Light

TWENTY-SIX 50,000 degrees K

'We had some luck of course,' admitted Uncle Zip.

Seria Mau had returned to orbit to find the Moire pod all over everything like a cheap suit. She had given them some grief on her way out of there, and was now holed up among the gravitational rocks and shoals of the inner system, talking to Uncle Zip via a network of randomly switching proxy transmitters. The Moire pod -accepting this precaution as a challenge, and rather glad to be out of a fight Uncle Zip wouldn't allow them to win-had licked their wounds, pooled their mathematics and were rolling up the network at a rate of ten million guesses a nanosecond. Meanwhile, Seria Mau's fetch looked up at Uncle Zip, and Uncle Zip looked down at her. She could barely see his pipe-clayed face and fancy waistcoat for the creaking under-curve of his belly, clad in captain's ducks and restrained by a black leather belt fully eight inches wide. He had in one hand something that resembled a brass telescope, and in the other an ancient paper fakebook, 'The Galaxy and its Stars'. His sailor hat was on his head, with Kiss Me Quick in cursive script around the crown.

'There's no substitute for luck,' he said.

What had happened was this: in their haste to beat one another to the White Cat, Uncle Zip and the commander of the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void had collided in the Motel Splendido parking lot. At the time of the collision, Uncle Zip's vehicle of choice-the K-ship El Rayo X, on loan, along with the Krishna Moire pod, from undisclosed contacts in the bureaucracy of EMC-had already torched up to around twenty-five per cent the speed of light. Thirty or forty seconds later, it was buried deep below the Nastic vessel's greenish rind-like hull, having penetrated the whorled internal structures as far as the command and control centre before losing momentum. Touching the Void absorbed this incoming energy in a simple Newtonian fashion, retransmitting it as heat, noise, and-finally-a sluggish acceleration in the direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Its ruptured hull was promptly surrounded by clouds of shadow operators trying to make damage estimates. A caul of tiny repair machines-low-end swarming programmes mediating via a substrate of smart ceramic glue--began to seal the hole.

'Meanwhile,' said Uncle Zip, 'I find that by his own lights the guy is in fact already dead, though his ship-math maintains him as some sort of fetch. I say, "Hey, we can still work together. Being dead this way is no impediment to that," and he agrees. It made sense we worked together. Working together can sometimes be the right thing.'

So that was how it was. Uncle Zip's shadow operators, correctly assuming that neither ship was going anywhere on its own, began to build software bridges between the K-ship's mathematics and the propulsion systems of its new host. No one had ever done this before: but within hours they were back up and running and in pursuit of the White Cat, their origin, position and motives cloaked beneath the curious double signature which had so puzzled Seria Mau. 'Some luck was involved,' Uncle Ziprepeated. He seemed to like the idea. He spread his hands comfortably. 'Things came unstuck a couple of times along the way. But here we are.'

He looked down at her. 'You and me, Seria Mau,' he said, 'we got to work together too.'

'Don't hold your breath, Uncle Zip.'

'Why is that?'

'Because of everything. But mainly because you killed your son.'

'Hey,' he said. 'You did that. Don't look at me!' He shook his head. 'It must be convenient to forget events so soon.'

Seria Mau had to acknowledge the truth of that.

'But it was you involved me with him,' she said. 'You wound me up and set me going. And why bother, anyway, when you already knew where Billy was? You knew it all along, or else you couldn't have told me. You could have found him any time. Why the charade?'

Uncle Zip considered how to answer.

'That's true,' he admitted in the end: 'I didn't need to find him. But I knew he would never share that secret source of his. He was down there on that shithole rainy planet for ten years, just hoping I would ask, so he could say no. So instead I sent him what he needed: I sent him a sad story. I showed him he could still do something good in the world. I sent him someone worse off than he was, someone he could help. I sent him you. I knew he'd offer to take you there.'

He shrugged.

'I figured I could follow you,' he said.

'Uncle Zip, you bastard.'

'Some people have said that,' admitted Uncle Zip.

'Well, Billy told me nothing in the end. You didn't guess him right. He only came aboard my ship to have sex with the Mona clone.'

'Ah,' said Uncle Zip. 'Everyone wants sex with Mona.'

He smiled reminiscently.

'She was one of mine, too,' he said. Then he shook his head sadly. 'Things weren't good between me and Billy Anker since his first day out the incubator. It sometimes happens with a father and a son. Maybe I was too tough on him. But he never found himself, you know? Which was a pity, because he so much resembled me when I was young, before I did one entrada too many and as a consequence got this fat disease.'

Seria Mau cut the connection.

Thesound of alarms. Under its shifting blue and grey internal light, the White Cat felt empty and haunted at the same time. Shadow operators hung beneath the ceilings of the human quarters, pointing at Seria Mau and whispering among themselves like bereaved sisters. 'For God's sake what's the matter now?' she asked them. They covered one another's bruised-looking mouths with their fingers. The Moire pod had chased down most of the RF proxies and were running about after the rest like a lot of dogs on the Carmody waterfront at night. 'We have a buffer a few nanoseconds thick,' her mathematics warned her. 'We should either fight or leave.' It thought for a moment. 'If we fight, they'll probably win.'

