M. Harrison: LIGHT

'Could you?'

'I didn't recognise the cutter's hand.' Uncle Zip spread his own hands and examined them. 'But I saw through the cut in a day.' He was proud of his plump fingers and their clean, spatulate nails, as proud of his touch as if he cut the genes directly, like a cobbler at a last. 'Right through and out the other side. It's what you need all right: no trouble '

'Then why won't it work? '

'You should bring it back. Maybe I take another look.'

'It keeps asking me for Dr. Haends.'

At first you thought the Cray sisters were running themselves on some kind of one-shot cultivar. You soon saw they took too much care of themselves to be doing that. Nevertheless, they were big, with that sensual, more-alive-than-alive look a cultivar has because its user just doesn't care what happens. They had big, powerful behinds, over which they wore short black nylon skirts. They had big, short legs, with calves tightened and moulded by a lifetime of four-inch heels. The big shoulders of their short-sleeved white 'secretary' blouses were padded and flounced. Tattooed snakes curled and uncurled lazily around their bare, fleshy biceps.

One day they came in the shop and Evie asked Tig Vesicle did he have a twink called Ed Chianese in one of the tanks. This twink would be about yay tall (she indicated two inches taller than herself), with a partly grown out peroxide Mohican and a couple of cheap tattoos. He would have been quite a muscular guy, she said, at least before tank-life got to him.

'I never saw anyone like that,' Vesicle lied.

He was immediately full of terror. If you could help it, you did not lie to the Cray sisters. They did their faces every morning with white pan-stick, and drew in wide red liplines, voluptuous, angry and clown-like all at once. With these mouths they held the whole of Pierpoint Street to ransom. They had innumerable soldiers, shadow boys in cultivars, cheap teenage punks with guns. Also, in their antique briefcases, or big, soft leather purses, they each carried a Chambers reaction pistol. At first they seemed like a mass of contradictions, bat you soon understood they weren't.

The truth was, this Chianese twink was Tig Vesicle's only regular. Who went to a tank farm in the upper 700s, Pierpoint? No one. The trade was all down at the other end, where you got any number of investment bankers, also women whose favourite dog died ten years before, they never got over it. The lunch trade was all down there, in the middle and low numbers. Without Chianese, who was twinking three weeks at a time when he could afford it, Vesicle's business would be fucked. He would be out on the street all day trying to move AbH and Earth speed to kids who were only interested in do-it-yourself gene patches which they got from some guy across the halo called Uncle Zip.

The Crays gave Tig Vesicle a look designed to say, 'You lie on this occasion, you get broken down for your rarer proteins.'

'Really,' he said.

Eventually Evie Cray shrugged.

'You see a guy like that, we're the first to know,' she said. 'The first.'

She stared round the tank farm, with its bare grey floor and shoot-up posters peeling off the walls, and gave Vesicle a contemptuous look. 'Jesus, Tig,' she said. 'Could you just make this place a little more unwelcoming? Do you think you could do that?'

Bella Cray laughed.

'Do you think you could do that for her?' she said.

After they had gone, Vesicle sat in his chair, repeating: 'Do you think you could do that?' and, 'You see a guy like that, we're the first to know,' until he thought he had the intonation right. Then he went over to look at the tanks. He got a rag out of a cupboard and wiped the dust off them. He was wiping Chianese's tank when he realised it was the warm one. 'Who is this guy,' he asked himself, 'the Cray sisters want him all of a sudden? No one ever wanted him before.' He tried to remember what Chianese looked like but he couldn't. Twinkies all looked the same to him.

He went out to a stall and got himself another fish curry. 'You see a guy like that,' he tried experimentally to the stallholder after he had paid, 'we're the first to know.'

The stallholder stared at him.

'The first,' Vesicle said.

New Men, she thought, as she watched him walk away up Pierpoint, one leg going out at an odd angle. What are they on?

Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid--if you stretched a point-and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less than reliable new entertainment technology.

Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:

'I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know.'

Vesicle went back to the tank farm. The head-ends of the tanks protruded a couple of feet from their shoulder-height plyboard cubicles, like stupidly baroque brass coffins covered with cheap decorative detail. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT, claimed the shoot-up posters on the back wall of each cubicle. Chianese's tank was warmer than it had been. Vesicle could see why: the twink was out of credit. He had maybe half a day left, this was according to readouts in the tank fascia, and then it was the cold world for him. The tank proteome, a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones, was beginning to prepare his body for the life he left behind.

Three thirty on a grey Friday afternoon in March. The East River was the colour of puddled iron. Since midday, westbound traffic had been backing up from Honaluchi Bridge. Chinese Ed stuck his head out the side window of his ramrod Dodge, into the smell of burned diesel and lead, and tried to get a look at what was ahead. Nothing. Something was broken up there, the lights were oil, someone had melted down; the people up there were on overload-office overload, 2.4 kids overload, shitcan overload-and had left their cars and were dully beating on one another to no good purpose. Who knew what had happened? It was the same old life. Ed shook his head at the futility of mankind, turned off the Capital traffic report and turned instead to Rita Robinson.

'Hey, Rita,' he said.

Two or three minutes later her peppermint and white candy-stripe skirt was up around her waist.

'Steady, Ed,' advised Rita. 'We could be here some time.'

Ed laughed. 'Steady Eddy,' he said. 'That's me.'

Rita laughed too. 'I'm ready,' she said. 'I'm ready, ready Eddy.'

It turned out Rita was right.

Two hours later they were still there.

'Doesn't this just suck?' said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of Ed's Dodge.

She looked in at Rita-who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror-and seemed to lose interest. 'Oh hi, honey,' she said. 'Just freshening up there?' Everyone had turned their engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement, A hot dog guy was working the queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. 'I never knew it this bad,' said the woman from the Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. 'Maybe the Russians landed.'