LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'You understand?' said the Shrander, which, having remained courteously silent through this process, now came to his side again and stared up in a companionable way. 'There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that.'

  Then it admitted: 'I can't keep you alive for much longer, you know. Not here.'

  Kearney smiled.

  'I guessed,' he said. 'You mustn't worry. Oh look! Look!'

  He saw the raging glory of the light. He felt himself slipping away into it, here in this fabulous place. He was so amazed. He wanted the Shrander to know. He wanted it to be certain he had understood.

  'I've been here and seen this,' he said. 'I've seen it.'

  He felt the vacuum empty him out.

  Oh Anna, I've seen it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Everywhere and No Place

  What had happened inside the White Cat was this:

  Seria Mau had gone up into the mathematical space, where the K-code ran without substrate in a region of its own. Everything else in the universe seemed to recede to a great distance. Things speeded up and slowed down at the same time. An actinic white light-sourceless yet directional-sprayed round the edges of every moving body. It was a space as lucid and intense and meaningless as one of Seria Mau's dreams.

  'Why are you dressed like that?' the mathematics asked her in a puzzled voice.

  'I want to know about this box.'

  'It's so very dangerous to us all,' the mathematics said, 'for you to be here like this.'

  '… so very dangerous,' echoed the shadow operators.

  'I don't care,' said Seria Mau. 'Look.'

  She raised her arms and offered up the box.

  'It's very dangerous dear,' the shadow operators said. They picked nervously at their fingernails and handkerchiefs.

  The code rushed out of Uncle Zip's box and merged with the code from the White Cat. Everything -box, giftwrap, and all-(dissolved into pixels, streamers, dark lights like non-baryonic matter, and blew past Seria Mau's upturned face at near-relativistic speeds. In the same instant, she felt the wedding dress catch fire. Her train melted. Her loving cherubs flashed to powder. The shadow operators covered their eyes with their hands and flung themselves about like dried leaves on a cold wind, their voices stretched and garbled by unknown space-time dilation effects. Suddenly everything was out of the box: every idea anyone had ever had about the universe was available, operating and present. The wires were crossed. The descriptive systems had collapsed into some regime prior to them all. The information supersubstance had broken loose. It was a moment of reinvention. It was the moment of maximum vertigo. Mathematics itself was loose, like a magician in a funny hat, and nothing could be the same again.

  Soft chimes rang.

  'Dr Haends, please,' said a woman's gentle, capable voice.

  Out he came, emerging from the universal substrate with his white gloves and gold-topped ebony cane. His tailcoat had a velvet collar and five-button cuffs, and down the outside leg of his narrow black pants ran a black satin stripe. His hat was on his head. His shoes, which Seria Mau had never seen, were chisel-toe patent leather dancing pumps. Hat, shoes, suit, gloves and cane, she saw now, were made of numbers, crawling so thick and fast across one another they looked like a solid surface. Was the whole world like that? Or was it only Dr Haends?

  'Seria Mau!' he cried. He held out his hand. 'Will you dance?'

  Seria Mau flinched away. She thought of the mother, leaving her to face things without a word of help. She thought of the father and the sex things he had wanted her to do. She thought of her brother, refusing to wave to her even though he knew he would never see her again.

  'I never learned to dance,' she said.

  'Whose fault was that?' Dr Haends laughed. 'If you won't play the game, how can you win the prize?'

  He gestured around. Seria Mau saw that they were standing in the magic-shop window, a little-girl cultivar in a wedding dress and a tall thin man with a thin moustache and lively blue eyes. All around them were stacked the things she had seen in her dreams-retro things, conjuror's things, children's things. Ruby coloured plastic lips. Feathers dyed bright orange and green. Bundles of silk scarves that would go into the top hat and hop out as live white pigeons. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine's heart which lit itself up by means of loving diodes within. There were 'X-Ray Specs' and elevator shoes, trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn't take off. They were all the things you wanted when you were a child, when it seemed there would always be more in the world and always more after that.

