M. Harrison - LIGHT

'I think we'll leave that for a later trip,' he said.

Everyone laughed except the clone, who spread her hands in front of her. 'Why do you all hate me so,' she said, looking at him over her bright red nails, 'that you make me do it and not her?'

He went over and drew her gently to her feet. He kissed her. 'We like you to do it because we love you,' he said. 'We all love you.' He took one of her hands and examined her fingernails. 'That's very historical,' he said. The hologram blinked, expanded until it measured four or five feet on a side, and was suddenly showing the clone's face in the throes of sexual arousal. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide with pain or pleasure, Seria Mau couldn't tell. You couldn't see what was being done to her. They all sat down and watched, giving the hologram their full consideration as if it were still showing images of Radio Bay, old alien artifacts, big secrets the things they most wanted. Soon they were fucking again.

Seria Mau, who had begun to wonder if she knew their real motives for being aboard, watched them suspiciously for some minutes more. Then she disconnected.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami, a space accordion-folded to contain more than seemed possible or advisable, as full of invisible matter as the halo itself. Was this how human beings dreamed of themselves? She had no idea.

Ten days into the voyage, she dreamed of a boat-ride on a river. It was called the New Pearl River and was wider, the mother told them, than a mile. From each bank, benign but exotically-tailored vegetation hung down into the water, the surface ripples of which looked firm and nacreous and gave off smells of almonds and vanilla. The mother loved it as much as the children. She trailed her bare feet in the cool pearly water, laughing. 'Aren't we lucky!' she kept saying. 'Aren't we lucky!' The children loved her brown eyes. They loved her enthusiasm for everything in the world.

'Aren't we lucky!'

These words echoed across a change of scene, first to blackness, then to the garden again, with its dark laurels.

It was afternoon. It was raining. The old man-he was the father, and you could see how puzzled that responsibility made him, how much of an effort it was-had built a bonfire. The two children stood and watched him throw things onto it. Boxes, papers, photographs, clothes. Smoke lay about the garden in long flat layers, trapped by the inversions of early winter. They watched the hot core of the fire. Its smell, which was like any other bonfire, excited them despite themselves. They stood dressed up in coats and scarves and gloves, sad and guilty in the cold declining afternoon, watching the flames and coughing in the grey smoke.

He was too old to be a father, he seemed to be pleading. Too old.

Just as it became unbearable, someone snatched this dream away. Seria Mau found herself staring into a lighted shop window. It was a retro window, full of retro things. They were from Earth, conjuror's things, children's things made of bad plastic, feathers, cheap rubber, objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine heart which lit itself up by means of the loving diodes within. There were 'X-Ray Specs' and elevator shoes. There was a dark red japanned box, in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom which turned out not to be your own. There were the trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn't take off. As she watched, the man in the black top hat and tails bent his upper body slowly into the window. His hat was on his head. He had removed his white kid gloves which he now held in the same hand as his beautiful ebony cane. His smile was unchanged, warm yet full of a glittering irony. He was a man who knew too much. Slowly and with a wide, generous gesture he used his free hand to take off his hat and sweep it across the contents of the window, as if to offer Seria Mau the items within. At the same time, she recognised, he was offering her himself. He was, in some way, these objects. His smile never changed. He replaced his hat slowly, unbent himself in polite silence, and disappeared.

A voice said: 'Every day, the life of the body must usurp and disinherit the dream.' Then it said: 'Though you never grew up, this is the last thing you saw as a child.'

Seria Mau woke shaking.

She shook and shook until the ship's mathematics took pity on her, flushing the tank so that specific areas of her proteome could be flooded with complex artificial proteins.

'Listen,' it said. 'We are having a problem here.'

'Show me,' said Seria Mau.

Up came the signature diagram again.

At its centre-if ten dimensions mediated as four can be said to have a centre-the lines of possibility wrote themselves so close to each other they became a solid: an inert object with the contours of a walnut, which was no longer changing much. Too many guesses had been made, was Seria Mau's first thought. The original signal, complicating itself towards infinity, had collapsed into this stochastic nugget and was now even more unreadable.

'This is useless,' she complained.

'It seems that way,' the mathematics said equably. 'But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this… '

There was a sudden jump. Randomness resolved to order. The signal simplified itself and split in two, with the fainter component- coloured deep violet-blinking rapidly in and out of view.

'What am I looking at?' demanded Seria Mau.

'Two vessels,' the mathematics told her. 'The steady trace is a K-ship. Phase-locked to its mathematics is some kind of Nastic heavy asset: maybe a cruiser. One clear benefit is that no one can interpret their signature, but that's a sideshow. The real issue is this: they're using the K-ship as a navigational tool. I've never seen that done before. Whoever wrote the code is almost as good as me.'

Seria Mau stared at the display.

'What are they doing?' she whispered.

'Oh, they're following us,' the mathematics said.

Tig Vesicle, stunned into a kind of strained passivity as his adrenalin high wore off, was lost but refused to accept it. Ed Chianese, his ears full of the faint fair voices of demons, continued to follow Vesicle because he couldn't think of anything else to do. He was hungry, and faintly embarrassed by himself. After their escape from the Cray sisters, they had wandered about the streets east of Pierpoint until they found themselves on some high ground near the corner of Yulgrave and Demesne. From there they could see the whole sweep of the city, falling away, clotted with light at major intersections, to the docks. With an air of renewed confidence, Vesicle had thrown his arms wide.

'The warren!'

Plunging downhill into the maze of light and dark, they were soon nowhere again, wandering aimlessly round corners into the sudden teeth of the wind until they found themselves back on Yulgrave-the black, echoing, completely deserted perspective of which stretched away between warehouses and goods yards, apparently forever. There, they were witness to an event so strange that Chianese put it out of his mind until much later. Too much later, as it turned out. At the time all he thought was:

This isn't happening.

Then he thought, it's happening but I'm still in the tank.

'Am I still in the tank?' he said out loud.

No reply. He thought: maybe I'm someone else.

Snow was still coming down, but warm air from Clinker Bay, tainted with the smell of the inshore rigs and cracking plants, had dissolved it to sleet, falling through the mercury vapour lamps like sheaves of sparks from some invisible anvil. Walking through the sparks towards them came a small, plump, oriental-looking woman in a gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh. Her gait had the quick irritability lent by high heels in bad weather. One minute, Chianese was sure, she wasn't there: the next she was. He blinked. He rubbed his hand over his face. Flashbacks, hallucinations, all the bad dreams of a twink.