Light

TWO Gold Diggers of 2400 AD

K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher was up in the halo with her ship, the White Cat, trolling for customers.

Up there, a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky, trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter. Seria Mau liked it there. She liked the halo. She liked the ragged margins of the Tract itself, which everyone called 'the Beach', where the corroded old pre-human observatories wove their chaotic orbits, tool-platforms and laboratories abandoned millions of years previously by entities who had no idea where they were-or perhaps anymore what they were. They had all wanted a closer look at the Tract. Some of them had steered whole planets into position, then wandered off or died out. Some of them had steered whole solar systems into position, then lost them.

Even without all that stuff, the halo would have been a hard place to navigate. That made it a good hunting ground for Seria Mau, who now lay at a kind of non-Newtonian standstill inside a classic orbital tangle of white dwarf stars, waiting to pounce. She liked this time the best. Engines were shut down. Coms were shut down. Everything was shut down so she could listen.

Some hours ago she had lured a little convoy-three dynaflow freighters, civilian ships carrying 'archeological' artifacts out of a mining belt twenty lights along the Beach, hurried along anxiously by a fast armed yawl called La Vie Fuerique -into this benighted spot and left them there while she went and did something else. Her ship's mathematics knew exactly how to find them again: they, however, tied to standard Tate-Kearney transformations, barely knew what day it was. By the time she returned, the yawl, overburdened by its duty of care, had got the freighters into the shadow of an old gas giant while it tried to calculate a way out of the trap. She watched them curiously. She was calm, they were not. She could hear their communications. They were beginning to suspect she was there. La Vie Fuerique had sent out drones. Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.

'Ah,' said Seria Mau Genlicher, as if they could hear her. 'You should be more careful, out here in empty space.'

As she spoke, the White Cat slipped into a cloud of non-baryonic junk, which, reacting weakly to her passage through it, stroked the hull like a ghost. A few dials woke up in the manual back-up systems in the empty human quarters of the ship, flickered, dropped back to zero. As matter, it was barely there, but the shadow operators were drawn to it. They gathered by the portholes, arranging the light that fell around them so that they could make the most tragic picture, looking at themselves in mirrors, whispering and running thin fingers across their mouths or through their hair, rustling their dry wings.

'If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,' they mourned, in the old language.

'Such a blessing,' they said.

Don't let me have to deal with this now, she thought.

'Go back to your posts,' she ordered them, 'or I'll have the portholes taken out.'

'We're always at our posts-'

'I'm sure we never meant to upset you, dear.'

'-always at our posts, dear.'

As if this had been a signal, La Vie Fuerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a minefield.

The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine engines etched into silicon wafers a centimetre square, weren't much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren't move and you daren't stop moving. The crew of La Vie Fuerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they broke cover on desperate, half-calculated EE trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.

'No, no, this is not how we do it,' said Seria Mau. 'You tubby little thing.'

She appeared from nowhere on its port stern quarter and allowed herself to be detected. This produced an explosion of internal coms traffic and a satisfying little dash for safety, to which she put an end with some of her more serious-if less sophisticated-ordnance. The flare of the explosion lit up several small asteroids and, briefly, the wreckage of the yawl, which, locked into the local chaotic attractor, toppled past end over end, wrapped in a rather beautiful radioactive glow.

'What does that mean?' Seria Mau asked the shadow operators: 'La Vie Feerique?'

No answer.

A little later she matched velocities with the wreckage and hung there while it wheeled slowly around her: buckled hull plates, monolithic items of dynaflow machinery, what looked like mile upon mile of slowly weaving cable. 'Cable?' Seria Mau laughed. 'What kind of technology is that?' You could see every strange thing out there on the Beach, ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out tubby little ships like these. In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone's worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all. Preoccupied by these thoughts, she eased the White Cat further in, to where the corpses turned in the vacuum. They were human. Men and women about her own age, bloated, frozen, limbs at odd, sexual angles, slowly cartwheeling through an atmosphere of their own possessions, they streamed past her bow. She nosed between them, looking for something in their expressions of dull fear and acceptance, though she was not sure what. Evidence. Evidence of herself.

'Evidence of myself,' she mused aloud.

'All around you,' whispered the shadow operators, giving her tragic glances from between their lacy fingers. 'And look!'

