Light

23 Star-crossed

The commander of Touching the Void tried to contact Seria Mau by fetch.

Something was wrong with his signal. It had lost part of itself, or got mixed up with something else, some of the baroque matter of the universe, before it reached her. The fetch squatted in front of her tank for a full minute, fading in and out of view, then vanished. It was much smaller than she remembered from their previous dealings—a bundle of yellowish limbs barely bigger than a human head, crouching in what looked like a puddle of sticky liquid. Its skin had the shine of roasted poultry. She wondered if that meant there was something wrong, not just with the signal but with the commander himself. She asked mathematics what it thought.

“Contact broken,” the mathematics said.

“For Christ’s sake,” Seria Mau told it, “I could work that out on my own.”

Over the next two days the apparition reappeared at intervals of a minute or two in different parts of the ship, caught by the drifting cameras as a brief subliminal flicker. The shadow operators drove it into corners, where it became panicked. Eventually it flickered to life in front of Seria Mau’s tank, from which position, stabilising quickly but still too small, it regarded Seria Mau patiently from its cluster of eyes and made several attempts to speak.

Seria Mau eyed it with distaste.

“What?” she said.

Eventually it managed to say her name:

“Seria Mau Genlicher, I—” Interference. Static. Echoes of nothing, with nothing to echo in. “—important to warn you about your position,” it said, as if completing some argument she had missed the beginning of. The signal faded, then blurted back loudly. “—modified the Dr. Haends package,” it said, and was silent again. It faded into brown smoke, moving its palps agitatedly: but if it was trying to communicate further, she couldn’t hear. When it had gone, Seria Mau asked the mathematics:

“What are they doing back there?”

“Nothing new. The Moire pod has lost way a little. Touching the Void is still phaselocked to an unknown K-ship.”

“Can you make any sense of this?”

“I don’t think so,” the mathematics admitted.

What does an alien think anyway? What use does it make of the world? As soon as they arrived on a planet the Nastic turned its indigenous population over to excavation projects. They wanted silos, a mile across and perhaps five miles deep. After the lithosphere was laced with these structures, the Nastic would hover by the million in the air above them, on wings which looked as cheap and brand-new as a plastic hairslide. No one knew why, although the best guess was that it had religious significance. If you tried to hold more than a practical conversation with a Nastic, it began saying things like, “The work fails only when the worker has turned from the wheel,” and, “In the morning, they face inward like the Moon.” The Nastic colonies, substantial in number, spread from the rim of the galaxy towards its centre, in the shape of a slice from a pie chart. The inference was obvious: they had originated from outside. That being so, no one could suggest how they had travelled the distances involved. Their own myths, in which the Urswarm travelled without ships at all, beating its wings down some lighted fracture in the continuum, alternately warmed and fried by radiation, could be discounted.

There were no more attempts at communication. The White Cat fled through empty space, while her pursuers hung back like cunning hounds. It was no easier to work out what to do.

Meanwhile, Billy Anker filled the ship. He did the most ordinary things in too large a way. Seria Mau, drawn and repelled at the same time, watched him carefully from the hidden cameras as he washed, ate, scratched his armpits sitting on the lavatory with his pressure-suit down round his knees. Billy Anker smelled of leather, sweat, something else she couldn’t identify, though it might have been machine oil. He never took off his fingerless glove.

Sleep was no consolation to him. Dreams lifted his top lip off his teeth in a frightened snarl; in the mornings he looked at himself askance in the mirror. What was there to see? What kind of inner resources could he have, with such an indifferent start in life? Invented and set in motion as an extension of his own father, he had flung himself into the void as a way of validating himself. He had done that mad thing among many other mad things, and got so worn out by them he crept away and spent ten years putting himself back together, while war came closer, and the big secrets got more remote instead of less, and the galaxy fell apart a little more, and everything strayed that bit farther from being fixable—

Give it all up, Billy Anker, she wanted to urge him. Live for the big discovery and you only feed the fat man inside. Also he profits from everything you find. She wanted to beg him:

“Give it all up, Billy Anker, and come away with me.”

What did she mean by that? What could she mean? She was a rocket ship and he was a man. She thought about that. She watched over him while he slept, and had her own dreams.

In Seria Mau’s dreams, which played themselves out as inaccurately as memories in the extended sensorium of the White Cat, Billy Anker knelt over her, smiling down endlessly while she smiled up at him. She was in love, but didn’t quite know what to want. Puzzled by herself, she simply exhibited herself to him in a daze. She wanted to feel the weight of his gaze, she realised, in a room full of light, on a summer afternoon. But a kind of shadow version of this event dogged her imagination and sometimes made things seem absurd—it was cold in the house, there was food cooling on a tray, the boards were bare, she was so much smaller than him; all she felt was embarrassment and a kind of uninspired chafing. In an attempt to discover how she should act, she ran footage of Mona the clone’s companions in the days before she blew them out the airlock. From this she learned to say, with a kind of angry urgency, “I want to do it. I want to fuck.” But in the end Seria Mau had no interest in being penetrated; indeed, she was rather upset by the absurdity of the idea.

Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, “I’m committing suicide.”

“Come away now dear and eat,” the shadow operators said listlessly.

“I mean it,” Mona threatened.

She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and—over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa—told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.

She asked him if he could fly the White Cat.

Billy Anker didn’t seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.

“What life’s that, kid?” he said vaguely.

Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. “This is where I live,” Mona informed him the next day: “And this is where you live.”

She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth’s deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn’t need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, “Jesus!” in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.

Seria Mau followed these domestic encounters with a kind of amused tolerance. It was like having pets. Their antics could often bring her out of her recurrent cafards, ill-humours and tantrums where the White Cat’s hormonal pharmacopoeia could not. She was reassured by Mona and Billy. She expected nothing new of them.

All the more surprising then, four or five days out of Redline, to catch them together in Mona’s bedroom.

The lighting mimicked afternoon leaking through half-closed blinds somewhere in the temperate zones of Earth. An atmosphere of cinq à sept prevailed. There was a dish of rosewater by the bed for Billy Anker to dip his fingers in if he started to come too soon. Mona wore a short grey silk slip, which was up round her waist, and lots of lip colour to make it look as if she had already bitten them. She had hold of the chrome bedhead in both hands. Her mouth was open and through the bars her eyes had a faraway look. One breast had come free of the slip.

“Oh yes, fuck me, Billy Anker,” she said suddenly.

Billy Anker, who was curved over her in a manner both protective and predatory, looked younger than he had. His forearms were long and brown, corded in the yellow light. His unbound hair hung down round his face; he still had on his fingerless mitt. “Oh, fuck me through the wall,” Mona said. This gave him pause; then he shrugged, lost his inturned look and carried on with what he had been doing. Mona went pink and gave a fluttering, delicate little cry. That was the last straw for Billy, who after a series of spasms groaned loudly and slumped over her. They slipped apart immediately and began to laugh. Mona lit a cigarette and let him take it from her without asking. He sat up against the bedhead with one arm round her. They smoked for a while then Billy Anker, casting around for something to slake his thirst, drank the rosewater from the bedside dish.

Seria Mau watched them in silence for a moment or two, thinking, Is this how he would have been with me?

Then she took control of the human quarters. She reduced the temperature by tens of degrees. She brought up the lights until they had the glare of hospital fluorescents. She introduced disinfectants into the air-conditioning. Mona the clone threw her arm across her eyes then, realising what must have happened, shoved Billy Anker away from her. “Get off me before it’s too late,” she said. “Oh God, get off me.” She scrambled out of bed and into the corner of the room, where she clung with both hands to the nearest fixed object, shaking with fear and whispering, “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”

Billy Anker stared at her puzzledly. He wiped away the aerosol of disinfectant which stood on his face like sweat. Looked down at the palm of his hand. Laughed.

“What’s going on?” he said.

Seria Mau examined him carefully. He looked like a plucked chicken in that light. His flesh looked as grey as his hair. She wasn’t quite sure what she had seen in him.

She said in her ship’s voice: “This is your stop, Billy Anker.”

The clone whimpered, clung on harder, shut her eyes as tight as she could. “You might well do that,” Seria Mau advised her: “It’s your stop too.” She dialled up the mathematics.

“Open the airlock,” she ordered.

She thought for a moment.

“No, wait,” she said.

Two minutes later, something levered its way out of nowhere on a remote curve of the Beach, at the edge of a system no one had ever bothered to name. Empty space convulsed. A splatter of particles organised itself in a millisecond or two from a fireworks display into the ugly lines of a K-ship—the White Cat, her torch already alight, heading in-system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic on a brutally straight line of fusion product.

Surveys of the system, carried out fifty years after humanity arrived on the Beach, had found a single solid object in a braiding orbital dance with gas giants. Though a little large, it was strictly a moon. Tidal heating in its core had raised the surface to temperatures resembling Earth’s, generating also a loose and wispy atmosphere which featured the gases that support life. Against a curious greenish arc of sky ballooned the salmon-pink bulk of the nearest gas giant. A single fractal structure occupied the entire planet. Though from a distance this resembled vegetation, it was neither alive nor dead. It was just some mad old algorithm which, vented from a passing navigational system, had run wild then run out of raw materials. The effect was of endless peacock feathers a million different sizes: a clever drawing ramped into three dimensions. Mathematics trying to save itself from death.

