Light

30 Radio RX-1

In the days that followed The Perfect Low wove her way across the halo. She was all bustle, her hull crowded to capacity, a warm, smelly node of humanity flying in the teeth of the vast Newtonian grin of empty space. A sense of purpose prevailed. Status-conscious and competitive at close quarters, the carnies were always dissatisfied with their accommodation, always, moving children and livestock from one part of the ship to another. Ed pushed his way up and down the packed companionways for a couple of days; then took up with an exotic dancer called Alice.

“I’m not looking for complications,” he warned her.

“Who is?” she said with a yawn.

Alice had good legs and bright expressionless eyes. She lay with her elbows on his bunk, staring out the porthole while he fucked her.

“Hello?” he said.

“Look at this,” she said. “What do you make of this?”

Out in the vacuum, eighty metres from the porthole, hung an object Ed recognised: a mortsafe maybe fifty feet in length, brass-coloured, and decorated with finials, groins and gargoyles, its blunt bow shaped like a head melted and streamlined by time. It was one of Sandra Shen’s aliens. They were never loaded aboard The Perfect Low. Instead, the day the circus left New Venusport they took off too, each firing some weird engine of its own—something that produced a mist of blue light, or curious slick pulses of energy that presented as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth—and giving new meaning to the words “containment vessel.” Since then, they had followed the ship with a kind of relentless ease, flying lazy, complex patterns around its direction of travel, circling it when it lay at rest like aboriginals in the night in ancient movies.

“What do they want?” Alice asked herself. “You know? I wonder how they think.” And when Ed only shrugged: “Because they aren’t like us. Any more than she is.”

She turned her attention to the world they now orbited, which could be seen—if you craned your neck a little and pressed your face up to the porthole—as a long bulge limned by its own atmosphere.

“And look at this dump,” she said. “Planet of the Damned.”

She was right. The Perfect Low’s course was, in circus terms, as unrewarding as it was unpredictable. From the start they had avoided the halo moneypots—Polo Sport, Anais Anais, Motel Splendido—in favour of nightside landings on agricultural planets like Weber II and Perkins’ Rent. Few performances were given. After a while, Ed noticed the ship’s complement getting smaller. He never got the hang of what was going on. Sandra Shen was no help. He would glimpse her off in the distance, mediating an argument between carnies: by the time he had pushed his way towards her, she had gone. He knocked on the control-room door. No answer. “If I’m not doing shows,” he said, “I don’t know why you made me train so hard.” Ed went back to his bunk and sweaty engagements with Alice while the dark matter trailed its weakened fingers down the hull outside. “Another lot went last night,” she would say morosely after they had finished. The ship got emptier and emptier. The next time they landed, Alice went, too.

“We’re not getting the work,” she said. “We’re not getting the shows.” There was no sense in staying under those circumstances. “I can get a connection from here down to the Core,” she said.

“Take care,” Ed said.

He looked around him the next day and the circus was gone: Alice had been the last of it. Had she stayed for him? More out of nerves, he thought. It was a long way to the Core.

Madam Shen’s exhibits still filled one hold. Everything else was gone. Ed stood in front of “Michael Kearney & Brian Tate Looking Into a Monitor, 1999.” There was something feral and frightened in their expressions, as if they had used up all their effort to get the genie out of the bottle and were beginning to wonder if they would ever persuade it to go back in again. Ed shivered. In the other holds he found: a spangled Lycra bodysuit; a child’s sock. The companionways still smelled of food, sweat, Black Heart rum. Ed’s footsteps seemed to fill the hull, then echo out past it and into empty space.

Like any ship, The Perfect Low had her shadow operators.

They hung in corners like dusty spiderwebs: seemed less disused than cowed and anxious. Once or twice, as Ed roamed the empty ship, they detached themselves and flew about in shoals as if something was pursuing them. They clustered round the portholes, whispering and touching one another, then looking back at Ed as if he was going to betray them. They fled before him as he entered the control room, and flattened themselves against the walls.

“Hello?” called Ed.

The equipment dialled itself up at the sound of his voice.

Three hologram windows opened onto the dynaflow, featureless and grey. Recognising a pilot, direct connections offered themselves, to the drivers, the external coms, the Tate-Kearney mathematics.

Ed said: “No.”

He sat in the pilot seat and watched thin ribbons of photinos stream past. There was no sign of a destination. There was no sign of Sandra Shen. Down by the side of the seat he found her fishtank, familiar but uncomforting, faint with the residues of memory, prophecy, applause. He was careful not to touch it: nevertheless, it knew he was there. Something seemed to shift inside it. At the same time, he felt changes in the dynaflow medium. A course correction had been made. He got out of the seat as if it had bitten him.

