LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  Surveys of the system, carried out fifty years after humanity arrived on the Beach, had found a single solid object in a braiding orbital dance with gas giants. Though a little large, it was strictly a moon. Tidal heating in its core had raised the surface to temperatures resembling Earth's, generating also a loose and wispy atmosphere which featured the gases that support life. Against a curious greenish arc of sky ballooned the salmon-pink bulk of the nearest gas giant. A single fractal structure occupied the entire planet. Though from a distance this resembled vegetation, it was neither alive nor dead. It was just some mad old algorithm which, vented from a passing navigational system, had run wild then run out of raw materials. The effect was of endless peacock feathers a million different sizes: a clever drawing ramped into three dimensions. Mathematics trying to save itself from death.

  Plush and velvety, surrounded by a vanishingly thin mist of itself, this structure defeated the eye at all scales. It did something strange and absorbent to the light. It lay brittle and exfoliated, fragmenting into a viral dust of itself, a useless old calculation which had accidentally become an environment. There was a biome: among its quaint bracts and stalks, local life forms moved with a kind of puzzled stealth. The logic of the ecology was unclear, its terminal fauna provisional. At dawn or dusk, something between a bird and a marmoset might be seen, making its way painfully to the tip of some huge feather to stare anxiously at the face of the gas giant, before it closed its eyes and began a fluting territorial aubade. No one had stayed long enough to find out any more.

  The White Cat burned a clearing among the feathers, hovered above them momentarily, and lowered herself down. For a minute or two nothing more happened. Then a cargo port opened and two figures debouched. After a pause in which they turned back and seemed to be arguing with the ship itself, they hurried down the already-closing cargo ramp and stood in silence. They were naked, although they had between them what seemed to be some party clothes and the bottom half of an old G-suit. As they watched, the White Cat stood on its tail, shot into the sky, and vanished, all in the same easy, practised gesture.

  Mona the clone stared helplessly about.

  'She might at least have dropped us near a town,' she said. 'The bitch.'

  Thrown into a fugue to which-for once-the mathematics of the White Cat had made no contribution, Seria Mau Genlicher, pilot of the spaceways, dreamed she was ten years old again. One moment her mother was smiling and excited; the next she was dead and in a photograph, which not long later went up into the wet afternoon air in grey smoke.

  The father couldn't bear anything that reminded him of his wife. That photograph was too hard to bear, he said. Just too hard to bear. All winter, he locked himself in his study, and when Seria Mau brought him the tray at lunchtime, touched her cheek and cried. Stay for a moment, he urged her. Be the mother for just a moment. She couldn't begin to articulate the embarrassment she felt at this. She looked at the floor, which only made it worse. He kissed her gently on the top of the head, then with one finger under her chin, gently compelled her to face him again. You look like her, he said. You look so like her. A gasp came from him. Sit here, no here, like this. Like this. He put his fingers down between Seria Mau's legs then gasped and burst into tears. Seria Mau took the tray and went out. Why would he do that? She felt as stiff and awkward as someone learning how to walk.

  'Waraaa!' said her brother, ambushing her on the landing. 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.

  All that winter, K-ships roared low over the New Pearl River. They made sudden dirty white arcs across the sky. The father took Seria Mau and her brother to the base, to watch those ships come in. It was war. It was peace. Who knew what it would be, out there on the edge of the galaxy, with the Nastic only three systems away, and unknown assets at large in the Kuiper Belt, presenting as lumps of dirty ice? The children loved it. There followed the best and worst of times, marked by parades and marches, economic crashes, political speeches, the overturning of scientific paradigms: fresh news every day. That was when Seria Mau made up her mind. That was when she made her own plans. She collected holograms-little black cubes full of stars, roseate nebulae, wisps of floating gas-the way other girls collected cosmetics. 'This is Eridon Omega,' she explained to her brother, 'south of the White Cawl. The Vittor Neumann pod rules there. Just let the Nastic try anything against them!' Her eyes glowed. 'They have ordnance that evolves itself, generation by generation, in a medium outside the ship. Whole worlds are at stake here!' She watched herself say this in the mirror, with no idea why she looked so wild-eyed and excited. The morning of her thirteenth birthday, she signed up. EMC were always looking for recruits, and for the K-pods they only wanted the youngest, fastest people they could find.

  'You should be proud of me,' she told the father.