They had located a single survivor in a vacuum suit, a bulky white figure windmilling its arms, trying to walk on nothing, opening and closing on itself like some kind of undersea life as it doubled up in pain or perhaps only fear and disorientation and denial. I suppose, thought Seria Mau, listening to its transmissions, you would close your eyes and tell yourself, 'I can get out of this if I stay calm'; then open them and understand all over again where you were. That would be enough to make you scream like that.

She was wondering how to finish the survivor off when a fraction of a shadow passed across her. It was another vessel. It was huge. Alarms went off all over the K-ship. Shadow operators streamed about. The White Cat broke right and left, disappeared from local space in a froth of quantum events, non-commutative microgeometries and short-lived exotic vacuum states, then reappeared a kilometre away from her original position with all assets primed and ready. Disgusted, Seria Mau saw that she was still in the shadow of the intruder. It was so big it could only belong to her employers. She put a shot across its bows anyway. The Nastic commander edged his vessel irritably away from her. At the same time he sent a holographic fetch of himself to the White Cat. It squatted in front of the tank where Seria Mau lived, leaking realistically from the joints of its several yellowish legs, stridulating every so often for no reason she could see. Its bony-looking head had more palps, mosaic eyes and ropes of mucous than she preferred to look at. It wasn't something you could ignore.

'You know who we are,' it said.

'Do you think it's so clever to surprise a K-ship like that?' shouted Seria Mau.

The fetch clicked patiently.

'We were not trying to embarrass you,' it said. 'We approached in a perfectly open way. You have been ignoring our transmissions since you did… ' It paused as if searching for a word; then, clearly at a loss, concluded uneasily: 'This.'

'That was a moment ago.'

'That was five hours ago,' the fetch said. 'We have been trying to talk to you since then.'

Seria Mau was so shaken she broke contact and-as the fetch faded away into a kind of brown smoke, a transparency of itself-hid the White Cat in a cloud of asteroids some distance off, to give herself time to think. She felt ashamed of herself. Why had she acted like that? What could she have been thinking of to leave herself vulnerable like that, insensible out there for live hours? While she was trying to remember, the Nastic vessel's mathematics began stalking her again, making two or three billion guesses a nanosecond at her position. After a second or two she allowed it to find her. The fetch reformed immediately.

'What would you understand,' Seria Mau asked it, 'by the idea, "Evidence of myself"?'

'Not much,' the fetch said. 'Is that why you did this? To leave evidence of yourself? Over here, we wonder why you kill your own kind so ruthlessly.' Seria Mau had been asked this before.

'They're not my kind,' she said.

'They are human.'

She greeted this argument with the silence it deserved, then after a moment said:

'Where's the money?'

'Ah, the money. Where it always is.'

'I don't want local currency.'

'We almost never use local currencies,' the fetch said, 'although we sometimes deal in them.' Its larger joints appeared to vent some kind of gas. 'Are you ready to fight again? We have several missions available forty lights down the Beach. You would be up against military vessels. It's a real part of the war, not ambushing civilians like this.'

'Oh, your war,' she said dismissively. Fifty wars, big and small, were going on out here in plain sight of the Kefahuchi Tract; but there was only one fight, and it was the fight over the spoils. She had never even asked them who their enemy was. She didn't want to know. The Nastic were strange enough. Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. 'Motives,' she thought, staring at the collection of legs and eyes in front of her, 'are a sensorium thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.' She thought about this. 'The housefly has a harder job,' she decided.

'I have what I want now,' she told the fetch. 'I won't be fighting for you again.'

'We could offer more.'

'It wouldn't help.'

'We could make you do what we want.'

Seria Mau laughed.

'I'll be gone from here faster than your vessel can think. How will you find me then? This is a K-ship.'

The fetch left a calculated silence.

'We know where you are going,' it said.

This gave Seria Mau a cold feeling, but only for a fraction of a second. She had what she wanted from the Nastic. Let them try. She broke contact and opened the ship's mathematical space.

'Look at that!' the mathematics greeted her. 'We could go there. Orthere. Or look, there. We could go anywhere. Let's go somewhere!'

Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could read, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. 'You see?' said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat's massive array-aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull-detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. 'At the moment,' the mathematics announced, 'I'm solving Schrцdinger's equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.'