LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  'Evidence of myself,' she mused aloud.

  'All around you,' whispered the shadow operators, giving her tragic glances from between their lacy fingers. 'And look!'

  They had located a single survivor in a vacuum suit, a bulky white figure windmilling its arms, trying to walk on nothing, opening and closing on itself like some kind of undersea life as it doubled up in pain or perhaps only fear and disorientation and denial. I suppose, thought Seria Mau, listening to its transmissions, you would close your eyes and tell yourself, 'I can get out of this if I stay calm'; then open them and understand all over again where you were. That would be enough to make you scream like that.

  She was wondering how to finish the survivor off when a fraction of a shadow passed across her. It was another vessel. It was huge. Alarms went off all over the K-ship. Shadow operators streamed about. The White Cat broke right and left, disappeared from local space in a froth of quantum events, non-commutative microgeometries and short-lived exotic vacuum states, then reappeared a kilometre away from her original position with all assets primed and ready. Disgusted, Seria Mau saw that she was still in the shadow of the intruder. It was so big it could only belong to her employers. She put a shot across its bows anyway. The Nastic commander edged his vessel irritably away from her. At the same time he sent a holographic fetch of himself to the White Cat. It squatted in front of the tank where Seria Mau lived, leaking realistically from the joints of its several yellowish legs, stridulating every so often for no reason she could see. Its bony-looking head had more palps, mosaic eyes and ropes of mucous than she preferred to look at. It wasn't something you could ignore.

  'You know who we are,' it said.

  'Do you think it's so clever to surprise a K-ship like that?' shouted Seria Mau.

  The fetch clicked patiently.

  'We were not trying to embarrass you,' it said. 'We approached in a perfectly open way. You have been ignoring our transmissions since you did… ' It paused as if searching for a word; then, clearly at a loss, concluded uneasily: 'This.'

  'That was a moment ago.'

  'That was five hours ago,' the fetch said. 'We have been trying to talk to you since then.'

  Seria Mau was so shaken she broke contact and-as the fetch faded away into a kind of brown smoke, a transparency of itself-hid the White Cat in a cloud of asteroids some distance off, to give herself time to think. She felt ashamed of herself. Why had she acted like that? What could she have been thinking of to leave herself vulnerable like that, insensible out there for live hours? While she was trying to remember, the Nastic vessel's mathematics began stalking her again, making two or three billion guesses a nanosecond at her position. After a second or two she allowed it to find her. The fetch reformed immediately.

  'What would you understand,' Seria Mau asked it, 'by the idea, "Evidence of myself"?'

  'Not much,' the fetch said. 'Is that why you did this? To leave evidence of yourself? Over here, we wonder why you kill your own kind so ruthlessly.' Seria Mau had been asked this before.

  'They're not my kind,' she said.

  'They are human.'

  She greeted this argument with the silence it deserved, then after a moment said:

  'Where's the money?'

  'Ah, the money. Where it always is.'

  'I don't want local currency.'

  'We almost never use local currencies,' the fetch said, 'although we sometimes deal in them.' Its larger joints appeared to vent some kind of gas. 'Are you ready to fight again? We have several missions available forty lights down the Beach. You would be up against military vessels. It's a real part of the war, not ambushing civilians like this.'

  'Oh, your war,' she said dismissively. Fifty wars, big and small, were going on out here in plain sight of the Kefahuchi Tract; but there was only one fight, and it was the fight over the spoils. She had never even asked them who their enemy was. She didn't want to know. The Nastic were strange enough. Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. 'Motives,' she thought, staring at the collection of legs and eyes in front of her, 'are a sensorium thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.' She thought about this. 'The housefly has a harder job,' she decided.

  'I have what I want now,' she told the fetch. 'I won't be fighting for you again.'

  'We could offer more.'

  'It wouldn't help.'

  'We could make you do what we want.'

  Seria Mau laughed.

  'I'll be gone from here faster than your vessel can think. How will you find me then? This is a K-ship.'

  The fetch left a calculated silence.

  'We know where you are going,' it said.

  This gave Seria Mau a cold feeling, but only for a fraction of a second. She had what she wanted from the Nastic. Let them try. She broke contact and opened the ship's mathematical space.

  'Look at that!' the mathematics greeted her. 'We could go there. Orthere. Or look, there. We could go anywhere. Let's go somewhere!'

  Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could read, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. 'You see?' said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat's massive array-aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull-detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. 'At the moment,' the mathematics announced, 'I'm solving Schrцdinger's equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.'

