Light

24 Tumbling Dice

“If I’m predicting the future, how come I always see the past?”

When Ed asked Sandra Shen that question, she was no more help than Annie Glyph. All she did was shrug lightly.

“I think we need practice, Ed,” she said. She lit a cigarette and gave her attention amusedly to something in the corner of the room. “I think we need to work harder.”

Ed never could decode that distant look of hers. If anything, she seemed pleased by the débâcle in the main tent. It filled her full of energy: her other projects languished, and she was around on a daily basis. She kicked the old men out of the bar of the Dunes Motel. He came in and found her fitting it out with equipment of her own, which she was bringing in at night in unmarked crates. This stuff was uniformly old. It featured cloth-covered electric cable, Bakelite casings, dials across which tiny needles rose and fell. There was some kind of amplifier that worked by valves.

“Jesus,” he said. “This is real.”

“Fun, isn’t it?” Sandra Shen said. “Four hundred and fifty years old, give or take. Ed, it’s time we began to work together on this. Put our heads together. What I need to do is fasten these straps round your wrists . . .”

The idea was that Ed sat with his arms and legs strapped to the arms and legs of a big raw-looking wooden chair that came with the rest of the equipment, while Sandra Shen connected herself to the valve amplifier. She then settled the fishtank on Ed’s head and asked him questions until she got an answer that suited her. Her voice came to him close and intimate, as if she was in there with him and the eels on their weird, tiring journey beneath the Alcubiere sea, forward towards some unwelcome revelation of his youth. The questions were meaningless to Ed.

“Is life a bitch or isn’t it, Ed?” she would say. Or: “Can you count to twelve?”

He never heard his own answers anyway. The part of him inside the fishtank wasn’t hooked up to the part outside: not in any way as simple as that. The bar at the Dunes Motel lay in its baking afternoon darkness, split by a single ray of white sunlight. The oriental woman leaned against the bar, smoked, nodded to herself. When she got an answer that suited her, she cranked a handle on her apparatus. Curious bluish jolts of light were emitted undependably from its cathodes. The man in the chair convulsed and screamed.

In the evenings, Ed still had to give his performance. He was exhausted. Audiences dwindled. Eventually, only Madam Shen, dressed in a frankly décolleté emerald cocktail dress, was there to watch. Ed began to suspect the audiences weren’t the point of it. He had no idea what Sandra Shen wanted from him. When he tried to talk to her about it before the show, she only told him not to worry. “More practice, Ed. That’s all you need.” She sat in the best seats, smoking, applauding with soft claps of her little strong hands. “Well done, Ed. Well done.” Afterwards two or three carnies would drag him away. Or if Annie happened to be around, she would pick him up with a kind of tender amusement and carry him back to her room.

“Why are you doing this to yourself, Ed?” Annie asked him one night.

Ed coughed. He spat into the sink.

“It’s a living,” he said.

“Oh, very entradista,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me about it, Ed. Tell me about the dipships again, and what hard-ons you all were. Tell me how you fucked the famous lady-pilot.”

Ed shrugged.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do.”

Annie looked as near exasperated as she could, and went outside so she could stalk about without breaking anything.

“What do you know about her, Ed?” she called back in. “Nothing. Why is she making you do this? What does she expect you to see?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “It’s just another version of the tank. You twinks will accept any amount of shit not to face the world.”

“Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.”

Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.

“It’s a beautiful night out here. Let’s walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I’ll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!”

“I am a show,” Ed said.

Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn’t want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn’t want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. “Any time, man.”

When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.

“Is this wise?” was all she said.

“Everyone,” he said, “deserves a break.”

“And yet, Ed, there’s Bella Cray.”

“What do you know about Bella?” he demanded. When she shrugged, he shrugged too.

“If you’re not scared of her, I’m not either.”

“Be careful, Ed.”

“I’m careful,” he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.

He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.

Had he lost them? He couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.

He didn’t get much time to think. There was a characteristic wet-sounding thump. At the same time, everything seemed to brighten and fade simultaneously. Half the street went out right in front of his eyes, and it still missed him.

