bet you are.' He raised his voice suddenly. 'Look,' he said, 'what do you want? I keep the phone in another room, you know? I've got work to do here.'

  Meanwhile, Anna Kearney was staring around as if she couldn't believe any of it. Every so often her eyes went across Tate with the calm contempt of one neurotic for another, and she shook her head. 'What's that?' she said suddenly. The white cat had emerged cautiously from under the desk. It looked up at Michael Kearney and ran off a little way. Then it stretched itself with a kind of careful self-regard and walked up and down purring, its tail stuck in the air. It seemed to be enjoying the heat. Anna knelt down and offered her hand. 'Hello, baby,' she said. 'Hello, little baby.' The cat ignored her, leapt lightly up on to the hardware, and from there on to Tate's shoulder. It looked thinner than ever, its head more than ever like the blade of an axe, ears transparent, fur a corona of light.

  'I'm living in just the one room,' Tate said.

  'What's happened, Brian?' Kearney said gently. 'I thought you said it was a glitch.'

  Tate held his hands out from his sides.

  'I was wrong.'

  Rooting about in the tangle of USB cable, stacked peripherals and old coffee cups that covered the desk, he came up with a 100Gb pocket drive in a polished titanium shell. This he offered to Kearney, who weighed it cautiously in his hand.

  'What's this?'

  'The results of the last run. It was decoherence-free for a whole minute. We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in. That's like a million
years down there. That's like the indeterminacy principle is suspended.'He gave a strained laugh. 'Is a million years long enough for us, do you think? Will that do? But then… I don't know what happened then. The fractals… '

  Kearney felt this wasn't going anywhere. He thought results like these were probably wrong, and that anyway they couldn't explain what he had seen in the laboratory.

  'Why did you smash the monitors up, Brian?'

  'Because it wasn't physics any more. Physics was off. The fractals started to — ' he couldn't think of a word, nothing had prepared him for whatever he was seeing in his head ' — leak. Then the cat went inside after them. She just walked through the screen and into the data.' He laughed, looking from Kearney to Anna. 'I don't expect you to believe that,' he said.

  Underneath it all — underneath the inexplicable fear, the weirdness, the simple guilt of selling the project out first to Meadows then to Sony-Tate was just a teenager good at physics. He hadn't developed past a hip haircut and the idea that his talent gave him some sort of edge in the world, if only he would always be forgiven by adults. Now his wife had disabused him of that. Worse, perhaps, physics itself had come looking for him in some unfathomable way he couldn't live with. Kearney felt sorry for him, but he only said carefully:

  'The cat's here, Brian. She's on your shoulder now.'

  Tate glanced at Kearney, then at his own shoulder. He didn't seem to see the white cat perched there, purring and kneading the material of his coat. He shook his head.

  'No,' he said abjectly. 'She's gone now.'

  Anna stared at Tate, then the cat, then Tate again.

  'I'm leaving,' she said. 'I'll call a taxi, if no one minds.'

  'You can't call from in here,' Tate told her, as if he was talking to a child. 'It's a cage.'Then he whispered, 'I had no idea Beth felt so badly about things.'

  Kearney touched his arm.

  'Why do you need the cage, Brian? What really happened?'

  Tate began to cry. 'I don't know,' he said.

  'Why do you need the cage?' Kearney persisted. He made Tate face him. 'Are you afraid something will get in?'