He called: “Madam Shen? Hello?”

Nothing. Then alarm bells went off all over the ship and she popped out of the dynaflow very suddenly and the Kefahuchi Tract filled all three screens like a bad eye. It was very close.

“Shit,” said Ed.

He got back in the pilot seat. “Direct connect,” he ordered. “And give me the fakebooks.” He stared up at the screens. Light poured out of them. “I’ve been here,” he said, “but I can’t—There! Rotate that. Again. Jesus, it’s Radio Bay!”

It was worse than that. He was in his old stamping ground—the gravitation alley at Radio RX-1. The accretion disc roared up at him, quaking with soft X-ray pulses. He was coming in at a steep angle with his fusion torch full on. His coms were getting nothing but the identification beacons of the derelict research hulks—Easyville, Moscar 2, The Scoop: then, very faintly, Billy Anker’s legendary Transubstantiation Station—communications as old as rust, Ed’s past rushing back at him, partial, decoherent, twinked out. Any moment, he would be caught up in the Schwarzschild surf, doomed to do the Black Hole Boogie in a fat tub. “Get us out of here,” he told the direct connect. Nothing happened. “Am I giving orders or not?” he asked the shadow operators. “Can you see my lips move?” They looked away from him and covered their faces. Then he caught sight of a twist of frail light on the inner edge of the accretion disc.

He began to laugh. “Oh fuck,” he said.

It was Billy Anker’s wormhole.

“Come on, Billy,” Ed said, as if Billy was sitting next to him, rather than dead from this exact same adventure more than a decade ago: “What do I do next?”

Something had entered the ship’s mathematics. It was inside the Tate-Kearney transformations themselves, fractally folded between the algorithms. It was huge. When Ed tried to talk to it, everything shut down. The screens went dark, the shadow operators, who had sensed it there days before, streaked about in panic, brushing Ed’s face like very old muslin rags. “We didn’t want this,” they told him. “We didn’t want you in here!” Ed battered at them with his hands. Then the screens fired up again, and the wormhole leapt suddenly into view, very clear and close, a spindle of nothing against the exposed grimace of RX-1.

The whole of the local space of The Perfect Low had, meanwhile, turned into a kind of agitated purple cloud, through which the alien mortsafes could be seen weaving their chaotic orbits, faster and faster like the shuttles of a loom. You could feel the ship shake to her frame with the approach of some catastrophic event, the phase change, the leap to the next stable state.

“Fucking hell,” Ed said. “What’s going on out there?”

There was a soft laugh. A woman’s voice said: “They’re the engine, Ed. What did you think they were?”

In the calm that followed this announcement, Ed hallucinated a white cat at his feet: tricked thus into looking down, saw instead a spill of light emerging like bright foam from Sandra Shen’s fishtank and licking out towards him.

“Hey!” he shouted.

He jumped out of the pilot seat. The shadow operators spread their arms and streamed away from him into the dark and empty ship, rustling in terror. Light continued to pour out of the fishtank, a million points of light which shoaled round Ed’s feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into a shape he almost recognised. Each point, he knew (and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that), would also make the same shape.

“Always more,” he heard someone say. “Always more after that.”

He threw up suddenly. The entity calling itself Sandra Shen had begun to assemble itself in front of him.

Whatever she was, she had energy. First she presented as Tig Vesicle, with his shock of red hair, eating a Muranese fish curry off the end of a throwaway plastic fork. “Hi, Ed,” he said. “The fuck we are! You know?” But that didn’t satisfy her, so she got rid of it and presented as Tig’s wife, half-naked in the gloom of the warren. Ed was so surprised he said, “Neena, I—” Neena got whipped away immediately and was replaced by the Cray sisters. “Dipshit,” they said. They laughed. Between each version of herself, Sandra Shen filled up the control room with sparkling motes of light, like one of her own tableaux, “Detergent Foam in a Plastic Bowl, 1958.” Finally she firmed up as the Sandra Ed first met, walking briskly along Yulgrave towards him in the blowing snow—a small, plump, oriental-looking woman, her gold leaf cheongsam slit to the thigh, her perfect oval face shifting constantly as she exchanged youth and yellow old age, her eyes sexy and fathomless with the charisma of something never human.

“Hello, Ed,” she said.

