Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  ‘And?’

  He smiled.

  ‘And she’s you,’ he said.

  The assistant stared at him without replying. Her nose caught the smell of bird plumage, musty and deep. She recalled how the alien lay on the bed looking up at her helplessly, surrounded by drifts of its own feathers and whispering, ‘I am here. I am.’ They had drilled its skull. What a place, she thought, to end your weird life. As if she was considering evidence the subtlety of which would be lost on Epstein, she walked to the window and stared down into the street. If she ordered up the right combination of overlays, she could examine Toni Reno both in his present condition and as he had been when she was first called to the alley off Tupolev. She consulted her forearm, down which the ideograms flowed Chinese black and chiminy red, solid and definite in the grainy crime-tourism air. It was raining again, but now the rain took no account at all of the hanging man. It rained through him. Epstein came and stood at her shoulder so that he could look into the street too.

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with this,’ he said. ‘The footage goes straight to your office, my people hold off on a report.’

  When she failed to reply, but only gave him that oblique smile of hers, he knew this was the most difficult part of his day. Even the fifth floor managers at Sitecrime were frightened of her. They said she had no personality, they said she had no empathy: they said she didn’t understand people. Epstein knew all these things to be true. What happened to him next would depend on how skilfully he could back away from what he had discovered.

  ‘I’m just a uniform,’ he emphasised. ‘This is your issue.’

  The assistant did not dispute that.

  All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Frand-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign — including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae — from day one. In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV.

  Rig Gaines, suddenly uncomfortable with events, not to say his place in them, rode the Uptown Six down to Alyssia Fignall’s archeological project, hoping he might persuade her to leave the planet with him before things took their inevitable turn for the worse. He didn’t imagine she would.

  The weather was hot, her house empty. In the cloister he found a note she had left: ‘Rig, when the rains come, something beautiful happens here.’ It didn’t look like rain. The stones were hot to the touch. Rather than arriving with the sunlight, heat seemed to generate itself between the eight rhyolite pillars around the fountain and spray upwards from there. Gaines sat all afternoon waiting for Alyssia, watching the glare move across the smooth oval cobbles. At four o’ clock, the sky clouded over. After a few grand but silent flashes of lightning, it seemed nothing else would happen. But by five it was pouring with rain.

  ‘Jesus, Alyssia,’ Gaines said. He went out to look for her, and was promptly drenched.

  The town square he found empty but for some children, who ran about in front of him laughing and calling ‘La Cava! La Cava!’ in excited voices. He followed them into the covered market. That was deserted too. All over the Halo, people sell each other ordinary things, from empty bottles to leather belts. Here the stalls offered drip trays and shoes, ten inch holograms of very fat children wearing lace. Then loaves of bread like large smooth stones on a beach. Then meat. Strips, strings and slivers of meat. Long thin slices of meat hung up like translucent shower-curtains, with a sour iron smell. ‘Hey kids,’ called Gaines, temporarily unable to locate them. ‘La Cava!’ they called. The market was a dark, confusing maze. A workman’s café offered sesos rebosadas, sautéed brains, eaten standing up. His nostrils were full of that idea until the children led him into the light on the other side, and a different smell took over. Rain poured from the market eaves. The kids beckoned. Gaines stood looking out but suddenly found it impossible either to move or to describe what was happening in the second, smaller square which now revealed itself.

  It was under two or three feet of water. The town sewers had backed up. Thigh-deep in putrid water, in which circled all kinds of waste from foecal matter to shattered packing crates, people had gathered to dance. Their clothes, stinking and soaked, clung to them. They were wading and chanting in groups, lifting their legs high, bending down to splash each other with diluted shit, as if this was an afternoon at the beach. Some of them were kneeling in it. Some were neither kneeling nor standing, but were leaning into one another, clasped together, obviously fucking. Gaines had his ideas about the world, but none of them covered this. He saw Alyssia right in there with them, laughing and beckoning to him. The children were tugging at his hands and grinning. Gaines pulled back as hard as he could and eventually broke free. As he ran off through the market, he thought he could hear a low booming sound somewhere deep under his feet.

  It rained for eight hours more. Gaines didn’t want to sleep. He spent all night in the cloister, piped into an FTL router he had left in orbit; then, when the rain stopped and the sun came up, sat by the fountain until the morning heat began to dry him out. A little after ten, Alyssia Fignall arrived back. She looked tired, but clean and happy. She seemed full of energy. ‘Rig, you’ll burn up out here,’ she laughed, taking his arm. ‘Come in and have breakfast. I bought some bread in the market.’

  Gaines shook his head.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  When he didn’t answer, she let go of his arm and said: ‘I knew it. I knew it! Rig, this is how they celebrate their contract with the world.’ She had been looking forward to seeing him, but he didn’t understand anything. The town was another kind of spiritual engine. How could she explain? Under the market lay a chain of limestone caves. It was typical karst country. Run-off from the nearby hills filled the system up within an hour of the rain starting, but as soon as the water reached a certain level some kind of airlock released itself. ‘The system drains as fast as it fills. The sewage runs away. The rain washes everyone clean, then they hold a wonderful party in the town, with fireworks and food, to celebrate. Everyone clean and fresh and in their best clothes. They’re dirty then they’re clean again, Rig, don’t you get it?’

  She pulled at his arm again, but he wouldn’t move.

  ‘How is that different to what the original inhabitants did, up on the hilltop there, whoever they were, a hundred thousand years ago? How is it different to your fucking war?

  ‘Come on, Rig, how different is it?’

