M. Harrison - LIGHT

Ed was at the circus for several days before anything happened. Annie Glyph came and went in her shy, calm way. She seemed pleased to see him at the end of her shift. She always had something for him. Always seemed a little surprised to find him still there. He grew used to her huge body moving behind the plastic shower curtain. She was so careful! Only at night, when she sweated out the cafй йlectrique, did he have to move away in case he got hurt.

'Do you like someone as big as me?' she would ask him. 'Everyone you've fucked, they were small and nice.'

This made him angry, but he didn't know how to tell her.

'You're OK,' he said. 'You're beautiful.'

She laughed and looked away.

'I have to keep the room empty,' she said, 'in case I break things.'

She was always gone in the morning. Ed woke late, ate breakfast at the Cafe Surf on the maritime strip, where he also got the news. War came closer every day. The Nastic were killing women and children off civilian ships. Who knew why? Space wrecks filled the holograms. Somewhere out near Eridani IV, children's clothes and domestic artifacts drifted slowly around in the vacuum as if they had been stirred. Some meaningless ambush, three freighters and an armed yawl, La Vie Fuerique, destroyed. Crews and passengers, gas in eighty nanoseconds. You couldn't make anything of it. After he'd eaten, Ed combed the circus for work. He talked to a lot of people. They were well disposed, but: none of them could help.

'It's important you meet Madam Shen first,' they said.

Looking for her became a game with him. Every day he picked someone new to represent her, some figure seen at a distance, sexually ambiguous, half-visible in the violent uplight from the concrete. In the evening he would pressure Annie Glyph with, 'Is she here today?' and Annie Glyph would only laugh.

'Ed, she's always busy.'

'But is she here today?'

'She has things to do. She's working on behalf of others. You'll meet her soon.'

'So, OK, look: is that her, over there?'

Annie was delighted.

'That's a man!'

'Well, is that her?'

'Ed, that's a d og! '

Ed enjoyed the bustle of the circus, but he couldn't understand the exhibits. He stood in front of 'Brian Tate and Michael Kearney' and felt only confused by the manic gleam in Kearney's eye as he stared at the monitor over his friend's shoulder, the oddness of Tate's gesture as he looked up and back, the beginnings of understanding dawning on his harassed features. Their clothes were interesting.

He did little better with the aliens. The huge bronze pressure tanks or mortsafes floating three or four feet offthe ground with a kind of oily resilience-so that if you touched one of them, however lightly, you could feel it respond in a simple, massively Newtonian fashion-filled him with a kind of anxiety. He was afraid of their circuitry inlays, and the baroque ribs that might as easily have been decoration as machinery. He was afraid of the way they followed their keepers across the site in the distance in the deceptive sea-light at noon. In the end, he could rarely bring himself to look in the tiny armoured-glass window that enabled you to see the MicroHotep or Azul or Hysperon they were supposed to contain. They hummed silently, or gave off barely visible flashes of ionising radiation. He imagined that looking into them was like looking into some kind of telescope. They reminded him of the twink-tank. He was afraid of seeing himself.

When he admitted this to Annie Glyph, she laughed.

'You twinks are always afraid of seeing yourselves,' she said.

'Hey, I looked once,' he said. 'Once was enough. It was like there was a kitten in there, some kind of black kitten.'

Annie smiled ahead of herself at something invisible.

'You looked at yourself and saw a kitten?' she said.

He stared at her. 'What I mean,' he explained patiently, 'I looked into one of those brass things.'

'Still: a kitten, Ed. That's real cute.'

He shrugged.

'You could barely see anything at all,' he said. 'It could have been anything.'

Madam Shen was a daily no-show. Nevertheless Ed believed he could sense her out there: she would come in her own good time, and he would have employment. In the meantime he rose late, drank Black Heart from the bottle, and crouched with the old men on the floor of the bar at the Dunes Motel, listening to them talk their desultory talk as the dice tumbled and fell. Ed won more than he lost. Since he left home he was lucky that way. But he kept throwing the Twins and the Horse and in consequence his dreams became as unsettled as Annie's. The two of them sweated, thrashed, woke, took the only route they could out of there. 'Fuck me, Ed. Fuck me as hard as you like.' Ed was hooked on Annie by then. She was his bulwark against the world.

'Hey, concentrate. Or you playing catch-up now,' the old men told him gleefully.

If Annie worked late, he played that shift too. The old men never switched on the light in their empty bar. The neon glow of the Tract, seeping in through the open door, was light enough for them. Ed thought they were beyond most things younger people needed. He was shaking the dice one night about ten when a shadow fell across the game. He looked up. It was the receptionist. Tonight she wore a fringed, soft-washed denim skirt. Her hair was up, and she had that fishtank-looking terminal of hers clutched under one arm like some white goods item she just that moment bought. She looked down at the money on the blanket.

'Call yourselves gamblers?' she challenged the old men.

'Yes, we do!' was their unison reply.

'Well I don't,' she said. 'Give me those dice, I'll show you how to gamble.'

She took the bone in one small hand, flexed her wrist and threw it. Double Horses.

'You think that's something?'

She threw again. And again. Two Horses, six in a row.

'Well now,' she admitted. 'That's on the way to being something.'

This trick, clearly familiar, made the old men more animated than Ed had ever seen them. They laughed and blew on their fingers to indicate scorching. They nudged each other, they grinned at Ed.

'You'll see something now,' they promised.

But the receptionist shook her head. 'I haven't come to play,' she said. They were upset, she could see. 'It's just,' she explained, looking meaningfully at Ed, 'I've got other things to do tonight.' They nodded their heads as if they understood, then looked at their feet to hide their disappointment. 'But, hey,' she said, 'it's Black Heart rum at the Long Bar too, and you know how you like the girls down there. What do you say?'

The old men winked and grinned. They could be interested by that, they allowed, and filed out.

'Why you old goats!' the receptionist chided them.

'I'll come too,' Ed said. He didn't feel like being alone with her.

'You'll stay,' she advised him quietly. 'If you know what's good for you.'

After the old men had gone the room seemed to get darker. Ed stared at the receptionist and she stared back at him. Faint glimmers in the fishtank under her arm. She patted her hair. 'What sort of music do you like?' she said. Ed didn't answer. 'I listen to a lot of Oort Country,' she said, 'as you can probably tell. I like its grown-up themes.' They stood in silence again. Ed looked away, pretended to study the broken old bar furniture, the slatted shutters. A breeze came up off the dunes outside, fingered the objects in the room as if trying to decide what to do with them. After a minute or two, the receptionist said softly:

'If you want to meet her, she's here now.'

Ed felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He kept himself firmly facing away.

'I just need a job,' he said.

'And we have one for you,' said a different voice.

Tiny lights began to pour into the room from somewhere behind Ed. He knew where they must be coming from. Nothing would be gained by admitting it, though: an admission like that could fuck up everything. I've seen a lot, Ed told himself, but I don't want the shadow operators in my life. The receptionist had put the fishtank down on the floor. White motes were pouring from her nostrils, from her mouth and eyes. Something pulled Ed's head round so that like it or not he had to witness this event: give it form by recognising it. The lights were like foam and diamonds. They had some kind of music with them, like the sound of the algorithm itself. Soon enough there was no receptionist, only the operator that had been running her, now busily reassembling itself as the little oriental woman he had already shot on Yulgrave Street. The exchange was denim for slit cheongsam, Oort Country drawl for fiercely plucked eyebrows and the faintest delicate swallowing of consonants. After the transition was complete, her face shifted in and out of its own shadows, old then young, young then old. Strange then perfect. She had the charisma of some unreal alien thing, more powerful than sex though you felt it like that.