“Jesus,” whispered Ed, backing away into a crowd of prostitutes tailored to look and act like sixteen-year-old Japanese girls from late twentieth-century internet fuck sites. “There was no need for that.” He touched his face. It felt hot. The prostitutes staggered about giggling nervously, their clothes in tatters, their skin sunburned to bright red. As soon as he could think again, Ed went off at a run. He ran until he didn’t know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there . . . He stared up and thought long and hard about Annie Glyph. It was like this the night he met her, bad light flickering across waste lots. Somehow he had brought her back to life just by asking her name. Now he was responsible for her.

He went back to the circus and found her sleeping. The room was full of her slow, calm heat. Ed lay down beside her and buried his face where her neck and shoulder met. After a moment or two she half woke and made room for him inside the curve of her body. He put his hand on her and she gave a big guttural grunt of pleasure. He would have to leave New Venusport before something happened to her because of him. He would have to leave her here. How would he tell her? He didn’t know.

She must have read his thoughts, because she came home a few nights later and said:

“What’s the matter, Ed?”

“I don’t know,” Ed lied.

“If you don’t know, Ed, you should find out,” she said. They stared puzzledly at one another.

Ed liked to walk around in the cold bright morning through the circus itself, moving from the salt smell of the dunes to the smell of warm dusty concrete that filled the air around the tents and pavilions.

He wondered why Sandra Shen had chosen this site. If you landed here, it was because you had no corporate credentials. If you left from here, no one wished you good luck. It was a transit camp, where EMC processed refugee labour before moving it on to the mines. Paperwork could maroon you at the noncorporate port for a year, during which your own bad choices would take the opportunity to stretch it to ten. Your ship rusted, your life rusted. But you could always go to the circus. This in itself worried Ed. What did it mean for Madam Shen? Was she trapped here too?

“This outfit ever move on?” he asked her. “I mean, that’s what a circus does, right? Every week another town?”

Sandra Shen gave him a speculative look, her face shifting from old to young then back again around its own eyes, as if they were the only fixed point in her personality (if personality is a word with any meaning when you are talking about an algorithm). They were like eyes looking out from cobwebs. She had a fresh drink beside her. Her little body was leaning back, elbows on the bar, one red high-heel hooked in the brass bar rail. Smoke from her cigarette rose in an exact thin stream, broke up suddenly into eddies and whorls. She laughed and shook her head.

“Bored already, Ed?” she said.

The next night Bella Cray was in the audience for his show.

“Christ!” whispered Ed. He looked around for Sandra Shen: she was off on other business. Ed was stuck there in the glare of the old theatre lights, the cold white glare of Bella Cray’s smile. There she was, sitting in the front row not two yards away, knees together, handbag in her lap. Her white secretary blouse had a little saddle of perspiration under each armpit, but her lipstick was bright and fresh and she was mouthing something he couldn’t quite make out. He remembered her saying, just before he shot her sister, “What can we do, Ed? We’re all fish.” To get away from her, he plunged his head into the tank. As the world went out he heard her call:

“Hey, Ed! Break a leg!”

When he woke up she was gone. His head was full of a high, pure ringing sound. Annie Glyph lugged him into the dunes, where she laid him down in the cool air and distant sound of the surf. He rested his head in her lap and held her hand. She told him he had prophesied war again, and worse; he didn’t tell her about seeing Bella Cray in the audience. He didn’t want to worry her. Also, he had spent a tiring hour inside the tank. He had watched his dead mother’s things thrown on the bonfire, seen his sister leave for other worlds, resented his father for being ordinary and weak, left for other worlds himself: then he had been led past his own past, into some completely unknowable state. He was worn out with it.

“It’s good you’re here,” he said.

“You should stop doing this, Ed. It isn’t worth it.”

“Do you think they’ll let me stop? Do you think she’ll let me stop? Everyone but you wants to kill me or use me. Maybe both.”

Annie smiled and shook her head slowly.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.

