Light

TWENTY Three Body Problem

Two days out from Redline, and the White Cat was changing course every twelve nanoseconds. Dyne-space enfolded the ship in a figured, incalculable blackness, out of which reached the caressing fingers of weakly reacting matter. The shadow operators hung motionless at the portholes whispering to one another in the old languages. They had taken on their usual form, of women biting their knuckles in regret. Billy Anker wouldn't have them near him. 'Hey,' he said, 'we don't know what they want!' He tried to exclude them from the human quarters, but they crept in like smoke while he was asleep and hung up in the corners watching him dream his exhausted dreams.

Seria Mau watched him too. She knew that she would soon have to have his account of himself, and of the object she had bought from Uncle Zip. Meanwhile she spent her time with the ship's mathematics, trying to understand what was going on behind them, where, several lights adrift, the Krishna Moire pod wove itself chaotically round the curious hybrid signature of the Nastic ship, to make a single, watery, undependable trace in the display.

'It's hard to feel threatened, when they stay back so far.'

'Perhaps they don't want us to panic,' the mathematics suggested. 'Or — ' with its equivalent of a shrug ' — perhaps they do.'

'Can we lose them?'

'Their computational success is high, but not as high as mine. With luck, I can keep them at arm's length.'

'But can we lose them?'

'No.'

She couldn't bear that idea. It was a limitation. It was like being a child again. 'Well then, do something!'she screamed. After some thought the mathematics put her to sleep, which for once she welcomed.

She dreamed again of the time they were all still happy. 'Let's go away!' the mother said. 'Would you like to go away?' Seria Mau clapped her hands, while her brother ran up and down the family room, shouting, 'Let's go away! Let's go away!' though when the time came he threw a tantrum because he couldn't take his little black cat. They caught the Rocket Train north, to Saulsignon. It was a long journey in a lost season-not quite winter, not quite spring-slow and exciting by turns. 'If it's a Rocket Train it should go faster!' the little boy shouted, running up and down the aisle. The sky was a stretched blue over long hypnotic lines of plough. They got down at Saulsignon the afternoon of the next day. It was the tiniest of stations, with wrought iron posts and tubs of Earth flowers, washed bright as a new pin by the little showers of rain falling through the sunlight. The platform cat licked its tortoiseshell fur in a corner, the Rocket Train departed, and a white cloud obscured the sun. Outside the station a man walked by. When he stopped to look back, the mother shivered and wrapped her honey-coloured fur coat about her, drawing its collar tight with one long white hand.

Then she laughed and the sun came out again. 'Come along, you two!' And there, moments later it seemed, was the sea!

Here the dream ended. Seria Mau waited attentively for the reprise, or second act, in which the conjuror would appear, dressed in his beautiful top hat and tails. When nothing happened she was disappointed. As soon as she woke up she switched on all the lights in the human quarters. The shadow operators, caught bending solicitously over Billy Anker's bed in the dark, fled right and left.

'Billy Anker,' Seria Mau called. 'Wake up!'

A few minutes later he stood blinking and rubbing his eyes in front of the Dr Haends package in its red gift box.

'This?' he said.

He looked puzzled. He poked about behind the box. He picked up one of Uncle Zip's roses and sniffed it. He raised the lid of the box cautiously (a bell chimed, a soft spotlight seemed to shine down from above) and eyed the upwelling and slow purposive spill of white foam. The bell chimed again. A female voice whispered, 'Dr Haends. Dr Haends, please.' Billy Anker scratched his head. He put the lid back on the box. He took it off again. He reached out to touch the white stuff with his finger.

'Don't do that!' warned Seria Mau.

'Shh,' said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. 'I look inside,' he said, 'and I don't see anything. Do you?'

'There's nothing to see.'

'Dr Haends to surgery, please,' insisted the quiet voice.

Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. 'I never saw anything like this before,' he said. 'Of course, we don't know what Uncle Zip did to it.' He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. 'It didn't look like this when I found it,' he said. 'It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.' He shrugged. 'Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn't have these theatrical values.' He smiled in a way she didn't understand, looking off into the distance. 'That's Uncle Zip's signature, if you like,' he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau's fetch wove nervously around his ankles.

'Where did you find it?' she said.

Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch's eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:

'You can't outrun EMC forever.'

'It's not me they're after,' she reminded him.

'All the same,' he said, 'they'll catch you in the end.'

'Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It's easy to lose yourself out here.'

'You're already lost,' Billy Anker said. 'I admire that you stole a K-ship,' he went on quickly: 'Who wouldn't? But you're lost, and you aren't finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You're doing the wrong thing. You know?'

'How come you say these things?' she shouted. 'How come you make me feel bad like this?'

He couldn't answer that.

'What's the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I'm not a refund kind of guy?' She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn't his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I don't know you well enough to say that.'

'No,' he said.

'I was wrong,' she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn't fill. 'It was wrong of me.'

She had to be content with a shrug.

'So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you're clearly so proud of.'

'Take this ship deep,' he said. 'Take it to the Tract.'

'I don't know why I'm talking to you, Billy Anker.'

He laughed.

'I had to try,' he said. He said, 'OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.'

She laughed.

'Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?' He went on anyway.

Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the 'affected area' and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. 'Containment' was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.

After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and-especially-navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

K-tech was born.

'So?' said Seria Mau. 'This is not news.'

She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. 'None of this is news to my life,' she said. 'You know?'

'I know,' said Billy Anker. He went on:

'EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, "We don't make the wars," and then have "terrorists" killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.' He grinned. 'But here's the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip's generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they're adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can't build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.

'Do you understand? We don't have a technology here. We have alien artifacts: a resource mined until it ran out.' He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. 'This may have been one of the last of them,' he said. 'And we don't even know what it was for.'

'Hey, Billy Anker,' she said. 'I know what it's for.'

He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.

'K-tech has run out,' he repeated.

'If that's a good thing, why are you so pissed off?'

Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.

'Because I found a whole planet of it,' he said.

Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'I was obsessed with the Sigma End wormhole. I wanted to know who put it there, how they did it. More than that, I wanted whatever was at the other end of it. I wasn't alone. For a year or two, every hot guy with a theory was hanging off the edge of the accretion disc, doing what he called "science" from some piece of junk he'd salvaged further down the Beach. A lot of them ended up as plasma.' He laughed softly. 'A thousand sky-pilots, entradistas, madmen. Amazing guys like Liv Hula and Ed Chianese. At that time we all thought Sigma End was the gateway to the Tract. I was the one found out it wasn't.'

'How?'

Billy Anker chuckled. His whole face changed.

'I went down it,' he said.

She stared at him. 'But… ' she said. She thought of everyone who had died trying that.

She said: 'Didn't you care?'

He shrugged. 'I wanted to know,' he said.

'Billy Anker-'

'Oh, it's no way to travel,' he said. 'It broke me. It broke the ship. That weird twist of light just hangs like a crack in nowhere. You can barely see it against the stars: but shoot through and it's like- ' He examined his damaged hand. 'Who knows what it's like? Everything changes. Things happened in there I can't describe. It was like being a kid again, some bad dream of running down an endless hallway in the dark. I heard things I still can't give a meaning to, filtering through the hull. But, hey, I was out there! You know?' The memory of it made him rock to and fro with excitement where he sat. He looked twenty years younger than when she woke him up. The lines had vanished from round his mouth. His greeny-grey eyes, harder to bear than usual, were lighted from inside by his joke, his hidden narrative, his fierce construction of himself; at the same time they made him seem vulnerable and human. 'I was somewhere no entradista had ever been before. I was in front, for the first time. Can you imagine that?'

She couldn't.

