Light

'What is it?' she said.

'I think it's a ship.'

Seria Mau studied the image again. She ran comparison studies. 'It isn't any kind of ship I know. Is it old? What is it doing out there?'

'I can't answer that.'

'Why?'

'I'm not yet entirely certain where "out there" is.'

'Spare me,' said Seria Mau. 'Do you know anything useful at all?'

'It's keeping pace with us.'

Seria Mau stared at the trace. That's impossible,' she said. 'It's nothing like a K-ship. What shall we do?'

'Keep sorting quanta,' said the mathematics.

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters of the ship.

There, one of the men had launched a holographic display and was clearly making some kind of presentation to the rest of them, while the female clone sat in a corner painting her fingernails, laughing with a kind of weak maliciousness at everything he said, and making inappropriate comments.

'What I don't understand,' she said, 'is why she never has to do that. I have to do it.'

The display was like a big smoky cube, showing fly-by images from the Radio Bay cluster, which contained among others Suntory IV and 3-alpha-Ferris VII. Low-temperature gas clouds roiled and swirled, failed old brown dwarf stars; blinking through them like drunks crossing a highway in fog. A planet jumped into resolution, mushroom-coloured, with creamy sulphurous-looking bands. Then there were images from the surface: clouds, chaotic streaming rain, less weather than chemistry. A scatter of non-human buildings abandoned two hundred thousand years before: something that looked like a maze. They often left mazes. 'What we've got here is old,' the man concluded. 'It could be really old.' Suddenly the camera jumped to an asteroid in full view of the Tract, which blazed out of the display like costume jewellery on black velvet.

'I think we'll leave that for a later trip,' he said.

Everyone laughed except the clone, who spread her hands in front of her. 'Why do you all hate me so,' she said, looking at him over her bright red nails, 'that you make me do it and not her?'

He went over and drew her gently to her feet. He kissed her. 'We like you to do it because we love you,' he said. 'We all love you.' He took one of her hands and examined her fingernails. 'That's very historical,' he said. The hologram blinked, expanded until it measured four or five feet on a side, and was suddenly showing the clone's face in the throes of sexual arousal. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide with pain or pleasure, Seria Mau couldn't tell. You couldn't see what was being done to her. They all sat down and watched, giving the hologram their full consideration as if it were still showing images of Radio Bay, old alien artifacts, big secrets the things they most wanted. Soon they were fucking again.

Seria Mau, who had begun to wonder if she knew their real motives for being aboard, watched them suspiciously for some minutes more. Then she disconnected.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami, a space accordion-folded to contain more than seemed possible or advisable, as full of invisible matter as the halo itself. Was this how human beings dreamed of themselves? She had no idea.

Ten days into the voyage, she dreamed of a boat-ride on a river. It was called the New Pearl River and was wider, the mother told them, than a mile. From each bank, benign but exotically-tailored vegetation hung down into the water, the surface ripples of which looked firm and nacreous and gave off smells of almonds and vanilla. The mother loved it as much as the children. She trailed her bare feet in the cool pearly water, laughing. 'Aren't we lucky!' she kept saying. 'Aren't we lucky!' The children loved her brown eyes. They loved her enthusiasm for everything in the world.

'Aren't we lucky!'

These words echoed across a change of scene, first to blackness, then to the garden again, with its dark laurels.

It was afternoon. It was raining. The old man-he was the father, and you could see how puzzled that responsibility made him, how much of an effort it was-had built a bonfire. The two children stood and watched him throw things onto it. Boxes, papers, photographs, clothes. Smoke lay about the garden in long flat layers, trapped by the inversions of early winter. They watched the hot core of the fire. Its smell, which was like any other bonfire, excited them despite themselves. They stood dressed up in coats and scarves and gloves, sad and guilty in the cold declining afternoon, watching the flames and coughing in the grey smoke.

He was too old to be a father, he seemed to be pleading. Too old.

Just as it became unbearable, someone snatched this dream away. Seria Mau found herself staring into a lighted shop window. It was a retro window, full of retro things. They were from Earth, conjuror's things, children's things made of bad plastic, feathers, cheap rubber, objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine heart which lit itself up by means of the loving diodes within. There were 'X-Ray Specs' and elevator shoes. There was a dark red japanned box, in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom which turned out not to be your own. There were the trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn't take off. As she watched, the man in the black top hat and tails bent his upper body slowly into the window. His hat was on his head. He had removed his white kid gloves which he now held in the same hand as his beautiful ebony cane. His smile was unchanged, warm yet full of a glittering irony. He was a man who knew too much. Slowly and with a wide, generous gesture he used his free hand to take off his hat and sweep it across the contents of the window, as if to offer Seria Mau the items within. At the same time, she recognised, he was offering her himself. He was, in some way, these objects. His smile never changed. He replaced his hat slowly, unbent himself in polite silence, and disappeared.

A voice said: 'Every day, the life of the body must usurp and disinherit the dream.' Then it said: 'Though you never grew up, this is the last thing you saw as a child.'

Seria Mau woke shaking.

She shook and shook until the ship's mathematics took pity on her, flushing the tank so that specific areas of her proteome could be flooded with complex artificial proteins.

'Listen,' it said. 'We are having a problem here.'

'Show me,' said Seria Mau.

Up came the signature diagram again.

At its centre-if ten dimensions mediated as four can be said to have a centre-the lines of possibility wrote themselves so close to each other they became a solid: an inert object with the contours of a walnut, which was no longer changing much. Too many guesses had been made, was Seria Mau's first thought. The original signal, complicating itself towards infinity, had collapsed into this stochastic nugget and was now even more unreadable.

'This is useless,' she complained.

'It seems that way,' the mathematics said equably. 'But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this… '

There was a sudden jump. Randomness resolved to order. The signal simplified itself and split in two, with the fainter component- coloured deep violet-blinking rapidly in and out of view.

'What am I looking at?' demanded Seria Mau.

'Two vessels,' the mathematics told her. 'The steady trace is a K-ship. Phase-locked to its mathematics is some kind of Nastic heavy asset: maybe a cruiser. One clear benefit is that no one can interpret their signature, but that's a sideshow. The real issue is this: they're using the K-ship as a navigational tool. I've never seen that done before. Whoever wrote the code is almost as good as me.'