LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  Tate wiped at his eyes. 'No, I'm frightened it will get out,' he said. He shivered and made a curious half-turn away from Kearney, raising his hand to zip the neck of the parka; this brought him face to face with Anna. He jerked in a startled way, as if he had forgotten she was there. 'I'm cold,' he: whispered. He felt around behind him with one hand, pulled the; chair out from behind the table and sat down heavily. All the time the white cat rode on his shoulder, shifting its balance fluently, purring. Tate looked up at Kearney from the chair and said:

  'I'm always cold.'

  He was silent for a moment, then he said: 'I'm not really here. None of us are.'

  Tears rolled down the dark grooves around his mouth.

  'Michael, we're none of us here at all.'

  Kearney stepped forward quickly and, before Tate could react, pulled back the hood of the parka. Fluorescent light fell mercilessly across Tate's face, stubbled, exhausted, old-looking, and with an abraded appearance about the eyes, as if he had been working without spectacles, or crying all night. Probably, Kearney thought, he had been doing both. The eyes themselves were watery, a little bloodshot, with pale blue irises. Nothing was odd about them in the end except the tears pouring in a silvery stream from their inner corners. There were too many of them for Tate's grief. Every tear was made up of exactly similar tears, and those tears too were made from tears. In every tear there was a tiny image. However far back you went, Kearney knew, it would always be there. At first he supposed it was his own reflection. When he saw what it really was he grabbed Anna by the upper arm and started dragging her out of the room. She struggled and fought all the way, hitting out at him with her luggage, staring back in horror at what was happening to Brian Tate.

  'No,' she said reasonably. 'No. Look. We have to help him.'

  'Christ, Anna! Come on!'

  The white cat was crying too. As Kearney watched, it turned its thin, savage little head towards him, and its tears poured out into the room like points of light. They flowed and flowed until the cat itself began to dissolve and spill off Brian Tate's shoulder like a slow glittering liquid on to the floor, while Tate rocked himself to and fro and made a noise like:

  'Er er er.'

  He was melting too.

  An hour later they were sitting in the brightest place they could find open in the centre of London, a pick-up bar at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street. It wasn't much of a place, but it was as far away as they could get from the cold endless suburbs and those streets of decent, bulky stockbroker homes with one lighted room visible between laurels and rhododendrons. The bar did food-mainly odds and ends of tapas-and Kearney had tried to get Anna to eat something, but she had only looked at the menu and shuddered. Neither of them was speaking, just staring out into the street outside, enjoying the warmth and the music and the feeling of being with people. Soho was still awake. Couples, mostly gay, were hurrying past the window arm in arm, laughing and talking animatedly. There was some human warmth to be had by holding your glass steady in both hands and watching that.

  Eventually Anna finished her drink and said:

  'I don't want to know what happened back there.'

  Kearney shrugged. 'I'm not sure it was actually happening like that anyway,' he lied. 'I think it was some sort of illusion.'

  'What are we going to do?'

  Kearney had been waiting for her to ask this. He found the pocket drive he had taken from Tate, weighed it in his hand for a moment then put it on the table between them, where it lay gleaming softly in the coloured light, a nicely designed object not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Titanium has a look to it, he thought. Today's popular metal. He said:

  'Take this. If I don't come back, get it to Sony. Tell them it's from Tate and they'll know what to do with it.'

  'But that stuff,' she said. 'That stuff is in there.'

  'I don't think it has anything to do with the data,' Kearney said. 'I think Tate is wrong about that. I think it's me this thing wants, and I think it's the same thing that's wanted me all along. It's just found a new way of talking to me.'

  She shook her head and pushed the: drive back towards him.

  'I'm not letting you go anyway,' she said. 'Where can you go? What can you do?'

  Kearney kissed her and smiled at her.

  'There are some things I can still try,' he said. 'I've saved them until last.'

  'But -'

  He slid back his stool and got up.

  'Anna, I can get out of this. Will you help me?' She opened her mouth to speak, but he touched her lips with his fingers. 'Will you just go home and keep this thing safe and wait for me? Please? I'll be back in the morning, I promise.'

  She glanced up at him, her eyes hard and bright, then away again. She reached out and touched the pocket drive, then put it quickly inside her coat. She shook her head, as if she had tried everything and was now consigning him to the world. 'All right,' she said. 'If that's what you want.'

  Kearney felt an enormous relief.

  He left the bar and took a cab to Heathrow, where he booked himself on the first available flight to New York.

