Light by M. John Harrison Page A

brilliant smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.
    “What were you really thinking?”
    “I was wondering how to get rid of you,” Kearney said.
    She laughed and touched his arm.
    “That’s not enough of a joke, really, is it?”
    “Of course it is,” Kearney said. “Look!”
    A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna, delighted, clutched Kearney’s arm. “We’re inside a Tom Waits song,” she exclaimed. The more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took out the leather bag that contained the Shrander’s dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned back away from him in her chair.
    “If you throw those things here,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it. I’ll leave you on your own.”
    This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.
    Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. “I can’t feel it near me,” he admitted. “For once. Perhaps I won’t need them.” He put the dice slowly back in the bag. “In Grove Park,” he said, “in your flat, in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.”
    “How would I know?” she said indifferently. “Perhaps I was sick of looking at them. Perhaps I thought it was high time. Michael, what are we doing here?”
    Kearney laughed. “I’ve got no idea,” he said.
    He had run three thousand miles, and now the fear was abating he had no idea why he had come here rather than anywhere else.
    Later the same afternoon they moved into the apartment of a friend of his in Morningside Heights. The first thing Kearney did there was telephone Brian Tate in London. When there was no answer from the research suite, he tried Tate’s house. It was the answer service there, too. Kearney put the phone down and rubbed his face nervously.
    Over the next few days, he bought new clothes at Daffy’s, books at Barnes & Noble, and a laptop from a cheap outlet near Union Square. Anna shopped too. They visited Mary Boone’s gallery, and the medieval Cuxa Cloister at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s branch in Fort Tryon Park. Anna was disappointed. “I expected it to look older, somehow,” she said. “More used.” When they ran out of other things to do they sat drinking New Amsterdam beer at the West End Gate. In the brown heat of the apartment at night, Anna sighed and walked about fractiously, dressing and undressing.
     
11
Machine Dreams
    Billy Anker’s location, as disclosed to Seria Mau by Uncle Zip, was several days down the Beach from Motel Splendido. Little would be required in the way of navigation until they encountered the complex gravitational shoals and corrosive particle winds of Radio Bay. Seria Mau checked her supercargo into the human quarters then found herself with nothing left to do. The White Cat ’s mathematics took over the ship and sent her to sleep. She was powerless to resist. Dreams and nightmares leaked up from inside her like warm tar.
    Seria Mau’s commonest dream was of a childhood. She supposed it to be her own. Oddly lit but nevertheless clear, the images in this dream came and went, framed like archaic photographs on a piano. There were people and events. There was a beautiful day. A pet animal. A boat. Laughter. It all came to nothing. There was a face close to hers, lips moving urgently, determined to tell her something she didn’t want to hear. Something was trying