Light (14 page)

From out beyond the atmosphere, Perkins’ Rent looked like a cataracted eye. The clone sat in her cabin staring listlessly down at it, while the shadow operators clustered around her, reaching out as if to touch her, whispering regretfully in their languages of guilt. “You can stop that,” Seria Mau Genlicher warned them, “before you start.” She saw off a couple of orbital interceptors with one of her low-end assets; then consulted the mathematics, fired up the dynaflow drivers and committed her ship to the endless dark.

A few tens of nanoseconds later, a familiar object detached itself stealthily from the ghost train and slipped after her. Its hull showed some pitting from a recent high-temperature event.

Ed always made sure
he talked to Tig as well as Neena.

It was hard on the street. The police were everywhere. The Cray sisters were everywhere. (Ed sensed them out there, nursing their grievance in the New Venusport night, cruel as fish. He knew he shouldn’t feel safe in the warren, where only plankton like himself collected, just beneath the surface in the dim blue light.) Tig came in later and later at night. He was always hungry but he had no time to eat. His gait was more disconnected when he was tired.

“It’s me. It’s Tig,” he would say from the doorway, as if he was reluctant to enter the cubicle without Ed’s permission.

Some nights, Ed went back out on the street with him. They stayed uptown, and played for small points. It was corner trade, a little here, a little there. If Tig suspected Ed was fucking his wife, he never let it show. By an unspoken agreement, they didn’t mention the Cray sisters either. They didn’t have much else in common, so most of the time they talked about Ed. That suited Ed. Talking helped. By his third week, thanks to Neena’s generosity, he had begun to reclaim large tracts of the past. The problem was, none of them joined up. It was sudden analepsis—images, people, places, events, caught by an unsteady camera, lit with bad light. Connective tissue was missing. There was no real narrative of Ed.

“I knew some amazing guys,” he began suddenly one night, in the hope that talking about it would make it clearer. “You know, really mad guys. Guys with charmed lives.”

“What sort of guys?”

“You know, all over the galaxy there are these guys who just
do
it,” Ed tried to explain. “They’re widely distributed. They’re having fun.”

“Do what?” Tig asked him.

Ed was puzzled that Tig didn’t already know. “Well, everything,” he said. They were standing at the corner of Dioxin and Photino at the time. It was maybe half two, half three in the morning. The street was slow. In fact, it was empty. The night sky was over it all with a field of stars. Off in one corner the Kefahuchi Tract glared down on them like a bad eye. Not really meaning to, Ed made a gesture which took it all in. “Just everything,” he said.

What it turned out was this:

From an early age, Ed Chianese had been some kind of drifter and sensationist. He couldn’t remember what planet he came from. “Maybe it was even this one!” He laughed. He left home as soon as he could. There was nothing for him there. He was a big raw black-haired kid who loved cats, excited all the time for no reason, and he felt less trapped than too well looked after. He rode the dynaflow ships. He hopped from planet to planet for three years until he fell off the edge of things onto the Beach. There, he got in with people to whom life was nothing unless it looked as if you were about to lose it. This meant doing the Kefahuchi Boogie. It meant prospecting, and the entrada. It meant surfing stellar envelopes in the one-man rockets they called dipships, which were made of nothing much more than mathematics, magnetic fields and some kind of smart carbon. Not many people did that anymore.

It meant running the old alien mazes scattered across the artificial systems of the halo. Ed was good at that. He did Cassiotone 9 in the best time since Al Hartmeyer off the old
Heavyside Layer,
who was, as everyone agreed, a fucking madman in his own day. No one ever matched Ed’s distance into the maze on Askesis, because no one else ever made it out. Maybe you did these things for money, on contract to some shit EMC subsidiary. Maybe you did them because they were a sport. One way or the other, Ed hung out with extreme people for some years, entradistas, sky pilots, particle jockeys, full-tilt people looking to score amid big, difficult alien machinery. Some of these guys were women. Ed was at the Venice Hotel on France Chance IV the day Liv Hula brought her hyperdip
Saucy Sal
out of the photosphere of the local sun. No one ever went that deep before. The instant she was safe you could hear the cheers a light-year off. She was the first to go that deep: she was the fucking
first one
. He lived four weeks in a freighter in the Tumblehome parking orbit while Dany LeFebre was waiting for the unknown disease she caught on-planet to run its course. He pulled her out of there in the end. Half mad. Half dead. He didn’t even know her that well.