  The airport was stunned into calmness by the late hour. Kearney sat in an empty row of seats in the departure lounge, yawning, peering out through the plate glass at the huge fins of the manoeuvring aircraft and throwing the Shrander's dice compulsively as he waited for night to turn into dawn. He had his bag on the seat beside him. He was going to America not because he wanted to, but because that was what the dice had suggested. He had no idea what he would do when he arrived. He saw himself driving through the heartlands trying to read a Triple A map in the dark; or staring out of a train window like someone in a Richard Ford story, someone whose life has long ago pivoted on to its bad side and is being held down by its own weight. All his strategies were bankrupt. They had been hollowed out years ago by a kind of persistent internal panic. Whatever was happening to him now, though, was new. It had a culminatory feeling. He was going to run again, and probably be caught this time, and perhaps find out what his life had been about. Anything else he had told Anna was a lie. She must have expected that, because just before 5 a.m. he felt her lean over him from behind and kiss him and close her thin hands over his so that he couldn't throw the dice again.

  'I knew you'd come here,' she whispered.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Star-crossed

  The commander of Touching the Void tried to contact Seria Mau by fetch.

  Something was wrong with his signal, It had lost part of itself, or got mixed up with something else, some of the baroque matter of the universe, before it reached her. The fetch squatted in front of her tank for a full minute, fading in and out of view, then vanished. It was much smaller than she remembered from their previous dealings-a bundle of yellowish limbs barely bigger than a human head, crouching in what looked like a puddle of sticky liquid. Its skin had the shine of roasted poultry. She wondered if that meant there was something wrong, not just with the signal but with the commander himself. She asked mathematics what it thought.

  'Contact broken,' the mathematics said.

  'For Christ's sake,' Seria Mau told it, 'I could work that out on my own.'

  Over the next two days the apparition reappeared at intervals of a minute or two in different parts of the ship, caught by the drifting cameras as a brief subliminal flicker. The shadow operators drove it into corners, where it became panicked. Eventually it flickered to life in front of Seria Man's tank, from which position, stabilising quickly but still too small, it regarded Seria Mau patiently from its cluster of eyes and made several attempts to speak.

  Seria Mau eyed it with distaste.

  'What?' she said.

  Eventually it managed to say her name:

  'Seria Mau Genlicher, I — ' Interference. Static. Echoes of nothing, with nothing to echo in. '- important to warn you about your position,' it said, as if completing some argument she had missed the beginning of. The signal faded, then blurted back loudly. ' �
�� modified the Dr Haends package,' it said, and was silent again. It faded into brown smoke, moving its palps agitatedly: but if it was trying to communicate further, she couldn't hear. When it had gone, Seria Mau asked the mathematics:

  'What are they doing back there?'

  'Nothing new. The Moire pod has lost way a little. Touching the Void is still phaselocked to an unknown K-ship.'

  'Can you make any sense of this?'

  'I don't think so,' the mathematics admitted.

  What does an alien think anyway? What use does it make of the world? As soon as they arrived on a planet the Nastic turned its indigenous population over to excavation projects. They wanted silos, a mile across and perhaps five miles deep. After the lithosphere was laced with these structures, the Nastic would hover by the million in the air above them, on wings which looked as cheap and brand new as a plastic hairslide. No one knew why, although the best guess was that it had religious significance. If you tried to hold more than a practical conversation with a Nastic, it began saying things like, 'The work fails only when the worker has turned from the wheel,' arid, 'In the morning, they face inward like the Moon.' The Nastic colonies, substantial in number, spread from the rim of the galaxy towards its centre, in the shape of a slice from a pie chart. The inference was obvious: they had originated from outside. That being so, no one could suggest how they had travelled the distances involved. Their own myths, in which the Ur-swarm travelled without ships at all, beating its wings down some lighted fracture in the continuum, alternately warmed and fried by radiation, could be discounted.

  There were no more attempts at communication. The White Cat fled through empty space, while her pursuers hung back like cunning hounds. It was no easier to work out what to do.

  Meanwhile, Billy Anker filled the ship. He did the most ordinary things in too large a way. Seria Mau, drawn and repelled at the same time, watched him carefully from the hidden cameras as he washed, ate, scratched his armpits sitting on the lavatory with his pressure-suit down round his knees. Billy Anker smelled of leather, sweat, something else she couldn't identify, though it might have been machine oil. He never took off his fingerless glove.

  Sleep was no consolation to him. Dreams lifted his top lip off his teeth in a frightened snarl; in the mornings he looked at himself askance in the mirror. What was there to see? What kind of inner resources could he have, with such an indifferent start in life? Invented and set in motion as an extension of his own father, he had flung himself into the void as a way of validating himself. He had done that mad thing among many other mad things, and got so worn out by them he crept away and spent ten years putting himself back together, while war came closer, and the big secrets got more remote instead of less, and the galaxy fell apart a little more, and everything strayed that bit farther from being fixable -

  Give it all up, Billy Anker, she wanted to urge him. Live for the big discovery and you only feed the fat man inside. Also he profits from everything you find. She wanted to beg him:

  'Give it all up, Billy Anker, and come away with me.'

