M. Harrison - LIGHT

'What about the other thing?'

'What other thing?'

'The glitch in the model, whatever it was.'

'Ah,' said Tate, 'that. Well, I did what I could with it.' He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney's shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney's shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.

'What do you make of it?' said Tate. 'Kearney?'

Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:

'It's probably an artefact, then.'

'That's what I thought,' said Tate. 'There's no point going any further with it.' He laughed. 'Except maybe to amuse the cat.' When Kearney didn't rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:

'Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.'

'Sprake,' said Kearney.

'That's what I said.'

Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.

'Did he take anything?' He indicated the monitor. 'He didn't see this?'

Tate laughed.

'You're joking. I wouldn't let him in. He walked up and down in the area, swinging his arms and haranguing me in a language I didn't recognise.'

'His bark's worse than his bite,' Kearney said.

'After the second time, I changed the door code.'

'So I noticed.'

'It was just in case,' said Tate defensively.

Kearney had met Sprake perhaps five years after he stole the dice. The meeting occurred on a crowded commuter train passing through Kilburn on its way to Huston. The walls of the Kilburn cutting were covered with graffiti, explosions of red and purple and green done with deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes bulging like damp tropical fruit, effects of glistening surfaces. Eddie, Daggo, Mince- less names than pictures of names. After you had seen them everything else became oppressive and dull.

The platform at Kilburn was empty but the train stopped there for a long time, as if it was waiting for someone, and eventually a man pushed his way on. He had red hair, pale hard eyes, and an old yellow bruise across the whole of his left cheek. He wore a belted military surplus coat with no jacket or shirt underneath it. Though the doors closed, the train remained still. As soon as he got in, he rolled a cigarette and began smoking it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other passengers. The men stared at their polished shoes. The women studied the mass of sandy hairs between his pectoral muscles; they exchanged angry glances. Though the doors had closed, the train remained where it was. After a minute or two, he pulled back his cuff to consult his watch, a gesture which revealed the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. He grinned, and indicated the graffiti outside.

'They call it "bombing",' he said to one of the women. 'We ought to live our lives like that.' Instantly she became involved with her Daily Telegraph.

Sprake nodded, as if she had said something. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and examined the flattened, porous, spittle-stained end of it. 'You lot, now,' he said. 'Well, you look like a lot of self-satisfied bullies.' They were corporate IT workers and estate agents in their mid twenties, passing themselves off with a designer tie or a padded shoulder as dangerous accountants from the City. 'Is that what you want?' He laughed. 'We should bomb our names on to the prison walls,' he shouted. They edged away from him, until only Kearney was left.

'As for you,' he said, staring interestedly up at Kearney with his head at an odd, bird-like angle on his neck, and dropping his voice to a barely audible murmur:

'You just have to keep killing, don't you? Because that's the way to keep it at arm's length. Am I right?'

The encounter already had the same edge of unease-the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding-many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. But at the time Kearney still considered himself as a kind of apprentice or seeker. He still hoped to gain something positive. He was still trying to see his retreat from the Shrander as accompanied by a counter-trajectory-a movement towards it -from which something like a transformational encounter might yet proceed. But the truth was that, by the time he met Sprake, he had been throwing the dice, and making random journeys, and getting nowhere, for what seemed like a lifetime. He felt a flicker of vertigo (or perhaps it was only the train starting up again, to drift, slowly at first then faster and faster, towards Hampstead South) and, thinking he was going to fall, reached a hand out to Sprake's shoulder to steady himself.

'How do you know?' he said. His own voice sounded hoarse and threatening to him. It sounded disused.

Sprake eyed him for a second, then chuckled round at the occupants of the carriage.

'A nudge,' he said, 'is as good as a wink. To a blind horse.'

He had slyly removed himself as Kearney reached for him. Kearney half fell into the woman hiding behind the Daily Telegraph, righted himself with an apology, and in that instant saw how good the body is at making metaphors. Vertigo. He was in flight. Nothing good would ever come of this now. He had been falling from the moment the dice came into his hands. He got off the train with Sprake, and they walked off across the noisy, polished concourse and out into Euston Road together.

In the years that followed they developed their theory of the Shrander, though it contained no elements of explanation, and was rarely articulated except by their actions. One Saturday afternoon on a train to Leeds, they murdered an old woman in the draughty space between the carriages, and, before stuffing her into the toilet cubicle, wrote in her armpit with a red gel pen the lines, 'Send me an eon heart/Seek it inside.' It was their first joint effort. Later, in an ironic reversal of the usual trajectory, they flirted with arson and the killing of animals. At first Kearney gained some relief, if only through the comradeship-the complicity-of this. His face, which had taken on a look so hollow he might have been dead, relaxed. He gave more time to his work.

But in the end, complicity was all it turned out to be. Despite these acts of propitiation, his circumstances remained unchanged, and the Shrander pursued him everywhere he went. Meanwhile, Sprake took up more and more of his time. His career languished. His marriage to Anna ended. By the time he was thirty, he was sclerotic with anxiety.

If he relaxed, Sprake kept him up to the mark.

'You still don't think it's real,' he would say suddenly, in his soft, insinuating way: 'Do you?'

Then: 'Go on, Mick. Mickey. Michael. You can admit it to me.'

Valentine Sprake was already in his forties and still lived at home. His family ran a second-hand clothes shop in North London. There was an old woman with a vaguely middle-European accent, who spent her time staring up in a kind of exhausted trance at the curiously wrenched space of the religious art on the walls. Sprake's brother, a boy of about fourteen, sat day in and day out behind the counter of the shop, chewing something which smelted of aniseed. Alice Sprake, the sister, with her heavy limbs, vacant heavy smile, her olive skin and faint moustache, regarded Kearney speculatively from large brown eyes. If they were ever left alone together, she sat next to him and put her damp hand softly on his cock. He became erect immediately, and she smiled at him in a possessive way, revealing that her teeth weren't good. No one ever saw this, but whatever their other limitations that whole family had a withering emotional intelligence.