M. Harrison - LIGHT

Touching the Void was under his control. He had nothing more to worry about in that direction. Nothing was alive down there in that rotten apple but his entradistas. Like the good team of lawyers they were they had begun to chop him out of his inadvertent contract with the Nastic vessel. It was a civil engineering project down there, with all the dull concussions and sudden flares you had to expect from that. Guys were getting a line open and saying, 'Hey Unc, could you give that a little more?' 'Could you give that a little less, Unc?' They were competing for his attention. And all the time now, his ship was gently trying to withdraw itself from the embrace of the cruiser. Uncle Zip thought of that embrace as a soft wet rottenness he would be glad to be out of. Trickles of particles flickered through the hull of El Rayo X, spun off from the destruction of the Nastic bridge. It was still hot down there. You had to give the guys their due, they were working in a heavily compromised environment. They had been dying for two hours now.

Touching the Void was his. But what was going on over there on the White Cat? It was total radio silence over there. K-ships had nothing you could call internal coms traffic: despite that you could usually tell if anyone was alive inside. Not in this case. Thirteen nanoseconds after the death of the Nastic commander, everything in the White Cat had switched itself off. The fusion engines were down. The dynaflow drivers were down. That ship wasn't even talking to itself, let alone Uncle Zip. 'I don't have time for this,' he complained. 'I got business elsewhere.' But he continued to watch. For another hour, nothing happened. Then, very slowly, a pale, wavering glow surrounded the White Cat. It was like a magnetic field, sketched slightly out from the ship's hull; or a faint diagram of some kind of fluid supercavitation effect. It was violet in colour.

'What's this?' Uncle Zip asked himself.

'Ionising radiation,' said his pilot in a bored voice. 'Oh, and I'm getting internal traffic.'

'Hey, who asked you?' said Uncle Zip. 'What kind of traffic?'

'Come to think of it, I got no idea.'

'Jesus.'

'It's stopped now anyway. Something was producing dark matter in there. Like the whole hull was full of it for a second.'

'That long?'

The pilot consulted his displays.

'Photinos, mostly,' he said.

After that, the ionising radiation died away and nothing happened for a further two hours. Then the White Cat jumped from blacked-out to torched-up without any intervening state. 'Jesus Christ!' screamed Uncle Zip. 'Get us out of here!' He thought she had exploded. His pilot went on ship-time and-ignoring the faint cries of the work teams still trapped inside-ripped the last few metres of the El Rayo X from the ruins of the Nastic vessel. He was good. He got them free and facing the right direction just in time to see the White Cat accelerate from a standstill to ninety-eight per cent the speed of light in less than fourteen seconds.

'Stay with them,' Uncle Zip told him quietly.

'France chance, honey,' the pilot said. 'That's no fusion engine.' Fierce annular shockwaves in no detectable medium were spilling back along the White Cat's course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein's universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. 'They were building themselves a new drive,' the pilot said. 'New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can't deal with that. My guess: we're stuffed.'

Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.

'They'll go to Sigma End,' he decided. 'Make the best time you can.'

'I'm on it,' the pilot said.

Sigma End, Billy Anker's old stamping ground, was a cluster of ancient research stations and lashed-up entradista satellites sited in and around the Radio RX-i accretion disc. Everything there was abandoned, or had the air of it. Anything new attracted the attention like a campfire seen in the distance for one night on an empty coast. This was deep Radio Bay. In places like this, Earth ran out of reach. Logistics went down. Supply lines dried up. Everything was for grabs, and the mad energy of the accretion disc lay over all of it. The black hole churned and churned, ripping material out of its companion star, V404 Stueck-Manibel, a blue supergiant at the end of its life. Those two had been locked together for a few billion years or so. This was the last of it: the wreckage of a fine old relationship. It looked like everything was going down the tubes for them.

'Which probably it is,' Uncle Zip's pilot told him. 'You know?'

'I didn't ask you here for your religious opinions,' said Uncle Zip. He stared out across the disc, and a faint smile crossed his fat white face. 'What we are looking at here is the most efficient energy transfer system in the universe.'

That disc was a roaring Einsteinian shoal. Gravitational warping from RX-1 meant you could see all of it, even the underneath, whatever angle you approached it from. Every ten minutes, transition states quaked across it, causing it to spike in the soft X-ray band, huge flares echoing backwards and forwards to illuminate the scattered experimental structures of Sigma End. Go close enough and this mad light enabled you to see clusters of barely pressurised vessels like leaky bathtubs, each hosting a failing hydroponic farm and two or three earthmen with lost eyes, bad stubble, radiation ulcers. You could see planets with ancient mass-drivers let into them, holding positions in the last stable orbit before the Schwarzchild radius. You could stumble over a group of eight perfectly spherical nickel-iron objects each the size of Motel Splendido, set into an orbital relationship which in itself seemed to be some sort of engine. But the outright prize, Uncle Zip said, went to the following effort: twenty million years before mankind arrived, some fucker had tapped off a millionth of one per cent of the output of the RX-1 system and punched a wormhole straight out of there to some destination no one knew. They had left behind no archeology whatsoever. No clue of how you would do it. Just the hole itself.

'Deep guys,' he said. 'Some really deep guys.'

'Hey,' the pilot interrupted him. 'I got them.' Then he said: 'Shit.'

'What?'

'They're going down it. There. Look.'

It was hard to lift the worrnhole out of the overall signature of the accretion disc. But El Rayo X came with the equipment to do that, and on the displays Uncle Zip could just make it out, there in the boiling gravitational rapids just outside the last stable orbit: a fragile vulva of light into which the White Cat could be seen propelling herself like a tiny sliver of ice, those curious annular shockwaves still slipping regularly back along her brilliant raw trail of fusion product.

In the days that followed The Perfect Low wove her way across the halo. She was all bustle, her hull crowded to capacity, a warm, smelly node of humanity flying in the teeth of the vast Newtonian grin of empty space. A sense of purpose prevailed. Status-conscious and competitive at close quarters, the carnies were always dissatisfied with their accommodation, always, moving children and livestock from one part of the ship to another. Ed pushed his way up and down the packed companionways for a couple of days; then took up with an exotic dancer called Alice.

'I'm not looking for complications,' he warned her.

'Who is?' she said with a yawn.

Alice had good legs and bright expressionless eyes. She lay with her elbows on his bunk, staring out the porthole while he fucked her.