M. Harrison - LIGHT

'No,' said Seria Mau.

'Yes,' he said.

In two strides he had reached her tank and thrown open the lid.

' No! 'she said.

She thrashed and raged, what was left of her, so that the fluid in which she was suspended-thick and inert as mucous to absorb the Newtonian forces to which even a K-ship was sometimes prone- slopped over the side and on to his patent leather shoes. Dr Haends didn't notice. He reached down into that stuff and pulled her out. In the microcameras she saw herself for the first time in fifteen years. She was this small, broken, yellowish thing, its limbs all at odd angles, curling and uncurling itself feebly against the pain of the open air. What she heard as a scream of horror and despair was only a faint rough groan. The skin stretched over her like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. There was no flesh between that and the bones beneath. The withered lips drew back over small, even teeth. The eyes glared out of tarry sockets. When she saw the thick cables trailing from the core-points in the scholiosed spine, she felt numb and disgusted. She felt the most awful pity for that thing. She felt the most awful shame. To begin with, that was why she fought him: she simply didn't want him to see her. Then, when she saw what he was doing, she fought him for that, too.

He had landed the ship. The cargo ramp was down. He was taking her outside. Terror fell across her like the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. What could she do, if she was no longer the White Cat? What could she be?

'No! No! '

The Tract pulsed above her.

'There's no air,' she said pitiably. 'There's no air.'

The sky was on fire with radiation.

'We can't live! We can't live in this!'

But Dr Haends didn't seem to care. Out there on the surface, among the strange low mounds and buried artifacts, he prepared for surgery. On went his white gloves. Up went his sleeves. While out of his eyes and mouth poured the white foam of the K-code, to assemble from the dust itself the necessary instruments. Dr Haends looked up. He held out one hand, palm up, like someone testing for rain. 'No need for extra light!' he decided.

Seria Mau wept.

'I'm dying! How can you give me a new body here?'

'Forget your body.'

They had to shout to hear themselves across the silent roar of the Tract. Particle winds blew back the tails of his coat. He laughed. 'Isn't it amazing, just to be alive?' Behind him, the shadow operators poured out of the ship like shoals of excited fish, flickering and dancing.

'She'll be well again,' they called to one another. 'She'll be well.'

Dr Haends raised his instruments.

'Forget yourself,' he commanded. 'Now you can be what you are.'

'Will you hurt me?'

'Yes. Do you trust me?'

'Yes.'

A long while later-it might have been minutes, it might have been years-Dr Haends wiped the numbers from his forehead like sweat and stepped back from the thing he had made. His evening suit was less than spruce. He was bloody to the cuffs of his linen shirt. His instruments, which to start with had been state of the art, now seemed to him dull and not entirely the right ones for the job. He shook his head. It had been an effort, he now admitted, even for him. Thermodynamically, it had been the most expensive thing he'd ever done. It had been a risk. But what do you gain without that?

'Now you can be what you are,' he repeated.

The thing he had made raised itself and flapped its wings uncertainly. 'This is hard,' it said. 'Am I meant to be this big?' It tried to look back at itself. 'I can't really see what I am,' it said. It flapped again. Collateral electromagnetic events lifted dust from the surface. The dust hung there, but nothing else happened.

'I think if you keep practising-' encouraged Dr Haends.

'I feel terrified,' it said. 'I feel such a fool.'

It laughed.

'What do I look like?' it said. 'Am I still her?'

'You are and you aren't,' Dr Haends admitted. 'Turn round, let me see you. There. You look beautiful. Just practise a bit more.'

Seria Mau turned and turned. She felt the light catch her wings.

'Are these feathers? she said.

'Not entirely.'

She said: 'I don't know how it works!'

'It will maintain any shape you want,' Dr Haends promised. 'You can be this, or you can be something else. You can be a white cat again, and pounce among the stars. Or why not try something new? I'm quite pleased with it now,' he said. 'Yes! Look! You see? That's it!'

She rose up and circled about awkwardly above his head. 'I don't know how to do this!' she called down to him.

'Some turns! Do some more turns! You see?'

She did some more turns. 'I'm quite good at it,' she said. 'I think I could be quite good at it.' The shadow operators flew up to her. They flocked to her whispering delightedly and clasping their bony work-worn hands. 'You took care of me so well,' she congratulated them. Then she made herself look down at the White Cat.

'All those years!' she marvelled. 'Was I that? '

She shed something that might have been tears, if an organism so bizarre -so huge and yet so frail, so perpetually emergent from its own desires-could be said to weep. 'Oh dear,' she said. 'I don't know how I feel.' Suddenly she laughed. Her laughter filled the vacuum. It was the laughter of particles. She was laughing in every regime. She tried out the different things she could be: there were always more; there were always more after that. 'Do you like this?' she called down. 'I think I preferred the last one.' Her wings lost their look of feathers, and the Kefahuchi-light ran along them from tip to tip like wild fire. Seria Mau Genlicher laughed and laughed and laughed.

'Goodbye,' she called down.

She rose suddenly, faster than even Dr Haends's eyes could follow. Her shadow passed over him briefly and vanished.

After she had gone, he stood there for a time, between the empty K-ship and the remains of the physicist Michael Kearney. He was exhausted, but he couldn't seem to settle. He bent down and picked up the dice Michael Kearney had brought to that place. He turned them over thoughtfully; put them down again. 'That was tiring,' he said to himself. 'They can be more tiring than you think.' After a while, he allowed himself to slip back into a shape he was more comfortable with, and stood there for a long time looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract, a small pudgy thing with a huge curved bone beak and a maroon wool coat with food stains down the front, which shrugged and said to itself:

'Well, the rest is yet to do.'

The Perfect Low emerged from her journey down the wormhole. Her engine wound itself down then broke up into its component parts. She seemed to consider her options for a minute or two, then made off busily through local space, to arrive a little later above an asteroid in full view of the Kefahuchi Tract.

Ed Chianese sprawled in the pilot seat with his mouth open, breathing heavily. Except that one hand rested on his genitals, he resembled The Death of Chatterton; and if he was dreaming it didn't show. Looking down at him with an expression in her eyes both maternal and ironic, stood a small oriental woman in a gold cheongsam split to the thigh. She lit a cigarette, smoked it between shakes of the head. Her eyes never left him. You would have said, if she had been a real woman, that she was trying to work him out.

'Well, Ed. Time to get on,' she said eventually.

A few whitish motes seemed to drift out of her eyes. 'You know, we should have music for this,' she said. 'Something measured.' She raised her hand. Ed was lifted gently out of his seat by the gesture and propelled at a walking pace to The Perfect Low's nearest hatch; which, when opened, evacuated the atmosphere from the entire ship. Ed, too. He seemed unaware of this event, which was perhaps to the good. A little later he lay in the air-perfectly horizontal, legs together, hands folded on his chest as if for burial-two or three feet off the surface of the asteroid.