Plush and velvety, surrounded by a vanishingly thin mist of itself, this structure defeated the eye at all scales. It did something strange and absorbent to the light. It lay brittle and exfoliated, fragmenting into a viral dust of itself, a useless old calculation which had accidentally become an environment. There was a biome: among its quaint bracts and stalks, local life forms moved with a kind of puzzled stealth. The logic of the ecology was unclear, its terminal fauna provisional. At dawn or dusk, something between a bird and a marmoset might be seen, making its way painfully to the tip of some huge feather to stare anxiously at the face of the gas giant, before it closed its eyes and began a fluting territorial aubade. No one had stayed long enough to find out any more.

The White Cat burned a clearing among the feathers, hovered above them momentarily, and lowered herself down. For a minute or two nothing more happened. Then a cargo port opened and two figures debouched. After a pause in which they turned back and seemed to be arguing with the ship itself, they hurried down the already-closing cargo ramp and stood in silence. They were naked, although they had between them what seemed to be some party clothes and the bottom half of an old G-suit. As they watched, the White Cat stood on its tail, shot into the sky, and vanished, all in the same easy, practised gesture.

Mona the clone stared helplessly about.

“She might at least have dropped us near a town,” she said. “The bitch.”

Thrown into a fugue to which—for once—the mathematics of the White Cat had made no contribution, Seria Mau Genlicher, pilot of the spaceways, dreamed she was ten years old again. One moment her mother was smiling and excited; the next she was dead and in a photograph, which not long later went up into the wet afternoon air in grey smoke.

The father couldn’t bear anything that reminded him of his wife. That photograph was too hard to bear, he said. Just too hard to bear. All winter, he locked himself in his study, and when Seria Mau brought him the tray at lunchtime, touched her cheek and cried. Stay for a moment, he urged her. Be the mother for just a moment. She couldn’t begin to articulate the embarrassment she felt at this. She looked at the floor, which only made it worse. He kissed her gently on the top of the head, then with one finger under her chin, gently compelled her to face him again. You look like her, he said. You look so like her. A gasp came from him. Sit here, no here, like this. Like this. He put his fingers down between Seria Mau’s legs then gasped and burst into tears. Seria Mau took the tray and went out. Why would he do that? She felt as stiff and awkward as someone learning how to walk.

“Waraaa!” said her brother, ambushing her on the landing. She dropped the lunch tray and the two of them stared down silently at the mess. A boiled egg rolled away and into a corner.

All that winter, K-ships roared low over the New Pearl River. They made sudden dirty white arcs across the sky. The father took Seria Mau and her brother to the base, to watch those ships come in. It was war. It was peace. Who knew what it would be, out there on the edge of the galaxy, with the Nastic only three systems away, and unknown assets at large in the Kuiper Belt, presenting as lumps of dirty ice? The children loved it. There followed the best and worst of times, marked by parades and marches, economic crashes, political speeches, the overturning of scientific paradigms: fresh news every day. That was when Seria Mau made up her mind. That was when she made her own plans. She collected holograms—little black cubes full of stars, roseate nebulae, wisps of floating gas—the way other girls collected cosmetics. “This is Eridon Omega,” she explained to her brother, “south of the White Cawl. The Vittor Neumann pod rules there. Just let the Nastic try anything against them!” Her eyes glowed. “They have ordnance that evolves itself, generation by generation, in a medium outside the ship. Whole worlds are at stake here!” She watched herself say this in the mirror, with no idea why she looked so wild-eyed and excited. The morning of her thirteenth birthday, she signed up. EMC were always looking for recruits, and for the K-pods they only wanted the youngest, fastest people they could find.

“You should be proud of me,” she told the father.

“I’m proud,” her brother said. He burst into tears. “I want to be a space ship too.”

Saulsignon was a training camp by then. There were wire fences everywhere. The little railway station had lost its look of Ancient Earth, its flower tubs and the tabby cat which made the brother angry because it reminded him of his little black kitten. They stood there, the three of them, on her last day, awkward in the wind and rain.

“Will you get leave?” the father said.

Seria Mau laughed triumphantly.

“Never!” she said.

As soon as this word was out, the dream faded to nothing, like lights going down. When they came up again, they came up in the magic shop window. Ruby-coloured plastic lips. Feathers dyed bright orange and green. Bundles of coloured scarves that would go into the magician’s shiny hat and then hop out as live white pigeons. All that stuff which, though sometimes pretty, was always fake: always made to mislead and dissemble. Seria Mau stood in front of the glass for some time, but the conjuror never came. Just as she was turning to leave, she heard a faint bell ring, and a voice whispered, “When will you come for me, Dr. Haends?” She looked around in surprise at the empty street. There was no doubt about it. The voice had been her own. When she woke, she thought for a moment that someone was bending over her: in the same instant, she saw herself marooning Billy Anker and Mona the clone in the shadow of the gas giant. The memory of an act that bad could only make you feel absurd.

