M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Always more,' he heard someone say. 'Always more after that.'

He threw up suddenly. The entity calling itself Sandra Shen had begun to assemble itself in front of him.

Whatever she was, she had energy. First she presented as Tig Vesicle, with his shock of red hair, eating a Muranese fish curry off the end of a throwaway plastic fork. 'Hi, Ed,' he said. 'The fuck we are! You know?' But that didn't satisfy her, so she got rid of it and presented as Tig's wife, half-naked in the gloom of the warren. Ed was so surprised he said, 'Neena, I-' Neena got whipped away immediately and was replaced by the Cray sisters. 'Dipshit,' they said. They laughed. Between each version of herself, Sandra Shen filled up the control room with sparkling motes of light, like one of her own tableaux, 'Detergent Foam in a Plastic Bowl, 1958'. Finally she firmed up as the Sandra Ed first met, walking briskly along Yulgrave towards him in the blowing snow-a small, plump, oriental-looking woman, her gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh, her perfect oval face shifting constantly as she exchanged youth and yellow old age, her eyes sexy and fathomless with the charisma of something never human.

'Hello, Ed,' she said.

Ed stared at her. 'You were all of them,' he said. 'None of that was real. You were everyone in that part of my life.'

' 'Fraid so, Ed.'

'You're not just a shadow operator,' he guessed.

'No, Ed, I'm not.'

'There was no Tig.'

'No Tig.'

'There were no Cray sisters.'

'Theatre, Ed, every moment of it.'

'There was no Neena… '

'Hey, Neena was fun. Wasn't Neena fun?'

Ed couldn't think of anything to say. He felt more used and manipulated -more self-disgusted-than at any point in his life before. He shook his head and turned away.

'Painful, isn't it?' said Sandra Shen.

Ed told her: 'Fuck off.'

'That's a disappointing attitude, Ed, even for a twink. Don't you want to know the rest of it? Don't you want to know why? '

'No,' Ed said. 'I don't,'

'It got your head in the fishtank, Ed.'

'Another thing,' he said. 'What was all that about? What was happening to me in there? What was that stuff I had to put my head in? Because, you know, it's disgusting to do that, day after day.'

'Ah,' said Sandra Shen. 'That was me. I was always in there with you, Ed. You weren't alone. I was the medium. You know? Like the proteome in the twink-tank? You swam to the future through me.' She smoked her cigarette meditatively. 'That's not quite true,' she admitted. 'I misled you there. I was training you, but not so much to see the future as be it. How'd you like that idea, Ed? Be the future? Change it all. Change everything.' She shook her head, as if this was a bad day for explaining herself. 'Put it another way,' she tried. 'When you applied for this job, you said you flew every kind of ship but one. What's the only kind of ship you never flew?'

'Who are you?' Ed whispered. 'And where are you taking me?'

'You'll know soon, Ed. Look!'

A filmy twist of light, a faint vertical smile seven hundred kilometres high, hung above them. The Perfect Low shuddered and rang as the forces that kept the wormhole open engaged with elements of Sandra Shen's ad hoc engine. 'There are more kinds of physics in play here,' she informed Ed, 'than you people dream of in your philosophy.' Outside the hull, the aliens redoubled their efforts, shuttling faster and in more complex patterns. Suddenly Madam Shen's eyes were full of excitement. 'Not many people have done this achievement, Ed,' she reminded him. 'You're out in front here, you've got to admit that."

Ed grinned despite himself.

'Just look at it,' he marvelled. 'How d'you think they made it?'

Then he shook his head. 'As to achievements,' he said, 'Billy Anker picked this peach. I watched him pick it ten, twelve years ago. If I remember anything, I remember that.' He shrugged. 'Of course, Billy never came back. You don't get the tick unless you come back.'

Something about this mindless philosophy made Sandra Shen smile to herself. She stared up at the image on the screens for a moment or two. Then she said softly: 'Hey, Ed.'

'What?'

'I wasn't Annie. Annie was real.'

'I'm glad,' Ed said.

The wormhole opened to receive him.

During the transit, he fell asleep. He didn't understand why, though even in his sleep he suspected that Madam Shen had organised it. He slumped in the pilot seat with his head on one side, couch-potatoed and breathing heavily through his mouth. Behind closed lids, his eyes flickered in REM manoeuvres, a simple but urgent code.

What he dreamed was this:

He was back in the family house. It was autumn-heavy, felted airs and rain. His sister came down from the father's study carrying the lunch tray. Ed skulked about in the shadows on the landing, then jumped out on her. 'Haraaar!' he said. 'Oops.' Too late. The lunch tray slipped out of her hands in the wet light from the window. A hard-boiled egg rolled about in dipping, eccentric arcs, then bounced away down the stairs. Ed ran after it, going, 'Yoiy yoiy yoiy!' His sister was upset. After that she didn't speak to him. He knew it was because of what he had seen before he jumped out. She was already holding the lunch tray in one hand. With the other, she was pulling her clothes about as if they didn't fit properly. Her hands were already relaxing, soft and strengthless. She was already crying.

'I don't want to be the mother,' she was telling herself.

That was the point everything went wrong in Ed's life. Nothing after that was as bad, even when his father stood on the black kitten; and anyone who claimed it had gone wrong before that, they didn't know anything.

A voice said: 'Time to forgive yourself these things.'

Ed half-woke, felt the soft inside of the wormhole touch the ship, contract. He smiled loosely, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, slept once more, this time without dreams. Protected by the violent glow of alien engines, cocooned and cosseted by the ironic smile and unknowable motives of the entity at that time calling itself Sandra Shen, he was borne with grace and without incident down a birth canal a million years old. Or more. At the end of which, deep light would explode in upon him, in ways none of us can imagine.

After he ran out of the cottage, Michael Kearney was thrown back for a last time into his own memory, where he saw himself, twenty years old, returning from his last innocent train journey to find a short, badly dressed woman walking up and down the taxi rank outside Charing Cross station, where the action of the Tarot cards had stranded him. She was holding up a letter in her right hand and shouting:

'You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper!'

Greying hair straggled down around a broad face reddened with effort. A maroon woollen coat, thick as carpet, compressed her fat breasts. 'You bloody pieceof paper!' she cried. As if trying for some final, indisputable delivery, she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. She had a duty of expression, you felt, to the forces inside her. It was work for her, work of the hardest sort, hawked up from somewhere deep. Kearney couldn't repress a shudder. But no one else seemed bothered: instead, they regarded her with a cautious, even affectionate, amusement, especially when her back was to them. When Kearney's turn came at the head of the queue, she stopped in front of him and caught his eye. She was short, stout. The smell that clung to her reminded him of empty houses, old clothes, mice. Her sense of drama, the intractable rawness of her emotion, left him unnerved.

'Piece of paper!' she shouted at him. He saw that the letter was old, shiny with use, falling apart at the folds. 'You bloody piece!' She held it out to him. Kearney stared mutely away, aching with embarrassment. He tapped his foot.