LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'You don't like anyone,' the mathematics pointed out.

  'Usually I don't,' said Seria Mau. 'But I'm very up and down today. I can't work out what's the matter with me.' Then she said: 'Where's that bastard Moire?'

  'He's down in the outer layers of the gas giant. He got out by surfing the expansion wave of the bump. He's taken damage, but his engines still work. Do you want to go in after him?'

  'No. Cook it up.'

  'Pardon?'

  'Cook the fucker up.'

  '?'

  'If you want something done,' sighed Seria Man, 'do it yourself. There.' Ordnance disengaged from one of the complex outer structures of the White Cat, hung for the blink of an eye while its engine fired, then streaked down into the gas giant's atmosphere. Gravity tried to crush it out of existence, but between here and there it had turned itself into the voice of God. Something like lightning flared across the face of the gas giant, as it began to torch itself up. Uncle Zip opened a line to the White Cat. He was puffing out his cheeks angrily. 'Hey,' he said, all that was unnecessary. You know? I paid good money for those guys. In the end I wouldn't of let them hurt you.'

  Seria Mau ignored him.

  'Better light out,' she advised her mathematics. She yawned. 'This is where we're going,' she said. And finally: 'I really didn't want to be bothered with that fucker again. I was just too tired.'

  As they left the system, a new star had begun to burn behind them.

  Seria Mau slept for a long time, dreamlessly at first. Then she began to see images. She saw the New Pearl River. She saw the garden, gloomy under rain. She saw herself from a great distance, very small but clear. She was thirteen. She had gone to sign up for the K-ships. She was saying goodbye to herbrother and her father. The scene was this: the station at Saulsignon, still pretty under its wartime skies, which were just like the wartime skies of Antique European Earth, blue, turbulent, vapour-trailed but full of hope. She saw herself wave, and she saw the father raise his hand. The brother refused to wave. He didn't want her to go, so he refused even to look at her. This scene faded slowly. After that, she glimpsed herself when she was last human, sitting on the edge of a bed shivering, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a cotton robe that fell open constantly at the back. You sign up for the K-ships in sterile white rooms at even temperatures: nevertheless, whatever you do you can't get warm. You mustn't have eaten. They give you the emetics anyway. They give you the injection. They give you the tests, but to be honest that is only to pass the two or three days it takes the injection to work. By then your bloodstream is teaming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down and give you a rubber gag, to bite on. The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon. They pump you with a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators. They core you at four points down the spine. You are conscious all the way through this process, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits, even now, don't make it past that point. If you do, they seal you in the tank. By then they have broken most of your bones, and taken some of your organs out: you are blind and deaf, and all you are aware of is a kind of nauseous surf rolling through you forever. They have cut into your neocortex so that it will accept the software bridge known ironically as 'the Einstein Cross' from the shape you see the first time you use it. You are no longer alone. You will soon be able to consciously process billions of billions of bits per second; but you will never walk again. You will never laugh or touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself again. You have signed up. It comes to you for an instant that you were able to choose this but that you will never, ever, ever be able to unchoose it.

  In the dream, Seria Mau saw herself from above. All these years on, she wept at what she had done to herself back then. Her skin was like a fish's skin. She was trembling in the tank like a damaged experimental animal. But her brother would not even wave her goodbye that day. That in itself was reason enough. Who wanted a world like that, where you had to be the mother all the time, and your brother wouldn't even wave goodbye?

  Abruptly Seria Mau was looking at a picture of a blank interior wall covered with ruched grey silk. After some time, the upper body of a man- he was tall, thin, dressed in a black tailcoat and starched white shirt; he held in one white-gloved hand a top hat, in the other an ebony cane-bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. Seria Mau trusted him immediately. He had laughter in his eyes- they were a penetrating light blue-and a black pencil moustache, and his jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he smiled at her, and in a quiet, friendly voice said:

  'You must forgive yourself all this.'

  'But -' Seria Mau heard herself reply.

  At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows opening on to the blunt glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. This made the room itself appear to be toppling through space at a measured, subrelativistic pace.