Everywhere there was excitement to be had and determined people gathered to have it, Ed was there. Go deep was what they said to one another: Hey, go deep. Then something happened he didn’t remember, and he drifted away from all that. Maybe it was someone he knew, maybe it was something he did; maybe it was Dany after all, looking up at him unable to speak ever again. One tear ran down her face. Afterwards, Ed’s life seemed to go downhill a little, but it was still full of stuff. He dropped proasavin-D-2 on Badmarsh, and in the orbital cities of the Kauffman Cluster shot up Earth-heroin cut with the ribosomes of a tailored marmoset. When he ran short of money he was, in a minor way, thief, dealer, pimp. Well, maybe more than minor. But if his hands weren’t clean, his heart was crazy for life, and where you got most life was on the edge of death. This is what he believed since his sister left, when he was just a kid. He wound up on the Beach at Sigma End, where he hung out with guys like the legendary Billy Anker, at that time obsessed with Radio RX-1.

“Man,” Ed said to Tig, “I can’t tell you the achievements that guy did.” He grinned. “I was on board for a few of them,” he said. “But not the best.” He shook his head remembering that.

Vesicle was puzzled. He had kids. He had Neena. He had a life. He couldn’t see the point of any of it. But that wasn’t the real issue. How come Ed ended up a twink, he wanted to know, when a twink was surely the opposite of all that? What was the point of having cheap fantasies in some tank, after you had surfed the Schwarzchild radius of a black hole?

Ed grinned his slow grin.

“The way I think of it,” he explained, “is this: when you’ve done all the things worth doing, you’re forced to start on the things that aren’t.”

The fact was, he didn’t know. Maybe he was always a twink. Twinking lay in wait for him all his life. It bided its time. Then one day he went round a corner—he couldn’t even remember which planet he was on—and there it was: BE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE. He had done everything else, so why not? Since then, being anything he wanted had cost him, if not quite everything, then most of it. Worse: if there wasn’t much to him back in those old wild days of his, there was even less to him now.

He thought privately he would twink out again as soon as he made some money.

It couldn’t go on. Ed knew that. He had guilt dreams. He had feelings of disaster when he woke in the night. In the end it all happened at once, one early evening when he was fucking Neena.

Each day the warren went through a cycle in which bustle segued imperceptibly into quiet and back again. This happened perhaps three or four times. To Ed, the quiet periods had a ghostly feel. Cold draughts made their way from cubicle to cubicle. Images of the Kefahuchi Tract glimmered from the cheap posters like religious icons. The kids were asleep, or out on the waste lot over towards the dockyards. Occasionally you would hear a sneeze or a sigh: that made it worse. You felt deserted by everything. Early evening was always like that: this evening it felt as if human life had stopped everywhere, not just in here.

All Ed could hear was Neena’s uneven breathing. She had got into an awkward position, on her front with one knee bent under her and her cheek pressed against the wall. “Push harder,” she kept saying indistinctly. This caused Ed, full of memory and melancholy, to shift his own position a little, allowing him to see across her long white back to the doorway where a shadowy figure was observing them. For a minute, Ed thought he was hallucinating his own father. A kind of raw gloom poured over him, a memory he couldn’t identify. Then he shuddered (“Yes,” said Neena: “Oh, yes.”) and blinked.

“Jesus. Is that you, Tig?”

“Yes. It’s me.”

“You’re never home this early.”

Vesicle, peering uncertainly into the room, seemed more puzzled than hurt. “Is that you, Neena?” he said.

“Of course it is.” She sounded angry and impatient. She pushed Ed away and jumped up, straightening her dress, running her fingers through her hair. “Who else did you expect?”

Tig seemed to think for a moment.

“I don’t know.” After a moment he gave Ed a direct look and said, “I didn’t expect it would be anybody. I thought—”

“Maybe I’ll leave,” Ed offered, anxious to make a gesture.

Neena stared at him.

