Light Read Free Page A

here, we wonder why you kill your own kind so ruthlessly.” Seria Mau had been asked this before.
    “They’re not my kind,” she said.
    “They are human.”
    She greeted this argument with the silence it deserved, then after a moment said:
    “Where’s the money?”
    “Ah, the money. Where it always is.”
    “I don’t want local currency.”
    “We almost never use local currencies,” the fetch said, “although we sometimes deal in them.” Its larger joints appeared to vent some kind of gas. “Are you ready to fight again? We have several missions available forty lights down the Beach. You would be up against military vessels. It’s a real part of the war, not ambushing civilians like this.”
    “Oh, your war,” she said dismissively. Fifty wars, big and small, were going on out here in plain sight of the Kefahuchi Tract; but there was only one fight, and it was the fight over the spoils. She had never even asked them who their enemy was. She didn’t want to know. The Nastic were strange enough. Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. “Motives,” she thought, staring at the collection of legs and eyes in front of her, “are a sensorium thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.” She thought about this. “The housefly has a harder job,” she decided.
    “I have what I want now,” she told the fetch. “I won’t be fighting for you again.”
    “We could offer more.”
    “It wouldn’t help.”
    “We could make you do what we want.”
    Seria Mau laughed.
    “I’ll be gone from here faster than your vessel can think. How will you find me then? This is a K-ship.”
    The fetch left a calculated silence.
    “We know where you are going,” it said.
    This gave Seria Mau a cold feeling, but only for a fraction of a second. She had what she wanted from the Nastic. Let them try. She broke contact and opened the ship’s mathematical space.
    “Look at that!” the mathematics greeted her. “We could go there. Or there. Or look, there . We could go anywhere. Let’s go somewhere!”
    Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could react, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. “You see?” said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat ’s massive array—aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull—detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. “At the moment,” the mathematics announced, “I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.”
     
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