  'You must forgive yourself for everything,' the conjuror said.

  Slowly, he tipped his hat to her, and bowed himself back out of the picture. Before he had quite gone, he beckoned her to follow him. She woke up suddenly.

  'Send the shadow operators to me,' she told her ship.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Alcubiere Break

  Ed's fishtank movie showed him his sister leaving again.

  'But will you come back?' the father begged her. There was no answer to that. 'But will you?'

  Ed wrenched his head around on his neck as far as it would go, stared at anything-the flower tubs, the white cumulus clouds, the tabby cat -so as not to look at either of them. He wouldn't have a kiss from her. He wouldn't wave goodbye. She bit her bottom lip and turned away. Ed knew this was a memory. He wished he could piece it together with the other stuff he remembered, make sense of the shitty retrospective project of his life. But her face wavered as if behind water, decoherent and strange, and suddenly he was right through it and out the other side.

  Everything lurched as hewent through, and there was nothing but blackness and a sense of enormous speed. A few dim points of light. A chaotic attractor churning and boiling in the cheap iridescent colours of 400-year-old computer art. Like a wound in the firmament.

  'You believe this shit?' Ed said.

  His voice echoed. Then he was out the other side of that too, and toppling in empty space forever, where he could hear the precise roaring surf of the songs of the universe, nested inside each other like fractal dimensions-and then woke and found he was still on stage. It was unusual for that to happen, and maybe what had wakened him was this unlooked-for noise he had heard, swelling up to penetrate his prophetic coma like the sound of the waves as they fall on Monster Beach. He opened his eyes. The audience, still on its feet, was applauding him for the third solid minute. Of them all, Sandra Shen was the only one still seated. Eyeing him from the front row with an ironic smile, she tapped her little oriental paws slowly together. Ed leaned forward to try and hear the sound they made. Fainted.

  Next he woke with the smell of salt in his nostrils. The great bulk of the dunes was black over him. Above that, the neck of the night with its cheap ornaments strung round it. Both of those were more comforting than the silhouette of the circus owner, the red ember of her bat-shit cigarette. She seemed pleased.

  'Ed, you did so well!'

  'What did I say? What happened?'

  'What happened, they loved you Ed,' she answered. 'You shot right through. I'
d say you were their boy.' She laughed. 'I'd say you were my boy too.'

  Ed tried to sit up.

  'Where's Annie?'

  'Annie had to be somewhere else, Ed. But I'm here.'

  Ed stared up at her. She was kneeling behind his head, bent over so she could look in his face. Her face was upside down to him, faint, sallow with clues. A few lively motes spilled from her eyes, blew away on the sea wind. She smiled and stroked his forehead.

  'Still bored, Ed? No need to be. The circus is yours. You can name your price. We can start selling futures. Oh, and Ed?'

  'What?'

  'We leave in a fortnight.'

  He felt relieved. He felt doomed. He didn't know how to tell Annie. He drank all day in the bars of the coastal strip; or- which was not like him-practised voluntarily with the fishtank in the afternoons. He would have played the Ship Game, but the old men were long gone from the Dunes Motel. He would have twinked out but he was afraid to go downtown. Annie, meanwhile, absented herself from his life. She worked all night, and came in quietly after she thought Ed had gone to sleep. When they did meet, she was preoccupied, quiet, withdrawn. Had she guessed? She looked away from him when he smiled. This made him wretched enough to say:

  'We have to talk.'

  'Do we, Ed?'

  'While we still remember each other.'

  A week after he hit the jackpot, she didn't come home at all.

  She was away three days. During that time, Madame Shen prepared to leave New Venusport. The exhibits were folded. The attractions were packed. The big tent was struck. Her ship, The Perfect Low, came down from the parking lot one bright blue morning. It turned out to be a tubby brass-coloured little dynaflow HS-SE freighter, forty or fifty years old, built cheap and cheerful with a pointed nose and long curved fins at the back. 'Well, Ed, what do you think of the rocket?' Sandra Shen asked. Ed stared up at the ripe-avocado geometry of its hull, blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core.

