M. Harrison: LIGHT

'Watch, though,' Tate warned him. 'Just before it decays. I've slowed it down about a million times, but it's still hard to catch--there!'

A cascade of fractals like a bird's wing, so tiny Kearney barely noticed it. But the female oriental, whose sensory-motor uptake times had been engineered by different biological considerations, was off his shoulder in an instant. She approached the screen, which was now blank, and batted it repeatedly with her front paws, stopping every so often to look into them as though she expected to have caught something. After a moment the male cat came out from wherever it had been hiding and tried to join in. She looked down at it, chattering angrily.

Tate laughed and switched the display off.

'She does that every time,' he said.

'She can see something we can't. Whatever it is goes on after the part we can see.'

'There's not really anything there at all.'

'Run it again.'

'It's just some artifact,' Tate insisted. 'It's not in the actual data. I wouldn't have shown you if I thought it was.'

Kearney laughed.

'That's encouraging,' he said. 'Will it slow down any further?'

'I could try, I suppose. But why bother? It's a bug.'

'Try,' said Kearney. 'Just for fun.' He stroked the cat. She jumped back onto his shoulder. 'You're a good girl,' he said absently. He pulled some things out of a desk-drawer. Among them was a little discoloured leather bag which contained the dice he had stolen from the Shrander twenty-three years before. He put his hand inside. The dice felt warm against his fingers. Kearney shivered over a sudden clear image of the woman in the Midlands, kneeling on a bed and whispering 'I want so much to come' to herself in the middle of the night. To Tate, he said: 'I might have to go away for a while.'

'You've only just come back,' Tate reminded him. 'We'd get on quicker if you were here more often. The cold gas people are on our heels. They can get robust states where we can't: if they make any more progress it's us who'll become the backwater. You know?'

'I know.'

Kearney, at the door, offered him the white cat. She twisted about in his hands. Her brother was still looking at the empty display.

'Have you got names for them yet?'

Tate looked embarrassed.

'Only the female,' he said. 'I thought we could call her Justine.'

'Very apt,' Kearney admitted. That evening, rather than face an empty house, he called his first wife, Anna.

K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher was up in the halo with her ship, the White Cat, trolling for customers.

Up there, a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky, trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter. Seria Mau liked it there. She liked the halo. She liked the ragged margins of the Tract itself, which everyone called 'the Beach', where the corroded old pre-human observatories wove their chaotic orbits, tool-platforms and laboratories abandoned millions of years previously by entities who had no idea where they were-or perhaps anymore what they were. They had all wanted a closer look at the Tract. Some of them had steered whole planets into position, then wandered off or died out. Some of them had steered whole solar systems into position, then lost them.

Even without all that stuff, the halo would have been a hard place to navigate. That made it a good hunting ground for Seria Mau, who now lay at a kind of non-Newtonian standstill inside a classic orbital tangle of white dwarf stars, waiting to pounce. She liked this time the best. Engines were shut down. Coms were shut down. Everything was shut down so she could listen.

Some hours ago she had lured a little convoy-three dynaflow freighters, civilian ships carrying 'archeological' artifacts out of a mining belt twenty lights along the Beach, hurried along anxiously by a fast armed yawl called La Vie Fuerique - into this benighted spot and left them there while she went and did something else. Her ship's mathematics knew exactly how to find them again: they, however, tied to standard Tate-Kearney transformations, barely knew what day it was. By the time she returned, the yawl, overburdened by its duty of care, had got the freighters into the shadow of an old gas giant while it tried to calculate a way out of the trap. She watched them curiously. She was calm, they were not. She could hear their communications. They were beginning to suspect she was there. La Vie Fuerique had sent out drones. Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.

'Ah,' said Seria Mau Genlicher, as if they could hear her. 'You should be more careful, out here in empty space.'

As she spoke, the White Cat slipped into a cloud of non-baryonic junk, which, reacting weakly to her passage through it, stroked the hull like a ghost. A few dials woke up in the manual back-up systems in the empty human quarters of the ship, flickered, dropped back to zero. As matter, it was barely there, but the shadow operators were drawn to it. They gathered by the portholes, arranging the light that fell around them so that they could make the most tragic picture, looking at themselves in mirrors, whispering and running thin fingers across their mouths or through their hair, rustling their dry wings.

'If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,' they mourned, in the old language.

' Such a blessing,' they said.

Don't let me have to deal with this now, she thought.

'Go back to your posts,' she ordered them, 'or I'll have the portholes taken out.'

'We're always at our posts-'

'I'm sure we never meant to upset you, dear.'

'-always at our posts, dear.'

As if this had been a signal, La Vie Fuerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a minefield.

The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine engines etched into silicon wafers a centimetre square, weren't much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren't move and you daren't stop moving. The crew of La Vie Fuerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they broke cover on desperate, half-calculated EE trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.

'No, no, this is not how we do it,' said Seria Mau. 'You tubby little thing.'

She appeared from nowhere on its port stern quarter and allowed herself to be detected. This produced an explosion of internal coms traffic and a satisfying little dash for safety, to which she put an end with some of her more serious-if less sophisticated-ordnance. The flare of the explosion lit up several small asteroids and, briefly, the wreckage of the yawl, which, locked into the local chaotic attractor, toppled past end over end, wrapped in a rather beautiful radioactive glow.

'What does that mean?' Seria Mau asked the shadow operators: ' La Vie Feerique? '

No answer.

A little later she matched velocities with the wreckage and hung there while it wheeled slowly around her: buckled hull plates, monolithic items of dynaflow machinery, what looked like mile upon mile of slowly weaving cable. 'Cable?' Seria Mau laughed. 'What kind of technology is that?' You could see every strange thing out there on the Beach, ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out tubby little ships like these. In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone's worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all. Preoccupied by these thoughts, she eased the White Cat further in, to where the corpses turned in the vacuum. They were human. Men and women about her own age, bloated, frozen, limbs at odd, sexual angles, slowly cartwheeling through an atmosphere of their own possessions, they streamed past her bow. She nosed between them, looking for something in their expressions of dull fear and acceptance, though she was not sure what. Evidence. Evidence of herself.