She gazed out to sea. After a minute or two she said in a different voice, “Ed, don’t you sometimes want someone smaller? Really? Someone nice and small to fuck, and not just that: to be with?”

He squeezed her huge hand.

“You’re a rock,” he told her. “Everything breaks on you.”

She pushed him away and went down to the water.

“Jesus, Ed,” she shouted into the sea wind. “You fucking twink.”

Ed watched her striding up and down at the tideline, picking up large stones and pieces of driftwood and hurling them far out into the ocean. He got himself carefully to his feet and left her there to her demons.

The spaceport was empty. Everyone had gone home long ago. The night was just chain-link rattling in the wind, smell of the tide, a voice calling out from some motel cabin. Mercury vapour light made everything look half real. Empty sheds, intermittent traffic. It was like that most nights. Nothing for hours, then four ships in twenty minutes—two tubby freighters in from the Core; the tender of a vast Alcubiere ship hanging somewhere up in the parking lot like an asteroid; some semi-corporate short-hauler, skulking down on business no one could afford to acknowledge. There would be bursts of flame the orange colour of New Men hair, then darkness and cold wind until morning. Ed didn’t feel like going back to the room until Annie was asleep. Instead he wandered over and stood between the rocket sheds, looking up at the huge ships, enjoying their smells of stressed metal and burnt pSi fuel.

After a while he noticed a figure pushing a wheeled waste bin slowly across the concrete in his direction. It was Bella Cray. Since her sister’s death her skirts were tighter. Bella was making-up for two, with several colours of eye shadow and lips that resembled a pumped-up rosebud. Those lips were the first thing you saw coming towards you. Going away, she presented as buttocks. Somewhere in between was her handbag full of guns.

“Hey, Ed,” she said, “look at this!”

The waste bin was almost as big as her. Folded awkwardly into it, their long legs hanging over the side, were Tig and Neena Vesicle. Their expressions were puzzled. They were dead. Up from the bin came a smell of alien fluids, bitter and hopeless. Neena’s eyes were still open, and she was looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract the way she had looked at Ed while he was fucking her in the warren, so that he expected her to laugh breathlessly and say, “Oh I’m so far in you!” Tig Vesicle didn’t even look like Tig anymore.

Bella Cray chuckled.

“Like it, Ed?” she said. “This is what’s going to happen to you. But first it’s going to happen to everyone you know.”

Neena Vesicle’s long legs hung out of the waste bin. Bella Cray, as if she needed something to busy herself with, began to try and stuff them back in. “If I could fold the bugger up a bit more,” she said. She leaned in over the bin until her feet came off the ground, then gave up. “They’re just as fucking awkward as they were alive, your friends,” she said. She wrenched at her skirt and blouse until she got them back into place. She patted her hair.

“Well, Ed,” she said.

Ed looked on at this performance. He felt cold; he didn’t know what he felt. Annie would be next, that was obvious enough. Annie was the only other person he knew.

“I could pay you something now,” he said.

Bella pulled a lace-edged handkerchief out of her bag to wipe her hands. While she was at it she checked her look in a little gold compact mirror. “Whoa!” she said. “Is that me?” Out came the lipstick. “Tell you what, Ed,” she said, applying it freely. “Money isn’t going to help with this.”

Ed swallowed.

He had another look in the bin. “You didn’t have to do this,” he said. Bella Cray chuckled.

At that moment Annie Glyph, who had worn off her irritation throwing stones into the tide, walked up out of the darkness, calling, “Ed? Ed, where are you?” She saw him standing there. “Ed, you shouldn’t be out here in the cold like this,” she said. Then she seemed to notice the contents of the waste bin. She stared at it puzzledly, and then at Bella Cray, and then Ed, with a sort of slow, patiently dawning anger. Finally, she said to Bella: “These people got no one to speak for them, they live in a warren, they get the shit end of every stick: you got no call to stuff them in a waste bin too.”

Bella Cray looked amused.

