Light (32 page)

He was still making journeys under the auspices of the Tarot cards. Two or three days later, somewhere between Portsmouth and Charing Cross, his train was delayed first by repair works along the line then by a fault in one of its power cars. Kearney dozed, then woke abruptly. The train wasn’t moving and he had no idea where he was, though it must be a station: passengers prowled outside the windows in the bitter cold, among them two clergymen with that uniform whiteness of hair which has been lost to the laity. He fell asleep again, to dream briefly of the lost pleasures of Gorselands, then woke suddenly in the horrified certainty that he had called out in his sleep. The whole carriage had heard him. He was twenty years old, but his future was clear. If he continued to travel like this he would become someone who made noises in his sleep on the London express: a middle-aged man with bad teeth and a cloth briefcase, head resting uncomfortably in the corner of the seat back as his mind unravelled like a pullover and everything became illegible to him.

That was the last of his epiphanies. By its light the Tarot, generator of epiphanies, looked like a trap. It looked like the drabbest of careers. Journeys—perhaps infinite numbers of them—remained nested within it like fractal dimensions: but the medium had become as transparent to him as the stationer’s window, and they were too easy to unpack. He was twenty years old, and the clean yellow front of an Intercity train, rushing towards the platform in the sunlight, no longer filled him with excitement. He had slept in too many overheated rooms, eaten in too many station cafés. He had waited for too many connections.

He was ready, without knowing it, for the next great transition of his life.

“
Are
we hiding?” Anna said.

“Yes.”

She came and put herself in front of him, close to, so that he could feel the heat from her skin.

“Are you sure?”

Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he was waiting. He sat out there on Monster Beach each night after she had gone to sleep. If he expected his nemesis, he was disappointed: for once it was nowhere near. Something in that relationship had changed forever. For the first time since their original encounter, Kearney—though he shook with fear upon confronting the idea—was encouraging the Shrander to catch up. Did he feel it stop? Turn its head, as intelligently as a bird, to listen for him now? Did it wonder why he was trailing his coat?

Out there at night he hadn’t much else to do but wait, and watch the ocean waves go in and out beneath the hard stars. Cold offshore winds picked up the sand and trickled it, hissing, between the marram grass on the dunes. There was a shivering luminescence. Kearney had a sense of things as endless: in this scheme the beach became a metaphor for some other transitional site or boundary, a beach at the edge of which lapped the whole universe. What kinds of monsters might wash up on a beach like that? More than the rotten, devolved carcass of a basking shark; more than the plesiosaur for which it had been so briefly and headily mistaken in 1970. Most nights he would go back into the cottage and take out the pocket drive containing Brian Tate’s last data. Most nights he turned it over for a minute or two in his hands in the cold blue light of the TV screen, then put it away again. Once, he got out his laptop and connected the drive to it, though he switched neither of them on, going instead into the bedroom where he got fully clothed into bed beside Anna and placed the palm of his hand against her sex until she half-woke and groaned.

By day he played those old records, or sifted through the TV channels looking for anything that passed for science news. Everything seemed to amuse him. Anna didn’t know what to make of it. One morning at breakfast she asked him:

“Will you kill me, do you suppose?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Not now.” Then he said, “I don’t know.”

She put her hand over his.

“You will, you know,” she said. “You won’t be able to stop yourself in the end.”

Kearney stared out of the window at the ocean.

“I don’t know.”

She took away her hand and kept herself to herself all morning. Equivocation always made her puzzled and, he thought, angry. It had to do with her childhood. Her problem with life was really the same as his: not giving it much credit, she had sought something which seemed more demanding. But there was more to what was happening than that. They’d driven themselves past the norms of their relationship, they had no idea what to make of each other. He didn’t want her to be healthy. She didn’t want him to be reliable or good-natured. They paced around one another by night, looking for openings, looking for less ordinary attitudes to force on one another. Anna was good at it. She surprised him by inviting him, off the back of one of those brilliant, vulnerable smiles of hers:

“Would you like to put your cock inside me?”

They had taken the patchwork quilt off the bed and arranged it in front of the hearth, where driftwood was burning down to pure white ash. Anna, almost as white, lay half on her side in the firelight. He looked down thoughtfully at the hollows and shadows of her body.

“No,” he told her. “I don’t think I would.”

She bit her lip and turned her back.

“What’s the matter with me?”

“You never wanted it,” he said cautiously.

“I did want it,” she said. “I wanted it from the beginning, but it was easy to see you didn’t. Half the girls at Cambridge knew. All you’d do was wank them off, and you never even came yourself. Inge Neumann—the girl with the Tarot cards?—was quite puzzled about it.” At this he looked so mortified she laughed. “At least I
got
you to come,” she said.

The only reprisal he had was to tell her about Gorselands.

“You would never see the house from the road,” he said. He leaned forward, anxious with the effort of imagining it all. “It was so well hidden. Only trees thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate.” In the grounds, everything was cool and shadowy except where the sun struck through onto a lawn like a broad pool. “It looked so real.” The same light struck through into a third floor room, where, in the heat under the roof, it was always late afternoon and there was always a deep, inturned breathing sound, like the breath of someone who has lost all consciousness of themselves. “Then my cousins would arrive and begin taking their clothes off.” He laughed. “That’s what I imagined, anyway,” he said. When Anna looked puzzled, he said: “I would watch them and masturbate.”

“But this wasn’t real?”

“Oh no. It was just a fantasy.”

“Then I don’t—”

“I had nothing to do with them in life.” He had never once approached them in life. They had seemed too energetic, too brutal. “The Gorselands fantasy spoilt everything for me. When I got to Cambridge I couldn’t do anything.”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know why,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t forget it. The promise of it.”

She stared at him.

“But that’s so exploitative,” she said, “using other people for something that only ever goes on inside you.”

“I ran away from the things I wanted—” he tried to explain.

“No,” she said. “That’s awful.”

She took the quilt by one corner and dragged it back into the bedroom. He heard the bed creak as she flung herself down on it. He felt abashed, caved-in. He said miserably, at least half-believing himself:

“I always thought the Shrander was my punishment for that.”

“Go away.”

“
You
used
me,
” he said.

“I didn’t. I never did.”

“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 25 percent 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 Zip repeated. 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 anytime. 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.

The sound 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.