LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  Always more. Always more after that.

  The little freighter shook with the excitement of it too. She balanced herself carefully on a column of flame and in her own tubby fashion hurled herself skyward.

  'Hey Ed,' came Sandra Shen's dry voice a minute or two later. 'Look at this!'

  The New Venusport parking orbit was full of K-ships. Pods and superpods stretched away as far as Ed could see, hundreds of them, in restlessly layered and shifting formations. They dipped in and out of local space, extruding w eapons, as suspicious of one another as animals, hulls simmering gently in a bouillabaisse of particles. They shimmered with navigational fields, defensive fields, fields for target acquisition and ordnance control, fields which shed everything from soft X-rays to hard light, Local space miraged and twisted around them. They were hunting without moving. He could almost hear the poisonous throb of their engines.

  War! he thought.

  The Perfect Low, receiving clearance, edged between them and out of the lot.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sparks in Everything

  After the argument with Anna, Michael Kearney dressed and took the rental car into Boston, where he drank beer and caught Burger King before it closed, after which he sped deliberately up and down the coast road, driving in and out of thick white pockets of fog while he ate a bacon double cheeseburger with fries. The ocean, when you could see it, was a silver strip far out, the dunes at the south end of the bay heaped up black against it. Seabirds cackled on the beach even in the dark. Kearney parked the car, cut the engine, listened to the wind in the grass. He made his way down through the dunes and stood on the damp sand, stirring with the toe of one shoe the bands of tide-sorted shingle. After a moment, he had the impression of something huge sweeping in across the bay towards him. The monster was returning to its beach. Or perhaps not the monster itself, but whatever lay behind it, some condition of the world, the universe, the state of things, which is black, revelatory and, in the end, a relief-something you don't want to know but are perversely glad to have confirmed. It swept in directly from the east, directly from the horizon. It passed over him, or perhaps into him. He shivered and turned away from the beach, and trudged back up the dunes to the car, thinking about the woman he had killed in the English Midlands, where their idea of a dinner-table game was to ask:

  'How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?'

  Even as he spoke he had wished he could answer differently. He had wished he could say the decent, optimistic kinds of things they were saying. Remembering this, he saw clearly how he had marginalised his own life. He had brought his life upon himself. Driving back to the cottage, he lowered the side window and threw the Burger King packaging out into the night.

  When he got back, the cottage was silent.

  'Anna?' he called.

  He found her in the front room. The TV was on, with the sound turned down. Anna had dragged the quilt off the bed again and now sat cross-legged on it by the fire, her hands resting, palms upwards, on her knees. The pound or two she had put on over the last month made her thighs, belly and buttocks seem smooth and young; above, she was still as ribby as a horse. He had a feeling there was some insight in all this he wasn't quite close enough to see. Her wrists were so white that the veins in them looked like bruises. Next to her she had placed the carbon-steel chefs knife he had bought on their first visit to the beach. Its blade flickered in the TV light, uncertain and grey, which filled the room.

  'I'm trying to scrape up all the courage I have, here,' she said, without looking away from the fire. Her voice was friendly. 'I knew you wouldn't want me if I got well.'

  Kearney picked up the knife and put it out of her reach and his. He bent over her and kissed her spine where it snaked up between the thin scapulae.

  'I do want you,' he said. He touched her wrists. They were hot but bloodless. 'Why are you doing this?'

  She shrugged. She laughed a little fake laugh. 'It's a measure of last resort,' she said. 'It's a vote of no confidence.' Kearney's laptop lay open on top of the TV set, also switched on, though it displayed only wallpaper. Into it, Anna had plugged the pocket drive they got from Tate. Of all these gestures, Kearney thought, this was probably the most dangerous. When he said so, she shrugged. 'What I hate most of all is that you don't even need to kill me any more,' she said.

  'Is that what you want? Me to kill you?'

  'No!'

  'Then what?'

  'I don't know,' she said. 'Just please fuck me properly.'

  It was awkward for both of them. Anna, instantly wet, presented herself determinedly; Kearney was less certain how to proceed. When he finally managed to penetrate her, he couldn't believe the heat of it. They began with what they knew, but she soon made him face her, urging him, 'Like this. Like this. I want to see you, I want to see your face.' Then: 'Is this better? Am I better than them?' For a second, he heard his cousins' laughter; Gorselands opened itself to him, then tilted and flickered away forever. He laughed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes!' It didn't last long, but she sighed and embraced him and gave further warm little sighs and smiles in a way she had never done before. They lay in front of the fire together for a while, then she encouraged him to try again.

  'God,' he said experimentally. 'You're so wet.'

  'I know. I know.'

  The TV chirped almost silently to itself in the gloom above them. Ads passed across its screen, to be replaced by the logo of some science channel, and after that an image of great roseate streamers of gas and dust, studded with actinic stars, pocked and wrapped with velvety blackness, full of the beautiful false clarity of a Hubble telescope image. 'The Kefahuchi Tract,' announced the voice-over, 'named after its discoverer, may upset all our-' There was a sense of the screen filling suddenly, overflowing. Silent sparks of light began to pour out of it into the room, bouncing and foaming across the bare boards to the fireside, where they encountered Anna Kearney, biting her lower lip and moving her head back and forth in a dreamy, inturned manner. Into her hair they flowed, down her flushed cheeks, across her breastbone. Taking them to be a part of what she was feeling, she moaned a little, rubbing them in handfuls into her face and neck.