  'It's a dog,' he told her. 'You want my opinion.'

  'You'd prefer a hyperdip,' she said. 'You'd prefer to be back on France Chance IV, going dive for dive with Liv Hula in a smart carbon hull. She couldn't have done it without you, Ed. She went on record later, "I only pushed so hard because I was afraid Ed Chianese would get there first".'

  Ed shrugged.

  'I did all that,' he said. 'I'd prefer to be with Annie now.'

  'Oh ho. Now he can go, he can't bring himself to leave. Annie's got things to do at the moment, Ed.'

  'Things for you?'

  It was Sandra Shen's turn to shrug. She continued to gaze wryly up at her ship. After a moment she said: 'Don't you want to know why they love your show? Don't you want to know why they changed their minds about you?'

  Ed shivered. He wasn't sure he did.

  'Because you stopped the war-talk, Ed, and all the stuff about eels. You gave them a future instead. You gave them the Tract, glittering in front of them like an affordable asset. You took them in there, you showed them what they might find, what it might make them. Everything's worn out down here, and they know it. You didn't offer them retro, Ed. You said it hadn't all been done. You said, "Go deep!" That's what they wanted to hear: one day soon they were going to get off the beach at last, and into the sea!'

  She laughed. 'You were very persuasive. Then you were sick.'

  'But I've never been there,' Ed said. 'No one has.'

  Sandra Shen licked a flake of local tobacco from the corner of her lower lip.

  'That's right,' she said. 'They haven't, have they?'

  Ed waited for Annie, she didn't come. One day, then two. He cleaned the room. He washed out her spare Lycra. He stared at the wall. Suddenly, when he didn't want to go anywhere, or be reminded there was anywhere to go, the port was full of activity. Rocket flare lit the dunes all night. Rickshaws bustled in and out. The circus was shipped, except for the aliens in their decorated mortsafes which you saw in the distance just after dawn, following their handlers across the concrete on some unknown errand. The third day, Ed got out an aluminium folding chair and sat in the sun with a bottle of Black Heart. Half past ten in the morning, a Pierpoint Street rickshaw entered the port from the city side and came on at a good clip.

  Ed jumped to his feet. 'Hey, Annie! Annie!' he called. The chair went over, but he saved the rum. 'Annie!'

  'Ed!'

  She was laughing. He heard her call his name all the way across the concrete. But when the rickshaw pulled up in front of him in a cloud of advertisements like coloured smoke and tissue paper, it wasn't Annie between the shafts, only some other girl with big legs who looked him up and down ironically.

  'Hey,' he said. 'Who are you?'

  'You ain't ready to know,' said the rickshaw girl. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. 'Your squeeze is in there.'

  At that moment, Annie Glyph stepped down on to the concrete. Those missing three days she had put to use, and had herself made over- an investment unknowingly underpinned by the humiliated Bella Cray. The cut was radical. New clean flesh had flourished like magic in the tailor's soup. The old Annie was gone. What Ed saw was this: a girl not more than fifteen years old. She wore a calf-length pink satin skirt with a kick pleat at the back, and a bolero top in lime green angora wool that showed off her nipples. This she had accessorised with a little gold chain belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. Her hair, a blonde floss, was done up in bunches with matching ribbon. Even with the shoes she was less than five foot two and a half inches tall.

  'Hi Ed,' she said. 'Like it? It's called Mona.'

  She looked down at herself. Looked back up at him and laughed.

  'You like it!' she said.

  She said anxiously: 'You do like it, don't you?' She said, 'Oh Ed. I'm so happy.'

  Ed didn't know what to say. 'Do I know you?'

  'Ed!'

  'It was a joke,' he said. 'I see the resemblance now. It's nice, but I don't know why you did this.'

  He said: 'I liked you the way you were.'

  Annie stopped smiling.

  'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'It wasn't for you. It was for me.'

  'I don't get this.'

  'Ed, I wanted to be smaller.'

