M. Harrison: LIGHT

The Kefahuchi Tract.

A singularity without an event horizon. A place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out, like cheap conjuror's stuff, magic that might work or it might not, undependable stuff in a retro-shop window. You couldn't make anything of an idea like that, but you couldn't stop trying. You couldn't stop trying to engage it.

Ed's visual cortex, as excited as an ion-pair in a Tate-Kearney device, hallucinated dice emblems in that vast flicker of sky. He saw the Twins, a horse-head, a clipper ship in a tower of cloud like smoke. Beneath these emblems of chance/not-chance, the surface of the asteroid-if that was what it was-stretched away from him, mostly even, covered in a fine white dust. Here and there could be seen the remains of low rectangular structures, their foundations worn to a three-centimetre nub by unknown ablative forces originating in the Tract. Scattered around them in this entradista paradise were the shapes of smaller artifacts, their outlines burred by layers of dust, each one worth a small fortune in the chopshop laboratories of Motel Splendido.

He tried to think of himself as an artefact.

He bent down and put his ear to the surface. He could hear the K-code not far beneath, singing to itself like a choir.

'You're still down there,' he whispered.

'Down there and everywhere else. So what do you want to do, Ed?'

Ed got back to his feet.

'Do?'

The Shrander laughed. 'I didn't bring you here just to look at it,' she told him. 'If you knew what it was costing in thermodynamic terms just to keep you alive in this-' she paused as if lost for words ' — in this fabulous place, you'd blanch. Honestly. No, Ed, I'd have been delighted just to bring you here, but it wouldn't have been cost-effective just for that.'

'So,' Ed said. 'What?'

'Don't be naive, Steady Eddy. You can't stay still in this life. You go on or you go down. What'll it be?'

Ed grinned. He had the measure of her now. 'You were in the twink-tank, too,' he said. He chuckled. 'Rita Robinson!' he remembered. 'I bet you were Rita Robinson too.' He wandered over to where the skeleton lay, knelt down in the dust and touched its brownish bones. He pulled off a strip of light-bleached rag that had adhered to its ribcage, let it fall, watched the slow gravity take it down.

'So, look,' he said. 'What's the story here?'

'Ah,' said the Shrander. 'Kearney.'

'Kearney?' Ed said. 'Jesus. Not the Kearney?'

'Now there was someone who fell back from himself,' the Shrander said, 'exactly what I'm talking about. He was so promising early on, and yet so frightened of it all. I watched him fire up from nothing, Ed, then go out suddenly, just like a light. Oh, I know what you're going to say. He and Brian Tate got you people out here. Without him you wouldn't have quantum machines. You wouldn't have massive parallel processing. And without that you'd never have found your way around. But in the end he was a disappointment, Ed, believe me: he was just too frightened of the things he knew. I shouldn't have brought him here, but I felt I owed him.'

She laughed. 'Even though he stole something of mine and ran away every time I tried to ask for it back.' She bent down and sought about in the dust with her little pudgy hands.

'Look.'

'Hey,' Ed said. 'The Ship Game.'

'These are the originals, Ed. Look at that workmanship. We never knew how old they were.' She stared at the dice on the palm of her stubby little hand. 'They were old when we found them.'

'So what do they do?'

'We never found that out either.' The Shrander sighed. 'I kept them for their sentimental value,' she said. 'Here. You have them.'

'It's just a game to me,' Ed said.

He took the dice and turned them so they caught the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. This was the way they were meant to be viewed, he thought. They were another device for trying to understand the place where the rules ran out. The familiar images flickered and yearned, as if they wanted to jump off the faces of the dice and cook in the light. He felt he owed her something for that understanding, so he said:

'What do I do?'

'Here's the deal: you take the K-ship. You go deep. It's the Kefahuchi Boogie, Ed: it's point and press. You go all the way.'

'Why me?'

'You're the first of them. You're what we hoped to make.'

'Kearney was the brains,' Ed pointed out. 'Not me.'

'I don't want you to understand it, Ed. I want you to surf it.'

Ed threw the dice thoughtfully.

He threw them again.

He said: 'I always wanted to fly one of those things. What will happen if I take it in there?'

'To you?'

Ed threw the dice.

'To it all,' he said, making a gesture which seemed to include the universe.

The alien shrugged.

'Who knows? Things will change forever.'

Ed threw the dice once more. The Kefahuchi Tract raged silently above him. War was breaking out in sympathy, up and down the Beach. He looked at the dice, lying in the irradiated dirt. Something he saw there-something about the way they had fallen-seemed to amuse him.

'Well, fuck all that,' he said, and came up grinning. 'Will it be fun?'

'Ed, it will.'

'Where do I sign up?'

A little later, paraplegic, catheterised and stuffed to the limits of his nervous system with brand new drugs, Ed Chianese, twink, felt the Einstein Cross light up his brain, and took control of his K-ship. Sandra Shen had trained him well. Navigation is an act of prophecy, a couple of guesses with your head in a tank of prophylactic jelly. You can leave the massive parallel processing to the algorithms: you can leave it to the quantumware. After signing him on, the mathematics had gone up into its own space, where Ed found it waiting for him.

'Hey,' Ed said.

'What's that?'

'One thing I wish. I had a sister, you know, and I did something stupid and walked away from her. I wish I'd see her again. Just once more. Sort that out.'

'That won't be possible, Ed.'

'Then I want to rename the ship. Can I do that?'

'Of course you can.'

Ed thought hard about his fucked-up life. 'We're the Black Cat,' he said. 'We're the Black Cat from now on.'

'Ed, it's a fine name.'

'So ramp me up.'

The mathematics was delighted to do that. Ed went on ship-time. Ten spatial dimensions spread themselves like legs for him; four of time. Dark matter boiled and flared. Out in the last place in the ordinary world, the Black Cat rose from the surface of the asteroid. She hunted like a compass needle, then turned herself slowly until she stood on her tail. For thirty nanoseconds, which is a million years down there where things are small, nothing happened. Then fusion product burst out of her stern. She leapt forward on a line of bright white light and shortly made a hole in nowhere.

'Well the engine's on. Let's just point the fucker.'

'Let's just do that, Ed.'

'Which of these switches is the music?'

The asteroid now stood empty, but for the bone dice and the dead physicist. The dice lay as they had fallen for Ed Chianese, and the dust sifted over them. Michael Kearney's bones browned a little further. Seria Mau Genlicher returned a number of times, sometimes happy, sometimes like a living winter, and looked down, and went away again. Years passed. Centuries passed. Then the sky began to change colour, subtly and slowly at first, then faster and wilder than anyone could dream.