Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  ‘I know that woman,’ Liv whispered, ‘but I can’t think where from.’

  Antoyne was unable to help. He had seen so many people like that, in bars from here to the Core. After you had yourself rebuilt to such a degree, body language was enough to tell whatever two-dimensional story you had left. You were so wired to yourself you no longer knew what you were. Every response ramped up, every surface tuned to receive rays from space: designed for looks, speed, confidence and security at point of use.

  ‘But who can say what back door access the tailor left?’ he concluded.

  Liv found this critique unhelpful. ‘I know her from somewhere,’ she said. Then: ‘Look! Antoyne! In the breaks!’

  Two hundred yards away, a long cylindrical object was beating up out of the sea, dipping and rolling in the salt spray. In three or four minutes it had found its way on to the beach. It looked like a mine from a forgotten war, rusty, steaming and throwing off curious dark rainbows while it decided where to go next. The woman by the Deleuze Motel was watching it too. She stood up and dusted off her hands. When the mortsafe showed signs of moving away into the dunes, she called out and began running after it at a rate no human being could sustain, becoming in three or four paces a mucoid blur. Almost immediately, she was in collision with an identical blur, which had lunged up at her from a shallow hiding place down in the sand and marram grass. Both of them shrieked loudly. It was as if she had run full tilt into a mirror. Every movement she made, her double matched. Sand flew up around them so it became impossible to tell which was which. Then one of them slowed down suddenly and strode around looking puzzled with her hands to her head. She sat down hard. Fell forward slowly from the waist. Leaving her there motionless, the survivor went fizzing away among the dunes, tearing up the marram grass, startling the shoreline birds.

  ‘They’ve killed her!’ said Liv.

  Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘This isn’t to do with us.’

  A third figure, some shadowy little old guy in a shortie raincoat, had watched the encounter from the dunes, clapping his hands, looking round as if appealing to the rest of the audience on a lively evening at the Preter Coeur fights. His face was a white oval. He had the look of an enthusiast. If there had been a way to bet, you thought, he would have set his money down. After a minute or two he approached the dead woman, knelt down near her head and busied himself about there, chuckling. Then he retreated into the dunes a little way and waited, his stillness such that he became difficult to see, until the woman woke up. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ they heard her complain distinctly. She rolled over, too late to avoid puking an evil pink fluid copiously on herself. She got to her feet and staggered to the side door of the Deleuze Motel, above which blinked a flamingo-coloured neon reading STARLIGHT ROOM with, above that, two stylised palm trees intertwined. Leaning against her own shadow on the blistered wall, she threw up again, more carefully this time, and went inside. The man in the raincoat, meanwhile, had walked off towards the sea without looking back once.

  ‘Fat Antoyne, this is so wrong!’

  By now Antoyne had something else to think about. Down at the base of the Nova Swing, just outside the harsh glare of the loading lights, the fifth mortsafe awaited him, quiet, unobtrusive, smelling of the sea.

  He went down to fetch it and found the usual corroded tin can, leaking its unknown past like a physical substance. This time someone had daubed it with nondrying anti-radar paint, into which a meaningless line of letters and numbers had then been impressed using some kind of stencil. It was warmer than the others. When he had got it stowed away, he found that Irene had left the ship. Liv didn’t know where. The two of them went out into the dunes and called around, but Irene didn’t answer. ‘You’d better go and find her,’ Liv told Antoyne. Then shouted after him, ‘She’s not happy, Antoyne.’ The wind blew harder and the moon was up. Squalls were headed in across the bay.

  Raised on an agricultural planet, Irene had questions from the start, mainly about her ability to empathise. But when you sign for the package they offer you a heart of gold, because it makes you happier in the work. It’s free. Really, it’s a cheap tweak. No one loses, not you, not your customer. Irene opted in and never regretted it, though maybe her heart was over-tuned now for the quarantine orbit, because here on South Hemisphere NV, made more upset than she could allow herself to understand by the story of the little boy in the sarcophagus, she needed a bar, a bottle of Black Heart, and the company of people she didn’t know.