  'Sparks,' she whispered. 'Sparks in everything.'

  Kearney, hearing this, opened his eyes and got off her in terror. He grabbed up the chefs knife, then stood with it for a moment, naked and uncertain. 'Anna!' he said. 'Anna!' Fractal light poured from the TV screen like the fanned-out tail of a peacock. He ran aimlessly about the room for a moment until he found the Shrander's dice in their soft leather scrotum. Then he looked at Anna, looked at the knife. He thought he heard her try to warn him, 'It's coming, it's coming.' Then: 'Yes, kill me. Quickly.' Disgusted with himself forever, he threw down the knife and sprinted out of the cottage. That was it: something huge roared down towards him in the night, like a shadow out of the sky. Behind him he heard Anna laughing, and then murmuring again:

  'Sparks. Sparks in everything… '

  When Anna Kearney woke up, at five thirty the next morning, she found herself alone. The fire had gone out, the beach house was cold. The TV, still tuned to CNN, buzzed to itself and displayed images of current events: war in the Middle East, deprivation in the Far East, in Africa and Albania. War and deprivation everywhere. She rubbed her hands over her face, then, naked and shivering, stood up and collected her scattered underwear with amusement. I made him do it at last, she thought: but remembered the night only vaguely. 'Michael?' she called. The beach house had one external door, and he had left that open, allowing a little bright white sand to blow in across the threshold. 'Michael?' She pulled on her jeans and sweater.

  Out on the beach the air was already bright, agitated. Kittiwakes swooped and fought over something in a clump of tidewrack. Up on the dunes Anna found flattened marram, the residue of some chemical smell, a long, shallow depression, as though something vast had settled there in the night. She looked down at Monster Beach: no marks.

  'Mic
hael!' she called.

  Only the cries of the gulls.

  She hugged herself against the cold breeze off the ocean, then walked back to the cottage, where she cooked eggs and sausages and ate them hungrily. 'I haven't felt so hungry,' she said to her own face in the bathroom mirror, 'since… ' But she couldn't think what to add, it had been so long ago.

  She waited for him for three days. She walked on the dunes, drove into Boston, cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. She ate. Much of the time she just sat in a chair with her legs curled up, listening to the afternoon rain on the window and remembering everything she could about him. Every so often she switched the TV on, but mostly she left it off and, staring at it thoughtfully, tried to picture the things they had done the night he went.

  On the morning of the third day she stood at the door listening to the gulls fighting up and down above the beach. 'You won't come back now,' she said, and went inside to pack her things. 'I'll miss you,' she said. 'I really will.' She disconnected the outboard drive from Kearney's laptop and hid it under a layer of clothes. Then, unsure how it would be affected by the airport fluoroscope, slipped it in her purse instead. She would ask them at the desk. She had nothing to hide, and she was sure they would let it through. When she got back she would find Brian Tate, and hope-whatever had happened to him -he could carry on Michael's work. If not, she would have to phone someone at Sony.

  She locked the beach house door and put the bags in the BMW. One last look along the dunes. Up there, with the wind taking her breath away, she had a clear memory of him at Cambridge, twenty years old, telling her with a kind of urgent wonder, 'Information might be a substance. Can you imagine that?'

  She laughed out loud.

  'Oh, Michael,' she said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Surgery

  The shadow operators flew to Seria Mau from all parts of the ship. They left the dark upper corners of the human quarters where, mourning the loss of Billy Anker and his girl, they had clung in loose temporary skeins like cobwebs in the folds of an old curtain. They abandoned the portholes, next to which they had been biting their thin, bony knuckles. They emerged from the software bridges and fakebook archives, the racked hardware on the smart-plastic surfaces of which they had lain undistinguishable from two weeks' dust in her father's house. They had undergone a sea change. Gossip rustled between them, bursts of data flickering like silver and random colours-

  They said: 'Has she-?'

  They said: 'Dare we-?'

  They said: 'Is she really going out with him?'

  Seria Mau watched them for a moment, feeling as remote as space. Then she ordered:

  'Cut me the cultivar you have always wanted me to have.'

  The shadow operators could scarcely believe their ears. They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors' Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math. They dried it out and eyed it critically. 'You'll look very nice, dear,' they told it, 'if you just wipe the sleep from your blue eyes now. Very nice indeed.' They brought it to the room in which she kept the Dr Haends package.

  'Here she is,' they said. 'Isn't she lovely? Isn't she charming?'

  'I could have done without the dress,' said Seria Mau.

  'Oh but dear: she had to wear something.'

  It was herself, twelve years old. They had decorated her pale hands with spirals of tiny seed pearls, and turned her out in a floor-length frock of icy white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped in cream lace. Her train was supported at each corner by hovering, perfect, baby boys. She stared shyly up at the cameras in the corners, whispering:

  'What was relinquished returns.'