“Why did you let me do it?” she said.

The mathematics gave its equivalent of a shrug. “You weren’t ready to listen.”

“Take us back there.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Take us back.”

The White Cat shut her torch down and fell as silently as a derelict between the gas giants. Course changes were made in increments, using tiny, ferocious pSi engines which worked by blowing oxygen onto porous silicon compounds. Meanwhile, the particle-detectors and massive arrays, extending like veinous systems in a leaf, sifted vacuum for the track of the Krishna Moire pod. “Power up,” the mathematics instructed quietly. “Power down.” What was left of Seria Mau’s body moved impatiently in its tank. She had a need to see Billy Anker that anyone else would have described as physical. If she had remembered how, she would have bitten her lip. “Why did I do this?” she asked herself. The shadow operators shook their heads: sooner or later something like it had been bound to happen, they inferred. In the end the White Cat got close enough to examine the planet itself. Something moved among the feathers. It might have been whatever lived down there; it might have been ancient calculations crumbling into dust.

“What’s that?” said the mathematics.

“Nothing,” said Seria Mau. “Go in,” she ordered. “I’ve had enough of this.”

She found Billy Anker and Mona the clone lying half out of the long cobalt shadows. Mona was already dead, her pretty blonde head resting on the upper part of Billy’s chest. He had one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he was still stroking her hair. As she died she had been looking intently into his face, and had placed one leg between both his, trying to get some final comfort out of life. Under the instructions of the old algorithm—which, provided so suddenly with raw material for its endless repetition, had sifted stealthily down onto them from the structures above—their cells were turning to feathers. Billy Anker’s legs looked like a peacock satyr’s. Mona was gone all the way to diaphragm, blue-black dusty feathers which seemed to shift and grow and do something odd to the light.

Seria Mau’s fetch—in these conditions little more than a shadow itself—wove nervously about in front of the lovers. How could I have done this? she thought, while she said aloud:

“Billy Anker, is there any way I can help?”

Billy Anker never stopped stroking the dead woman’s hair, or looking away from her.

“No,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

Billy Anker smiled to himself. “Kid,” he said, “it’s more comfortable than you’d think. Like a good downer.” He laughed suddenly. “Hey, the wormhole was the spectacle. You know? That’s what I keep remembering. That was how I expected to go.” Silent a moment, he contemplated that. “I could never even describe what it was like in there,” he said. Then he said, “I can hear this thing counting. Or is that some sort of illusion?”

Seria Mau came as close to him as she could.

“I can’t hear anything. Billy Anker, I’m sorry to have done this.” At that, he bit his lip and finally looked away from Mona the clone.

“Hey,” he said. “Forget it.”

He convulsed. Dust billowed up from the stealthily shifting surface of his body. The algorithm was reorganising him at all scales. For a moment his eyes filled with horror. He hadn’t expected this. “It’s eating me!” he shouted. He flailed with his arms, clutched at the dead woman as if she might help him. Forgetting she was only a fetch, he tried to clutch at Seria Mau too. Then he got control of himself again. “The more you deny the forces inside, kid, the more they control you,” he said. His hand went through her like a hand through smoke. He stared at it in surprise. “Is this happening?” he asked.

“Billy Anker, what am I to do?”

“That ship of yours. Take it deep. Take it to the Tract.”

“Billy, I—”

Above them, streaks of violet ionisation went across the face of the gas giant. There was a great whistling thud of displaced air; then another; then a vast emerald fireball somewhere in orbit, as the White Cat began to defend herself against what must be the attentions of the Krishna Moire pod. Suddenly, Seria Mau was half up there with her ship, half down here with Billy Anker. Alarms were going off everywhere along the continuum between these two states, and the mathematics was trying to disconnect her fetch.

“Leave me!” she cried. “I want to stay with him! Someone must stay with him!”

Billy Anker smiled and shook his head.

“Get out of here, kid. That’s Uncle Zip up there. Get out while you can.”

“Billy Anker, I brought them down on you!”

He looked tired. He closed his eyes.

“I brought them down on myself, kid. Get out of here. Take it deep.”

“Goodbye, Billy Anker.”

“Hey, kid—”

But when she turned to answer, he was dead.

I fell for it, she told herself in despair. All the fucking and the fighting. Despite everything I promised myself, I fell for it too.

Then she thought: Uncle Zip! Terror dissolved her, because she had so underestimated that fat man, how intelligent he was, how galaxywide. She had been in his hands from the moment she began to deal with him.

What would she do now?