“ ‘You got no call,’ ” she mimicked. She stared interestedly up at Annie, who was perhaps twice her height, then went back to working with the lipstick. “Who’s this horse?” she asked Ed. “Hey, let me guess. I bet you’re fucking her, Ed. I bet you’re fucking this horse!”

“Look,” Ed said. “It’s me you want.”

“That’s clever of you, to work that out.”

Bella replaced the compact in her purse and started to zip the purse up. Then she seemed to remember something.

“Wait,” she said. “You’ve got to see this—”

She had the Chambers gun half out when Annie Glyph’s hands—big-knuckled and clumsy, callused from five years in the rickshaw shafts, trembling a little from all that café électrique—closed over it. Ed loved those hands but he never got the wrong side of them. There was a barely noticeable struggle then Annie had passed the pistol to him. He checked the load, which resembled a black oily fluid but was really a kind of particle-jockey’s nightmare held in place by magnetic fields. He swept the shadows for telltale signs of gun-punks, which were generally raincoats, shoes with big soles, anyone with a nova grenade or a bad haircut. Meanwhile, Annie had one hand still clamped over both of Bella’s: this simple grip she used to hoist Bella slowly off the floor.

“Now we can talk face to face,” she said.

“What’s this?” Bella said. “Is this your dubious shot at fame? You think you won’t get hurt for this?” She raised her voice. “Hey, Ed, you think I don’t have guys out there?”

“That’s a valid point,” Ed told Annie.

“There’s no one out there,” Annie said. “It’s the night.”

Her free hand went up, curled all the way round Bella’s neck and met itself coming the other way. Bella made a noise. Her face got red, she milled her arms about like a baby. One of her shoes fell off.

“Jesus, Annie,” Ed said. “Put her down and let’s get out of here.”

The fact was, it filled him with anxiety to see one of the Cray sisters treated like this. He owed his recent personality to being her victim. Bella was everywhere. In this city at least she was broadband, nationwide. She earned from everyone she saw. She had her finger in every pie from Earth-heroin to giftwrap. Bella bought gun-punks and love-kiddies. For relaxation she had a patch which made her come all day then, like a female mantis, eat Mr. Lucky with her favourite sauce. This was the woman who had sworn to revenge herself after Ed killed her sister. If she proved so easy to show up on her own turf, where did that leave Ed? Besides, no one, as he knew from the personal evidence in the waste bin, turned the tables on Bella Cray for long. He shivered.

“There’s a fog coming up, Annie,” he said.

Annie was explaining to Bella, “You don’t see the consequences of your acts, you might as well be in a twink-tank.” She forced Bella to look in the waste bin. “I want you to understand what you did when you did this,” she said. “What you really did.”

Bella tried to laugh. What came out was “Guck guck guck.”

Annie’s grip tightened. Bella’s colour deepened. She squeezed out one more guck and went limp. At that Annie seemed to lose interest. She dropped Bella on the floor and picked up Bella’s purse instead. “Hey Ed, look! It’s full of money!” She sheafed the money into her hands and held it up and laughed like a kid. Annie’s delight never knew any bounds. She was a rickshaw girl. Everything she did, she was full-on inside it. They would have called her simple in another age; but that was the last thing she was. “Ed, I never saw so much money!” While she was counting it, Bella Cray scraped herself off the concrete and limped quickly away into the fog. She seemed a little one-sided.

Ed raised the Chambers gun, but it was too late to get a shot. Bella was gone. He sighed.

“No good will come of this,” he said.

“Oh yes it will,” said Annie. She rolled up the money. “Better I have it than that little cow. You’ll see.”

“She won’t rest until you’re dead too.”

Towards dawn the two of them trundled the waste bin across the concrete and into the dunes, where Ed buried Tig and Neena and stuck the Monster Beach sign in the sand over them. Annie stood in the fog for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry about your friends, Ed,” and went to bed; but Ed stayed until the fog cleared, the seabirds began to call and the onshore wind ruffled the marram grass, thinking of Neena Vesicle and how when he was inside her she would tremble and say, “Push harder. Oh. Me.” Something changed for Ed that night. The next show he did, he dreamed right through his childhood and into another place.