'Well then, go.'

'Where?'

'Anywhere. Just lose them.'

'We might lose the K-pod, but not the Nastic ship. Their navigational systems aren't as good as me, but their pilot is better than you.'

'Don't keep saying that!'shrieked Seria Mau. Then she laughed. 'What does it matter, after all? They won't hurt us-not until they find out where we're going, anyway. And maybe not even then.'

'Where are we going?'

'Wouldn't you like to know!'

'We can't go there unless I do,' the mathematics reminded her.

'Ramp me up,' said Seria Mau. Instantly, the fourteen dimensions of the White Cat's sensorium folded out around her, and she was on ship-time. One nanosecond, she could smell vacuum. Two, she could feel the minute caress of dark matter against the hull. Three, she could tune into the hideous fusion life of the local sun, with its sounds no one has ever described. Four nanoseconds, and she had the shifting constantly redesigned command languages of the Moire pod drifting up to her through something like layers of clear liquid, which was the encryption they were suspended in. In five nanoseconds she knew everything about them: propulsion status, rate of burn, ordnance on call. What damage they were carrying from the day's encounter-the hulls thinned at crucial points from particle ablation, the arsenals depleted. She could feel the nanomachines working overtime to shore up their internal architecture. They were too young and stupid to realise how damaged they were. She thought she could beat them, whatever the mathematics said. She hung there a further nanosecond, warming herself in the fourteen-dimensional night. Blinks and fibres of illumination came and went. Distant things like noises. She heard Krishna Moire say, 'Got: it!' but knew he hadn't.

This was the place for her.

It was the place for people who didn't know what they were any more. Who had never known. Uncle Zip had called her 'a sad story'. Her mother was long dead. She had not seen her brother or father for fifteen years. Mona the clone had felt only contempt for her, and Billy Anker had pitied her even as she killed him: in addition his hard death still hung before her, like the menu for her own. Then she conned herself that all the complex stuff of being human was transparent at this level of things, and she could see straight through it to the other side-right to the simple code beneath. She could stay or go: in this place as in life. She was the ship.

'Arm me,' she commanded.

'Is this what you want;'

'Arm me.'

At that exact juncture, the K-pod found the last of her proxies and began unspooling the thread that led to her. But she was connected, and they were still thinking in milliseconds. Each time they found her, she was somewhere else. Then, in the instant it took them to realise what had happened, she had got into their personal space.

The engagement had to take place within one and a half minutes, or Seria Mau would burn out. During that time she would flicker unpredictably in and out of normal space fifty or sixty thousand times. She would remember little of it afterwards, an image here, an image there. In ship-space, a high-end gamma burst, generating 50,000K for an endless fourteen nanoseconds, looked like a flower. Targets turned under the gaze of her acquisition systems like diagrams, to be flipped this or that number of degrees in seven dimensions until they bloomed like flowers too. To the targets themselves the White Cat seemed to come out of nowhere on three or four different arcs which though sequential appeared simultaneous, in a mist of decoys, false signals and invented battle languages, a froth of code and violence which could have only the one conclusion. 'The fact is, boys,' she commiserated, 'I'm not sure which of these is me.' The Norma Shirike, struggling to connect, broke up into a cloud of pixels, like jigsaw pieces blown off a table in a high wind. The Kris Rhamion and the Sharmon Kier, trying not to run into one another in their haste to get away, ran into a small asteroid instead. Suddenly, it was all unmatched bits and pieces, floating in nowhere. They had ragged edges. None of them looked human, at any scale she chose. Local space was cooling down, but it was still like a cooker, resonating with light and heat, glittering with exotic particles and phase states. It was beautiful.

'I love it in here,' she said.

'You have three milliseconds left,' the mathematics warned her. 'And we didn't get them all. I think one of them left the system. But Moire himself is loose and I'm still looking for him.'

'Leave me in here.'

'I can't do that.'

'Leave me in, or we're stuffed anyway. He used his team as decoys, went on ship-time late. The bet was he would have a millisecond or two left to bounce me as I slowed down.' It was a textbook tactic and she had fallen for it. 'Moire, you fucker, I know what you're up to!'Too late. She was back on normal time. The tank proteome, flushed with nutrients and hormonal tranquillisers, was beginning to try and repair her. She could barely stay awake. 'Fuck,' she told the mathematics. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.' There was laughter on the RF frequencies. Krishna Moire flickered briefly into existence in front of her, dressed in his powder-blue stormtroop uniform.

'Hey, Seria,' he said. 'What's this, you ask? Well it's goodnight from me. And a fucking goodnight to you.'

'He's on us,' said the mathematics.