  THREE

  New Venusport, 2400 AD

  Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm on Pierpoint Street.

  He was a typical New Man, tall, white-faced, with that characteristic shock of orange hair that makes them look constantly surprised by life. The tank farm was too far up Pierpoint to do much trade. It was in the high 700s, where the banking district gave out into garments, tailoring, cheap chopshop operations franchising out-of-date cultivars and sentient tattoos.

  This meant Vesicle had to have other things going.

  He collected rents for the Cray sisters. He acted as an occasional middleman in what were sometimes called 'off-world imports', goods and services interdicted by Earth Military Contracts. He moved a little speciality H, cut with adrenal products from the local wildlife. None of this took much of his time. He spent most of his day on the farm, masturbating every twenty minutes or so to the hologram porn shows; New Men were great masturbators. He kept an eye on his tanks. The rest of the time he slept.

  Like most New Men, Tig Vesicle didn't sleep well. It was as if something was missing for him, something an Earth-type planet could never provide, which his body needed less while it was awake. (Even in the warmth and darkness of the warren, which he thought of as 'home', he twitched and mewled in his sleep, his long, emaciated legs kicking out. His wife was the same.) His dreams were bad. In the worst of them, he was trying to collect for the Cray sisters, but he had become confused by Pierpoint itself, which in the dream was a street aware of him, a street full of betrayal and malign intelligence.

  It was mid morning, and already two fat cops were pulling a convulsed rickshaw girl from between the shafts of her vehicle. She was flailing about like a foundered horse, cyanosing round the lips as everything went away from her and got too small to see. Street Life was playing on her personal soundtrack, and cafй йlectrique had blown up another determined heart. Entering Pierpoint about halfway along its length, Vesicle found there were no numbers on the buildings, nothing he could recognise. Should he walk right to get to the high numbers, or left? He felt a fool. This feeling segued smoothly into panic, and he began changing direc
tion repeatedly in the teeth of the traffic. In consequence he never moved more than a block or two from the side street by which he had entered. After a while he began to catch glimpses of the Cray sisters themselves, holding court outside a falafel parlour as they waited for their rents. He was certain they had seen him. He turned his face away. The job had to be finished by lunch, and he hadn't even started. Finally lie went into a restaurant and asked the first person he saw where he was, to discover that this wasn't Pierpoint at all. It was a completely different street. It would take hours to get where he was supposed to be. It was his own fault. He had started out too late in the day.

  Vesicle woke from this dream weeping. He couldn't help but identify with the dying rickshaw girl: worse, somewhere between waking and sleeping, 'rents' had become 'tears', and this, he felt, summed up the life of his whole race. He got up, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and went out into the street. He had that oddly jointed look, that shambling look all New Men have. Two blocks down towards the Exotic Diseases Hospital, he bought a Muranese fish curry, which he ate with a wooden throwaway fork, holding the plastic container close under his chin and shovelling the food into his mouth with awkward, ravenous movements. Then he went back to the tank farm and thought about the Crays.

  The Crays, Evie and Bella, had started out in digitised art retroporn- specialising in a surface so realistic it seemed to defamiliarise the sex act into something machinelike and interesting-then diversified, after the collapse of the 2397 bull market, into tanking and associated scams. Now they were in money. Vesicle was less afraid of them than awed. He was star-struck every time they came in his shop to pick up the rents or check his take. He would tell you at length the things they did, and was always trying to imitate the way they talked.

  After he had slept a little more, Vesicle went round the farm and checked the tanks. Something made him stop by one of them and put his hand against it. It felt warm, as if the activity inside it had increased. It felt like an egg.

  Inside the tank, this is what was happening.

  Chinese Ed woke up and nothing in his house worked. The bedside alarm didn't go off, the TV was a greyout, and his refrigerator wouldn't talk to him. Things got worse after he had his first cup of coffee, when two guys from the DA's office knocked on his door. They wore double-breasted sharkskin suits with the jackets hanging open so you could see they were heeled. Ed knew them from when he worked the DA office himself. They were morons. Their names were Hanson and Rank. Hanson was a fat guy who took things easy, but Otto Rank was like rust. He never slept. He had ambitions, they said, to be DA himself. These two sat on stools at the breakfast bar in Ed's kitchen and he made them coffee.

  'Hey,' said Hanson. 'Chinese Ed.'

  'Hanson,' Ed said.

  'So what do you know, Ed?' Rank said. 'We hear you're interested in the Brady case.' He smiled. He leaned forward until his face was near Ed's. 'We're interested in that too.'

