“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.”
The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway. Then, staring up at the collapsing, constantly replaced towers of light, he changed his mind and began to wonder what he could offer in return. Everything he thought of was inappropriate. Suddenly he remembered the dice. He still had them. He extracted them carefully from their leather bag and offered them to the Shrander.
“I don’t know why I took these,” he said.
“I wondered too.”
“Well anyway. Here they are.”
“They’re only dice,” the Shrander said. “People play some kind of game with them,” it added vaguely. “But look, I did have a use for them. Why don’t you just put them down?”
Kearney looked around. The surface they were standing on curved away, salted with dust, too bright to look at for long.
“On the ground?”
“Yes, why not? Just put them on the ground.”
“Here?”
“Oh, anywhere,” said the Shrander, making an offhand, liberal gesture. “Anywhere they can be seen.”
“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” said Kearney. “Dreaming or dead.”
He placed the dice carefully on the dusty rock. After a moment, smiling at the fears of his vanished self, he arranged them so that the emblem he knew as “the High Dragon” faced upwards. Then he walked a little way away from them and stood on his own and turned up his face to the sky, where he imagined he could see among the clouds of stars and incandescent gas, the shapes of everything that had been in his life. He knew those things weren’t there: but it wasn’t wrong to imagine them. He saw pebbles on a beach. (He was three years old. “Run here!” his mother called. “Run here!” There was water in a bucket, cloudy with moving sand.) He saw a pool in winter, brown reeds emerging from the cat-ice at its margins. “Your cousins are coming!” (He saw them run laughing towards him across the lawn of an ordinary house.) He even saw Valentine Sprake, looking almost human, in a railway carriage. In all of that he never saw Gorselands once: but over it all he thought he saw Anna Kearney’s strong, determined face, guiding him to self-knowledge through the shoals of both their lives.
“You understand?” said the Shrander, which, having remained courteously silent through this process, now came to his side again and stared up in a companionable way. “There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that.”
Then it admitted: “I can’t keep you alive for much longer, you know. Not here.”
Kearney smiled.
“I guessed,” he said. “You mustn’t worry. Oh look! Look!”
He saw the raging glory of the light. He felt himself slipping away into it, here in this fabulous place. He was so amazed. He wanted the Shrander to know. He wanted it to be certain he had understood.
“I’ve been here and seen this,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”
He felt the vacuum empty him out.
Oh Anna, I’ve seen it.
32
Everywhere and No Place
What had happened inside the White Cat was this:
Seria Mau had gone up into the mathematical space, where the K-code ran without substrate in a region of its own. Everything else in the universe seemed to recede to a great distance. Things speeded up and slowed down at the same time. An actinic white light—sourceless yet directional—sprayed round the edges of every moving body. It was a space as lucid and intense and meaningless as one of Seria Mau’s dreams.
“Why are you dressed like that?” the mathematics asked her in a puzzled voice.
“I want to know about this box.”
“It’s so very dangerous to us all,” the mathematics said, “for you to be here like this.”
“. . . so very dangerous,” echoed the shadow operators.
“I don’t care,” said Seria Mau. “Look.”
She raised her arms and offered up the box.
“It’s very dangerous dear,” the shadow operators said. They picked nervously at their fingernails and handkerchiefs.
The code rushed out of Uncle Zip’s box and merged with the code from the White Cat. Everything—box, giftwrap, and all—dissolved into pixels, streamers, dark lights like non-baryonic matter, and blew past Seria Mau’s upturned face at near-relativistic speeds. In the same instant, she felt the wedding dress catch fire. Her train melted. Her loving cherubs flashed to powder. The shadow operators covered their eyes with their hands and flung themselves about like dried leaves on a cold wind, their voices stretched and garbled by unknown space-time dilation effects. Suddenly everything was out of the box: every idea anyone had ever had about the universe was available, operating and present. The wires were crossed. The descriptive systems had collapsed into some regime prior to them all. The information supersubstance had broken loose. It was a moment of reinvention. It was the moment of maximum vertigo. Mathematics itself was loose, like a magician in a funny hat, and nothing could be the same again.
Soft chimes rang.
“Dr. Haends, please,” said a woman’s gentle, capable voice.
Out he came, emerging from the universal substrate with his white gloves and gold-topped ebony cane. His tailcoat had a velvet collar and five-button cuffs, and down the outside leg of his narrow black pants ran a black satin stripe. His hat was on his head. His shoes, which Seria Mau had never seen, were chisel-toe patent leather dancing pumps. Hat, shoes, suit, gloves and cane, she saw now, were made of numbers, crawling so thick and fast across one another they looked like a solid surface. Was the whole world like that? Or was it only Dr. Haends?
“Seria Mau!” he cried. He held out his hand. “Will you dance?”
Seria Mau flinched away. She thought of the mother, leaving her to face things without a word of help. She thought of the father and the sex things he had wanted her to do. She thought of her brother, refusing to wave to her even though he knew he would never see her again.
“I never learned to dance,” she said.
“Whose fault was that?” Dr. Haends laughed. “If you won’t play the game, how can you win the prize?”
He gestured around. Seria Mau saw that they were standing in the magic-shop window, a little-girl cultivar in a wedding dress and a tall thin man with a thin moustache and lively blue eyes. All around them were stacked the things she had seen in her dreams—retro things, conjuror’s things, children’s things. Ruby-coloured plastic lips. Feathers dyed bright orange and green. Bundles of silk scarves that would go into the top hat and hop out as live white pigeons. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine’s heart which lit itself up by means of loving diodes within. There were “X-Ray Specs” and elevator shoes, trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn’t take off. They were all the things you wanted when you were a child, when it seemed there would always be more in the world and always more after that.
“Choose anything you want,” invited Dr. Haends.
“All these things are fake,” said Seria Mau stubbornly.
Dr. Haends laughed.
“They’re all real too,” he said. “That’s the amazing thing.”
He let go of her hand and danced elegantly about, shouting, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy!” Then he said:
“You could have anything you wanted.”
Seria Mau knew it was true. Full of panic, she fell away from this idea in all possible directions, as if from the highest ledge in the universe. “Leave me alone!” she screamed. The ship’s mathematics—which had been Dr. Haends all along, or half of him at least—sent her to sleep. It had a quick look at some of the other parts of its project (this involved some travel in ten spatial and, especially, four temporal dimensions). Then, having reorganised the White Cat a little more to its satisfaction, it took the shortest possible route to Sigma End and threw itself down the wormhole. There was a lot left to do.