M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Hold on,' he said. 'Don't die. You can make it.'

There was a painful laugh.

'The fuck you know about it,' the girl said thickly.

He could feel the heat pouring off her. He had the feeling it would rush away like that, full tilt, and then stop and never be replaced. He tried to put his arms round her to hold it in. But she was too big, so he just held one of her hands.

'What's your name?' he said.

'What's it to you?'

'You tell me your name, you can't die,' Ed explained. 'It's like somehow, you know, we made contact. So you owe me something, and all that.' He thought. 'I need you not to die,' he said.

'Shit,' she said. 'Other people go out in peace. I get a twink.'

Ed was surprised she could guess that.

'How do you know?' he said. 'You can't know that.'

She drew her breath in raggedly.

'Look at yourself,' she advised. 'You're as dead as me, only it's on the inside.' She narrowed her eyes. 'You got blood all on you, man,' she told him. 'You're all over blood. At least I haven't got blood on me.' This seemed to cheer her up in some way. She nodded to herself, settled back.

'I'm Annie Glyph,' she said. 'Or I was.'

'Visit today!' boomed the rickshaw's advertising chip suddenly. 'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao. Also: the future descried. Prophecy. Fortune Telling. Atheromancy.'

'I worked this city five years, on cafй йlectrique and sheer fucking guts,' Annie Glyph said. 'That's two years more than most.'

'What's atheromancy?' Ed asked her.

'I got no idea.'

He stared at the rickshaw. Cheap spoked wheels and orange plastic, totally Pierpoint Street. The rickshaw girls ran eighteen hours a day for speed money, and opium money to take the edge off the speed; then they blew up. Cafй йlectrique and guts: that was their boast. All they had in the end was a myth of themselves. They were indestructible: this destroyed them. Ed shook his head.

'How can you live with it?' he said.

But Annie Glyph wasn't living with it any more. Her eyes were empty, and she had slumped to one side, tipping the rickshaw over with her. He couldn't quite believe something as alive as her could die. Her huge body still had the sheen of sweat on it. Her rawboned face, dwarfed by the muscles of her neck and shoulders, masculised by the inboard testosterone patch the tailor had specified as part of the cheap conversion kit, had a kind of etched beauty. Ed studied it a moment or two then leaned forward to close her eyes. 'Hey, Annie,' he said. 'Sleep at last.' At this, something weird happened. Her cheekbones rippled and shifted uneasily. He put it down to the unsteady illumination of the rickshaw ads. But then her whole head blurred, and seemed to break up into lights.

'Shit!' Ed said. He jumped to his feet and fell over backwards.

It lasted a minute, maybe two. The lights seemed to flutter up into the softly glowing region where the rickshaw ads blossomed out of the air. Then lights and ads together poured back down into her face, which received them like a dry sponge soaking up tears. Her left leg contracted, then kicked out galvanically. 'The fuck,' she said. She cleared her throat and spat. Pushing into the mud with her feet and hands, she got herself and the rickshaw upright. She shook herself and stared down at Ed. Steam was already coming up off the small of her back into the cold night. 'Nothing like that ever happened to me before,' she complained.

'You were dead,' Ed whispered.

She shrugged. 'Too much speed. I can fix that with more speed. You wanna go somewhere?'

Ed got up and backed away.

'No thanks.'

'Hey, climb in, man. It's free. You got a ride.' She looked up at the stars, then slowly around at the waste ground, as if she wasn't sure how she came to be there. 'I owe you, I can't remember why.'

It was the weirdest ride Ed ever had.

2.30 a.m.: the streets were deserted, silent but for the steady soft slap of Annie Glyph's feet. The shafts moved up and down as she ran, but the cab had a chip to damp the effect of that. To Ed it was like gliding and being motionless, both at once. All he could see of the rickshaw girl was her massive lats and buttocks, painted with electric-blue Lycra. Her gait was an energy-saving shuffle. She was designed to run forever. Every so often she shook her head, and an aerosol of sweat sprayed up into the cab's soft corona of advertising light. The heat of her streamed around him, so that he was insulated against the night. He felt insulated from everything else too, as if being Annie's passenger allowed him to withdraw from the world: take a rest from its mysteries.

When he admitted this, she laughed.

'Twinks!' she said. 'Rest is all you fuckers ever do.'

'I had a life once.'

'They all say that,' Annie advised him. 'Hey,' she said. 'Don't you know not to talk to the rickshaw girl? She's got work to do if you ain't.'

The night ran past, the garment district flowing into Union Square and then East Garden. EMC adprop was everywhere. 'War!' announced the hologram hoardings: 'Are you ready?' Annie turned briefly on to downtown Pierpoint, which was as deserted as if the war had already happened. The tank parlours and chopshops were all closed. Here and there some loser drank Roses whiskey in an empty bar while a cultivar in an apron wiped the bartop with his dirty rag and pondered the difference between life and the semblance of it. They would be like that 'til dawn then go home, still wondering.

'So what did you do, this other life you had?' Annie asked Ed suddenly. 'This, "I wasn't always a twink" life of yours?'

Ed shrugged.

'One thing I did,' he began, 'I flew dipships-'

'They all say that.'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'We don't have to talk.'

Annie laughed to herself. She hung a left off Pierpoint on to Impreza, then another at the corner of Impreza and Skyline. There, she had to pull hard into a half-mile grade, but her breathing barely altered. Hills, her body language implied, were the small change of life to a rickshaw girl. After a while, Ed said:

'One thing I remember, I had a cat. That was when I was a kid.'

'Yeah? What colour was that?'

'It was black,' Ed said. 'It was a black cat.'

He could make a clear mental picture of the cat, juggling with a coloured feather in the hall. For twenty minutes it would put its whole heart into whatever you offered-paper, a feather, a painted cork-then lose interest and fall asleep. It was black and thin, with nervous, fluid movements, a pointed little face and yellow eyes. It was always hungry. Ed could make a clear mental picture of the cat, but he couldn't remember anything about the family house. Instead he had a lot of tank memories, which he knew weren't real because of their shiny completeness, their perfection of structure. 'Maybe there was another cat too,' he said: 'A sister.' But on reflection he knew that wasn't true.

'We're here,' Annie said suddenly.

The rickshaw stopped with a jerk. Ed, thrown back out into the world, stared cluelessly around. Fences and gates, dripping with condensation, rattled in the onshore wind. Behind that, a chilly strip of concrete stretched away into saltmarsh and sand dunes, where an encrustation of cheap, sea-soured wooden hotels and bars could be seen.

'Where's this?' he said. 'Shit.'

'The customer doesn't give a destination, I bring them here,' Annie Glyph explained. 'Don't you like it? I'm on a percentage from the circus. See? Over there.' She drew his attention to a distant cluster of lights, then, when he seemed unimpressed, gave him an anxious look. 'It's not so bad,' she said. 'They got hotels and stuff here too. It's the noncorporate spaceport.'

Ed stared over the fence.

'Shit,' he said again.

'I get a percentage to bring in trade,' Annie said. 'I can take you in if you like.' She shrugged. 'Or I could take you on somewhere. But you have to pay for that.'