LIGHT

by M. John Harrison

  When Seria Mau fetched up in the middle of the parlour floor, Uncle Zip was entertaining.

  'This is just a few friends,' he said, when he saw her at his feet. 'You can stay and learn a thing or two. Or you can come back later.'

  He had got himself up in a white dress shirt and black trousers the waist of which came up to his armpits, and he was playing the piano accordion. A round, rosy patch of blusher on each chalk-white cheek made him look like a huge porcelain doll, glazed with sweat. His instrument, an elaborate antique with ivory keys and glittering chromium buttons, flashed and flickered in the Carmody neon. As he played, he stamped from side to side to keep the beat. When he sang, it was in a pure, explosive counter-tenor. If you couldn't see him you didn't know immediately whether you were listening to a woman or a boy. Only later did the barely controlled aggression of it convince you this voice belonged to a human male. His audience, three or four thin, dark-skinned men in tight pants, lurex shirts and jet-black pompadour haircuts, drank and talked without seeming to pay him much attention, although they gave thin smiles of approval when he hit his high, raging vibrato. Occasionally two or three children came to the open parlour door and egged him on, clapping and calling him Papa. Uncle Zip stamped and played and shook the sweat off his china brow.

  In his own good time he dismissed his audience-who vanished with a polite sly hipster grace into the Moneytown night as if they had never been there at all-and sat down on a stool, breathing heavily. Then he shook one of his fat fingers at Seria Mau Genlicher.

  'Hey,' he said. 'You come in down here in a fetch?'

  'Spare me,' said Seria Mau. 'I get enough of that at home.'

  Seria Mau's fetch looked like a cat. It was a low end model which came in colours you could change according to your mood. Otherwise it resembled one of the domestic cats of Ancient Earth-small, nervous, pointy-faced, and with a tendency to rub the side of its head on things.

  'It's an insult to the cutter, a fetch. Come to Uncle Zip in person or not at all.' He mopped his forehead with a huge white handkerchief, laughed his high, pleasant laugh. 'You want to be' a cat,' he advised, 'I make you into one no trouble.' He leaned over and put his hand several times through the hologram. 'What's this? A ghost, young lady. Without a body you're a photino, you're a weak reactor to this world. I can't even offer you a drink.'

  'I already have a body, Uncle,' Seria Mau reminded him quietly.

  'So why did you come back here?'

  'The package doesn't work. It won't talk to me. It won't even admit what it's for.'

  'I told you this is complex stuff. I said there might be problems.'

  'You didn't say it wasn't yours.'

  Faint disagreeable lines appeared on Uncle Zip's white forehead.

  'I said I owned it,' he was ready to acknowledge. 'But I didn't say I built it. In fact, it was passed to me by Billy Anker. The guy said he thought it was modern. He thought it was K-tech. He thought it was military.' He shrugged. 'Some of those people, they don't care what they say-' he shook his head and pursed his little lips judicially '-though this guy Billy is usually very acute, very dependable.' The thought leading him nowhere, he shrugged. 'He got it in Radio Bay, but he couldn't work out what it did.'

  'Could you?'

  'I didn't recognise the cutter's hand.' Uncle Zip spread his own hands and examined them. 'But I saw through the cut in a day.' He was proud of his plump fingers and their clean, spatulate nails, as proud of his touch as if he cut the genes directly, like a cobbler at a last. 'Right through and out the other side. It's what you need all right: no trouble '

  'Then why won't it work?'

  'You should bring it back. Maybe I take another look.'

  'It keeps asking me for Dr. Haends.'

  SIX

  In Dreams

  At first you thought the Cray sisters were running themselves on some kind of one-shot cultivar. You soon saw they took too much care of themselves to be doing that. Nevertheless, they were big, with that sensual, more-alive-than-alive look a cultivar has because its user just doesn't care what happens. They had big, powerful behinds, over which they wore short black nylon skirts. They had big, short legs, with calves tightened and moulded by a lifetime of four-inch heels. The big shoulders of their short-sleeved white 'secretary' blouses were padded and flounced. Tattooed snakes curled and uncurled lazily around their bare, fleshy biceps.