  Hanson looked nervous. He said:

  'We know you were at the scene, Ed.'

  'Fuck this,' Rank said immediately. 'We don't need to discuss this with him.' He grinned at Ed. 'Why'd you waste him, Ed?'

  'Waste who?'

  Rank shook his head at Hanson, as if to say, What do you make of this shithead? Ed said:

  'Kiss it, Rank. You want some more Java?'

  'Hey,' Rank said. 'You kiss it.' He took out a handful of brass cases and threw them across the breakfast bar. 'Colt.45,' he said. 'Military issue. Dumdum rounds. Two separate guns.' The brass cases danced and rattled. 'You want to show me your guns, Ed? Those two fucking Colts you carry like: some TV detective? You want to bet we can get a match?'

  Ed showed his teeth.

  'You have to have the guns for that. You want to take them off me, here and now? Think you can do that, Otto?'

  Hanson looked anxious. 'No need for that, Ed,' he said.

  'We can go away and get the fucking warrant, Ed, and then we can come back and take the guns,' said Rank. He shrugged. 'We can take you. We can take your house. We could take your wife, you still had one, and play jump the bones with her 'til Saturday next. You want to do this the hard way, Ed, or the easy way?'

  Ed said: 'We can do it either way.'

  'No we can't, Ed,' said Otto Rank. 'Not this time. I'm surprised you don't know that.' He shrugged. 'Hey,' he said, 'I think you do,' He lifted his finger in Ed's face, pointed it like a gun. 'Later,' he said.

  'Fuck you, Rank,' Ed said.

  He knew something was wrong when Rank only laughed and left.

  'Shit, Ed,' Hanson said. He shrugged. Then he left too.

  After he was sure they were gone, Ed went out to his car, a four to-the-floor '47 Dodge into which someone had shoehorned the 409 from a '52 Caddy. He fired it up and sat in it for a moment listening to the four-barrel suck air. He looked at his hands.

  'We can do it either way you fuckers,' he whispered. Then he dumped the clutch and drove downtown.

  He had to find out what was going on. He knew a broad in the DA's office called Robinson. He persuaded her to go to Sullivan's diner with him and get lunch. She was a tall woman with a wide smile, good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours. Ed knew that he could find that out if he wanted to. He could find that out, but he was more interested in the Brady case, and what Rank and Hanson knew.

  'Hey,' he said. 'Rita.'

  'Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,' said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. 'Don't put that sugar on me,' she sang.

  Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan's when he heard her say:

  'Hey, Ed. You still fuck?'

  He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan's doorway. Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn't, began to ask her what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.

  'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'Look.'

  He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.

  FOUR

  Operations of the Heart

  'But you never phone!' Anna Kearney said.

  'I'm phoning now,' he explained, as if to a child.

  'You never come and see me.'

  Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the: bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

  If you don't want to do something you don't have to, Kearney read. Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

  'You look well,' he told her.

  'You mean I look fat. I always know I'm too fat when people say that.'

  He shrugged.

  'Well, it's nice to see you anyway,' he said.

  'I'm having a bath. I was running it when you called.'

  She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph ofhimself at seven years old.

  Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the
candle. He shook the Shrander's dice out of their little leather bag: threw them repeatedly. Larger than you would expect, made from some polished brownish substance which he suspected was human bone, they skittered and rolled between the other objects, throwing up patterns he could make nothing of. Before he stole the dice, he had cast Tarot cards for the same purpose: there were two or three decks in the chest of drawers somewhere, grubby from use but still in their original cartons.

  'Do you want something to eat?' Anna called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. 'I could make you something if you like.'

  Kearney sighed.

  'That would be nice,' he said.

  He threw the dice again, then replaced them and looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Kearney had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn't make anything of them, either.

  After they had eaten, she lit candles and persuaded him to go to bed with her. 'I'm really tired,' she said. 'Really exhausted.' She sighed and clung to him. Her skin was still damp and flushed from the bath. Kearney ran his fingers down between her buttocks. She breathed in sharply, then rolled away on to her stomach and half-knelt, raising herself so that he could reach her better. Her sex felt like very soft suede. He rubbed it until her entire body went rigid and she came, gasping, making a kind of tiny coughing groan. To his surprise this gave him an erection. He waited for it to subside, which took a few minutes, then said:

  'I probably have to go away.'

  She stared at him. 'But what about me?'

  'Anna, I left you long ago,' he reminded her.