M. Harrison - LIGHT

He went back to the circus and found her sleeping. The room was full of her slow, calm heat. Ed lay down beside her and buried his face where her neck and shoulder met. After a moment or two she half woke and made room for him inside the curve of her body. He put his hand on her and she gave a big guttural grunt of pleasure. He would have to leave New Venusport before something happened to her because of him. He would have to leave her here. How would he tell her? He didn't know.

She must have read his thoughts, because she came home a few nights later and said:

'What's the matter, Ed?'

'I don't know,' Ed lied.

'If you don't know, Ed, you should find out,' she said.

They stared puzzledly at one another.

Ed liked to walk around in the cold bright morning through the circus itself, moving from the salt smell of the dunes to the smell of warm dusty concrete that filled the air around the tents and pavilions.

He wondered why Sandra Shen had chosen this site. If you landed here, it was because you had no corporate credentials. If you left from here, no one wished you good luck. It was a transit camp, where EMC processed refugee labour before moving it on to the mines. Paperwork could maroon you at the noncorporate port for a year, during which your own bad choices would take the opportunity to stretch it to ten. Your ship rusted, your life rusted. But you could always go to the circus. This in itself worried Ed. What did it mean for Madam Shen? Was she trapped here too?

'This outfit ever move on?' he asked her. 'I mean, that's what a circus does, right? Every week another town?'

Sandra Shen gave him a speculative look, her face shifting from old to young then back again around its own eyes, as if they were the only fixed point in her personality (if personality is a word with any meaning when you are talking about an algorithm). They were like eyes looking out from cobwebs. She had a fresh drink beside her. Her little body was leaning back, elbows on the bar, one red high-heel hooked in the brass bar rail. Smoke from her cigarette rose in an exact thin stream, broke up suddenly into eddies and whorls. She laughed and shook her head.

'Bored already, Ed?' she said.

The next night Bella Cray was in the audience for his show.

'Christ!' whispered Ed. He looked around for Sandra Shen: she was off on other business. Ed was stuck there in the glare of the old theatre lights, the cold white glare of Bella Cray's smile. There she was, sitting in the front row not two yards away, knees together, handbag in her lap. Her white secretary blouse had a little saddle of perspiration under each armpit, but her lipstick was bright and fresh and she was mouthing something he couldn't quite make out. He remembered her saying, just before he shot her sister, 'What can we do, Ed? We're all fish.' To get away from her, he plunged his head into the tank. As the world went out he heard her call:

'Hey, Ed! Break a leg!'

When he woke up she was gone. His head was full of a high, pure ringing sound. Annie Glyph lugged him into the dunes, where she laid him down in the cool air and distant sound of the surf. He rested his head in her lap and held her hand. She told him he had prophesied war again, and worse; he didn't tell her about seeing Bella Cray in the audience. He didn't want to worry her. Also, he had spent a tiring hour inside the tank. He had watched his dead mother's things thrown on the bonfire, seen his sister leave for other worlds, resented his father for being ordinary and weak, left for other worlds himself: then he had been led past his own past, into some completely unknowable state. He was worn out with it.

'It's good you're here,' he said.

'You should stop doing this, Ed. It isn't worth it.'

'Do you think they'll let me stop? Do you think she'll let me stop? Everyone but you wants to kill me or use me. Maybe both.'

Annie smiled and shook her head slowly.

'That's ridiculous,' she said.

She gazed out to sea. Alter a minute or two she said in a different voice, 'Ed, don't you sometimes want someone smaller? Really? Someone nice and small to fuck, and not just that: to be with?'

He squeezed her huge hand.

'You're a rock,' he told her. 'Everything breaks on you.'

She pushed him away and went down to the water.

'Jesus, Ed,' she shouted into the sea wind. 'You fucking twink.'

Ed watched her striding up and down at the tideline, picking up large stones and pieces of driftwood and hurling them far out into the ocean. He got himself carefully to his feet and left her there to her demons.

The spaceport was empty. Everyone had gone home long ago. The night was just chain-link rattling in the wind, smell of the tide, a voice calling out from some motel cabin. Mercury vapour light made everything look half real. Empty sheds, intermittent traffic. It was like that most nights. Nothing for hours, then four ships in twenty minutes-two tubby freighters in from the Core; the tender of a vast Alcubiere ship hanging somewhere up in the parking lot like an asteroid; some semi-corporate short-hauler, skulking down on business no one could afford to acknowledge. There would be bursts of flame the orange colour of New Men hair, then darkness and cold wind until morning. Ed didn't feel like going back to the room until Annie was asleep. Instead he wandered over and stood between the rocket sheds, looking up at the huge ships, enjoying their smells of stressed metal and burnt pSi fuel.

After a while he noticed a figure pushing a wheeled waste bin slowly across the concrete in his direction. It was Bella Cray. Since her sister's death her skirts were tighter. Bella was making-up for two, with several colours of eye shadow and lips that resembled a pumped-up rosebud. Those lips were the first thing you saw coming towards you. Going away, she presented as buttocks. Somewhere in between was her handbag full of guns.

'Hey, Ed,' she said, 'look at this!"

The waste bin was almost as big as her. Folded awkwardly into it, their long legs hanging over the side, were Tig and Neena Vesicle. Their expressions were puzzled. They were dead. Up from the bin came a smell of alien fluids, bitter and hopeless. Neena's eyes were still open, and she was looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract the way she had looked at Ed while he was fucking her in the warren, so that he expected her to laugh breathlessly and say, 'Oh I'm so far in you!' Tig Vesicle didn't even look like Tig any more.

Bella Cray chuckled.

'Like it, Ed?' she said. This is what's going to happen to you. But first it's going to happen to everyone you know.'

Neena Vesicle's long legs hung out of the waste bin. Bella Cray, as if she needed something to busy herself with, began to try and stuff them back in. 'If I could fold the bugger up a bit more,' she said. She leaned in over the bin until her feet came off the ground, then gave up. They're just as fucking awkward as they were alive, your friends,' she said. She wrenched at her skirt and blouse until she got them back into place. She patted her hair.

'Well, Ed,' she said.

Ed looked on at this performance. He felt cold; he didn't know what he felt. Annie would be next, that was obvious enough. Annie was the only other person he knew.

'I could pay you something now,' he said.

Bella pulled a lace-edged handkerchief out of her bag to wipe her hands. While she was at it she checked her look in a little gold compact mirror. 'Whoa!' she said. 'Is that me?' Out came the lipstick. 'Tell you what, Ed,' she said, applying it freely. 'Money isn't going to help with this.'

Ed swallowed.

He had another look in the bin. 'You didn't have to do this,' he said. Bella Cray chuckled.

At that moment Annie Glyph, who had worn off her irritation throwing stones into the tide, walked up out of the darkness, calling, 'Ed? Ed, where are you?' She saw him standing there. 'Ed, you shouldn't be out here in the cold like this,' she said. Then she seemed to notice the contents of the waste bin. She stared at it puzzledly, and then at Bella Cray, and then Ed, with a sort of slow, patiently dawning anger. Finally, she said to Bella: 'These people got no one to speak for them, they live in a warren, they get the shit end of every stick: you got no call to stuff them in a waste bin too.'