Light

3 New Venusport, 2400 AD

Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm on Pierpoint Street.

He was a typical New Man, tall, white-faced, with that characteristic shock of orange hair that makes them look constantly surprised by life. The tank farm was too far up Pierpoint to do much trade. It was in the high 700s, where the banking district gave out into garments, tailoring, cheap chopshop operations franchising out-of-date cultivars and sentient tattoos.

This meant Vesicle had to have other things going.

He collected rents for the Cray sisters. He acted as an occasional middleman in what were sometimes called “off-world imports,” goods and services interdicted by Earth Military Contracts. He moved a little speciality H, cut with adrenal products from the local wildlife. None of this took much of his time. He spent most of his day on the farm, masturbating every twenty minutes or so to the hologram porn shows; New Men were great masturbators. He kept an eye on his tanks. The rest of the time he slept.

Like most New Men, Tig Vesicle didn’t sleep well. It was as if something was missing for him, something an Earth-type planet could never provide, which his body needed less while it was awake. (Even in the warmth and darkness of the warren, which he thought of as “home,” he twitched and mewled in his sleep, his long, emaciated legs kicking out. His wife was the same.) His dreams were bad. In the worst of them, he was trying to collect for the Cray sisters, but he had become confused by Pierpoint itself, which in the dream was a street aware of him, a street full of betrayal and malign intelligence.

It was mid morning, and already two fat cops were pulling a convulsed rickshaw girl from between the shafts of her vehicle. She was flailing about like a foundered horse, cyanosing round the lips as everything went away from her and got too small to see. Street Life was playing on her personal soundtrack, and café électrique had blown up another determined heart. Entering Pierpoint about halfway along its length, Vesicle found there were no numbers on the buildings, nothing he could recognise. Should he walk right to get to the high numbers, or left? He felt a fool. This feeling segued smoothly into panic, and he began changing direction repeatedly in the teeth of the traffic. In consequence he never moved more than a block or two from the side street by which he had entered. After a while he began to catch glimpses of the Cray sisters themselves, holding court outside a falafel parlour as they waited for their rents. He was certain they had seen him. He turned his face away. The job had to be finished by lunch, and he hadn’t even started. Finally he went into a restaurant and asked the first person he saw where he was, to discover that this wasn’t Pierpoint at all. It was a completely different street. It would take hours to get where he was supposed to be. It was his own fault. He had started out too late in the day.

Vesicle woke from this dream weeping. He couldn’t help but identify with the dying rickshaw girl: worse, somewhere between waking and sleeping, “rents” had become “tears,” and this, he felt, summed up the life of his whole race. He got up, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and went out into the street. He had that oddly jointed look, that shambling look all New Men have. Two blocks down towards the Exotic Diseases Hospital, he bought a Muranese fish curry, which he ate with a wooden throwaway fork, holding the plastic container close under his chin and shovelling the food into his mouth with awkward, ravenous movements. Then he went back to the tank farm and thought about the Crays.

The Crays, Evie and Bella, had started out in digitised art retroporn—specialising in a surface so realistic it seemed to defamiliarise the sex act into something machinelike and interesting—then diversified, after the collapse of the 2397 bull market, into tanking and associated scams. Now they were in money. Vesicle was less afraid of them than awed. He was star-struck every time they came in his shop to pick up the rents or check his take. He would tell you at length the things they did, and was always trying to imitate the way they talked.

After he had slept a little more, Vesicle went round the farm and checked the tanks. Something made him stop by one of them and put his hand against it. It felt warm, as if the activity inside it had increased. It felt like an egg.

Inside the tank, this is what was happening.

Chinese Ed woke up and nothing in his house worked. The bedside alarm didn’t go off, the TV was a greyout, and his refrigerator wouldn’t talk to him. Things got worse after he had his first cup of coffee, when two guys from the DA’s office knocked on his door. They wore double-breasted sharkskin suits with the jackets hanging open so you could see they were heeled. Ed knew them from when he worked the DA office himself. They were morons. Their names were Hanson and Rank. Hanson was a fat guy who took things easy, but Otto Rank was like rust. He never slept. He had ambitions, they said, to be DA himself. These two sat on stools at the breakfast bar in Ed’s kitchen and he made them coffee.

“Hey,” said Hanson. “Chinese Ed.”

“Hanson,” Ed said.

“So what do you know, Ed?” Rank said. “We hear you’re interested in the Brady case.” He smiled. He leaned forward until his face was near Ed’s. “We’re interested in that too.”

Hanson looked nervous. He said:

“We know you were at the scene, Ed.”

“Fuck this,” Rank said immediately. “We don’t need to discuss this with him.” He grinned at Ed. “Why’d you waste him, Ed?”

“Waste who?”

Rank shook his head at Hanson, as if to say, What do you make of this shithead? Ed said:

“Kiss it, Rank. You want some more java?”

“Hey,” Rank said. “You kiss it.” He took out a handful of brass cases and threw them across the breakfast bar. “Colt .45,” he said. “Military issue. Dumdum rounds. Two separate guns.” The brass cases danced and rattled. “You want to show me your guns, Ed? Those two fucking Colts you carry like some TV detective? You want to bet we can get a match?”

Ed showed his teeth.

“You have to have the guns for that. You want to take them off me, here and now? Think you can do that, Otto?”

Hanson looked anxious. “No need for that, Ed,” he said.

“We can go away and get the fucking warrant, Ed, and then we can come back and take the guns,” said Rank. He shrugged. “We can take you. We can take your house. We could take your wife, you still had one, and play jump the bones with her ’til Saturday next. You want to do this the hard way, Ed, or the easy way?”

Ed said: “We can do it either way.”

“No we can’t, Ed,” said Otto Rank. “Not this time. I’m surprised you don’t know that.” He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I think you do.” He lifted his finger in Ed’s face, pointed it like a gun. “Later,” he said.

“Fuck you, Rank,” Ed said.

He knew something was wrong when Rank only laughed and left.

“Shit, Ed,” Hanson said. He shrugged. Then he left too.

After he was sure they were gone, Ed went out to his car, a four-to-the-floor ’47 Dodge into which someone had shoehorned the 409 from a ’52 Caddy. He fired it up and sat in it for a moment listening to the four-barrel suck air. He looked at his hands.

“We can do it either way you fuckers,” he whispered. Then he dumped the clutch and drove downtown.

He had to find out what was going on. He knew a broad in the DA’s office called Robinson. He persuaded her to go to Sullivan’s diner with him and get lunch. She was a tall woman with a wide smile, good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours. Ed knew that he could find that out if he wanted to. He could find that out, but he was more interested in the Brady case, and what Rank and Hanson knew.

“Hey,” he said. “Rita.”

“Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,” said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. “Don’t put that sugar on me,” she sang.

Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan’s when he heard her say:

“Hey, Ed. You still fuck?”

He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan’s doorway. Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn’t, began to ask her what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.

“Jesus, Ed,” she said. “Look.”

He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.