She thought: If you can't stop yourself trying to attract people this way, Billy Anker, it's because you have no self-esteem. We want a human being, all you dare show us is the lack of Hearts. Then suddenly she realised who he reminded her of. The ponytail, if it had still been black; the thin dark-skinned face, if it hadn't been so tired, so burned out by the rays of distant suns: neither would have looked out of place at the tailorshop party on Henry Street in downtown Carmody, in the soft humid night of Motel Splendido-

'You're one of Uncle Zip's clones,' she said.

At first she thought this would shock him into saying something new. But he only grinned and shrugged it off. 'The personality didn't take,' he said. A complex expression crossed his face.

'He made you for this.'

'He wanted a replacement. His entradista days were over. He thought the child would follow the father. But I'm my own man,' Billy Anker said. He blinked. 'I say that to everyone, but it's true.'

'Billy -'

'Don't you want to know what I found?"

'Of course I do,' she said. She didn't care one way or another at that moment, she was so chilled by his fate. 'Of course I do.'

He was silent for a time. Once or twice he started to speak, but language seemed to fail him. Finally he began:

'That place: it butts up against the Tract so tight you can practically hear the rush and roar of it. You fall out the wormhole, toppling end over end, all your control systems redlined, and there it is. Light. Deep light. Fountains, cascades, falling curtains of light. All the colours you can imagine and some you can't. Shapes they used to see through optical telescopes, in the old days back on Earth. You know? Like gas clouds, and clouds of stars, but evolving there in human time in front of you. Building and falling like surf.' He was silent again, looking inside himself as if he'd forgotten she was there. Eventually he said: 'And you know, it's small, that place. Some used-up old moon they sent down the wormhole for their own purposes. No atmosphere. You can make out the curve of the horizon. And bare. Just white dust on a surface like a cement floor…

'A cement floor,' he whispered. 'You hear the K-code resonating in it like the sound of a choir.' He raised his voice. 'Oh, I didn't stay,' he said. 'I wasn't up to it. I saw that at once. I was too scared to stay. I could feel the code, humming in the fabric, I could hear the light pour over me. I could feel the Tract at my back, like something watching. I couldn't believe they would drive a wormhole through to somewhere so insane. I grabbed a few things-just like the old prospectors, the first few things I saw-and I got out of there as fast as I could.'

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Haends package.

'That was one of them,' he said. After a moment he shivered. 'I got the Karaoke Sword off the moon, but it was a long time before I could go anywhere. We just hung there in the wash of light. Even the ship felt a kind of terror. I couldn't make myself enter the wormhole again. A wormhole is a lottery. It's a one-shot thing, even for a man like me. In the end I took absolute navigational fixes-fixes from the standing gravity wave, also fixes I was less certain of, from the anisotropy of the whole universe-to find out where I was. Then I came back the long way round, by dynaflow. I was broke, so I got together a few of the things I'd found, and sold them on. It was a mistake. After that I knew everyone in the galaxy would want to know what I knew. I hid up.'

'But you could find the place again,' said Seria Mau. She held her breath.

'Yes,' he said.

'Then take me there, Billy Anker. Take me to that planet!'

He looked down at his hands, and after a time shook his head. 'It's important we don't lead them there,' he said. 'You can see that.' He held up his hand to forestall her arguments. 'But that's not the reason. Oh, I'd take you there despite them, because I can tell how much that package means to you. Between you and me and the White Cat, we might lose them on the way-'

'Then why not take me? Why?'

'Because it's no place for you or me.'

Seria Mau walked her fetch away from him and through a bulkhead. Billy Anker looked surprised. The next time he heard her voice, it was the ship's voice. It came from all around him. 'I see right through you, Billy Anker,' she said. She tut-tutted mildly. 'All this talk about leaving the Beach, and you're too scared to swim.'

He looked angry then stubborn. 'That's no place for human beings,' he insisted.

'I'm not a human being!'

He smiled. His face lit up softly and shed the years, and she saw he was his own man after all.

'Oh yes you are,' he said.