Light by M. John Harrison Page B

to make itself known to her, the way a narrative tries to make itself known. The final image was this: a garden, darkened with laurel and close-set silver birch; and a family, centred on an attractive black-haired woman with round, frank brown eyes. Her smile was delighted and ironic at once—the smile of a lively student, rather surprised to find herself a mother. In front of her stood two children seven and ten years old, a girl and a boy, resembling her closely about the eyes; the boy had very black hair and was holding a kitten. And there, behind the three of them, with his hand on her shoulder and his face slightly out of focus, stood a man. Was he the father? How would Seria Mau know? It seemed very important. She stared as deeply into the photograph as she would stare into a face; while it faded slowly into a drifting grey smoke which made her eyes water.
    A further dream followed, like a comment on the first:
    Seria Mau was looking at a blank interior wall covered with ruched oyster silk. After some time, the upper body of a man bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. He was tall and thin; dressed in a black tailcoat and starched white shirt. In one white-gloved hand he held a top hat by its brim; in the other a short ebony cane. His jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. He had eyes a penetrating light blue, and a black pencil moustache. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he smiled at her. At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows opening onto the magisterial glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. The picture, she saw, was taken in a room toppling through space. Slowly, the man in the tailcoat bowed himself back out of it.
    If this dream’s purpose was to elucidate the one which had preceded it, nothing was achieved. Seria Mau woke up in her tank and experienced a moment of profound emptiness.
    “I’m back,” she told the ship’s mathematics angrily. “Why do you send me there? What is the point of that?”
    No answer.
    The mathematics had woken her, relinquished control of the ship, and slipped quietly back up into its own space, where it began to sort the quanta leaking from significant navigational events in non-local space, using a technique called stochastic resonance. Without quite knowing why, Seria Mau was left feeling angry and inadequate. The mathematics could send her to sleep when it wanted to. It could wake her up when it wanted to. It was the centre of the ship in some way she could never be. She had no idea what it was, what it had been before K-tech webbed them together forever. The mathematics was wrapped around her—kind, patient, amiable, inhuman, as old as the halo. It would always look after her. But its motives were completely unknowable.
    “Sometimes I hate you,” she advised it.
    Honesty made her amend this. “Sometimes I hate myself,” she was forced to admit.
    Seria Mau had been seven years old the first time she saw a K-ship. Impressed despite herself by its purposeful lines, she cried excitedly, “I don’t want to have one of those. I want to be one.” She was a quiet child, already locked in confrontation with the forces inside her. “Look. Look. ” Something took her and shook her like a rag; something—some feeling which would eventually marshal all of her other feelings—rippled through her. That was what she wanted then.
    Now she had changed her mind, she was afraid it was too late. Uncle Zip’s package taunted her with its promise, then delivered nothing. A sense of caution had led her to isolate it from the rest of the ship.
    The visible part of it lay on the deckplates in a small room in the human quarters, in a shallow red cardboard box tied with shiny green ribbon. Uncle Zip had presented it to her in his typical fashion, with a signed card depicting putti, laurel wreaths and