M. Harrison - LIGHT

'It's beautiful,' Anna said, in a shocked voice.

Kearney, sweating suddenly, turned the sound down.

'Sometimes I think this is all such bollocks,' he said.

'It is beautiful, though,' she objected.

'It doesn't look like that,' Kearney told her. 'It doesn't look like anything. It's just data from some X-ray telescope. Just some numbers, massaged to make an image. Look around,' he told her more quietly. 'That's all anything is. Nothing but statistics.' He tried to explain quantum theory to her, but she just looked bemused. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It's just that there isn't really anything there. Something called decoherence holds the world into place the way we see it: but people like Brian Tate are going to find maths that will go round the end of that. Any day now we'll just go round decoherence on the back of the maths, and all this-' he gestured at the TV, the shadows in the room '-will mean as much to us as it does to a photon.'

'How much is that?'

'Not much.'

'It sounds awful. It sounds undependable. It sounds as if everything will just-' she made a vague gesture '-boil around. Spray about.'

Kearney looked at her.

'It already does,' he said. He raised himself on one elbow and drank some wine. 'Down there it's just disorder,' he was forced to admit. 'Space doesn't seem to mean anything, and that means that time doesn't mean anything.' He laughed. 'In a way that's the beauty of it.'

She said in a small voice, 'Will you fuck me again?'

The next day he managed to get Brian Tate on the phone and ask him, 'Have you seen that crap on TV?'

'Sorry?'

'This X-ray object, whatever it is. I heard someone from Cambridge talking about Penrose and the idea of a singularity without an event horizon, some bollocks like that-'

Tate seemed distracted. 'I haven't heard about any object,' he said. 'Look Michael, I need to talk to you-'

The connection went down. Kearney stared angrily at his phone, thinking of Penrose's definition of the event horizon not as a limitation of human knowledge but as protection against the breakdown of physical laws which might otherwise leak out into the universe. He switched the television on. It was still tuned to CNN. Nothing.

'What's the matter?' asked Anna.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Look, would you mind if we went home?'

He drove the Pontiac into Logan International. Three hours later they were on a standby flight, climbing above the Newfoundland coast, which at that point looked like a skin of mould on the sea. Up they went through a layer of cloud, then broke into glaring sunlight. Anna seemed to have put aside the events of the night. She spent much of the journey staring down at the surface of the clouds, a faint, almost ironical smile on her face; although once she took Kearney's hand briefly and whispered:

'I like it up here.'

But Kearney's mind was on other journeys.

In his second year at Cambridge, he had worked in the mornings, cast cards in his room in the afternoon.

To represent himself, he always chose The Fool.

'We move forward,' Inge had told him before she found someone who would fuck her properly, 'by the deeply undercutting action of desire. As The Fool steps continually off his cliff and into space, so we are presences trying to fill the absence that has brought us forth.' At the time, he had had no idea what she meant by this. He supposed it was some bit of patter she had learned to make things more interesting. But he began with this image of himself in mind: so that each journey would be, in every sense, atrip.

He had to remove The Fool from the deck before the cards could be dealt. Late afternoon, as the light went out of the room, he laid it on the arm of his chair, from which it fluoresced up at him, more an event than a picture.

Through simple rules, a cast of the cards determined the journey that would be based upon it. For instance: if the card turned up was a Wand, Kearney would go north only if the trip was to take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up was a Knight. Further rules, whose clauses and counter-clauses he intuited with each cast and recast of the cards, covered the choice of south, west and east; of destination; even of the clothes he would wear.

He never cast the cards once the journey had started. There was too much to occupy him. Whenever he looked up there was something new in the landscape. Gorse spilled down the side of a steep little hill with a farm on top. Factory chimneys dissolved in a blaze of sun he couldn't look into. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage, sounding like the spatter of rain on a window. Between each event his reverie poured itself, as seamless as golden syrup. He wondered what the weather would be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turned to the Independent to find out, read: 'Global economy likely to remain subdued.' Suddenly, he noticed the wristwatch of the woman sitting across the aisle. It was made of plastic, with a dial transparent to its own works, so that, in the complexity of the greenish, flickering cogs, your eye lost the position of the hands!

What was he looking for? All he knew was that the clean yellow front of an Intercity train filled him with excitement.

Kearney worked in the morning. In the afternoon he cast the Tarot. At weekends he made journeys. Sometimes he saw Inge around the town. He told her about the cards; she touched his arm with a kind of rueful affection. She was always pleasant, though a little puzzled. 'It's just a bit of fun,' she would repeat. Kearney was nineteen years old. Mathematical physics was opening to him like a flower, revealing his future inside. But the future wasn't quite enough. By following the journeys as they fell out, he believed then, he would open for himself what he thought of as a 'fifth direction'. It would lead to the real Gorselands, perhaps; it would enact those dreams of childhood, when everything had been filled with promise, and predestination, and light.

'Michael!'

Kearney stared around him, uncertain for a moment where he was. Light will transform anything: a plastic drinking glass full of mineral water, the hairs on the back of your hand, the wing of an airliner thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. All these things can be redeemed and become for a time essentially themselves. The cabin crew had begun to run up and down the aisles, emptying the seatback trays. Shortly afterwards the engines throttled up and then down again, as the aircraft banked and slipped down into the cloud. Vapour roiled in the wingtip turbulence, then the runway was visible, and the illuminated day transformed itself suddenly into the wet, windswept spaces of London Heathrow.

'We're landing!' said Anna excitedly.

She clutched his upper arm and stared out of the window. 'We're landing!'

In the end all the journeys had led to, of course, was the Shrander. The Shrander had been waiting for him, all along, to catch up.

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters and found them clustered round the hologram display again. This time it was showing some of the complex machinery in the White Cat's hold, being operated onsite in the middle of a desert of olivine sand and low melted-looking heaps of rock which when you studied them hard turned out to be rains.

'The guys knew how to party all right,' one of the men said. This stuff went down at twelve thousand Kelvin, maybe more, from some kind of large-scale gamma emitter. Looks as though they piped the output of a small star in here,' he said. 'A million years ago, and they were fighting over assets a million years older than that. Jesus! Will you just look at this?'

'Jesus,' repeated the female clone listlessly. 'What a fucking bore.'

They all laughed and gathered round the display. The two women, who were wearing identical shocking-pink tube skirts with a satin look, held hands behind their backs.