M. Harrison - LIGHT

'It's hard to feel threatened, when they stay back so far.'

'Perhaps they don't want us to panic,' the mathematics suggested. 'Or — ' with its equivalent of a shrug ' — perhaps they do.'

'Can we lose them?'

'Their computational success is high, but not as high as mine. With luck, I can keep them at arm's length.'

'But can we lose them?'

'No.'

She couldn't bear that idea. It was a limitation. It was like being a child again. ' Well then, do something! 'she screamed. After some thought the mathematics put her to sleep, which for once she welcomed.

She dreamed again of the time they were all still happy. 'Let's go away!' the mother said. 'Would you like to go away?' Seria Mau clapped her hands, while her brother ran up and down the family room, shouting, 'Let's go away! Let's go away!' though when the time came he threw a tantrum because he couldn't take his little black cat. They caught the Rocket Train north, to Saulsignon. It was a long journey in a lost season-not quite winter, not quite spring-slow and exciting by turns. 'If it's a Rocket Train it should go faster!' the little boy shouted, running up and down the aisle. The sky was a stretched blue over long hypnotic lines of plough. They got down at Saulsignon the afternoon of the next day. It was the tiniest of stations, with wrought iron posts and tubs of Earth flowers, washed bright as a new pin by the little showers of rain falling through the sunlight. The platform cat licked its tortoiseshell fur in a corner, the Rocket Train departed, and a white cloud obscured the sun. Outside the station a man walked by. When he stopped to look back, the mother shivered and wrapped her honey-coloured fur coat about her, drawing its collar tight with one long white hand.

Then she laughed and the sun came out again. 'Come along, you two!' And there, moments later it seemed, was the sea!

Here the dream ended. Seria Mau waited attentively for the reprise, or second act, in which the conjuror would appear, dressed in his beautiful top hat and tails. When nothing happened she was disappointed. As soon as she woke up she switched on all the lights in the human quarters. The shadow operators, caught bending solicitously over Billy Anker's bed in the dark, fled right and left.

'Billy Anker,' Seria Mau called. 'Wake up!'

A few minutes later he stood blinking and rubbing his eyes in front of the Dr Haends package in its red gift box.

'This?' he said.

He looked puzzled. He poked about behind the box. He picked up one of Uncle Zip's roses and sniffed it. He raised the lid of the box cautiously (a bell chimed, a soft spotlight seemed to shine down from above) and eyed the upwelling and slow purposive spill of white foam. The bell chimed again. A female voice whispered, 'Dr Haends. Dr Haends, please.' Billy Anker scratched his head. He put the lid back on the box. He took it off again. He reached out to touch the white stuff with his finger.

'Don't do that!' warned Seria Mau.

'Shh,' said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. 'I look inside,' he said, 'and I don't see anything. Do you?'

'There's nothing to see.'

'Dr Haends to surgery, please,' insisted the quiet voice.

Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. 'I never saw anything like this before,' he said. 'Of course, we don't know what Uncle Zip did to it.' He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. 'It didn't look like this when I found it,' he said. 'It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.' He shrugged. 'Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn't have these theatrical values.' He smiled in a way she didn't understand, looking off into the distance. 'That's Uncle Zip's signature, if you like,' he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau's fetch wove nervously around his ankles.

'Where did you find it?' she said.

Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch's eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:

'You can't outrun EMC forever.'

'It's not me they're after,' she reminded him.

'All the same,' he said, 'they'll catch you in the end.'

'Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It's easy to lose yourself out here.'

'You're already lost,' Billy Anker said. 'I admire that you stole a K-ship,' he went on quickly: 'Who wouldn't? But you're lost, and you aren't finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You're doing the wrong thing. You know?'

'How come you say these things?' she shouted. 'How come you make me feel bad like this?'

He couldn't answer that.

'What's the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I'm not a refund kind of guy?' She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn't his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I don't know you well enough to say that.'

'No,' he said.

'I was wrong,' she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn't fill. 'It was wrong of me.'

She had to be content with a shrug.

'So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you're clearly so proud of.'

'Take this ship deep,' he said. 'Take it to the Tract.'

'I don't know why I'm talking to you, Billy Anker.'

He laughed.

'I had to try,' he said. He said, 'OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.'

She laughed.

'Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?' He went on anyway.

Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the 'affected area' and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. 'Containment' was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.