“What? No,” she said. “I don’t want you to.” Suddenly she turned away from them both and went over to the stove. “Turn the lights up,” she said. “It’s cold in here.”

“We can’t breed with them, you know,” Tig said.

Her left shoulder seemed to shrug of its own accord. “Do you want noodles?” she demanded. “Because it’s all we’ve got.”

By this time, Ed’s heart rate had gone down, his concentration had returned, and he was hearing noise again in the warren. At first it sounded normal—squeals of kids, hologram soundtracks, a general domestic clatter. Then he heard louder voices. Shouts coming closer. Then two or three loud, flat explosions.

“What’s this?” he said. “People are running. Listen!”

Neena looked at Tig. Tig looked at Ed. They looked at one another, the three of them.

“It’s the Cray sisters,” Ed said. “They’ve come for me.”

Neena turned back to the stove as if she could ignore this.

“Do you want
noodles
?” she said impatiently.

Ed said, “Get the gun, Tig.”

Vesicle got the gun, which he kept in a thing that looked like a meat safe. It was wrapped in a piece of rag. He unwrapped it, looked at it for a moment, then offered it to Ed.

“What are we going to do?” he whispered.

“We’re going to leave here,” Ed said.

“What about the children?” shouted Neena suddenly. “I’m not leaving my children!”

“You can come back later,” Ed told her. “It’s me they want.”

“We haven’t
eaten anything
!” Neena said.

She held on to the stove. Eventually they pulled her away from it and made off through the warren in the direction of the Straint Street entrance. It took forever. They blundered over outstretched limbs in the bluish light. They couldn’t get up any speed. Neena hung back as hard as she could, or made off in inappropriate directions. Every time they went through a door they upset something or someone. Every cubicle seemed connected to every other. If the warren was like a maze in a cheap nightmare, so was the pursuit: it would seem to diminish, then, just as Ed relaxed, start up from another direction, more energetic than before. A firefight developed, ran away with itself, guttered into silence. There were screams and explosions. Who was shooting who, amid the echoes in a cubicle full of smoke? Miniature gun-punks in rainslickers. One-shot cultivars with tusks a foot long. Silhouettes of men, women and children scattering with disconnected motions against the sudden flash of guns. Neena Vesicle looked back. A shudder went through her. She laughed suddenly.

“You know, I haven’t run like this for ages!” she said.

She hugged Ed’s arm. Her eyes, lively and slightly unfocused with excitement, glittered into his. Ed had seen it before. He laughed back.

“Steady down, kid,” he said.

Shortly after that, the light got greyer and less blue. The air got colder. One minute they were scattering someone’s evening meal across the floor—Ed had time to see an arc of liquid, a ceramic bowl spinning on its edge like a coin, an image of the Kefahuchi Tract glittering out of some hologram display to the sound of cathedral music—the next they were out on Straint Street, panting and banging one another on the back.

It was snowing again. Straint, a perspective made of walls and streetlights, stretched off into the distance like a canyon full of confetti. Old political posters flapped off the walls. Ed shivered. Sparks, he thought suddenly: Sparks in everything. He thought: Shit.

After a minute he began to laugh.

“We made it,” he said.

Tig Vesicle began to laugh too. “What are we like?” he said.

“We made it,” Neena said experimentally. She said it once or twice more. “We
made
it,” she said.

“You certainly did, dear,” Bella Cray agreed.

Her sister said: “We thought you’d come out this side.”

“In fact we banked on it, dear.”

The two of them stood there in the middle of the street in the blowing snow, where they had been waiting all along. They were fully made up, and clutching their big purses to their chests like women out for fun on the edge of the garment district seven o’clock at night, ready to drink and do drugs and meet what the world had to offer. To keep the chill off they had each added a little waist-length fake-fur jacket to their black skirts and secretary blouses. In addition, Bella was wearing a pillbox hat of the same material. Their bare legs were reddened and chapped above black calf-length winter boots. Evie Cray began to unzip her purse. She looked up from the operation halfway through.

“Oh, you can go, dear,” she said to Neena, as if she was surprised to find her still there. “We won’t need you.”

Neena Vesicle looked from Ed to her husband. She made an awkward gesture.

“No,” she said.

“Go on,” Ed said gently. “It’s me they want.”