  'I'm proud,' her brother said. He burst into tears. 'I want to be a space ship too.'

  Saulsignon was a training camp by then. There were wire fences everywhere. The little railway station had lost its look of Ancient Earth, its flower tubs and the tabby cat which made the brother angry because it reminded him of his little black kitten. They stood there, the three of them, on her last day, awkward in the wind and rain.

  'Will you get leave?' the father said.

  Seria Mau laughed triumphantly.

  'Never!' she said.

  As soon as this word was out, the dream faded to nothing, like lights going down. When they came up again, they came up in the magic shop window. Ruby-coloured plastic lips. Feathers dyed bright orange and green. Bundles of coloured scarves that would go into the magician's shiny hat and then hop out as live white pigeons. All that stuff which, though sometimes pretty, was always fake: always made to mislead and dissemble. Seria Mau stood in front of the glass for some time, but the conjuror never came. Just as she was turning to leave, she heard a faint bell ring, and a voice whispered, 'When will you come for me, Dr Haends?' She looked around in surprise at the empty street. There was no doubt about it. The voice had been her own. When she woke, she thought for a moment that someone was bending over her: in the same instant, she saw herself marooning Billy Anker and Mona the clone in the shadow of the gas giant. The memory of an act that bad could only make you feel absurd.

  'Why did you let me do it?' she said.

  The mathematics gave its equivalent of a shrug. 'You weren't ready to listen.'

  'Take us back there.'

  'I wouldn't recommend that.'

  'Take us back.'

  The White Cat shut her torch down and fell as silently as a derelict between the gas giants. Course changes were made in increments, using tiny, ferocious pSi engines which worked by blowing oxygen on to porous silicon compounds. Meanwhile, the particle-detectors and massive arrays, extending like veinous systems in a leaf, sifted vacuum for the track of the Krishna Moire pod. Tower up,' the mathematics instructed quietly. 'Power down.' What was left of Seria Mau's body moved impatiently in its tank. She had a need to see Billy Anker that anyone else would have described as physical. If she had remembered how, she would have bitten her lip. 'Why did I do this?' she asked herself. The shadow operators shook their heads: sooner or later something like it had been bound to happen, they inferred. In the end the White Cat got close enough to examine the planet itself. Something moved among the feathers. It might have been whatever lived down there; it might have been ancient calculations crumbling into dust.

  'What's that?' said the mathematics.

  'Nothing,' said Seria Mau. 'Go in,' she ordered. 'I've had enough of this.'

  She found Billy Anker and Mona the clone lying half out of the long cobalt shadows. Mona was already dead, her pretty blonde head resting on the upper part of Billy's chest. He had one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he was still stroking her hair. As she died she had been looking intently into his face, and had placed one leg between both his, trying to get some final comfort out of life. Under the
instructions of the old algorithm-which, provided so suddenly with raw material for its endless repetition, had sifted stealthily down on to them from the structures above-their cells were turning to feathers. Billy Anker's legs looked like a peacock satyr's. Mona was gone all the way to diaphragm, blue-black dusty feathers which seemed to shift and grow and do something odd to the light.

  Seria Mau's fetch-in these conditions little more than a shadow itself -wove nervously about in front of the lovers. How could I have done this? she thought, while she said aloud:

  'Billy Anker, is there any way I can help?'

  Billy Anker never stopped stroking the dead woman's hair, or looking away from her.

  'No,' he said.

  'Does it hurt?'

  Billy Anker smiled to himself. 'Kid,' he said, 'it's more comfortable than you'd think. Like a good downer.' He laughed suddenly. 'Hey, the wormhole was the spectacle. You know? That's what I keep remembering. That was how I expected to go.' Silent a moment, he contemplated that. 'I could never even describe what it was like in there,' he said. Then he said, 'I can hear this thing counting. Or is that some sort of illusion?'

  Seria Mau came as close to him as she could.

  'I can't hear anything. Billy Anker, I'm sorry to have done this.' At that, he bit his lip and finally looked away from Mona the clone.

  'Hey,' he said. 'Forget it.'

  He convulsed. Dust billowed up from the stealthily shifting surface of his body. The algorithm was reorganising him at all scales. For a moment his eyes filled with horror. He hadn't expected this. 'It's eating me!' he shouted. He flailed with his arms, clutched at the dead woman as if she might help him. Forgetting she was only a fetch, he tried to clutch at Seria Mau too. Then he got control of himself again. 'The more you deny the forces inside, kid, the more they control you,' he said. His hand went through her like a hand through srnoke. He stared at it in surprise. 'Is this happening?' he asked.

