Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  It was hard work, like manhandling something in water. Once he manoeuvred it out of the shed, there were six or seven hundred yards to cover. The arcs were off in the whole south sector of the port, the rain coming on again. One moment clouds filled the sky, the next they had passed over and the Tract cast down a bluish light. Reno would push a while; stop and call out, ‘Enka!’ or try to dial her up; then bend down to get his hands and forearms underneath one end of the tube, almost embracing it. That was the position to push from, the embrace. Each time he pushed, the tube dipped and rocked a little on its long axis before moving forward in a slow, oily way. One moment it had more inertia than you expected, the next a breath of wind was enough to send it off course.

  The boat they called the Nova Swing stood up against the night sky among all the other short-haulers — tubby, three-finned, brass-looking. Her cargo cradle was out. A man known around the port as Fat Antoyne sat on the cradle rail drinking from a pint of Black Heart, his unzipped leather pilot jacket and oiled pompadour flapping in the wind up there. When he saw Reno he waved. The lift descended its eighty feet slowly, with whining servo noises, and jolted to a halt; at which Reno put in one last embrace and shoved the goods aboard.

  ‘Hey, Fat Antoyne,’ he said.

  Fat Antoyne said hey. He said, ‘What’s this?’

  Reno brushed down his Sadie Barnham coat. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

  He felt rain cooling the back of his neck and his scalp. It darkened the surface of the tube, the way rain soaks a little into any porous surface; which he somehow didn’t expect. You didn’t think about this object — which he now saw had faint remains of moulded features, worn down to bulges and vague crockets long ago — as being subject to weather. The two of them contemplated it for a moment, then compared paperwork in case that helped. Fat Antoyne had ‘mortsafe’. ‘You know what a “mortsafe” is?’ he asked Toni Reno.

  Reno admitted he had never heard that word. His lading bills had ‘hard goods’, that was all.

  Antoyne chuckled. ‘Hard goods is right,’ he said. ‘I’ll sign off on that.’ Close up, you saw his chinos, tailored for comfort in some kind of twill, had grease stains down the front. He was on his own tonight, he said. His crew were getting rest and relaxation in a bar they liked, he wasn’t so keen himself. He offered Reno a drink, but Reno regretfully declined.

  ‘You take care,’ Reno told him.

  When Reno had gone, Fat Antoyne put the cap back on the bottle and put the bottle in his jacket.

  ‘Asshole,’ he said.

  He hoisted the tube up into his number one hold. ‘Mortsafe,’ he said, and chuckled. That was a word he could get used to. When he touched the tube, it was cold. He knelt down and carefully passed his hands underneath, feeling the faint resistance you feel when you try to press two magnets together. He studied its surface with the help of a loupe designed to operate in three different regimes, making a clicking noise with his tongue as if he was thinking. Then he shrugged — because what did he know? — secured it, and left. After the arcs went off in the hold, and Fat Antoyne had closed the hatch, and his footsteps had gone away inside the ship, the tube seemed to settle a little in its restraints. A few minutes went by, then a few more. A couple of lights flickered suddenly on the panel up by the porthole.

  When Reno got back to the warehouse to have one more look for his loader, he found her hanging some feet in the air above the place where the artefact had been. She was turned towards him as he entered, her face presenting upside down, her back arched as if he had caught her in the middle of a suspended moment of jouissance, a sort of unpremeditated back-flip. She was naked.

  ‘Christ, Enka,’ Reno said. He wondered if she had been there all along.