  What did she mean by that? What could she mean? She was a rocket ship and he was a man. She thought about that. She watched ever him while he slept, and had her own dreams.

  In Seria Mau's dreams, which played themselves out as inaccurately as memories in the extended sensorium of the White Cat, Billy Anker knelt over her, smiling down endlessly while she smiled up at him. She was in love, but didn't quite know what to want. Puzzled by herself, she simply exhibited herself to him in a daze. She wanted to feel the weight of his gaze, she realised, in a room full of light, on a summer afternoon. But a kind of shadow version of this event dogged her imagination and sometimes made things seem absurd-it was cold in the house, there was food cooling on a tray, the boards were bare, she was so much smaller than him; all she felt was embarrassment and a kind of uninspired chafing. In an attempt to discover how she should act, she ran footage of Mona the clone's companions in the days before she blew them out the airlock. From this she learned to say, with a kind of angry urgency, 'I want to do it. I want to fuck.' But in the end Seria Mau had no interest in being penetrated; indeed, she was rather upset by the absurdity of the idea.

  Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, 'I'm committing suicide.'

  'Come away now dear and eat,' the shadow operators said listlessly.

  'I mean it,' Mona threatened.

  She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and-over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa -told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.

  She asked him if he could fly the White Cat.

  Billy Anker didn't seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.

  'What life's that, kid?' he said vaguely.

  Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. 'This is where I live,' Mona informed him the next day: 'And this is where you live.'

  She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth's deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn't need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, 'Jesus!' in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.

  Seria Mau followed these domestic encounters with a kind of amused tolerance. It was like having pets. Their antics could often hiring her out of her recurrent cafards, ill-humours and tantrums where the White Cat's hormonal pharmacopoeia could not. She was reassured by Mona and Billy. She expected nothing new of them.

  All the more surprising then, four or five days out of Redline, to catch them together in Mona's bedroom.

  The lighting mimicked afternoon leaking through half-closed blinds somewhere in the temperate zones of Earth. An atmosphere of cinq а sept prevailed. There was a dish of rosewater by the bed for Billy Anker to dip his fingers in if he started to come too soon. Mona wore a short grey silk slip, which was up round her waist, and lots of lip colour to make it look as if she had already bitten them. She had hold of the chrome bedhead in both hands. Her mouth was open and through the bars her eyes had a faraway look. One breast had come free of the slip.

  'Oh yes, fuck me, Billy Anker,' she said suddenly.

  Billy Anker, who was curved over her in a manner both protective and predatory, looked younger than he had. His forearms were long and brown, corded in the yellow light. His unbound hair hung down round his face; he still had on his fingerless mitt. 'Oh, fuck me through th
e wall,' Mona said. This gave him pause; then he shrugged, lost his inturned look and carried on with what he had been doing. Mona went pink and gave a fluttering, delicate little cry. That was the last straw for Billy, who after a series of spasms groaned loudly and slumped over her. They slipped apart immediately and began to laugh. Mona lit a cigarette and let him take it from her without asking. He sat up against the bedhead with one arm round her. They smoked for a while then Billy Anker, casting around for something to slake his thirst, drank the rosewater from the bedside dish.

  Seria Mau watched them in silence for a moment or two, thinking, Is this how he would have been with me?

  Then she took control of the human quarters. She reduced the temperature by tens of degrees. She brought up the lights until they had the glare of hospital fluorescents. She introduced disinfectants into the air-conditioning. Mona the clone threw her arm across her eyes then, realising what must have happened, shoved Billy Anker away from her. 'Get off me before it's too late,' she said. 'Oh God, get off me.' She scrambled out of bed and into the corner of the room, where she clung with both hands to the nearest fixed object, shaking with fear and whispering, 'It wasn't me. It wasn't me.'

  Billy Anker stared at her puzzledly. He wiped away the aerosol of disinfectant which stood on his face like sweat. Looked down at the palm of his hand. Laughed.

  'What's going on?' he said.

  Seria Mau examined him carefully. He looked like a plucked chicken in that light. His flesh looked as grey as his hair. She wasn't quite sure what she had seen in him.

  She said in her ship's voice: 'This is your stop, Billy Anker.'

  The clone whimpered, clung on harder, shut her eyes as tight as she could. 'You might well do that,' Seria Mau advised her: 'It's your stop too.' She dialled up the mathematics.

  'Open the airlock,' she ordered.

  She thought for a moment.

  'No, wait,' she said.

  Two minutes later, something levered its way out of nowhere on a remote curve of the Beach, at the edge of a system no one had ever bothered to name. Empty space convulsed. A splatter of particles organised itself in a millisecond or two from a fireworks display into the ugly lines of a K-ship-the White Cat, her torch already alight, heading in-system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic on a brutally straight line of fusion product.