  'Billy Anker, what am I to do?'

  'That ship of yours. Take it deep. Take it to the Tract.'

  'Billy, I-'

  Above them, streaks of violet ionisation went across the face of the gas giant. There was a great whistling thud of displaced air; then another; then a vast emerald fireball somewhere in orbit, as the White Cat began to defend herself against what must be the attentions of the Krishna Moire pod. Suddenly, Seria Mau was half up there with her ship, half down here with Billy Anker. Alarms were going off everywhere along the continuum between these two states, and the mathematics was trying to disconnect her fetch.

  'Leave me!' she cried. 'I want to stay with him! Someone must stay with him!'

  Billy Anker smiled and shook his head.

  'Get out of here, kid. That's Uncle Zip up there. Get out while you can.'

  'Billy Anker, I brought them down on you!'

  He looked tired. He closed his eyes.

  'I brought them down on myself, kid. Get out of here. Take it deep.'

  'Goodbye, Billy Anker.'

  'Hey, kid-'

  But when she turned to answer, he was dead.

  I fell for it, she told herself in despair. All the fucking and the fighting. Despite everything I promised myself, I fell for it too.

  Then she thought: Uncle Zip! Terror dissolved her, because she had so underestimated that fat man, how intelligent he was, how galaxywide. She had been in his hands from the moment she began to deal with him.

  What would she do now?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tumbling Dice

  'If I'm predicting the future, how come I always see the past?'

  When Ed asked Sandra Shen that question, she was no more help than Annie Glyph. All she did was shrug lightly.

  'I think we need practice, Ed,' she said. She lit a cigarette and gave her attention amusedly to something in the corner of the room. 'I think we need to work harder.'

  Ed never could decode that distant look of hers. If anything, she seemed pleased by the debacle in the main tent. It filled her full of energy: her other projects languished, and she was around on a daily basis. She kicked the old men out of the bar of the Dunes Motel. He came in and found her fitting it out with equipment of her own, which she was bringing in at night in unmarked crates. This stuff was uniformly old. It featured cloth-covered electric cable, Bakelite casings, dials across which tiny needles rose and fell. There was some kind of amplifier that worked by valves.

  'Jesus,' he said. 'This is real.'

  'Fun, isn't it?' Sandra Shen said. 'Four hundred and fifty years old, give or take. Ed, it's time we began to work together on this. Put our heads together. What I need to do is fasten these straps round your wrists… '

  The idea was that Ed sat with his arms and legs strapped to the arms and legs of a big raw-looking wooden chair that came with the rest of the equipment, while Sandra Shen connected herself to the valve amplifier. She then settled the fishtank on Ed's head and asked him questions until she got an answer that suited her. Her voice came to him close and intimate, as if she was in there with him and the eels on their weird, tiring journey beneath the Alcubiere sea, forward towards some unwelcome revelation of his youth. The questions were meaningless to Ed.

  'Is life a bitch or isn't it, Ed?' she would say. Or: 'Can you count to twelve?'

  He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn't hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of whitesunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.

  In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly dйcolletй emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren't the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. 'More practice, Ed. That's all you need.' She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. 'Well done, Ed. Well done.'Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.

  'Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?' Annie asked him one night.

  Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.

  'It's a living,' he said.

  'Oh, very entradista,' she said sarcastically. 'Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.'

  Ed shrugged.

  'I don't know what you mean.'

  'Yes you do.'

  Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.

  'What do you know about her, Ed?' she called back in. 'Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to see?' When he didn't answer, she said, 'It's just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.'

  'Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.'

  Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.

  'It's a beautiful night out here. Let's walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I'll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!'

  'I am a show,' Ed said.

  Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn't want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn't want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by
. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. 'Any time, man.'

  When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.

  'Is this wise?' was all she said.

  'Everyone,' he said, 'deserves a break.'

  'And yet, Ed, there's Bella Cray.'

  'What do you know about Bella?' he demanded.

  When she shrugged, he shrugged loo.

  'If you're not scared of her, I'm not either.'

  'Be careful, Ed.'

  'I'm careful,' he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.

  He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.

  Had he lost them? He couldn't be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But: they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.