  But the other side of the fence things only deteriorated. Seaward in the fog, you could feel distance growing in everything. From Lizard Sex to The Metropole, the shutters were up all along the strip. The old-fashioned signs banged in the wind; rust ran down from blisters in the paintwork. Outside the joint they called 90-Proof & Boys, the air tasted of salt. Ivy Mike’s lay silent and unoccupied. The circus wasn’t in town, and it was coming on to rain.

  Eventually she heard voices. The front doors of the Deleuze Motel, flanked by frosted glass windows and scoured wood panels with tinpot ads, were padlocked shut. She shook them. A wan yellow light could be seen inside. ‘Hello!’ No one answered. They didn’t even stop what they were doing. There were distinct rattling sounds and, every so often, outbreaks of a kind of subdued shouting. The yellow light came and went, as if someone was walking jerkily to and fro in front of it. Irene could hear ordinary sounds too: a chair scraped back, ice clattering in a glass. She patted the door as if it was someone’s arm. ‘So hey,’ she said, ‘you’re having a good time in there.’ She went round the side and found, under the pink and mint neon STARLIGHT ROOM, another pair of doors, loosely latched and shifting in the wind. Without a thought she put her eye to the gap, where the paint was slick with rain. Whatever she saw in there made her take one startled pace backwards then run away as fast as a b-girl can.

  EIGHTEEN

  It Takes Place in a Vacuum

  Some days the shadow operators vanished the moment daylight fell on them. Others, they fluttered up to meet it, swimming about delightedly in the air above her desk. Their behaviour was as opaque to the assistant as hers was to them. They predated the human. They were a form of life you found everywhere: but what they did before human beings arrived in the Galaxy to make use of them, no one knew, not even the shadow operators themselves. If you asked them they grew shy and thoughtful.

  ‘It’s so nice you’re interested, dear.’

  She asked them to list her some names from the files.

  They offered Magellan, Radtke and dos Santos. Nevy Furstenberg and John K. Matsuda. They offered the notorious Ephraim Shacklette. They offered MP Renoko.

  ‘Him,’ the assistant said.

  MP Renoko, aka Ronostar Productions, aka Dek Echidna, had begun stripping the assets of Madame Shen’s circus late in 2400, after five consecutive quarters of mixed results. Thereafter you could follow the paper trail across the Halo from South Hemisphere, New Venusport. It led to FUGA-Orthogen — once a thriving EMC subsidiary with interests in mining and recovery, now a single empty Lost & Found office on a badlands planet in the long tail of niche tourism — then trickled away into meaningless local eddies. It was commerce at the edge of viscosity, until Renoko quietly began buying items back. Now he was moving them around under junk certification, using the same ship that had hauled the Halo’s favourite travelling entertainment from planet to planet.

  ‘So what are we looking at?’ she asked the shadow operators.

  They were unable to say at this time.

  The assistant, who had expected nothing more, took herself off to New Venusport. The travel lounges were rammed with people trying to get home. War had upped the ante on their lives.

  South Hemisphere, NV: underlit smoke poured all night from cheap-and-dirty chemical launchers humping payload into secure EMC orbits. Particle jockeys sweated out their radiation meds under the blackened hulls of K-ships. In the breakers’ yards, indentured New Men — without benefit of a pair of leather gloves, let alone
a lead suit — crawled by the thousand over scrapped Alcubiere warpers the size of small towns. Everywhere you looked, you saw machines which would, if their science was turned off for a second, revert instantly to a slurry of nanotech and a few collapsing magnetic fields. Ionisation flickered through clouds of sulphur dioxide and radioactive steam.

  What remained of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant — aka The Circus of Pathet Lao — could be found on three acres of fenced-off cement between the rocket pits and the sea. Yard machinery rose up on one side, rippling with bad physics; on the other it was sand dunes steadily absorbing an encrustation of abandoned cabana units, beach bars and hotels — Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge. The fences dripped with condensation, rattling in an offshore wind. Beneath the chemical signature of the yards, the assistant smelled only salt and dust. Her tailoring, attentive to every breeze, picked up particle dogs, scrambled EMC traffic, low-grade electromagnetic haze from unshielded operations. Otherwise, nothing. Then a K-ship ripped towards the marshalling orbit at Mach 40, its line of fusion product lighting everything in the near ultraviolet: a few alien poppies were revealed growing in the earth at the base of a gate, their crumpled metallic flowerheads nodding in the disturbed air. Life at the circus, NV style. Over in a distant corner of the field stood a three-fin short-hauler, stubby and used-looking, its image still rippling with the heat of a recent re-entry. Nova Swing!

  She listened in to its internal comms for a moment. Well, well, she thought. Now you have some talking to do, you three. She was in no hurry. She smiled to herself and sat down not far from the Deleuze Motel; watched the ocean waves break white on luminous indigo, and let a handful of sand run through her fingers. She wondered if she should call herself Queenie, Aspodoto or Tienes mi Corazon. Roxie. Mexie. Maybe Backstep Cindy.

  After a minute or two the acid-clouds parted to reveal stars in subtly different arrangements to the ones she knew.

  A minute or two after that, something shot quickly left to right along the front of a breaking wave eighty metres out, then, half-submerged in turbulence, nosed its way up through the swash on to the beach. A corroded bronze pressure tank — tubular, perhaps three metres by one and recently daubed with crude Jaumann absorbers in a resin base — it featured inlaid circuits and a lateral line of deep blue LEDs. A single quartz port glittered at one end. In a universe boiling with algorithms, anything can behave as if it’s alive; harder, the assistant thought, to look intelligent, even when you were. The mortsafe, if that’s what it was, hunted for some moments through twenty or thirty degrees of arc, as if trying to orient itself; then — hovering three or four feet above the beach, swaying with an oiled resilience in every gust of wind — it slipped inland between the dunes, heading towards the Nova Swing.

  ‘Wait!’ the assistant called.

  Her tailoring redlined, but something much closer than the ship had already begun dismantling it. Whoever it was, they were too quick for her. Structured magnetic fields reached in through the doped protein meshes around her brainstem and squeezed firmly for eight or nine milliseconds. They let her stagger away, choking and dancing. She could feel herself kicking up the sand. Seizure-sites propagated across the cortex in cascades. Proprioception went down. Target acquisition went down. Autonomic functions went down. Everything went down. It wasn’t a Preter Coeur kill. It was something EMC. Just before the system folded, IR and active sonar acquired what she thought might be a human figure leaning over her. After that she got: sensation of a door closing: sensation of something frying in the spinothalamic tract: a smell like rendered fat. Just illusions. All she felt as she fell was a kind of shame. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before.

  When she woke up it was still night. The tide was a little further out. She was alone. The smell of burnt rocket fuel blew over the dunes and for a moment she interpreted that, too, as synaesthesia from some cortical fuck-up they had done to her. Best to lie in the marram, fitting and retching while the self-repair kits crawled dispassionately over her brain. She felt worse than at any time since she came out of the chopshop tank in Preter Coeur with her new career and her specialised arm. Eventually she got to her feet and staggered into the Deleuze Motel, where she found a ballroom full of drifted sand. Two low-wattage bulbs alive in the chandelier. At the back, by the bar, three old men in white flat caps and polyester trousers, staring at her. They were playing dice. They had a crate of alcopops and two or three bottles of Black Heart barrel proof rum, which they were drinking on its own, no ice.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ the assistant said. ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll give me some of that.’

  Impasse van Sant had come down the Carling Line as just another speck in fifty tonnes of deep-frozen trade gametes. Sperm and egg futures were declining: passed hand to hand for two hundred years, often as a sweetener in some more interesting deal, van Sant was finally thawed out as farmworker potential. After that he couldn’t seem to settle. It was a common enough syndrome in the Halo. Dedicated before birth to the gods of irreversible flight and determined-but-unpredictable motion, Imps now stared into empty space and whispered:

  ‘Are you out there?’

  No answer. Then a momentary flicker, very quick and faint. In response, the research vessel sorted quantum events. Software injected the system with wide-band noise, pumping it by stochastic resonance into the story of some brief imbalance in the vacuum energy. Data built suddenly, crested, fell away fast. The number of objects in local space had suddenly doubled. Half a parsec towards the Core, something banked like a white wing, caught tilted up against the dark as if on some other errand. He didn’t know how many times she had slipped away from him like this before he had time to speak, a huge frail orphan in the substrate of the universe. There were days when he couldn’t bear the possibility. Today was one of them. Whatever shit he shot with Rig Gaines over beer and table tennis, Imps knew he was kidding himself when he thought he could get by in outer space on his own. He worked feverishly to reel her in, his expression suddenly soft and desperate in the old-fashioned glow of the control panel.

  ‘Hello?’ he called into the dark. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello.’

  His heart raced. He tried to think of some way to extend their previous conversations; something certain to keep her attention.

  ‘What would you be,’ he said, ‘if you could be one other thing?’

  ‘One thing?’

  ‘One other thing.’

  She turned restlessly in the vacuum. Her shadow fell across him, elegant, high aspect ratio, one thousand metres tip to tip. Sometimes she presented like this, as feathers. Others it would be plasma, superconductors, a tangle of magnetic fields around which raced particles of all energies. Every so often she chose a thick cold slab of flesh instead, it rippled like a manta ray. As if to acknowledge the problems of such diversity, and of the question itself, she answered:

  ‘I never knew what I was anyway.’

  ‘You don’t know what you were?’

  ‘I was something but I didn’t know what, even then.’

  She thought about it. ‘Even then I was on a journey back to something. It was a long time ago,’ she said eventually. ‘If I knew what I was then, that’s what I’d choose to be.’

  ‘You’ve already been something else?’

  ‘I can’t explain.’

  ‘I was never anything but myself. I was always locked in.’

  But she wouldn’t help him with that, not this time. In the end she whispered bleakly: ‘We all make bad decisions.’

  Just then a random pulse of energy shuddered across the face of the K-Tract. A tenuous shell of something — less than gas, more than nothing, dark matter like a kind of ghost velvet — expanded into the local universe. ‘Oh look!’ she called. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ She manoeuvred herself to face it, her hundred-metre tip feathers curling and separating. Meanwhile the wavefront penetrated the hull of van Sant’s tub, giving rise to events of such subtle
ty they couldn’t be detected. It touched his face light as lovers’ fingers, and left the wiring confused.

  ‘Someone went in there,’ he heard her whisper.

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘It wasn’t so long ago. I wondered if I should go too.’

  Exotic radiation bathed them both, to different ends, for twenty minutes. By the time van Sant emerged from its trailing edge, she had resumed her restless patrol of empty space, and he was alone again.

  Don’t go! Imps wanted to shout.

  He always failed to ask her so many things.

  Who are you? What are you? Why are we out here, the two of us? What’s the nature of your dialogue with the universe? What happens next? Is it possible for species as different as us to fuck?

  All of these questions but one were in fact asked of himself, and might have been rephrased: Will I ever go home?

  None of them mattered if you were involved with R.I. Gaines. Everything Rig ever did implied that the real action was happening elsewhere. Some other domain of possibilities was being actively explored alongside this one. Gaines’ motives were so obscure — his projects went so unreported, even in the hierarchy of EMC — that in the end only your own part in an op could be described (for the same reason, it could hardly be called a ‘contribution’, since you had no idea what it contributed to). Every time Imps’ alien visitor appeared, she forced him to query not why Rig Gaines wanted him out here in the middle of nowhere, but what facet of his so-called personality had prompted him to agree to come there in the first place.