  The patch of air around her was dark and bluish, despite the lights being on, and in it the shadows fell at wrong angles both to one another and to the shadows in the rest of the shed. This gave Enka an effect of being snatched from the world inhabited by people like Reno to another, colder, more complex regime, as if in seeking release she had exchanged one set of predictabilities for another. Her arms and legs were still moving slowly. Although that action caused her to rotate a little, it seemed to make no difference to her position in the air; or to her essential plight. Her expression was one of understanding, the slow understanding that will lead to panic in another moment. At an undetermined point before this understanding set in, something had inserted itself powerfully at a diagonal from her left armpit to the lower part of her ribcage on the opposite side. A long triangular flap of tissue was hanging down, but it was a white and fishy colour unsuited to a human being. If he stood on his toes and extended his reach, Toni could catch the end of it, but it had a rubbery touch that made it hard to hold, and when he got sufficient grip to pull on it nothing seemed to happen. If her new state shared enough of the boundary conditions of the normal to anchor her there, it was also different enough for Enka to be unreachable by Toni Reno.

  Toni couldn’t think how it happened.

  ‘Fuck you, Enka,’ he said aloud. ‘For getting yourself into this.’

  As if in answer a voice said: ‘My name is Pearlent and I come from the future.’

  The shed was empty under the arcs. Enka swam backwards towards him through her new reality, like someone suspended in a low-grade hologram.

  Toni ran out the shed, past the Nova Swing — now closed and dark — and across the noncorporate port in the wind. He would have run all the way home to his refurb in the Magellan Ladder if a woman — or what he thought of as a woman — hadn’t come at him in a side street off Tupolev. She came at him very fast and at an odd angle out of the shadows — as if before Toni arrived she had been lying down in the shadows at the base of a building — and took hold of him round the upper body. Toni’s tailoring was state of the art, but a millisecond or two after it cut in, her tailoring somehow switched it off again. Toni was ramped — nerve propagation speeds were up all over his body, his haemoglobin structures were retuning themselves in the picosecond range — but he never landed a punch. He felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He was behind the action. He was still seeing her come up from the pavement when she wrapped her left arm almost lovingly round his head and pushed the barrel of a weapon up into his armpit.

  ‘So what do you want to do next?’ she asked him, in a voice which seemed really interested to know.

  When Toni moved his head fractionally to be able to speak, she pressed the trigger and that was that. A couple of b-girls on their way back from a night at the Ivory Coast found him very early the next morning. Apparently he was surrounded by black and white cats. ‘We’re knee deep in them,’ one of the b-girls explained to the police detectives. ‘So cute. But then we find this guy.’ When Toni’s girlfriend heard later how suddenly he died, she said it was the way Toni would have liked it. He dug his existence in this world but he didn’t cling to it. Toni’s belief, she said, was that if you could get your life down to a nanometre thick it would stretch out forever.

  She added: ‘As far as you were concerned, obviously.’

  THREE

  Swimming with Eels

  Saudade, Friday, 4am:

  Two agents and a wire jockey were in a holding cell in the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, servicing a client.

  It was a small cold room, with a retro-medical decor of cracked white tiles and large, complex overhead lighting. Straps confined the client to a stainless steel table; there were tubes in many of his orifices. They had run the wire up into his brain, and by moving it about drew from him a few warm, puppylike yips and yaps, also some twitching of the limbs. No one expected much. It was a calibration period. Every so often the wire jockey leaned back from the green felt eyepieces of his equipment and massaged the small of his back. He was tired, and he wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Meanwhile the client, a New Man with the characteristic shock of bright red hair, tried out fresh expressions each time the wire moved. />
  He was naked, had suffered a brief convulsion and was secreting a wide range of pheromones. He seemed eager to please. He would laugh vaguely, then wince. Or his eyes would turn up as if he was trying to look into his own head and he would say, in a tired voice he had copied from some old film: ‘My face is a mess tonight.’

  ‘We should call an operator,’ the wire jockey suggested. ‘Then whatever this alien knows we know it too.’

  The agents looked at one another.

  ‘So you organise that,’ one of them said.

  No one wanted an operator. It would be an admission of failure. While they were talking, they cast nervous glances at the fourth person in the room.

