M. Harrison - LIGHT

After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and-especially-navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

K-tech was born.

'So?' said Seria Mau. 'This is not news.'

She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. 'None of this is news to my life,' she said. 'You know?'

'I know,' said Billy Anker. He went on:

'EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, "We don't make the wars," and then have "terrorists" killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.' He grinned. 'But here's the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip's generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they're adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can't build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.

'Do you understand? We don't have a technology here. We have alien artifacts: a resource mined until it ran out.' He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. 'This may have been one of the last of them,' he said. 'And we don't even know what it was for.'

'Hey, Billy Anker,' she said. ' I know what it's for.'

He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.

'K-tech has run out,' he repeated.

'If that's a good thing, why are you so pissed off?'

Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.

'Because I found a whole planet of it,' he said.

Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn't alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called "science" from some piece of junk he'd salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.' He laughed softly. 'A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn't.'

'How?'

Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.

'I went down it,' he said.

She stared at him. 'But… ' she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.

She said: 'Didn't you care?'

He shrugged. 'I wanted to know,' he said.

'Billy Anker-'

'Oh, it's no way to travel,' he said. 'It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it's like- ' He examined his damaged hand. 'Who knows what it's like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can't describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can't give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?' The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himself; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. 'I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?'

She couldn't.

She thought: If you can't stop yourself trying to attract people this way, Billy Anker, it's because you have no self-esteem. We want a human being, all you dare show us is the lack of Hearts. Then suddenly she realised who he reminded her of. The ponytail, if it had still been black; the thin dark-skinned face, if it hadn't been so tired, so burned out by the rays of distant suns: neither would have looked out of place at the tailorshop party on Henry Street in downtown Carmody, in the soft humid night of Motel Splendido-

'You're one of Uncle Zip's clones,' she said.

At first she thought this would shock him into saying something new. But he only grinned and shrugged it off. 'The personality didn't take,' he said. A complex expression crossed his face.

' He made you for this. '

'He wanted a replacement. His entradista days were over. He thought the child would follow the father. But I'm my own man,' Billy Anker said. He blinked. 'I say that to everyone, but it's true.'

'Billy -'

'Don't you want to know what I found?"

'Of course I do,' she said. She didn't care one way or another at that moment, she was so chilled by his fate. 'Of course I do.'

He was silent for a time. Once or twice he started to speak, but language seemed to fail him. Finally he began:

'That place: it butts up against the Tract so tight you can practically hear the rush and roar of it. You fall out the wormhole, toppling end over end, all your control systems redlined, and there it is. Light. Deep light. Fountains, cascades, falling curtains of light. All the colours you can imagine and some you can't. Shapes they used to see through optical telescopes, in the old days back on Earth. You know? Like gas clouds, and clouds of stars, but evolving there in human time in front of you. Building and falling like surf.' He was silent again, looking inside himself as if he'd forgotten she was there. Eventually he said: 'And you know, it's small, that place. Some used-up old moon they sent down the wormhole for their own purposes. No atmosphere. You can make out the curve of the horizon. And bare. Just white dust on a surface like a cement floor…

'A cement floor,' he whispered. 'You hear the K-code resonating in it like the sound of a choir.' He raised his voice. 'Oh, I didn't stay,' he said. 'I wasn't up to it. I saw that at once. I was too scared to stay. I could feel the code, humming in the fabric, I could hear the light pour over me. I could feel the Tract at my back, like something watching. I couldn't believe they would drive a wormhole through to somewhere so insane. I grabbed a few things-just like the old prospectors, the first few things I saw-and I got out of there as fast as I could.'