  'I can do without that, too,' said Seria Mau.

  'But you must have a voice, dear-'

  She didn't have time to argue. Suddenly she wanted it all over with. 'Bridge me in,' she said.

  They bridged her in. Under the impact of this, the cultivar lost psychomotor control and fell back against a bulkhead. 'Oh,' it whispered. It slid down on to the deck, staring puzzledly at its own hands. 'Am I me?' it asked. 'Don't you want me to be me?' It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. 'I'm not sure where I am,' it said, before it shivered once and got to its feet as Seria Mau Genlicher. 'Aah,' whispered the shadow operators. 'It's all too beautiful.' Deco uplighters introduced to the room a gradual pearly illumination, wavering yet triumphant; while rediscovered choral works by Janacek and Philip Glass filled the air itself. Seria Mau stared around. She felt no more 'alive' than she had in the tank. What had she been so frightened of? Bodies were not new to her, and besides, this one had never been her self.

  'The air smells like nothing in here,' she said. 'It smells like nothing.'

  The Dr Haends package lay on the floor in front of her, locked up in Uncle Zip's red and green beribboned box-which, she saw now, was a kind of metaphor for the actual mechanisms of confinement the gene-tailor had used. She studied the box for a moment, as if it might look different viewed from real human eyes, then knelt down and threw back its lid. Instantly, a creamy white foam began to spill out into the room. The Photographer (revisioned from five surviving notes on a corrupted optical storage disc by the 22nd-century composer Onotodo-Ra) faded to the muzak it so resembled. Over it, a gentle chime rang, and a woman's voice called:

  'Dr Haends. Dr Haends to surgery, please.'

  Meanwhile, though dead by his own definitions since the collision with Uncle Zip's K-ship, the commander of the Nastic vessel Touching the Void flickered in and out of view in one of the darkened corners of the room. He looked like a cage made of leaky insect legs, but while his ship remained, so did the burden of his responsibilities. Among these he included Seria Mau Genlicher. She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired. It was a Nastic quality. Because of it, he had been surprised to discover, he felt he owed her a duty of care; and he had been trying to discharge it since he died. He had done what he could to protect her from the Krishna Moire. More importantly, he had been trying to tell her what he knew.

  He wasn't sure he could remember all of it. He had no clear idea, for instance, why he had been co-operating with Uncle Zip in the first place: though he guessed perhaps that Uncle Zip had promised to share Billy Anker's discovery with him. An entire planet of unmined K-tech! On the eve of another war with human beings, this certainly would have seemed an attractive offer. It must, however, have begun to seem less attractive after the attempt to retailor the Dr Haends package. Uncle Zip had met with little success. All he had done was wake up something which already lived inside it. What that was, neither he nor the Nastic tailors had any idea. It was something much more intelligent than any of its predecessors. It was self-aware in a way that might take years to comprehend. If it had once been what Uncle Zip claimed it to be-a package of measures powerful enough to undo safely the bridge between the operator and the code: a kind of reverse signing-up-it was no longer anything like that.

  It was alive, and it was looking for other K-code to talk to.

  'If it's faulty,' Seria Mau said, 'there's one way to find out.'

  Still kneeling, she leaned forward and extended her arms, palms up. The shadow operators lifted the red and green box until it lay across her arms, then streamed away from her like fish in an aquarium, flickering agitatedly this way and that.

  'Don't ask me if I know what I'm doing,' she warned them. 'Because I don't.'

  She got to her feet, and with her train spilling out behind her, walked slowly towards the nearest wall.

  Foam poured from the box.

  'Dr Haends-' it said.

  'Take us up,' said Seria Mau to the wall.

  The wall opened. White light spille
d out to meet her, and Seria Mau Genlicher carried the package up into navigational space, where she intended to do what she should have done all along, and introduce it to the ship's mathematics. The shadow operators, rendered suddenly thoughtful by this decision, went up after her as demure as lace. The wall closed behind them all.

  The Nastic commander watched from his corner. He made one more attempt to attract her attention.

  'Seria Mau Genlicher,' he whispered, 'you really must listen-'

  But -rapt, dissociated, pixilated in the way only a human being can be with the vertigo of commitment-she gave no sign of having noticed him, and all that happened was that the shadow operators chivvied him away. They were worried he would become involved with the train of her dress. That would have spoiled everything.

  I hate to feel so weak and useless, he thought.

  Shortly after that, events on his own bridge intervened. Uncle Zip, puzzled by what was going on and suddenly growing suspicious, had him shot. A realtime vacuum commando unit, which had been hacking its way grimly through the Nastic ship since the collision, finally broke into the command-and-control section and hosed it out with hand-held gamma ray lasers. The walls melted and dripped. The computers went down. The commander felt himself fade. It was a feeling of intolerable weariness, sudden cold. For a nanosecond he hung in the balance, beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of a dream. The papery structures of his home, a drowsy buzzing sound, some complex gesture he had once loved, gone too quickly to be pinned down. Curiously enough, his last thought was not for that but for Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human. He was amused to find himself thinking this.