Ed stared at her. “You were all of them,” he said. “None of that was real. You were everyone in that part of my life.”

“ ’Fraid so, Ed.”

“You’re not just a shadow operator,” he guessed.

“No, Ed, I’m not.”

“There was no Tig.”

“No Tig.”

“There were no Cray sisters.”

“Theatre, Ed, every moment of it.”

“There was no Neena . . .”

“Hey, Neena was fun. Wasn’t Neena fun?”

Ed couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt more used and manipulated—more self-disgusted—than at any point in his life before. He shook his head and turned away.

“Painful, isn’t it?” said Sandra Shen.

Ed told her: “Fuck off.”

“That’s a disappointing attitude, Ed, even for a twink. Don’t you want to know the rest of it? Don’t you want to know why?”

“No,” Ed said. “I don’t.”

“It got your head in the fishtank, Ed.”

“Another thing,” he said. “What was all that about? What was happening to me in there? What was that stuff I had to put my head in? Because, you know, it’s disgusting to do that, day after day.”

“Ah,” said Sandra Shen. “That was me. I was always in there with you, Ed. You weren’t alone. I was the medium. You know? Like the proteome in the twink-tank? You swam to the future through me.” She smoked her cigarette meditatively. “That’s not quite true,” she admitted. “I misled you there. I was training you, but not so much to see the future as be it. How’d you like that idea, Ed? Be the future? Change it all. Change everything.” She shook her head, as if this was a bad day for explaining herself. “Put it another way,” she tried. “When you applied for this job, you said you flew every kind of ship but one. What’s the only kind of ship you never flew?”

“Who are you?” Ed whispered. “And where are you taking me?”

“You’ll know soon, Ed. Look!”

A filmy twist of light, a faint vertical smile seven hundred kilometres high, hung above them. The Perfect Low shuddered and rang as the forces that kept the wormhole open engaged with elements of Sandra Shen’s ad hoc engine. “There are more kinds of physics in play here,” she informed Ed, “than you people dream of in your philosophy.” Outside the hull, the aliens redoubled their efforts, shuttling faster and in more complex patterns. Suddenly Madam Shen’s eyes were full of excitement. “Not many people have done this achievement, Ed,” she reminded him. “You’re out in front here, you’ve got to admit that.”

Ed grinned despite himself.

“Just look at it,” he marvelled. “How d’you think they made it?”

Then he shook his head. “As to achievements,” he said, “Billy Anker picked this peach. I watched him pick it ten, twelve years ago. If I remember anything, I remember that.” He shrugged. “Of course, Billy never came back. You don’t get the tick unless you come back.”

Something about this mindless philosophy made Sandra Shen smile to herself. She stared up at the image on the screens for a moment or two. Then she said softly: “Hey, Ed.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t Annie. Annie was real.”

“I’m glad,” Ed said.

The wormhole opened to receive him.

During the transit, he fell asleep. He didn’t understand why, though even in his sleep he suspected that Madam Shen had organised it. He slumped in the pilot seat with his head on one side, couch-potatoed and breathing heavily through his mouth. Behind closed lids, his eyes flickered in REM manoeuvres, a simple but urgent code.

What he dreamed was this:

He was back in the family house. It was autumn—heavy, felted airs and rain. His sister came down from the father’s study carrying the lunch tray. Ed skulked about in the shadows on the landing, then jumped out on her. “Haraaar!” he said. “Oops.” Too late. The lunch tray slipped out of her hands in the wet light from the window. A hard-boiled egg rolled about in dipping, eccentric arcs, then bounced away down the stairs. Ed ran after it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy!” His sister was upset. After that she didn’t speak to him. He knew it was because of what he had seen before he jumped out. She was already holding the lunch tray in one hand. With the other, she was pulling her clothes about as if they didn’t fit properly. Her hands were already relaxing, soft and strengthless. She was already crying.

“I don’t want to be the mother,” she was telling herself.

That was the point everything went wrong in Ed’s life. Nothing after that was as bad, even when his father stood on the black kitten; and anyone who claimed it had gone wrong before that, they didn’t know anything.

A voice said: “Time to forgive yourself these things.”

Ed half-woke, felt the soft inside of the wormhole touch the ship, contract. He smiled loosely, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, slept once more, this time without dreams. Protected by the violent glow of alien engines, cocooned and cosseted by the ironic smile and unknowable motives of the entity at that time calling itself Sandra Shen, he was borne with grace and without incident down a birth canal a million years old. Or more. At the end of which, deep light would explode in upon him, in ways none of us can imagine.