  'This isn't smaller,' Ed said. 'It's Pierpoint Street.'

  'Oh, great,' she said. 'Fuck off. It's what I am, Ed. Pierpoint Street.'

  She got back in the rickshaw. To the rickshaw girl she said, 'Take me away from this fucker.' She got down out of the rickshaw again and stamped her foot. 'I love you Ed, but it has to be said you're a twink. What if I wanted to be fucked by someone bigger than me? What if that was what I needed to get off? You don't see that, that's why you're a twink.'

  Ed stared at her. 'I'm having an argument with someone I don't even recognise,' he complained.

  'Look at me then. You helped me when I was down, only I found out too late that being your mother was the price. Twinks always need a mother. What if I didn't want to be that any more?"

  She sighed. She could see he didn't get it.

  'Look,' she said. 'What's my life to you? You saved me, and I don't forget that. But I got my ideas about things. I got my ambitions, I always did. You're shipping out with Madam Shen anyway. Oh yes! You think I didn't know that? Ed, I was there before you. Only a twink would think I wasn't.

  'We already saved each other, now it's time to save ourselves. You know I'm right.'

  A long curved wave of bleakness raced towards Ed Chianese's shore: the Alcubiere break, which is the black surf gravity; which is the coiled swell of empty space that sucks into itself one significant event of your life after another and if you don't move on you're left there gazing out across nothing at nothing much again.

  'I guess,' he said.

  'Hey,' she said. 'Look at me.' She came close and made him look in her eyes. 'Ed, you'll be OK.'

  Her tailored pheromones caused his head to spin. Her very voice gave him an erection. He kissed her. 'Mmmm,' she said. 'That's nice. You'll soon be out ther
e again, flying those famous lady-pilots. Which I have to say I'm jealous of them.' Her eyes were the colour of speedwell in the water meadows of a New Venusport corporate village. Her hair smelled of peppermint shampoo. Despite all this, she had completely natural lines. It was art not artifice. You would never know she had been to the tailor. She was sex on a stick, Mona the clone, the porn in your pocket.

  'I got what I wanted, Ed -'

  'I'm glad,' Ed made himself say. 'I really am.'

  ' — and I hope you will too.'

  He kissed the top of her head. 'You take care, Annie.'

  She let him see her smile.

  'I will,' she said.

  'Bella Cray… '

  Annie shrugged.

  'You didn't know me, Ed. How will she?'

  She detached herself from him gently and got back in the rickshaw. 'You certain about this?' the rickshaw girl was prompted to enquire. 'Because you been in and out of there before.'

  'I'm certain,' Annie said. 'I'm sorry.'

  'Hey,' said the rickshaw girl, 'don't apologise. You work the port you're on a diet of raw sentiment.'

  Annie laughed. She sniffed and wiped her eyes.

  'You take care too,' she told Ed.

  With that she was gone. Ed watched the rickshaw grow smaller and smaller as it crossed the bare concrete to the spaceport gate, its advertisements streaming after it like a cloud of coloured scarves and butterflies in the sun. Annie's little hand appeared for a moment, to be waved back at Ed, forlorn and cheerful at the same time. He heard her call something which he worked out later was, 'Don't spend too much time in the future!' Then she turned the corner to the city, and he never saw her again in that life.

  Ed went and got drunk the rest of the day at the Cafй Surf and was dragged home in the dark by his former gambling partners from the Dunes Motel. There, he found Sandra Shen waiting for him with the fishtank under her arm. The old men laughed and blew on their hands to indicate scorching. 'You in trouble now, my man!' they predicted. All that night, pale white motes flickered in the dark in Annie Glyph's old room; then, later, on the dunes outside. Next day he woke exhausted aboard The Perfect Low. He was alone, and the ship was warming for take-off He felt the hum of engines through her frame. He felt the tremble in the tips of her fins. The oily preflight roll of the dynaflow drivers came up to him from somewhere below and the hair rose on the back of his neck for the millionth time because he was alive in this place and this time, and leaving it all only to find something else out there.