M. Harrison - LIGHT

' What do you know, Billy Anker?'

He shrugged.

'No one can catch the White Cat! 'she screamed at him.

At that moment Mona the clone walked out from among the hieroglyphs on the wall of Billy Anker's control room. Her fetch, a smaller and cheaper version of herself, flickered like bad neon. It was wearing red fuck-me pumps with five-inch heels, a calf-length latex tube- lime green-and a bolero top in pink angora wool. Its hair was done up in bunches with matching ribbon.

'Oh, hi, sorry,' she said. 'I must have pressed the wrong thing.'

Billy Anker looked irritated.

'You want to be more careful, kid,' he advised her. She gave him a casual up-and-down, then ignored him.

'I was trying to find some music,' she said to Seria Mau.

'Get out of here,' said Seria Mau.

'I just can't work this stuff,' the clone complained.

'If you don't remember what happened to your friends,' Seria Mau reminded her, 'I can show you the footage.'

The clone stood biting her lips for a moment, outrage struggling in her expression with despair, then tears ran down her face and she shrugged and faded slowly away into brown smoke. Though he must have wondered what was behind it all, Billy Anker watched this performance with a studied lack of interest. After a minute he said to Seria Mau:

'You changed the name of the ship. I'm interested why.'

She laughed. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Why do you do anything like that? We hung there in the dark, the ship, the mathematics and me. There was nothing to orient ourselves by except the Tract-faint, distant, winking like a bad eye. Suddenly I remembered the legend the original space-captains had, when they first used the Tate-Kearney transformations all those hundreds of years ago to find their way from star to star. How in the long watches of the night they would sometimes see, inside their navigational holograms, a ghostly vision of Brian Tate himself, toppling through the vacuum with his white cat on his shoulder. That's when I chose the name.'

Billy Anker stared at her.

'Jesus,' he said.

Seria Mau fetched up on the arm of his chair.

'Are you going to tell me where you got the Dr Haends package?' she said, staring into his eyes.

Before he could answer, she was pulled away from the Karaoke Sword and back to the White Cat. Soft, persistent alarms filled the ship. Up in the corners, the shadow operators were wringing their hands.

'Something is happening here,' the mathematics said.

Seria Mau turned restively in the narrow volumes of her tank. What limbs she had left made vague, nervous motions.

'Why tell me?' she said.

The mathematics brought up the signature diagram of an event five or six hundred nanoseconds old. It presented as faint grey fingers knotting and unknotting against spectral light: 'Why does this always look like sex? 'complained Seria Mau. The mathematics, unsure how to answer, remained silent. 'Choose a new regime,' she ordered irritably. The mathematics chose a new regime. Then another. Then a third. It was like trying on coloured spectacles until you saw what you wanted. The image flickered and changed like ancient holiday snaps in a slide projector. Eventually it began to toggle regularly between two states. If you knew exactly how to look into the gap between them you could detect, like weakly reacting matter, the ghost of an event. Two AUs distant, deep in a band of hot gas and asteroidal rubbish, something had moved and then become still again. The nanoseconds spooled away, and nothing further happened.

'You see?' said the mathematics. 'Something is there.'

'This is a difficult system to see in. The fakebooks are clear on that. And Billy Anker says-'

'I appreciate that. But you do agree that something is there?'

'Something's there,' admitted Seria Mau. 'It can't be them. That ordnance would have melted a planet.'

She thought for a moment.

'We'll ignore it,' she said.

'I'm afraid we can't do that,' the mathematics told her. 'Something is happening here and we don't know what it is. They slipped away, like us, just as the ordnance went off. We have to assume this is them.'

Seria Mau thrashed in her tank.

'How could you let this happen!' she shrieked. 'They were gas in eighty nanoseconds!'

The mathematics sedated her while she was still speaking. She heard herself dopplering away into silence like an illustration of some point in General Relativity. Then she dreamed she was back in the garden, one month before the first anniversary of her mother's death. Damp spring now reigned, with Earth-daffodils in the beds beneath the laurel bushes, Earth-sky pale blue between towering white clouds. The house, opening its doors and shutters reluctantly after the long winter, had breathed the three of them forth like an old man's breath. The brother found a slug. He bent down and poked it with a stick. Then he picked it up and ran about with it, going, 'Yoiy yoiy yoiy.' Seria Mau, nine years old, dressed carefully in her red woollen coat, wouldn't look at him, or laugh. All winter she had dreamed of a horse, a white horse which would step so delicately! It would come from nowhere and after that follow her everywhere she went, touching her with its soft nose.

Smiling sadly, the father watched them play.

'What do you want?' he asked them.

'I want this slug!' cried the brother. He fell down and kicked his legs. 'Yoiy yoiy.'

The father laughed.

'What about you, Seria Mau?' he said. 'You can have anything you want!'

He had lived by himself all winter, playing chess in his cold room upstairs, with his hands in fingerless mitts. He cried every lunchtime when he saw Seria Mau bringing the food. He wouldn't let her leave the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and made her look into his hurt eyes. She didn't want that every day of her life. She didn't want his tears; she didn't want his garden, either, with its patch of ashes and its smell of loss among the birch trees. The moment she thought that, she did want him, after all! She loved him. She loved her brother. All the same, she wanted to run far away from them both and sail the New Pearl River.

She wanted to go right up into some space of her own, clutching the mane of a great white horse whose gentle breath would smell of almonds and vanilla.

'I want not to have to be the mother,' Seria Mau said.

Her father's face fell. He turned away. She found herself standing in front of a retro-shop window in the rain.

Hundreds of small items were on display behind the steamy glass. Every one of them was false. False teeth, false noses, fake ruby lips, false hair, X-ray spectacles that never worked. Old, corrupt stuff made of tin or plastic, whose only purpose was to become something else the moment you picked it up. A kaleidoscope that blacked your eye. Puzzles which, taken apart, would never go back together. False-bottom boxes that laughed when they were touched. Musical instruments which farted when you blew in them. It was all false. It was a paradigm of undependability. In the middle of all the other objects, in pride of place, lay Uncle Zip's gift-box with its green satin ribbon and its dozen long-stemmed roses. The rain stopped. The lid of the box lifted a little of its own accord. A nanotech substrate like white foam poured out and began to fill the shop window, while the soft bell chimed and the woman's voice whispered:

'Dr Haends? Dr Haends please. Dr Haends to surgery!'

At this there came a light but peremptory tap on the inside of the glass. The foam cleared, revealing the display to be empty but for a single item. Against a background of ruched oyster satin stood a piece of stiff white card, on which was reproduced the crude and lively drawing of a man in black top hat and tails, caught preparing to light an oval Turkish cigarette. He had shot his cuffs with a flourish. He had tamped the tobacco on the back of his long white hand. Frozen in that moment, he was full of elegant potential. His black eyebrows made ironic arcs. 'Who knows what will happen next?' he seemed to be saying. The cigarette would vanish. Or the magician would vanish. He would tip back his hat with the end of his ebony cane and fade slowly into nothing while the Kefahuchi Tract slithered across the ruched satin void behind him like a cheap Victorian necklace and the streetlight flashed-ting!-off one of his white, even, incisor teeth. Everything would vanish.