Light (36 page)

After all, he reminded himself. She was the enemy.

Two hours later and a thousand kilometres away, shrouded in blue light from the signature displays in the human quarters of
El Rayo X,
Uncle Zip the tailor sat on the three-legged wooden stool he had brought with him from Motel Splendido and tried to understand what was happening.

Touching the Void
was under his control. He had nothing more to worry about in that direction. Nothing was alive down there in that rotten apple but his entradistas. Like the good team of lawyers they were they had begun to chop him out of his inadvertent contract with the Nastic vessel. It was a civil engineering project down there, with all the dull concussions and sudden flares you had to expect from that. Guys were getting a line open and saying, “Hey Unc, could you give that a little more?” “Could you give that a little less, Unc?” They were competing for his attention. And all the time now, his ship was gently trying to withdraw itself from the embrace of the cruiser. Uncle Zip thought of that embrace as a soft wet rottenness he would be glad to be out of. Trickles of particles flickered through the hull of
El Rayo X,
spun off from the destruction of the Nastic bridge. It was still hot down there. You had to give the guys their due, they were working in a heavily compromised environment. They had been dying for two hours now.

Touching the Void
was his. But what was going on over there on the
White Cat
? It was total radio silence over there. K-ships had nothing you could call internal coms traffic: despite that you could usually tell if anyone was alive inside. Not in this case. Thirteen nanoseconds after the death of the Nastic commander, everything in the
White Cat
had switched itself off. The fusion engines were down. The dynaflow drivers were down. That ship wasn’t even talking to itself, let alone Uncle Zip. “I don’t have time for this,” he complained. “I got business elsewhere.” But he continued to watch. For another hour, nothing happened. Then, very slowly, a pale, wavering glow surrounded the
White Cat
. It was like a magnetic field, sketched slightly out from the ship’s hull; or a faint diagram of some kind of fluid supercavitation effect. It was violet in colour.

“What’s this?” Uncle Zip asked himself.

“Ionising radiation,” said his pilot in a bored voice. “Oh, and I’m getting internal traffic.”

“Hey, who asked you?” said Uncle Zip. “What kind of traffic?”

“Come to think of it, I got no idea.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s stopped now anyway. Something was producing dark matter in there. Like the whole hull was full of it for a second.”

“That long?”

The pilot consulted his displays.

“Photinos, mostly,” he said.

After that, the ionising radiation died away and nothing happened for a further two hours. Then the
White Cat
jumped from blacked-out to torched-up without any intervening state. “Jesus Christ!” screamed Uncle Zip. “Get us out of here!” He thought she had exploded. His pilot went on ship-time and—ignoring the faint cries of the work teams still trapped inside—ripped the last few metres of the
El Rayo X
from the ruins of the Nastic vessel. He was good. He got them free and facing the right direction just in time to see the
White Cat
accelerate from a standstill to 98 percent the speed of light in less than fourteen seconds.

“Stay with them,” Uncle Zip told him quietly.

“France chance, honey,” the pilot said. “That’s no fusion engine.” Fierce annular shockwaves
in no detectable medium
were spilling back along the
White Cat
’s course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein’s universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. “They were building themselves a new drive,” the pilot said. “New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can’t deal with that. My guess: we’re stuffed.”

Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.

“They’ll go to Sigma End,” he decided. “Make the best time you can.”

“I’m on it,” the pilot said.

Sigma End, Billy Anker’s old stamping ground, was a cluster of ancient research stations and lashed-up entradista satellites sited in and around the Radio RX-1 accretion disc. Everything there was abandoned, or had the air of it. Anything new attracted the attention like a campfire seen in the distance for one night on an empty coast. This was deep Radio Bay. In places like this, Earth ran out of reach. Logistics went down. Supply lines dried up. Everything was for grabs, and the mad energy of the accretion disc lay over all of it. The black hole churned and churned, ripping material out of its companion star, V404 Stueck-Manibel, a blue supergiant at the end of its life. Those two had been locked together for a few billion years or so. This was the last of it: the wreckage of a fine old relationship. It looked like everything was going down the tubes for them.

“Which probably it is,” Uncle Zip’s pilot told him. “You know?”

“I didn’t ask you here for your religious opinions,” said Uncle Zip. He stared out across the disc, and a faint smile crossed his fat white face. “What we are looking at here is the most efficient energy transfer system in the universe.”

That disc was a roaring Einsteinian shoal. Gravitational warping from RX-1 meant you could see all of it, even the underneath, whatever angle you approached it from. Every ten minutes, transition states quaked across it, causing it to spike in the soft X-ray band, huge flares echoing backwards and forwards to illuminate the scattered experimental structures of Sigma End. Go close enough and this mad light enabled you to see clusters of barely pressurised vessels like leaky bathtubs, each hosting a failing hydroponic farm and two or three earthmen with lost eyes, bad stubble, radiation ulcers. You could see planets with ancient mass-drivers let into them, holding positions in the last stable orbit before the Schwarzchild radius. You could stumble over a group of eight perfectly spherical nickel-iron objects each the size of Motel Splendido, set into an orbital relationship which in itself seemed to be some sort of engine. But the outright prize, Uncle Zip said, went to the following effort: twenty million years before mankind arrived, some
fucker
had tapped off a millionth of one percent of the output of the RX-1 system and punched a wormhole straight out of there to some destination no one knew. They had left behind no archeology whatsoever. No clue of how you would do it. Just the hole itself.

“Deep guys,” he said. “Some really deep guys.”

“Hey,” the pilot interrupted him. “I got them.” Then he said: “Shit.”

“What?”

“They’re going
down
it. There. Look.”

It was hard to lift the wormhole out of the overall signature of the accretion disc. But
El Rayo X
came with the equipment to do that, and on the displays Uncle Zip could just make it out, there in the boiling gravitational rapids just outside the last stable orbit: a fragile vulva of light into which the
White Cat
could be seen propelling herself like a tiny sliver of ice, those curious annular shockwaves still slipping regularly back along her brilliant raw trail of fusion product.

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.