  This woman had a fuck-off way of moving achievable only by the heavily tailored. Her white-blond hair was cropped to nothing much. She was statuesque and a frank air of sexual boredom surrounded her, as if she had come down here because there was nothing else to do in the dog hours of a Friday night. Her career had begun a year or two before, under the auspices of Lens Aschemann, SiteCrime’s late, legendary investigator. Though she had never been more than his assistant, she remained in the building even after his death in the Saudade event site. Rumour had it she was connected, but no one knew who to; and on the present occasion none of the agents understood why she was in the basement with them. They were happy enough to defer to her; but they didn’t like the amused way she stared into the bright light and polluted air above the client’s head, so they were relieved when after an hour she got a dial-up.

  ‘Send my car to the front,’ she said. Then, to the agents: ‘Boys, we must do this again. No, I mean it.’

  She was halfway out of the building when the client broke his straps and sat up. At the same time everyone heard a soft voice in the holding cell say:

  ‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’

  At that the situation changed rapidly. The assistant’s tailoring came up and took control of the space, carefully inhibiting any electromagnetic activity except its own. The lights went out. The wire jockey’s signal went bottom-up. The agents found that their tailoring had quit. Six and a half thousand resident nanocameras, drifting in the air like fish semen, all burned out at once. What would they have recorded? Some silvery, mucoid blurs connecting different parts of the room, which, upon analysis, would turn out to be the signature of a single woman moving at abnormal speeds. Each contact she made slowed her down for a fraction of a second, partly resolving this image, freezing her in a curious half-turn; or looking over her shoulder into the upper corner of the room; or with her head at an inhuman angle, face transfigured by a radiant smile.

  Fifteen seconds after it had initiated the engagement, her tailoring stood down. The agents lay in opposite corners. The wire jockey sat puffing and blowing on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs stuck out stiffly in front of him. One eyepiece hung on its flex, the other seemed to have been driven into his skull. The body of the New Man rolled slowly off the table and on to the floor at the assistant’s feet. She stared down at it as if waiting for something else to happen, then left. The nanocameras came back on. The holding cell was silent for a while, then you got a small sigh as of final bowel sounds, which was the wire jockey giving up.

  Heavy rain fell vertically into the alley off Tupolev, where a man named Toni Reno could be found performing slow fishlike movements eight feet above the pavement in a dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket. Toni was dead. The uniform branch was already on scene, under the supervision of a thin cop called Epstein. Toni faced away from them, up into the weather, his back arched, his arms and legs dangling bonelessly. Water poured off each limb; shaking it off their faces like a cluster of big shapeless animals, the cops in their slickers peered up.

  ‘This is how you found him,’ the assistant suggested.

  ‘He started lower down.’

  ‘You couldn’t start much lower than Toni.’

  Epstein ignored this. ‘When I get here,’ he explained, ‘the guy is on the floor like any other dead guy. Then he floats up. Not so quick that you can see it: but when you turn away, next time you look he’s a little higher. It takes maybe twenty minutes.’ The assistant regarded him with not much expression on her face.

  He shrugged. ‘Thirty at the outside.’

  She said, ‘Get me into one of these houses.’

  ‘Dead guys don’t float,’ Epstein said.

  The uniforms banged on a door until someone let them in. It was a four-floor walk-up designed to have an ambience of shiny brown paintwork and roach smells in passageways. West of Tupolev, over as far as Radia Marelli, all the buildings were like this: warrens falling into the ramified tunnels and flooded cellars underneath, patrolled by crime tourists enjoying an economy of low-rent donkey parlours, futurology joints and tank farms where you could get the bootlegged experience of being a plant from a distant world. The assistant went up to the second floor and opened a window so she could look down on the corpse.

  ‘What do you notice?’ she said.

  There was a flicker in the air immediately above Toni Reno, a very pale blue illumination like neon seen at night from the next street along. The Sadie Barnham jacket had fallen away to reveal his ribcage, emphasising its curve up out of the diaphragm. Say what you like, Toni kept himself in shape. His face was waxy, his expression one of surprise. There was no clue to how he was hanging there like that.

