M. Harrison - LIGHT

'I wasn't listening deliberately,' she said.

'Keep off this band from now on,' Seria Mau warned her. 'And do something with that hair.' Ten minutes later she sent her fetch back down to Billy Anker.

'We get a lot of interference here,' he said wisely. 'Maybe that was why I lost you.'

'Maybe it was.'

Whatever Billy Anker had done, whatever he was famous for, he wasn't doing much of it now. He lived in his ship, the Karaoke Sword, which Seria Mau suspected would never leave Redline again. The neon vegetation, bluish, pale and strong, grew over its half-mile length like radioactive ivy over a fluted stone column. The Karaoke Sword was made of alien metals, pocked from twenty thousand years of use and ten of Redline rain. You could only guess at its history before Billy found it. Inside, ordinary Earth stuff was hot-wired into its original controls. Bundles of conduit, nests of wires, things like TV screens four hundred years old and full of dust. This was not K-tech. It was as old-fashioned as nuts and bolts, though nothing like as kitschy and desirable. Also, there were no shadow operators on board the Karaoke Sword. If you wanted something doing, it was do it yourself. Billy Anker mistrusted the shadow operators though he never would say why. Instead he sat in what looked like an ancient fighter-pilot's chair, with tubes of coloured fluid and wires going into him, and a helmet he could put on if he felt like it.

He watched Seria Mau's fetch sniffing around in the rubbish at his feet and said:

'In its day this shit took me some weird places.'

'I can imagine that,' said Seria Mau.

'Hey, if it's good enough it's good enough.'

'Billy Anker, I'm here to tell you the Dr Haends package doesn't work.'

Billy looked surprised; then unsurprised.

A sly expression came to his face. 'You want your money back,' he guessed. 'Well, I'm not known-'

'-as a refund guy. I know. But look, that's not-'

'It's policy, babe,' said Billy Anker. He shrugged sadly, but his look above that was comfortable. 'What can I say?'

'You can say nothing and listen for once. Is that why you're alone here with all this historical stuff, because you never listen to anyone? I didn't come here for a refund. If I wanted that I could have it from Uncle Zip. Only I don't trust him.'

'Fair point,' admitted Billy Anker. 'So what do you want?'

'I want you to tell me where you got it from. The package.'

Billy Anker pondered this.

'That isn't usual,' was his reply.

'All the same it's what I want.'

They regarded one another evenly. Billy Anker tapped the fingers of his good hand on the arm of his acceleration chair. In response the screens in front of him cleared, then began showing planets. They were big. They came in fast towards the viewer, swelling and blooming like something live then diving left and right in the moment they disappeared. They were layered with swirling bands of cloud, magenta, green, dirty brown and yellow.

'This is footage I took,' said Billy Anker, 'on a sweep through here just after they discovered it. See how complex this shit is? And the people who built it didn't even have a sun to work with. They towed a brown dwarf into place and torched it up. They knew how to do that so it became a kind of star doesn't fit on any sequence we're aware of. Then they brought in these eight gas giants, along with sixty smaller planetary objects, and injected Redline into the most complex artificial gravitation alley anyone ever saw. Some kind of resonance libration did the rest.' He considered this. 'These guys weren't hobbyists. That operation alone must have taken them a million years. Why do you start a project like that, never finish it?'

'Billy Anker, I don't care.'

'Maybe you just get bored and drift away. There's another thing, though, and it's this: if you can do all that, if you can muster the psychic energy to do all that just to build some kind of scientific instrument, how fucking serious is what you're looking for? You ever think of that? Why these people bothered to spend their time like this?'

'Billy -'

'Anyway: as a result of that and other important aspects of its history, this system is a particle-jockey's nightmare. Interference, as the fakebooks say, is common. So that's probably why our previous connection broke down. Do you think? Which I regretted because I was enjoying it so much.'

He killed the screens and looked down at Seria Mau's fetch.

'Tell me how you stole the White Cat, 'he invited her.

The control room of the Karaoke Sword smelled of hot dust. The monitors ticked and cooled, or switched themselves on suddenly in random patterns. (They showed the Redline surface, an eroded mesa here, a ruined structure there, nothing much to tell between the two; they always came back to the South Polar Artefact, dimly observable in its wastes of radio-snow.) A flickering light went across the control room walls, which had original hieroglyphs on them similar to ancient Earth civilisations. Billy Anker absently rubbed his right hand as if to alleviate the pain of his missing fingers. Seria Mau knew that she had to give something to get something, so she let the silence draw out, then said:

'I didn't. The mathematics stole it.'

Billy Anker laughed in disbelief.

'The mathematics stole it? How does that come about?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'How do I know? It put me to sleep. It can do that. When I woke up we were a thousand lights from anywhere, looking down at the halo.' She had woken from the usual disturbing dreams- though in those days they did not yet feature the man in the top hat and tails-to find herself nowhere. In her tank, she shivered at the recollection. 'It was empty space,' she said. 'I had never been in empty space before. You have no idea. You just have no idea.' She remembered only dislocation, feelings of panic that really had nothing to do with her situation. 'You know,' she said, 'I think it was trying to show me something.'

Billy Anker smiled.

'So the ship stole you,' he said, more to himself than her.

'I suppose it did,' she admitted.

'Oh,' she said, 'I was happy enough to be stolen. I was sick of EMC anyway. All those "police" actions in the Free Trade Zones! I was sick of Earth politics. Mostly I was sick of myself… ' This made him look interestedly at her, so she stopped. 'I was sick of a lot of things which aren't your business.' She struggled to formulate something. 'And yet if the ship stole me, you know, it had no agenda. It hung there. It just hung there in empty space for hours. After I had calmed down, I took it back into the halo. We were running flat out for months. That was when I really deserted. That was when I made my own plans.'

'You went rogue,' said Billy Anker.

'Is that what they say?'

'You play for anyone who pays.'

'Oh, and that makes me so different from all of you people! Everyone has to earn a living, Billy Anker.'

'EMC want you back. You're just an asset to them.'

It was Seria Mau Genlicher's turn to laugh.

'They'll have to catch me first.'

'How close are they to that?' Billy Anker asked her. He waggled the fingers of his good hand. 'This close. When you came in here, my systems had a look at your hull. You were in an exchange of top-end ordnance not long ago. You have particle scouring from some kind of high volume X-ray device.'

'It was no "exchange",' said Seria Mau. 'I was the only one who fired.' She laughed grimly. 'They were gas in eighty nanoseconds,' she claimed, hoping it was true.

He shrugged to show that though he was impressed he would not be deflected from the issue.

'But who were they? They're on to you, kid.'

'What do you know?'

'It's not what I know. It's what you know, which you're trying to deny. It's all over you. It's in the way you speak.'