M. Harrison - LIGHT

He looked tired. He closed his eyes.

'I brought them down on myself, kid. Get out of here. Take it deep.'

'Goodbye, Billy Anker.'

'Hey, kid-'

But when she turned to answer, he was dead.

I fell for it, she told herself in despair. All the fucking and the fighting. Despite everything I promised myself, I fell for it too.

Then she thought: Uncle Zip! Terror dissolved her, because she had so underestimated that fat man, how intelligent he was, how galaxywide. She had been in his hands from the moment she began to deal with him.

What would she do now?

'If I'm predicting the future, how come I always see the past?'

When Ed asked Sandra Shen that question, she was no more help than Annie Glyph. All she did was shrug lightly.

'I think we need practice, Ed,' she said. She lit a cigarette and gave her attention amusedly to something in the corner of the room. 'I think we need to work harder.'

Ed never could decode that distant look of hers. If anything, she seemed pleased by the debacle in the main tent. It filled her full of energy: her other projects languished, and she was around on a daily basis. She kicked the old men out of the bar of the Dunes Motel. He came in and found her fitting it out with equipment of her own, which she was bringing in at night in unmarked crates. This stuff was uniformly old. It featured cloth-covered electric cable, Bakelite casings, dials across which tiny needles rose and fell. There was some kind of amplifier that worked by valves.

'Jesus,' he said. 'This is real. '

'Fun, isn't it?' Sandra Shen said. 'Four hundred and fifty years old, give or take. Ed, it's time we began to work together on this. Put our heads together. What I need to do is fasten these straps round your wrists… '

The idea was that Ed sat with his arms and legs strapped to the arms and legs of a big raw-looking wooden chair that came with the rest of the equipment, while Sandra Shen connected herself to the valve amplifier. She then settled the fishtank on Ed's head and asked him questions until she got an answer that suited her. Her voice came to him close and intimate, as if she was in there with him and the eels on their weird, tiring journey beneath the Alcubiere sea, forward towards some unwelcome revelation of his youth. The questions were meaningless to Ed.

'Is life a bitch or isn't it, Ed?' she would say. Or: 'Can you count to twelve?'

He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn't hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of whitesunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.

In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly dйcolletй emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren't the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. 'More practice, Ed. That's all you need.' She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. 'Well done, Ed. Well done .'Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.

'Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?' Annie asked him one night.

Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.

'It's a living,' he said.

'Oh, very entradista,' she said sarcastically. 'Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.'

Ed shrugged.

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Yes you do.'

Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.

'What do you know about her, Ed?' she called back in. 'Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to see? ' When he didn't answer, she said, 'It's just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.'

'Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.'

Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.

'It's a beautiful night out here. Let's walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I'll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!'

'I am a show,' Ed said.

Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn't want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn't want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. 'Any time, man.'

When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.

'Is this wise?' was all she said.

'Everyone,' he said, 'deserves a break.'

'And yet, Ed, there's Bella Cray.'

'What do you know about Bella?' he demanded.

When she shrugged, he shrugged loo.

'If you're not scared of her, I'm not either.'

'Be careful, Ed.'

'I'm careful,' he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.

He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.

Had he lost them? He couldn't be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But: they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.

He didn't get much time to think. There was a characteristic wet-sounding thump. At the same time, everything seemed to brighten and fade simultaneously. Half the street went out right in front of his eyes, and it still missed him.

'Jesus,' whispered Ed, backing away into a crowd of prostitutes tailored to look and act like sixteen-year-old Japanese girls from late twentieth-century internet fuck sites. 'There was no need for that.' He touched his face. It felt hot. The prostitutes staggered about giggling nervously, their clothes in tatters, their skin sunburned to bright red. As soon as he could think again, Ed went off at a run. He ran until he didn't know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there… He stared up and thought long and hard about Annie Glyph. It was like this the night he met her, bad light flickering across waste lots. Somehow he had brought her back to life just by asking her name. Now he was responsible for her.