  One day they came in the shop and Evie asked Tig Vesicle did he have a twink called Ed Chianese in one of the tanks. This twink would be about yay tall (she indicated two inches taller than herself), with a partly grown out peroxide Mohican and a couple of cheap tattoos. He would have been quite a muscular guy, she said, at least before tank-life got to him.

  'I never saw anyone like that,' Vesicle lied.

  He was immediately full of terror. If you could help it, you did not lie to the Cray sisters. They did their faces every morning with white pan-stick, and drew in wide red liplines, voluptuous, angry and clown-like all at once. With these mouths they held the whole of Pierpoint Street to ransom. They had innumerable soldiers, shadow boys in cultivars, cheap teenage punks with guns. Also, in their antique briefcases, or big, soft leather purses, they each carried a Chambers reaction pistol. At first they seemed like a mass of contradictions, bat you soon understood they weren't.

  The truth was, this Chianese twink was Tig Vesicle's only regular. Who went to a tank farm in the upper 700s, Pierpoint? No one. The trade was all down at the other end, where you got any number of investment bankers, also women whose favourite dog died ten years before, they never got over it. The lunch trade was all down there, in the middle and low numbers. Without Chianese, who was twinking three weeks at a time when he could afford it, Vesicle's business would be fucked. He would be out on the street all day trying to move AbH and Earth speed to kids who were only interested in do-it-yourself gene patches which they got from some guy across the halo called Uncle Zip.

  The Crays gave Tig Vesicle a look designed to say, 'You lie on this occasion, you get broken down for your rarer proteins.'

  'Really,' he said.

  Eventually Evie Cray shrugged.

  'You see a guy like that, we're the first to know,' she said. 'The first.'

  She stared round the tank farm, with its bare grey floor and shoot-up posters peeling off the walls, and gave Vesicle a contemptuous look. 'Jesus, Tig,' she said. 'Could you just make this place a little more unwelcoming? Do you think you could do that?'

  Bella Cray laughed.

  'Do you think you could do that for her?' she said.

  After they had gone, Vesicle sat in his chair, repeating: 'Do you think you could do that?' and, 'You see a guy like that, we're the first to know,' until he thought he had the intonation right. Then he went over to look at the tanks. He got a rag out of a cupboard and wiped the dust off them. He was wiping Chianese's tank when he realised it was the warm one. 'Who is this guy,' he asked himself, 'the Cray sisters want him all of a sudden? No one ever wanted him before.' He tried to remember what Chianese looked like but he couldn't. Twinkies all looked the same to him.

  He went out to a stall and got himself another fish curry. 'You see a guy like that,' he tried experimentally to the stallholder after he had paid, 'we're the first to know.'

  The stallholder stared at him.

  'The first,' Vesicle said.

  New Men, she thought, as she watched him walk away up Pierpoint, one leg going out at an odd angle. What are they on?

  Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid--if you stretched a point-and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism
and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less than reliable new entertainment technology.

  Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:

  'I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know.'

  Vesicle went back to the tank farm. The head-ends of the tanks protruded a couple of feet from their shoulder-height plyboard cubicles, like stupidly baroque brass coffins covered with cheap decorative detail. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT, claimed the shoot-up posters on the back wall of each cubicle. Chianese's tank was warmer than it had been. Vesicle could see why: the twink was out of credit. He had maybe half a day left, this was according to readouts in the tank fascia, and then it was the cold world for him. The tank proteome, a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones, was beginning to prepare his body for the life he left behind.

  Three thirty on a grey Friday afternoon in March. The East River was the colour of puddled iron. Since midday, westbound traffic had been backing up from Honaluchi Bridge. Chinese Ed stuck his head out the side window of his ramrod Dodge, into the smell of burned diesel and lead, and tried to get a look at what was ahead. Nothing. Something was broken up there, the lights were oil, someone had melted down; the people up there were on overload-office overload, 2.4 kids overload, shitcan overload-and had left their cars and were dully beating on one another to no good purpose. Who knew what had happened? It was the same old life. Ed shook his head at the futility of mankind, turned off the Capital traffic report and turned instead to Rita Robinson.

  'Hey, Rita,' he said.

  Two or three minutes later her peppermint and white candy-stripe skirt was up around her waist.

  'Steady, Ed,' advised Rita. 'We could be here some time.'

  Ed laughed. 'Steady Eddy,' he said. 'That's me.'