  ‘I notice the rain falling off him,’ Epstein said, ‘but not on to him.’

  The assistant smiled briefly. ‘That was Toni’s ambition all his short life,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it gives us a clue to the type of crime we have here.’ As if thinking about this, she stared down at the corpse a minute or two more. Eventually she said:

  ‘Pull him down if you can. If you can’t, leave someone to watch what happens. I’ll send a SiteCrime team over. Maybe an operator.’

  The thought of working with an operator dampened Epstein’s spirits. The uniforms nodded to one another, they had guessed all along it would play this way. Halfway down the street stairs the assistant stopped as if she had forgotten something. ‘You go on,’ she told Epstein. She waited until the uniforms were out of the building then entered the first room she found, where an alien of some kind, bipedal, its strigiform skull drilled for electrical access, lay on a pallet surrounded by drifts of its own feathers. Several small objects — including a pair of Entreflex dice turned up to display the ‘Tower of Cloud’ face; a cheap hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract; and a handful of intricately etched wide-bore titanium needles — were arranged on the nightstand. Two or three weeks ago, the assistant estimated, someone had begun recording these things through the alien’s sensorium, then lost interest. There was a mouldy smell in the room, like pigeons under a bridge. The assistant made two or three dial-up calls, spoke briefly to her office, then stood the way people do when they are waiting for someone to talk to them by holographic fetch. Nothing happened, although for a moment a half-formed shape seemed to flicker in an upper corner of the room.

  ‘Are you there?’ she said encouragingly.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered the alien on the pallet. It thrashed about briefly, sending up a cloud of feathers. ‘I am. I am here.’

  The assistant maintained an office on the fifth floor of the building at Uniment & Poe. She had staff, she had a budget, she had a ’52 mint-blue Cadillac roadster in the parking garage: no one knew how she achieved this kind of success. You saw the Cadillac outside the bar they called the Tango du Chat where she often spent an evening; two or three times a week she would leave it at the kerb on C-Street and enter Cedar Mountain, an upscale tank farm where they kept several personalised immersive art experiences on file for her, based on the life of a fictitious 20th century housewife called Joan. As Joan, the assistant cooked meals, used ‘cleaning products’ and serviced her man 1956-style, which generally meant he grunted a lot and came on her leg (despite its exoticism, she found this aspect of the experience profoundly calming). Today, though, she
chose another Cedar Mountain favourite: the five-star Room 121, based on a tableau of the same name by Sandra Shen, in which she could be a woman — unnamed but still perhaps 20th century — ‘alone’ in a hotel.

  It was night. She was lounging in the tropical heat of a single room. She was at the window, a tall woman whose eyes were blue, whose age was hard to tell, whose clothes — a black two-piece with lightly padded shoulders, a striped grey and black blouse of some glazed material — scarcely hid an untidy sexuality. She never did much in the room. She drank rum; she stared out the window, thinking that wherever you are at night in the city you can always see, beyond the roof of the next building, the faint glow of floodlights. The radio played a musing version of a popular tune, `Rhapsody in Blue’. It was all as it should be. It was leading to the moment when her hands went impersonally into her underwear, when it would seem to the assistant that she was not so much having sex with herself as with the room, the song, the hotel: with every object in that instance of the liquid world.

  This time, though, Room 121 went dark and dropped sideways. A million silver eels flickered past the windows. Whispers filled each dusty corner. She felt the tank world come apart around her, into dark and streaming pixels: next thing, she was hanging in the parking orbit above a rusty alien artefact the size of a brown dwarf. Things were such an effort. She was swimming with eels, down to the pocked and gouged surface. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath, a woman like herself lay on the allotropic carbon deck, a white paste oozing from the corner of her mouth. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. She was waiting. She came from the past, she came from the future; she was about to speak.