Light

'I knew you'd come here,' she whispered.

TWENTY-THREE Star-crossed

The commander of Touching the Void tried to contact Seria Mau by fetch.

Something was wrong with his signal, It had lost part of itself, or got mixed up with something else, some of the baroque matter of the universe, before it reached her. The fetch squatted in front of her tank for a full minute, fading in and out of view, then vanished. It was much smaller than she remembered from their previous dealings-a bundle of yellowish limbs barely bigger than a human head, crouching in what looked like a puddle of sticky liquid. Its skin had the shine of roasted poultry. She wondered if that meant there was something wrong, not just with the signal but with the commander himself. She asked mathematics what it thought.

'Contact broken,' the mathematics said.

'For Christ's sake,' Seria Mau told it, 'I could work that out on my own.'

Over the next two days the apparition reappeared at intervals of a minute or two in different parts of the ship, caught by the drifting cameras as a brief subliminal flicker. The shadow operators drove it into corners, where it became panicked. Eventually it flickered to life in front of Seria Man's tank, from which position, stabilising quickly but still too small, it regarded Seria Mau patiently from its cluster of eyes and made several attempts to speak.

Seria Mau eyed it with distaste.

'What?' she said.

Eventually it managed to say her name:

'Seria Mau Genlicher, I — ' Interference. Static. Echoes of nothing, with nothing to echo in. '- important to warn you about your position,' it said, as if completing some argument she had missed the beginning of. The signal faded, then blurted back loudly. ' — modified the Dr Haends package,' it said, and was silent again. It faded into brown smoke, moving its palps agitatedly: but if it was trying to communicate further, she couldn't hear. When it had gone, Seria Mau asked the mathematics:

'What are they doing back there?'

'Nothing new. The Moire pod has lost way a little. Touching the Void is still phaselocked to an unknown K-ship.'

'Can you make any sense of this?'

'I don't think so,' the mathematics admitted.

What does an alien think anyway? What use does it make of the world? As soon as they arrived on a planet the Nastic turned its indigenous population over to excavation projects. They wanted silos, a mile across and perhaps five miles deep. After the lithosphere was laced with these structures, the Nastic would hover by the million in the air above them, on wings which looked as cheap and brand new as a plastic hairslide. No one knew why, although the best guess was that it had religious significance. If you tried to hold more than a practical conversation with a Nastic, it began saying things like, 'The work fails only when the worker has turned from the wheel,' arid, 'In the morning, they face inward like the Moon.' The Nastic colonies, substantial in number, spread from the rim of the galaxy towards its centre, in the shape of a slice from a pie chart. The inference was obvious: they had originated from outside. That being so, no one could suggest how they had travelled the distances involved. Their own myths, in which the Ur-swarm travelled without ships at all, beating its wings down some lighted fracture in the continuum, alternately warmed and fried by radiation, could be discounted.

There were no more attempts at communication. The White Cat fled through empty space, while her pursuers hung back like cunning hounds. It was no easier to work out what to do.

Meanwhile, Billy Anker filled the ship. He did the most ordinary things in too large a way. Seria Mau, drawn and repelled at the same time, watched him carefully from the hidden cameras as he washed, ate, scratched his armpits sitting on the lavatory with his pressure-suit down round his knees. Billy Anker smelled of leather, sweat, something else she couldn't identify, though it might have been machine oil. He never took off his fingerless glove.

Sleep was no consolation to him. Dreams lifted his top lip off his teeth in a frightened snarl; in the mornings he looked at himself askance in the mirror. What was there to see? What kind of inner resources could he have, with such an indifferent start in life? Invented and set in motion as an extension of his own father, he had flung himself into the void as a way of validating himself. He had done that mad thing among many other mad things, and got so worn out by them he crept away and spent ten years putting himself back together, while war came closer, and the big secrets got more remote instead of less, and the galaxy fell apart a little more, and everything strayed that bit farther from being fixable -

Give it all up, Billy Anker, she wanted to urge him. Live for the big discovery and you only feed the fat man inside. Also he profits from everything you find. She wanted to beg him:

'Give it all up, Billy Anker, and come away with me.'

What did she mean by that? What could she mean? She was a rocket ship and he was a man. She thought about that. She watched ever him while he slept, and had her own dreams.

In Seria Mau's dreams, which played themselves out as inaccurately as memories in the extended sensorium of the White Cat, Billy Anker knelt over her, smiling down endlessly while she smiled up at him. She was in love, but didn't quite know what to want. Puzzled by herself, she simply exhibited herself to him in a daze. She wanted to feel the weight of his gaze, she realised, in a room full of light, on a summer afternoon. But a kind of shadow version of this event dogged her imagination and sometimes made things seem absurd-it was cold in the house, there was food cooling on a tray, the boards were bare, she was so much smaller than him; all she felt was embarrassment and a kind of uninspired chafing. In an attempt to discover how she should act, she ran footage of Mona the clone's companions in the days before she blew them out the airlock. From this she learned to say, with a kind of angry urgency, 'I want to do it. I want to fuck.' But in the end Seria Mau had no interest in being penetrated; indeed, she was rather upset by the absurdity of the idea.

Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, 'I'm committing suicide.'

'Come away now dear and eat,' the shadow operators said listlessly.

'I mean it,' Mona threatened.

She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and-over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa -told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.