M. Harrison - LIGHT

'I've got to go,' he said. 'Anna?'

He emptied his cup into the sink. When he got to the door she was already there, standing so he couldn't open it. She had dressed for going out, in a big cable-knit cardigan and fake Versace skirt, and there was a bag at her feet. She saw him looking down at it. 'If you can go I can go too,' she said. Kearney shrugged and reached over her shoulder for the knob of the Yale lock.

' Why don't you trust me?' she said, as if it was already established that he didn't.

'It isn't anything like that.'

'Oh yes it is. I try to help you-'

He made an impatient gesture.

'-only you won't let me.'

'Anna,' he said quickly, 'I help you. You're a drunk. You're anorexic. You're ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You're always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know.'

'You bastard.'

'So how can you help?'

'I'm not letting you go without me,' she said. 'I'm not letting you open this door.'

She struggled against him.

'Jesus, Anna.'

He got the door open and pushed past her. She caught up with him on the stairs and held on to the collar of his jacket and wouldn't let go even when he started to drag her down the stairs.

'I hate you,' she said.

He stopped and stared at her. They were both panting.

'Why are you doing this, then?'

She hit him in the face.

'Because you have no idea!' she shouted. 'Because no one else will help you. Because you're the useless one, the damaged one. Are you so stupid you can't see that? Are you so stupid?'

She let go of his coat and sat down suddenly. She glanced up at him, then away again. Tears poured down her face. Her skirt had ridden up as she fell, and he found himself staring at her long, thin thighs as if he had never seen her before. When she saw that, she blinked her tears away and pulled the skirt up further. 'Christ,' Kearney whispered. He turned her over and pushed her into the cold stone stairs, while she pushed back hard against his hand, sniffing and crying throughout.

When, ten minutes later, he dragged himself away and walked off towards the tube station, she simply followed.

He had met her in Cambridge, perhaps two years after he stole the dice. He was looking for someone to murder, but Anna took him to her room instead. There he sat on the bed while she opened a bottle of wine, showed him photographs of her most recent brush with anorexia, walked nervously about in a long cardigan and nothing else. She told him: 'I like you but I don't want to have sex. Is that all right?' It was all right with Kearney, who-constrained by the Gorselands fantasies and worn out by the evasions he normally had to practise on these occasions-often found himself saying much the same thing. Every time the cardigan fell open thereafter, he gave her a vague smile and looked politely away. This only seemed to make her more nervous. 'Will you just sleep next to me?' she begged him when it was time to go. 'I really like you but I'm not ready for sex.' Kearney spent an hour stretched out next to her, then, at perhaps three in the morning, left the bed and masturbated violently into the bathroom sink. 'Are you all right?' she called in a muffled, sleepy voice.

'You're so nice,' she said, when he came back. 'Hug me.'

He stared at her in the dark. 'Were you even asleep?' he said.

'Please.'

She rolled against him. As soon as he touched her, she groaned and pulled away, raising her behind in the air and burying her face in the pillow while he manipulated her with one hand and himself with the other. At first she tried to join in, but he wouldn't let her touch him. He kept her at the edge of coming, breathing in great sobbing gasps, whimpering into the pillow between each breath. He watched her like this until watching her had made him so hard again his cock hurt. Finally he brought her off with two or three quick little circular rubs and let himself come on to the small of her back. Gorselands had never seemed so close. He had never felt so in control. Engineering that, he supposed, was her way of feeling in control. With her face still in the pillow she said:

'I really didn't mean to do that right up until I did it.'

'Didn't you?' said Kearney.

'You've made me very sticky.'

'Stay there, stay there,' he ordered her, 'don't move,' and fetched tissue to wipe her dry.

He went everywhere with her after that. He was attracted by her cleverly chosen clothes, sudden bursts of laughter, dissembled narcissism. At nineteen, her fragility was already obvious. She had a confusing relationship with her father-some kind of academic in the north- who had wanted her to attend a university closer to home. 'He's sort of disowned me,' she said, looking up at Kearney with a soft, dawning surprise, as if it had just happened. 'Can you understand why anyone would do that?' She had tried to kill herself twice. Her friends, in the way students are, were almost proud of this; they took care of her. Kearney, they intimated fiercely, had responsibilities too. Anna herself seemed only embarrassed: forgotten for a minute, though, she began to waste away. 'I don't think I'm eating much,' she would say helplessly on the telephone. She had the air of someone the simplest levels of whose personality must be held together, hands on, daily.

Kearney was drawn to her by all that (not to say by a species of deep gallantry he detected in her, the presence at some level beneath all these gestures of panic and self-defeat, of a woman determined to have what life her demons would allow). But it was her way of having sex that kept him there. If Kearney wasn't precisely a voyeur, Anna wasn't quite an exhibitionist. Neither of them ever knew quite what they were. They were a mystery to one another.

Eventually that in itself would enrage them: but those early encounters were like water in a desert. They married in a register office two days after he got his doctorate-he bought for the occasion a Paul Smith suit. They were together ten years after that. They never had children, though she said she wanted them. He saw her through two stretches of therapy, three more bouts of anorexia, a last, almost nostalgic attempt to do away with herself. She watched him follow the funding from university to university, doing what he called 'MacScience' for the corporates, keeping track of the new discipline of complexity and emergent properties, all the time staying ahead of the game, the Shrander, the body count. If she suspected anything, she never spoke. If she wondered why they moved so often, she never said. In the end he told her everything one night, sitting on the edge of her bed at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital, staring down at her bandaged wrists and wondering how they had come to this.

She laughed and took his hands in hers. 'We're stuck with each other now,' she said, and within the year they were divorced.

Two days out from Redline, and the White Cat was changing course every twelve nanoseconds. Dyne-space enfolded the ship in a figured, incalculable blackness, out of which reached the caressing fingers of weakly reacting matter. The shadow operators hung motionless at the portholes whispering to one another in the old languages. They had taken on their usual form, of women biting their knuckles in regret. Billy Anker wouldn't have them near him. 'Hey,' he said, ' we don't know what they want!' He tried to exclude them from the human quarters, but they crept in like smoke while he was asleep and hung up in the corners watching him dream his exhausted dreams.

Seria Mau watched him too. She knew that she would soon have to have his account of himself, and of the object she had bought from Uncle Zip. Meanwhile she spent her time with the ship's mathematics, trying to understand what was going on behind them, where, several lights adrift, the Krishna Moire pod wove itself chaotically round the curious hybrid signature of the Nastic ship, to make a single, watery, undependable trace in the display.