Moire's ship flickered towards her through the wreckage. It looked like a ghost. It looked like a shark. Nothing she could do would be fast enough. The White Cat turned and turned in panic like one of her own victims, looking for a way out. Then everything lit up like a Christmas tree, and the Krishna Moire was batted away in the blast, a black needle toppling end over end against the dying flare of the explosion. In the same instant, Seria Mau became aware that something huge had materialised beside the White Cat. It was the Nastic cruiser, its vast, mouldy-looking hull, like a rotting windfall in some old orchard, still crawling with autorepair media.

'Jesus,' she said. 'They bumped him. Uncle Zip bumped his own guy.'

'I don't think it was Uncle Zip,' the mathematics said. 'The command came from somewhere else in the ship.' A dry laugh. 'It's like the bicameral mind in there.'

Seria Mau felt weepy when she heard this.

'It was the commander,'she said. 'He always liked me. And I always liked him.'

'You don't like anyone,' the mathematics pointed out.

'Usually I don't,' said Seria Mau. 'But I'm very up and down today. I can't work out what's the matter with me.' Then she said: 'Where's that bastard Moire?'

'He's down in the outer layers of the gas giant. He got out by surfing the expansion wave of the bump. He's taken damage, but his engines still work. Do you want to go in after him?'

'No. Cook it up.'

'Pardon?'

'Cook the fucker up.'

'?'

'If you want something done,' sighed Seria Man, 'do it yourself. There.' Ordnance disengaged from one of the complex outer structures of the White Cat, hung for the blink of an eye while its engine fired, then streaked down into the gas giant's atmosphere. Gravity tried to crush it out of existence, but between here and there it had turned itself into the voice of God. Something like lightning flared across the face of the gas giant, as it began to torch itself up. Uncle Zip opened a line to the White Cat. He was puffing out his cheeks angrily. 'Hey,' he said, all that was unnecessary. You know? I paid good money for those guys. In the end I wouldn't of let them hurt you.'

Seria Mau ignored him.

'Better light out,' she advised her mathematics. She yawned. 'This is where we're going,' she said. And finally: 'I really didn't want to be bothered with that fucker again. I was just too tired.'

As they left the system, a new star had begun to burn behind them.

Seria Mau slept for a long time, dreamlessly at first. Then she began to see images. She saw the New Pearl River. She saw the garden, gloomy under rain. She saw herself from a great distance, very small but clear. She was thirteen. She had gone to sign up for the K-ships. She was saying goodbye to herbrother and her father. The scene was this: the station at Saulsignon, still pretty under its wartime skies, which were just like the wartime skies of Antique European Earth, blue, turbulent, vapour-trailed but full of hope. She saw herself wave, and she saw the father raise his hand. The brother refused to wave. He didn't want her to go, so he refused even to look at her. This scene faded slowly. After that, she glimpsed herself when she was last human, sitting on the edge of a bed shivering, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a cotton robe that fell open constantly at the back. You sign up for the K-ships in sterile white rooms at even temperatures: nevertheless, whatever you do you can't get warm. You mustn't have eaten. They give you the emetics anyway. They give you the injection. They give you the tests, but to be honest that is only to pass the two or three days it takes the injection to work. By then your bloodstream is teaming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down and give you a rubber gag, to bite on. The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon. They pump you with a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators. They core you at four points down the spine. You are conscious all the way through this process, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits, even now, don't make it past that point. If you do, they seal you in the tank. By then they have broken most of your bones, and taken some of your organs out: you are blind and deaf, and all you are aware of is a kind of nauseous surf rolling through you forever. They have cut into your neocortex so that it will accept the software bridge known ironically as 'the Einstein Cross' from the shape you see the first time you use it. You are no longer alone. You will soon be able to consciously process billions of billions of bits per second; but you will never walk again. You will never laugh or touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself again. You have signed up. It comes to you for an instant that you were able to choose this but that you will never, ever, ever be able to unchoose it.

In the dream, Seria Mau saw herself from above. All these years on, she wept at what she had done to herself back then. Her skin was like a fish's skin. She was trembling in the tank like a damaged experimental animal. But her brother would not even wave her goodbye that day. That in itself was reason enough. Who wanted a world like that, where you had to be the mother all the time, and your brother wouldn't even wave goodbye?

Abruptly Seria Mau was looking at a picture of a blank interior wall covered with ruched grey silk. After some time, the upper body of a man- he was tall, thin, dressed in a black tailcoat and starched white shirt; he held in one white-gloved hand a top hat, in the other an ebony cane-bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. Seria Mau trusted him immediately. He had laughter in his eyes- they were a penetrating light blue-and a black pencil moustache, and his jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he smiled at her, and in a quiet, friendly voice said:

'You must forgive yourself all this.'

'But -' Seria Mau heard herself reply.

At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows opening on to the blunt glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. This made the room itself appear to be toppling through space at a measured, subrelativistic pace.

'You must forgive yourself for everything,' the conjuror said.

Slowly, he tipped his hat to her, and bowed himself back out of the picture. Before he had quite gone, he beckoned her to follow him. She woke up suddenly.

'Send the shadow operators to me,' she told her ship.