M. Harrison - LIGHT

Suddenly it was dawn, and in a corner of the sea wall, where a water-stair went down to what was now new-washed empty sand, grey in the thin light of dawn, she came upon three shadow boys. Running on one-shot cultivars-the throwaway 24-hour kind, all tusks and rank-smelling muscles, sleeveless denim jackets, sores from bumping against things in an unconsidered manner-they were squatting in the dawn wind playing the Ship Game on a blanket, grunting as the bone dice tumbled and toppled, every so often exchanging high-speed datastreams like squeals of rage. Complex betting was in progress, less on the game than the contingencies of the world around it: the flight of a bird, the height of a wave, the colour of the sunlight. After every cast of the dice they pawed and fought pantomimically and tossed folding money at one another, laughing and snuffling.

'Hey,' they said when Seria Mau fetched up. 'Here, kitty kitty!' There was nothing they could do to her. She was safe with them.

It was like having grown-up brothers. For a moment or two they threw the dice at blinding speed. Then one of them said, without looking up: 'You don't get bored, being not real that way?'

They couldn't play for laughing at that.

Seria Mau watched the game until a bell rang softly on the White Cat and drew her away.

As soon as she was gone, two of the shadow boys turned on the third and cut his throat for cheating, then, overcome by the pure existential moment, cradled his head in the warm golden light as he smiled softly up at nothing, bubbling his life out all over them like a benediction. 'Hey you,' they comforted him, 'you can do it all again. Tonight you'll do it all again.'

Up in the parking lot, Seria Mau sighed and turned away.

'You see?' she told her empty ship. 'It always comes to this. All the fucking and the fighting, it all comes to nothing. All the pushing and the shoving. All the things they give each other. If for a moment I thought-' Could she still cry? She said, apropos of nothing: 'Those beautiful boys in the sunlight.' This made her remember what she had said to the Nastic commander, out there in the shadow of his stupidly big ship. It made her remember the package she had bought from Uncle Zip, and what she intended to do with it. It made her recall Uncle Zip's offer. She opened a line to him and said:

'OK, tell me where this Billy Anker guy is.' She laughed, and, mimicking the tailor's manner, added, 'Also his present ambitions.'

Uncle Zip laughed too. Then he let his face go expressionless.

'You waited too long for that free offer,' he informed her. 'I changed my mind about that.'

He was sitting on a stool in his front room above the shop. He had on a short-sleeve sailor suit and hat. White canvas trousers clung tight to bursting over his spread thighs. On each thigh he had a daughter sitting, plump red-faced little girls with blue eyes, shiny cheeks and blonde ringlets, caught as if in a still picture, laughing and reaching for his hat. All the flesh in this picture was lively and varnished. All the colours were pushed and rich. Uncle Zip's fat arms curved around his daughters, his hands placed in the small of each back as if they were the bellows-ends of his accordion. Behind him, the room was lacquered red and green, and there were shelves on which he had arranged his collections of polished motorcycle parts and other kitschy things from the history of Earth. Whatever you saw in Uncle Zip's house, he never let you see his wife, or gave you one thin glimpse of the tools of his trade. 'As to where the guy is,' he said, 'this is where you go… '

He gave her the name of a system, and a planet.

'It surveys as 3-alpha-Ferris VII. The locals-which there aren't many of them-call it Redline.'

'But that's in-'

'-Radio Bay.' He shrugged. 'Nothing comes easy in this world, kid. You got to decide how much you want what you want.'

Seria Mau cut him off.

'Goodbye, Uncle Zip,' she said, and left him there with his expensive family and his cheap rhetoric.

Two or three days later, the K-ship White Cat, registered as a freebooter out of Venusport, New Sol, quit the Motel Splendido parking orbit and slipped away into the long night of ths halo. She had loaded fuel and ordnance. After port authority inspection she had accepted minor hull maintenance, and paid the scandalous tax upon it. She had paid her dues. At the last moment, for reasons her captain barely understood, she had taken on payload too: a team of corporate exogeologists and their equipment, headed towards Suntory IV. For the first time in a year, the lights were on in the human quarters of the ship. The shadow operators mapped and mowed. They hung in corners, whispering and clasping their hands in a kind of bony delight.

What were they? They were algorithms with a life of their own. You found them in vacuum ships like the White Cat, in cities, wherever people were. They did the work. Had they always been there in the galaxy, waiting for human beings to take residence? Aliens who had uploaded themselves into empty space? Ancient computer programmes dispossessed by their own hardware, to roam about, half lost, half useful, hoping for someone to look after? In just a few a hundred years they had got inside the machinery of things. Nothing worked without them. They could even run on biological tissue, as shadow boys full of crime and beauty and inexplicable motives. They could, if they wanted, they sometimes whispered to Seria Mau, run on values.

Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm, but he didn't do that stuff himself, anymore than he would have filled his arm with AbH. How he looked at it was this: his life was crap, but it was a life. So the kind of porn he liked to watch was ordinary, cheap, unimmersive, holographic stuff. It was often advertised as intrusion-porn. The fantasy of it was: some woman's room would get fitted with microcameras without her knowledge. You could watch her do anything, though things would usually end with some cultivar-all tusks, prick the size of a horse-finding her in the shower. Vesicle often turned that part off. The show he watched most was syndicated from out in the halo and featured a girl called Moaner, who was supposed to live in a corporate enclave somewhere on Motel Splendido. The story was, her husband was always away (though in fact he often arrived back unexpectedly with five of his business associates, who included another woman). Moaner wore short pink latex skirts with tube tops and little white socks. She had a little clean mat of pubic hair. She was bored, the narrative went; she was agile and spoilt. Vesicle preferred her to do ordinary things, like painting her toenails naked, or trying to look over her shoulder at herself in a mirror. One thing with Moaner was this: even though she was a clone, her body looked real. She wasn't any kind of rebuild. They advertised her as 'never been to the tailor' and he could believe that.

The other thing about her was that she was aware of you, even though she didn't know you were there.

Could you get behind that paradox? Vesicle believed you could. If he once understood it, it would tell him something about the universe or, equally important, about human beings. He felt as if she knew he was there. She isn't a porn star! he would tell himself.

He was dreaming this cheap, doomed, New Man dream-while Moaner herself yawned and tried on a pair of brand new yellow Mickey Mouse shorts with big buttons and matching suspenders-when the door of the tank farm banged open, letting in a gust of cold grey wind from the street, along with six or seven tiny kids. They had short black hair and tight, furious Asian faces. Snow was melting on the shoulders of their black rainslickers. The oldest was maybe eight, with lightning flashes etched into the short hair above her ears and a Nagasaki Hi-Lite Autoloader clutched in both hands. They spread out and began going through the tank cubicles as if they were looking for something, shouting and gabbling in gluey voices and pulling out the power cables so the tanks went on to emergency wake-up call.