  'Choose anything you want,' invited Dr Haends.

  'All these things are fake,' said Seria Mau stubbornly.

  Dr Haends laughed.

  'They're all real too,' he said. 'That's the amazing thing.'

  He let go of her hand and danced elegantly about, shouting, 'Yoiy yoiy yoiy!' Then he said:

  'You could have anything you wanted.'

  Seria Mau knew it was true. Full of panic, she fell away from this idea in all possible directions, as if from the highest ledge in the universe. 'Leave me alone!'she screamed. The ship's mathematics-which had been Dr Haends all along, or half of him at least-sent her to sleep. It had a quick look at some of the other parts of its project (this involved some travel in ten spatial and, especially, four temporal dimensions). Then, having reorganised the White Cat a little more to its satisfaction, it took the shortest possible route to Sigma End and threw itself down the wormhole. There was a lot left to do.

  Sigma End.

  Uncle Zip watched, his eyes narrowed.

  'Get after them,' he said.

  'Too late, Unc. They're already in.' Uncle Zip was silent.

  'They're dead,' the pilot said. 'We're dead too if we go in there.'

  Uncle Zip shrugged. He waited.

  'This isn't a place for human beings,' the pilot said.

  'But don't you want to know?' said Uncle Zip softly. 'Isn't that really why you came?'

  'Oh fuck it, yes.'

  The White Cat cartwheeled silently out of the other end of the wormhole like a ghost ship. Her engines were off. Her coms were silent. Nothing was moving inside her hull; outside, a single blue riding light, normally used only in the parking orbit, winked, redundant and steady into nowhere. The hull itself-scarred and scraped, ablated through contact with some indescribable medium, as if wormhole travel meant a thousand years in a coffee-grinder, motion as Newtonian as a ride on a runaway train- cooled quickly down through red to plum-coloured to its normal thuggish grey. A lot of the exterior work was missing. The wormhole exit, a filmy twist of whitish light, fell behind. For two or three hours, the ship toppled out of control through empty space. Then her fusion torch flared briefly, and in obedience to some unspoken command, she shook herself and fell into orbit around the nearest large object.

  Seria Mau Genlicher woke up shortly afterwards.

  She was back in her tank. Everything was dark. She was cold. She was puzzled.

  'Displays,' she ordered.

  Nothing happened.

  'Am I on my own here?' she said. 'Or what?'

  Silence. She moved uneasily in the dark. The tank proteome felt lifeless and stagnant.

  'Displays!' she said.

  This time a coms feed came up, two or three visual images, garbled, intermittent, imbricated, speckled with interference.

  A large white object could be seen sprawled across the floor in the human quarters of a K-ship, resolving, as the cameras moved carefully around it, into a partly dismembered human being. Its clothes, torn off by gravitational forces, were compacted into the corners of the room like wet washing, along with one of its arms. The walls above it were daubed and reddened. The second image was of Uncle Zip, playing the accordion as his ship tumbled endlessly down the wormhole. Over the music, his pilot could be heard shouting, 'Shit. Oh Jesus shit.' In the third, Uncle Zip's mouth was seen in close-up, repeating the words: 'We can get out of this if we keep our head
s.'

  'Why are you showing me this?' said Seria Mau.

  The ship remained silent around her. Then it said suddenly:

  'All these things are happening at once. This is a realtime feed. Whatever happened to him in there is still happening. It will always be happening.'

  Uncle Zip stared out of the display at Seria Mau.

  'Help,' he said.

  He threw up.

  'Actually, this is quite interesting,' the mathematics said.

  Seria Mau watched one moment more. Then she said: 'Get me out of here.'

  'Where do you want to go?'

  She moved helplessly in her tank. 'No, I want to get out of here,'she said. And then, when no answer was forthcoming: 'It didn't work, did it? Whatever happened back there before you put me to sleep? I thought I saw the conjuror, but it was another dream. I thought-' She was like a thirteen-year-old girl, trying to shrug. In response, the fluid in the tank swirled sluggishly about. She imagined it washing what was left of her body like warm spit. Like fifteen years of despair. 'Oh well, what does it matter what I thought? I'm really tired now. I don't care what I do. I've had enough. I want to go home and this never to have happened. I want my life back.'

  'Shall I tell you something?' the mathematics said.

  'What?'

  'Display up,' said the mathematics, and the Kefahuchi Tract exploded into her head.

  'This is the way things really look,' said the mathematics. 'If you think ship-time is the way things look, you're wrong. If you think ship-time is something, you're wrong: it's nothing. You see this? This isn't just some "exotic state". It's light years of blue and rose fire, roaring up out of nowhere, toppling away again in real, human time. That's the way it is. That's what it's like inside you.'

  Seria Mau laughed bitterly.

  'Very poetic,' she said.

  'Look into the fire,' the mathematics ordered.

  She looked. The Tract roared and sighed above her.

  'I can't give you your body back,' the mathematics said. 'You had this rage to live, but you were afraid of it. What you had them do to you was irreversible. Do you understand that?'

  'Yes,' she whispered.

  'Good. There's more.'

  After a moment, the Tract seemed to frame itself in three tall arched windows, set into a wall covered in ruched grey satin. She was in the magic-shop window. At the same time she was in the tank-room aboard the White Cat.

  Those locations, she saw now, had always been one and the same place. She could see her tank, EMC's corporate idea of what a thirteen-year-old girl would want: a coffin decorated with gold mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons, all making heroic self-sacrifices over and over again, as if death wasn't a permanent state and heartbreak could always be risen above. It had a thick hinged lid-impossible to open from inside, as if they had been frightened all along she might get out-and sheaves of inlet pipes. She was above it, inside it, and behind it too: she was in the tiny shipboard surveillance cameras which fell like dust through every ray of light. As she watched, the upper body of Dr Haends bent itself slowly into the central window. His white shirt was freshly starched; his jet-black hair shone with brilliantine. After he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could, Dr Haends winked at her. This time, instead of bowing himself out, he threw one long, elegant leg across the window sill and clambered into the room.

  'No,' said Seria Mau.

  'Yes,' he said.

  In two strides he had reached her tank and thrown open the lid.

  'No!'she said.

  She thrashed and raged, what was left of her, so that the fluid in which she was suspended-thick and inert as mucous to absorb the Newtonian forces to which even a K-ship was sometimes prone- slopped over the side and on to his patent leather shoes. Dr Haends didn't notice. He reached down into that stuff and pulled her out. In the microcameras she saw herself for the first time in fifteen years. She was this small, broken, yellowish thing, its limbs all at odd angles, curling and uncurling itself feebly against the pain of the open air. What she heard as a scream of horror and despair was only a faint rough groan. The skin stretched over her like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. There was no flesh between that and the bones beneath. The withered lips drew back over small, even teeth. The eyes glared out of tarry sockets. When she saw the thick cables trailing from the core-points in the scholiosed spine, she felt numb and disgusted. She felt the most awful pity for that thing. She felt the most awful shame. To begin with, that was why she fought him: she simply didn't want him to see her. Then, when she saw what he was doing, she fought him for that, too.

  He had landed the ship. The cargo ramp was down. He was taking her outside. Terror fell across her like the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. What could she do, if she was no longer the White Cat? What could she be?

  'No! No!'

  The Tract pulsed above her.

  'There's no air,' she said pitiably. 'There's no air.'

  The sky was on fire with radiation.

  'We can't live! We can't live in this!'

  But Dr Haends didn't seem to care. Out there on the surface, among the strange low mounds and buried artifacts, he prepared for surgery. On went his white gloves. Up went his sleeves. While out of his eyes and mouth poured the white foam of the K-code, to assemble from the dust itself the necessary instruments. Dr Haends looked up. He held out one hand, palm up, like someone testing for rain. 'No need for extra light!' he decided.

  Seria Mau wept.

  'I'm dying! How can you give me a new body here?'

  'Forget your body.'

  They had to shout to hear themselves across the silent roar of the Tract. Particle winds blew back the tails of his coat. He laughed. 'Isn't it amazing, just to be alive?' Behind him, the shadow operators poured out of the ship like shoals of excited fish, flickering and dancing.

  'She'll be well again,' they called to one another. 'She'll be well.'

  Dr Haends raised his instruments.

  'Forget yourself,' he commanded. 'Now you can be what you are.'

  'Will you hurt me?'

  'Yes. Do you trust me?'

  'Yes.'

  A long while later-it might have been minutes, it might have been years-Dr Haends wiped the numbers from his forehead like sweat and stepped back from the thing he had made. His evening suit was less than spruce. He was bloody to the cuffs of his linen shirt. His instruments, which to start with had been state of the art, now seemed to him dull and not entirely the right ones for the job. He shook his head. It had been an effort, he now admitted, even for him. Thermodynamically, it had been the most expensive thing he'd ever done. It had been a risk. But what do you gain without that?

  'Now you can be what you are,' he repeated.

  The thing he had made raised itself and flapped its wings uncertainly. 'This is hard,' it said. 'Am I meant to be this big?' It tried to look back at itself. 'I can't really see what I am,' it said. It flapped again. Collateral electromagnetic events lifted dust from the surface. The dust hung there, but nothing else happened.

  'I think if you keep practising-' encouraged Dr Haends.

  'I feel terrified,' it said. 'I feel such a fool.'

  It laughed.

  'What do I look like?' it said. 'Am I still her?'

  'You are and you aren't,' Dr Haends admitted. 'Turn round, let me see you. There. You look beautiful. Just practise a bit more.'

  Seria Mau turned and turned. She felt the light catch her wings.

  'Are these feathers? she said.

  'Not entirely.'

  She said: 'I don't know how it works!'

  'It will maintain any shape you want,' Dr Haends promised. 'You can be this, or you can be something else. You can be a white cat again, and pounce among the stars. Or why not try something new? I'm quite pleased with it now,' he said. 'Yes! Look! You see? That's it!'

  She rose up and circled about awkwardly above his head. 'I don't know how to do this!' she called down to him.
r />   'Some turns! Do some more turns! You see?'

  She did some more turns. 'I'm quite good at it,' she said. 'I think I could be quite good at it.' The shadow operators flew up to her. They flocked to her whispering delightedly and clasping their bony work-worn hands. 'You took care of me sowell,' she congratulated them. Then she made herself look down at the White Cat.

  'All those years!' she marvelled. 'Was I that?'

  She shed something that might have been tears, if an organism so bizarre -so huge and yet so frail, so perpetually emergent from its own desires-could be said to weep. 'Oh dear,' she said. 'I don't know how I feel.' Suddenly she laughed. Her laughter filled the vacuum. It was the laughter of particles. She was laughing in every regime. She tried out the different things she could be: there were always more; there were always more after that. 'Do you like this?' she called down. 'I think I preferred the last one.' Her wings lost their look of feathers, and the Kefahuchi-light ran along them from tip to tip like wild fire. Seria Mau Genlicher laughed and laughed and laughed.

  'Goodbye,' she called down.

  She rose suddenly, faster than even Dr Haends's eyes could follow. Her shadow passed over him briefly and vanished.

  After she had gone, he stood there for a time, between the empty K-ship and the remains of the physicist Michael Kearney. He was exhausted, but he couldn't seem to settle. He bent down and picked up the dice Michael Kearney had brought to that place. He turned them over thoughtfully; put them down again. 'That was tiring,' he said to himself. 'They can be more tiring than you think.' After a while, he allowed himself to slip back into a shape he was more comfortable with, and stood there for a long time looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract, a small pudgy thing with a huge curved bone beak and a maroon wool coat with food stains down the front, which shrugged and said to itself: