M. Harrison - LIGHT

'Nice,' said Sandra Shen. 'You look nice, Ed.'

She tilted her face to the glare of the Tract, against which could dimly be seen the shape of The Perfect Low.

'I shan't need you any more,' she told it.

The ship manoeuvred for a second or two, the aliens in their mortsafes visible briefly in intermittent bursts of torchlight. Then they fired up the Purple Cloud again and were gone.

Sandra Shen stared after them. For a moment or two she seemed regretful, and reluctant to make decisions. 'Do I want another cigarette?' she asked Ed. 'No, I don't think I do.' She was restless, edgy: not quite herself. Her shadow became briefly restless too. Her hands were busy about her clothes. Or were they? Perhaps it was more than that. For a moment, sparks seemed to pour out of everything. She sighed exasperatedly, then seemed to relax.

'Do wake up, Ed,' she said.

Ed woke standing, on the curve of a small world under the desperate illumination of the Kefahuchi Tract.

Pillars of fire rose and fell above him-colours in suites, colours which had no business together, stained-glass colours. A little way off to one side, illuminated in a way he couldn't describe, lay a K-ship, its drive in park, its hull shimmering with the effort of repressing its weaponry; also, he noticed, the complete skeleton of a human being, brownish in colour, with bits of cloth and tarry cartilage still adhering to the bones. At his shoulder-odd and uncertain-looking in that raging, intransigent light, yet somehow less threatening than it first appeared-stood the entity sometimes known as 'Sandra Shen', sometimes 'Dr Haends', but most often down the years, and to most of its brief associates, 'the Shrander'. Ed eyed her sidelong. He took in the tubby figure, the maroon wool coat with its missing buttons; the head like a horse's skull, the eyes like pomegranate halves.

'Whoa!' he said. 'Are you real?'

He felt at himself with his hands. First things first.

'Am I real?' he said. Then: 'I've met you before.' Receiving no answer, he massaged his face. 'I know I've met you before.' He made a vague gesture. 'All this… ' he said.

'Amazing, isn't it?' said the Shrander. 'And it's like this all over.'

Ed didn't mean that. He meant he had come further than he wanted to.

'I'm not sure where I am.'

'Do you know,' the Shrander said, with an air of delight, 'I'm not, either! There's so much of it, isn't there?'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'You're Sandra Shen.'

'Her too. Yes.'

Ed gave up. For a moment, he thought, it would be enough just to be kind to himself. Take it in. But the Shrander seemed companionable and considerate, and he soon felt more secure than he had when he woke up. That in its turn made him feel as if he ought to make some further effort: so after a little thought he said, 'You're from the K-culture, aren't you? You didn't die, you guys. That's what this has been all about.'

He looked at her in a kind of sidelong awe.

'What kind of thing are you?'

'Ah,' said the Shrander. 'I'm not sure you'd understand the answer to that. Whatever kind, I'm the last of them: that's for sure.' She sighed. 'All good things must come to an end, Ed.'

Ed was unsure how to respond to this.

'How are you with that?' he said eventually. 'I mean, in yourself?'

'Oh fine. I'm fine with it.'

'You don't feel alone? Let down?'

'Oh, of course. Alone. A bit sidelined. Anyone would. But you know, we had our day, Ed, and it was a good one!' She looked up at him animatedly. 'I wish you could have seen us. We looked just like this, only if anything we had more ribbons.' She laughed. 'I won't show you what's under the coat.'

'Hey,' Ed said, 'I bet you look fine.'

'I'm not exactly Neena Vesicle down there.' She thought about this, perhaps for longer than she had intended. 'What was I saying?' she asked Ed.

'That you had your day,' Ed reminded her.

'Oh we did, Ed, we did! Life went as well for us as it does for you, maybe even better. One moment as dignified as a tea-dance in paradise; the next, fast, hallucinatory, last-chance, realtime. Oh, you know: absolute hell. We ate a few lunches. And you should have seen the achievements we did, Ed! We moved stuff about with the best of them. We had the code licked. We got all the answers you people want-'

She stopped. Indicated the sky.

'Then we came up against this. To tell you the absolute truth Ed, it stopped us as dead as the rest. It was old when we got here. The people who had been here before us, well they were old when we were nothing. We stole their ideas as fast as we could, the way you're doing now. We had our try at that thing- ' the Shrander seemed to shrug '-and it failed. Wow, Ed,' she said, 'but you should have seen us. By then we had some control of things. It was an exciting time. But it all comes to nothing, all the pushing and the shoving.' She tilted back her head a moment and pointed her great bone beak at the Tract. Then she looked back down at her own feet in the dust. 'Oh,' she said, 'I'm not complaining. Even that was fine. I mean, it was an adventure, it was our adventure. It was part of being what we were.

'And that's the thing, Ed. Being here. Being up to your neck in what you are.'

'You feel you lost that,' Ed said.

The Shrander sighed. 'I do,' she said.

She said: 'We got off-base with ourselves. That's what happens with this thing. You fall back from it. You break yourself on it. You lose heart. It beat us: it beat our intelligence, our capacity to understand. In the end, we didn't have the juice.' There was a pause in which they both contemplated the idea of limits, which was a comfortable one for Ed, since he had spent his life pushing them. When he felt it had gone on long enough, he said:

'So. What happened then?'

'You pick yourself up, Ed. You try to carry on. We were missing something, we had to admit. But that in itself gave us our big idea. We couldn't know the Tract; but we decided to build something that could. I'm the last of my kind, Ed, you're right. They left me here to make the project work.'

The Shrander fell silent.

After a while she said tiredly, 'I'm a long way out of date, Ed.'

Ed felt the weight of that. He felt the loneliness of it. What do you do for an alien entity? Do you put your arm around it? What do you say: 'I'm sorry you're old'? The Shrander must have gathered some of this, because she reassured him, 'Hey, Ed. Don't sweat it'; then, after a moment, gathered up her resources and gestured in a way that took in the low ruins, the inexplicable artifacts in the dust, the K-ship squatting there like an evil demon of engineering, its systems cooking with radiation, its armaments extruding senselessly as it detected possibly threatening events a hundred lights up and down the Beach.

'I lived in these ruins, these objects and others, all across the halo. There was a part of me in all of them, and every part of me was all of me. After EMC discovered K-tech, I lived in the navigational space of this ship. I stole it. From inside its maths, and across the bridge into its wetware, I had the run of fourteen dimensions, including four temporal. I was halo-wide, I was backwards and forwards in time like a yo-yo. I could intervene.'

'Why?'

'Because we built you, Ed. We built you from the amino acids up. We made a guess at what we didn't have, and we built your ancestors to evolve into what we couldn't be. It was a long-term project, as long-term as anything here on the Beach. OK, maybe not so visible as some of this solar engineering stuff. But, you know, did any of that actually work? Look around you; I'd say it didn't. We thought our investment had a chance, Ed. It was low-end and elegant both at the same time; even more interesting, we gave the universe a hand in it and left some things to chance. All this time I was watching over it.'