  Rita laughed too. 'I'm ready,' she said. 'I'm ready, ready Eddy.'

  It turned out Rita was right.

  Two hours later they were still there.

  'Doesn't this just suck?' said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of Ed's Dodge.

  She looked in at Rita-who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror-and seemed to lose interest. 'Oh hi, honey,' she said. 'Just freshening up there?' Everyone had turned their engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement, A hot dog guy was working the queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. 'I never knew it this bad,' said the woman from the Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. 'Maybe the Russians landed.'

  'You got a point there,' Ed told her. She smiled at him, stepped on the butt of her cigarette, and went back to her car. Ed turned on the radio. The Russians hadn't landed. The Martians hadn't landed. There was no news at all.

  'So. This Brady thing,' he said to Rita. 'What are they saying in the DA's office?'

  'Hey, Eddy,' Rita said. She looked at him for a moment or two, then shook her head and turned back to the mirror. She had her lipstick out now. 'I thought you'd never ask,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice. The lipstick didn't seem to suit her, because she put it away with an irritable gesture and looked out the window at the river running by.

  'I thought you'd never ask,' she repeated bitterly.

  That was when the big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed's open side-window. This time, Rita didn't seem tonotice it, even though it was speaking.

  'Come in, Number Seven,' it was saying. 'Your time is up.'

  Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out one of his Colts.

  'Hey,' the duck said. 'I'm joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes' credit to run before this facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can make the most of what's left.'

  The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.

  'I know which I'd do,' it said.

  SEVEN

  The Pursuit of God

  When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.

  'Who's there?' he said sharply. 'Lizzie?'

  The noise stopped.

  A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth's clothes which had remained to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn't sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn't enough saliva to speak.

  'I can't begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!' it shouted suddenly. 'Ever feel that, Kearney? Ever feel your life is threadbare? Ever feel it's like this worn-out curtain which barely hides all the rage, the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared show themselves?'

  'For God's sake,' Kearney said, backing away.

  The head smiled contemptuously.

  'It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn't that what you feel? Just like the ones at these windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung.'

  Kearney tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.

  Eventually he said: 'Elizabeth never hung curtains.'

  The head licked its lips. 'Well let me tell you something, Kearney: it didn't hide you anyway! Behind it that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty-odd years, laughing and making faces (oh yes, making faeces, Kearney!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won't look, will you? Because pull that curtain back once and you'd be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it.'

  The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

  'Ever feel like that, Kearney?'

  Kearney considered.

  'No.'

  Valentine Sprake's face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. 'No?' he said. 'Oh well.'

  He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he hid been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absent-minded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levis which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand-its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness-he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.

  'Look at this.'

  'I don't want it.' Kearney backed away. 'I don't want it.' />
  'More fool you,' said Valentine Sprake. 'I got it off the shelf there.' He tore out two or three pages of the volume-which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth's beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of Madame Bovary-and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. 'I can't be bothered with people who don't know their own minds.'

  'What do you want from me?'

  Sprake shrugged. 'You phoned me,' he said. 'As I heard it.'

  'No,' said Kearney. 'I got some sort of answer service, but I didn't leave a message.'

  Sprake laughed.

  'Oh yes you did. Alice remembered you. Alice quite fancies you.' He rubbed his hands busily. 'How about a cup of tea?'

  'I'm not even sure you're here,' Kearney said, looking anxiously at the sofa. 'Did you understand anything you were saying over there?' Then he said: 'It's caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two days ago. I thought you might know what to do.'

  Sprake shrugged.

  'You already know what to do,' he suggested.

  'I'm sick of doing it, Valentine.'

  'You'd better get out, then. I doubt you'll finish with a whole skin whatever you do.'

  'It doesn't work any more. I don't know if it ever worked.'

  Sprake gave him a small colourless smile. 'Oh, it works,' he said. 'You're just a wanker.' He held up one hand in the pretence that Kearney might take offence. 'Only joking. Only joking.' He kept smiling for a moment or two, then added: 'Mind if I roll a cigarette?' On the inside of his left wrist he had a home-made tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Kearney shrugged and went into the galley. While Kearney made the tea Sprake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to fill with streetlight instead.

  At one point he said, 'The Gnostics were wrong, you know.' Then, when Kearney didn't reply: