Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  ‘But do try and remember,’ Anna urged. ‘Little 3D pictures! And enamel badges like the ones you wore when you were at Cambridge.’

  ‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘It is five o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Is it, darling?’ Anna said. ‘I thought they were just the type of thing a child might collect,’ she tried to explain. ‘I thought you’d be interested.

  ‘Do you know something?’ she said. ‘Some of them are warm!’

  ‘Hang up, Anna,’ Marnie advised. ‘I am.’

  Anna stared at the items for some minutes, as if they had given her a new lease of life. Then she fetched her handbag from the hall and out of it, after some rummaging, took out Michael Kearney’s pocket drive. This she put down among all the other stuff, where the light could shine off its slippery titanium surface. While she was staring at it, James the cat came in and began butting and fussing around her calves, his purr thick and close, breathy and mechanical at the same time. Suddenly he went to his bowl and began to eat tuna as if his life depended on it. The milkman left the milk. A train went past on the valley line. The phone rang again. She wondered what had really happened to the summerhouse in the night: everything had remained perfectly silent throughout, she thought, like a fire in a difficult film. She wondered what had happened to her. Eventually, she swept everything back into the shoebox, put the pocket drive in her bag, and caught the next train up to London, where she expected to spend the afternoon nosying into other people’s houses. For once she rather looked forward to it.

  FIVE

  Archive Style

  In his glory days Fat Antoyne Messner had run a number of petty mules like the Nova Swing. All featured illegal propulsion systems, capacious holds and occult service histories: they were registered out of planets with made-up names. He had operated them, so he claimed, on behalf of numerous Halo celebrities: Emmie-Lou Parang, Impasse van Sant, Margot Furstenburg, Ed Chianese. Why rocket-sport stars and entradistas like that would need the services of a rusty cargo vessel, when they were up to their eyes in smart carbon and BMG-composite hulls with salvaged alien machinery bolted the other side of the pilot bulkhead, he never made clear. Maybe it was to haul spare parts. Maybe it made them feel good to have a fat man around.

  Whether you believed these claims or not, one thing was certain: Antoyne was no longer the loser you used to see beached-up in Saudade City, narratising his bad luck, drinking Black Heart rum, reduced to making small points at the very edge of the game as errand boy for cheap crooks like Vic Serotonin or Pauli DeRaad. He owned his own ship. He had an eye for a transaction. He wasn’t even fat anymore.

  At 4am the morning after he met with Toni Reno, Antoyne made some FTL calls, as a result of which he found himself down in the Nova Swing number one hold, re-examining the payload Toni left behind. On the bills of lading it was described, ‘Delivery, insurance, freight, documents on sight’, which is not to say much. Because of his previous career, Antoyne experienced a natural anxiety when it came to Port Authority paper. About the payload itself, technology had told him all it could. He concentrated instead on its viewport, situated at the front end and constructed of three inch quartz glass, opal in colour, elliptical in shape. To obviate reflections, Antoyne had switched off the halogen lights. Every so often he was forced to wipe condensation from the glass with a piece of rag.

  If he cupped his hands round his face, he could make out a greenish object, like something alive viewed under low-power photomultiplication. This object moved about, or maybe not. Antoyne didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like being in the dark with it, or the way the Nova Swing main hold seemed warmer than usual, or the carmine LEDs that occasionally flickered into life up and down the mortsafe’s lateral line.

  Two years before, Antoyne’s company — Bulk Haulage, aka Dynadrive-DF — had won a six month contract to tow hulks in the Vera Rubin’s World quarantine orbit. Antoyne left the Nova Swing at home, hired an 18/42 series Weber tug — the Pocket Rocket, old but serviceable — and ran the job out of a landing-field bar known to its habitués as ‘The East Ural Nature Reserve’. He took a room for the duration, not far down Gravuley Street from the field, and ate with all the other quarantine dogs at the Faint Dime diner, where he liked the way the light reflected off the chromed faux-Deco panels behind the counter. Early evening would find him at the window of his room, eyeballing the Neapolitan layers of a late sunset while he waited for the neon to come on. It was a two-storey town on a one-issue planet. Their idea of style was yellow Argylls and black loafers. Gravuley Street seemed to go on forever, especially at night.

  A week after he arrived, Antoyne watched something strange emerge from a boarded-up building not far from the Faint Dime: the naked body of a baby, magnified to adult size and the same olive-drab colour as the frontage. At first, looking up from the sidewalk to the second floor, he had it as some kind of novelty sign. What would you advertise with a giant baby? He didn’t know. Any kind of baby was a mystery to Antoyne. He didn’t like them much. This one, which appeared perhaps three months old, protruded at an odd angle, so that its pudgy legs lolled apart. It was a girl. Antoyne averted his gaze, as if he had seen some kind of porn not to his taste. He thought he heard a faint, squeezing rustle: when he made himself look again the baby had forced itself out a millimetre or two more. It was working its way into Antoyne’s world. A voice from beside him said without preamble:

  ‘Have you ever been inside a quarantine hulk?’

  This voice belonged to MP Renoko, a man you often met at The East Ural Nature Reserve, where he would begin a conversation by saying: ‘You agree there’s no neccessity to confuse a practical tool with a theory of the world?’ Renoko came and went, but always bought rounds of drinks.

  ‘I’m relieved to see you,’ Antoyne said. ‘Considering this.’

  ‘Considering what?’

  ‘That,’ Antoyne said, pointing above his head; but the baby was gone. He looked up, around, behind him: nothing.

  Gravuley Street offered no aid. To the left lay darkness and the empty planet; to the right, the savagely lighted window of the Faint Dime. He could see every item of interior decoration, pressed-out and perfect in candy colours. Someone was drinking Ovaltine with rum. Someone else was getting a big-size ham on rye sandwich with fries. Antoyne wiped his mouth. The hair went up on his neck. One o’ clock in the morning, and a light wind blew dust in ribbons down the middle of the street.

  ‘Something was here,’ he asserted. ‘Why don’t we get a drink?’

  ‘I’m buying,’ said MP Renoko. ‘It seems to me you’ve had some sort of shock.’

  Renoko looked like a photograph of Anton Chekhov, if Chekhov had aged more and come to favour a little white chin-beard. Otherwise his look sucessfully teamed used raincoats with grey worsted trousers five inches too short. His hair — white, swept back to a grubby collar — always seemed full of light. He was small-boned, and intense in manner. His clothes came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘soup’. On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went unwashed. As soon as he and Fat Antoyne had settled themselves in the comparative safety of The East Ural Nature Reserve, he returned to his original subject as if he had never left it:

  ‘“Everyone their own evolutionary project,” we tell each other here in the Halo. Excuse me, this can only be an element of cultural self-dramatisation, even in times like ours.’ His smile meant he was prepared to forgive that. ‘But if there is a new species,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s up there in those quarantine hulks.’

  Fat Antoyne said he didn’t get it.

  Renoko smiled. ‘You get it,’ he said.

  Leaked navigational nanoware or eleven-dimensional imaging code slips up someone’s anus at night and discovers it can run on a protein substrate. In a similar way, ads, memes, diseases and algorithms escape into the wild. They can run on your neurones, they can run inside your cells. They perform a default c
onversion. Suddenly the cops are out with the loudhailers, ‘Stay inside! Stay indoors!’ but it’s too late: on your street, in your house, everything collapses suddenly into an unplanned slurry of nanotech, half-tailored viruses and human fats — your husband, your two little girls in their identical dresses, you. ‘Entire planetary populations,’ Renoko said, ‘are converting to this stuff. Is it an end-state?’ He threw up his little hands. ‘No one knows! Is it a new medium? No one is willing to say! It’s as beautiful as water in strong sunlight, yet it stinks like rendered fat, and can absorb an adult human being in forty seconds. The hulks are full of it, the quarantine orbit is full of hulks. Men like you keep it safe.’ Obsolete pipeliners that worked the Carling Line, decommissioned Alcubierre warps the size of planetisimals, anything with a thick hull, especially if it’s easy to reinforce further: Fat Antoyne had a sudden clear image of those pocked relics in the interplanetary darkness — used-up ships mysterious with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs, pinwheeling around on near-chaotic operator-controlled trajectories.

  He shook his drink and watched it settle. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I got a six month contract to move some of it around, that’s all.’

  ‘And how are you enjoying that?’

  Antoyne made the universal gesture for money. ‘This way,’ he boasted. ‘Mostly though my pilot does the work, you’ve seen her in here. She goes by Ruby Dip.’ Suddenly it occurred to him to ask: ‘Why are we talking about this?’

  ‘Because once all the other questions are asked, the last one left is: what does this new species want?’

  Renoko leaned forward intently. He looked in Fat Antoyne’s eyes.

  ‘Would your pilot ever take a passenger up to the orbit? Would that seem possible?’ Immediately he suggested it, he began to laugh. They both knew he’d gone too far. Up there, the Quarantine Bureau was all over you with every kind of licence and paperwork. In addition they had oversight by EMC assets, the fragmentary orbits of which looped round Vera Rubin’s World as tight as the lines of a paranoid magnetic field. ‘Before you answer that,’ said Renoko, to release the tension, ‘let me get you another of those weird drinks you like.’

  But Antoyne now shook his head no thanks and got to his feet. Some said MP Renoko was a twink addict and orbital miner, real name ‘Remy Kandahar’, wanted for crimes on all those worn-out planets of the Core. Others believed him to be all that remained of the notorious Circus of Pathet Lao — aka Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant — the assets of which he had been in the process of stripping since Sandra Shen’s disappearance fifty years before. Fat Antoyne, who subscribed to neither of these options, took out a hologram business card for Dynadrive-DF. This he placed on the table next to Renoko’s empty glass, saying: ‘“We haul anything,” is our pledge. Find us at Carver Field, Saudade if you ever want to do business of that kind. Just get in touch.

  ‘Thanks for the drink, I needed that after what I saw.’

  Later that night, having found his way without further incident down the unreliable perspectives of Gravuley Street to Ruby Dip’s room, he said:

  ‘It makes you think.’

  ‘I know what it makes me think,’ said Ruby.

  Ruby Dip was a short, broad, muscular woman fifty years old, whose skin not only told the whole story of life in the Halo through tattoos reading ‘Tienes mi corazon’ and ‘They Came from Planet E!’, but also featured treasure maps; fragments of secret code which, interpreted freely, could show any man the way home; and smart red worms of light that propagated across her substantial tits and into her armpits like the embers at the edge of a piece of burnt paper. Though she had her passions, Ruby liked the continual entertainment that was the rocket jockey’s life, and saw no reason to want much else. Her hair was cadmium yellow stubble. She favoured cropped and faded denim, smelled of the Pocket Rocket, and collected antique Spanish tambourines stuck all over with deep red roses and bits of sheet music and lighted from the inside, several examples of which now lay scattered across the cheap furniture or hung from the walls.

  ‘But have you ever seen inside a hulk?’ said Fat Antoyne, who if nothing else knew how to persist at the wrong moment.

  Ruby confessed herself puzzled.

  ‘Honey,’ she said. ‘I just push them around.’ She looked up at him. ‘Now come on and push me around, Fat Antoyne, don’t wait!’ Besides which, she said, after they finished gasping and grunting at one another and Ruby rolled away to look at the ceiling, where did he get these ideas? She climbed up on the sink in the corner, sat there for a while, then got off again impatiently. She wouldn’t piss now for half an hour, she said, as if that was Antoyne’s fault.

  ‘Ruby, at least run the water.’

  ‘I never saw anyone less like a human being than MP Renoko.’

  If you wanted Ruby’s opinion, he was a Shadow Boy. He was one of those mysterious, almost metaphysical entities whose reign in the Halo predated that of the Earth people, and whose motives remained, even now, opaque. ‘If indeed they have motives the way we do.’

  ‘Or if they even existed,’ Antoyne reminded her.

  Ruby Dip waved this away.

  ‘Wait ’til you owe those boys money,’ she said, ‘you’ll find they exist! You’ll owe them half your brain as well! One day they pull you in and collect,’ she promised him. ‘They’re the gangsters, they’re the cops: fact is, you don’t know who they are. Don’t you get it? They look just like you and me!’

  Antoyne shrugged. ‘Hey, no problems.’

  If that was the way Ruby Dip wanted it, he said, that was OK with him. By then they were back on the bed again.

  ‘No this is the way I want it,’ Ruby Dip said.

  Ruby’s unreasonable anger at Renoko, it turned out, stemmed from an argument she had with him one lunchtime in the Faint Dime diner. It concerned the nature of kitsch. Renoko felt that kitsch was a product of an event he named ‘the postmodern ironisation’, prior to which it could not exist: before that, the objects you could now describe as kitsch were actually trash objects. ‘Without the operation of irony on trash,’ he maintained, ‘there would be no kitsch.’ To him, the postmodern ironisation was like the Death of History or the coming Singularity. ‘Everything was changed by it. Nothing could be the same again. It had the irreversibly transformational qualities of a Rapture.’ He believed it had those qualities even now.

  Ruby’s commitment to body-art and collectible tambourines couldn’t let this go unchallenged. Prior to the age of irony, she thought, kitsch was already established. ‘It was low art’s idea of high art,’ she said — the aesthetic of people with no taste. Its keynote was sentimentality, not simply in conception but in use. Trash, for her, was another thing altogether, and it was with trash she found herself at home. A true low art, trash was the aesthetic of people who had no aesthetic, and in use it could almost be described as utilitarian. ‘In all its forms,’ she insisted to MP Renoko, ‘and across every media platform, trash is the art of demonstrating, celebrating — and above all getting — sex. It is a Saturday night art.’

  Antoyne scratched his head. ‘What happened when you said that?’

  ‘What happened then was that a fist fight followed, which it soon drew in the entire lunchtime clientele of the Faint Dime, becoming a legend in its own time.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem enough,’ he said.

  ‘That, Fat Antoyne, is the big difference between us.’

  Because of the weird grimness of the work they do, Ruby believed, quarantine dogs live their opinions hard and proud: so it was predictable Antoyne wouldn’t see such things as intensely as she did. Perhaps because of that it was good that their liaison retained its temporary nature.

  They were standing outside the Faint Dime, 9:15 am. There was a smell of cinnamon coffee — a Dime speciality — and eggs. Morning light came down between buildings onto cracked tarmac. On Gravuley Street, everything else lay in grainy shade. It was like a black and white photograph, except for the tri
umphant pressed-steel values of the diner itself, caught in a ray of light and shining, as Ruby put it, ‘like this real future we are in, rendered with such impossible 3D fidelity as it is, in the language of algorithmic texture and image map!’ A few weeks later, the job was over. Antoyne never saw Vera Rubin’s World or The West Ural Nature Reserve or Ruby Dip again.

  He never saw the huge baby either, though the memory of it gave rise to dreams in which he became certain it had found its way through the walls of Gravuley Street to him at last. And in the end, he wished he hadn’t given his business card to MP Renoko. That gesture returned to haunt him too, because Renoko kept the card and later got in touch through Toni Reno, that well-known cunt; and that was how Fat Antoyne came by the mortsafe.

  5am, Saudade: not late enough to be morning, too late to be night. Fat Antoyne stood out on the loading platform and stared across the noncorporate port at the dawn, just then arriving in streaks of pale green and salmon over the distinctive silhouette of the Rock Church. He wiped his hands. The rag, which had originally been a white cotton singlet of Irene’s, cropped short and bearing the slogan HIGGS, made him feel both horny and full of an almost nostalgic guilt. A little later, as if to further demonstrate his condition, Irene herself appeared, walking brassily across the windswept cement arm in arm with Liv Hula. They leaned into one another for balance — also a little forward as if compensating for a strong headwind — and sang. Irene was wearing a Vinci Nintendino bolero jacket featuring foot-long alien pinfeathers dyed pink. In one hand she clutched her signature see-thru cosmetics bag; in the other a pair of five-inch heels, red patent leather and with an otherworld glow all their own.