  Gaines stared at her. A year and a half ago, she had written to him, ‘The bird cries here grow stranger and stranger. I sit and count the pillars around the fountain, while the tourist rockets lug themselves into the air above me like suitcases full of cheap souvenirs. I love it so. Oh Rig, please come!’

  ‘I just need to deal with this call,’ he said.

  Alyssia gave him a look of death, to which he replied with one of his vague smiles. ‘I can see that there’s a lot of difference between us on this,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re disappointed.’ Suddenly the dial-up had his full attention. ‘What? What do you mean, “changed again”?’ Just as he got rid of whoever it was, the Uptown Six, which had been skulking around the Panamax L2 point since it arrived, tapped its fusion drive briefly and dropped out of orbit, coming to a silent halt fifty feet above the house. Alyssia stared uncomprehendingly up at it, then at Gaines.

  ‘Get that foul thi
ng out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it near me. Not today of all days.’

  She walked into the house.

  Gaines still kept a hologram of Alyssia aged fourteen, wearing the uniform of some EMC youth movement, always laughing out at him, always seeking to make contact. Twenty hours after she refused to leave Panamax IV, he stood in the PEARLANT control room at a loss. Activity had dropped off sharply. Since his previous visit, Case’s team, defeated by ancient labyrinthine physics, had abandoned the containment project: instead they’d pitched a tent of filmy blue halogen light at the centre of the space, around which knots of specialists gathered to stare thoughtfully at the figure which now occupied it.

  Pearl had completed her long fall, dawn to dewy eve. She lay on her side on the allotropic carbon deck, one knee raised, the upper part of her body curved at the waist and propped up on her elbow. In the corner of her mouth appeared a humanising trace of what looked like dried toothpaste. Something had happened to her on the way down, as a result of which she now looked partly like a woman in a ruched metallic gown around five hundred years old, and partly like a cat. It was a different part every time Gaines blinked: sometimes the whole of the upper body was wrong, sometimes only one arm or leg. Limbs, skin, armature, nothing fitted together — the cat’s long-muzzled facial structure under the woman’s flesh, then the other way around. At the same time her eyes — when they were human eyes — had a film of hypnotic calm, even amusement, as if she was asking some unanswerable question, or as if you had caught her in some very sophisticated form of déshabillé you could both enjoy; while the cat’s fur collected the light at the edges of the image, leading your gaze out into tenuousness, turbulence and eventual transparency.

  It was hard not to see the resulting chimera as a statement — a picture or statue, an out-take from one of the vanished religiocultural pantheons of Ancient Earth. Though it seemed immobile when you first saw it, the figure was slowly writhing and moving, struggling not to become one thing or the other but to retain both styles of presentation at once. Gaines found himself silenced by the sheer effort of will involved. He felt privy to something no one should be able to see, the hidden mayhem of events prior to the real, the effort to remain complex in the face of the decohering and literalising forces of the universe. Beyond the arena of this struggle — beyond the knots of observers with their insufficiently imaginative physics, their failed intuitions — the light thinned out quickly to grey; a darkness higher up gave the illusion of unlimited space against which events as consistently weird as this might unfold.

  Gaines stood there shaking his head and Case asked him, ‘What do you think now?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Gaines said.

  ‘Things we can tell you,’ Case offered: ‘this isn’t the Aleph, but the Aleph’s still present.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We had an operator go back over the data. What it found was this: fifty minutes before the original convulsion, the Aleph began connecting itself to the maze —’ Here, Case brought up hologram schematics supposed to represent the six-and-four-fifths-dimension topology of the maze — ‘specifically to Sector VF14/2b, a structure of tunnels flooded with highly tuned superconducting liquids.’

  ‘I remember VF14,’ Gaines said, who had come through there with Emil Bonaventure’s group in, he thought, 2422 or 23. ‘Emil believed it was focused on the Tract.’ Not that they had had time to think anything much. The tunnels were fifty feet in diameter, tiled, dank as a disused subway, curving in directions that made no sense. In some places the stuff was like water. Others it ate into their excursion suits, or floated through them, or slushed around like warm saliva from someone else’s mouth. All he remembered was Johnnie Izzet vomiting blood into the headpiece of his suit, and someone else shouting, ‘Fucking shit!’ Johnnie’s blood coagulated instantly it touched the visor, as if it had come out in some transition state. Then the whole tube was alive with ionising radiation, along with something that sounded like music but couldn’t have been. Every direction was the wrong direction. Things were moving behind them where they couldn’t see. Emil and Rig and two other men tried to drag Johnnie away but he was dead before they made a hundred yards. ‘He thought it might be for measuring time in there.’

  ‘Not measuring, it turns out,’ Case said. ‘Manipulating. The Aleph sits here for half a million years. It has interesting physics, very different to ours —’

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘ — but it does nothing with them until it brings Pearl here. We’re not sure if it was waiting for her, or went looking for her, or if it found her by accident.’ He gestured at the superposition state wrestling with its own deep refusal of identity in front of them. ‘Did it intend this to happen? We suspect not. What you see now isn’t the Aleph. It isn’t the woman, either. The two of them are giving rise to some third kind of thing.’

  Gaines, still seeing Johnnie Izzet’s blackened faceplate and hearing the music of non-Abelian states at room temperature, made himself say:

  ‘Where does the cat fit in?’

  For a moment, Case looked puzzled.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Our best guess is that it isn’t really a cat. Any more than she’s really a woman. You know?’

  ‘I didn’t think physics did metaphors.’

  ‘Here’s the problem. This thing, whatever it is, has all the hallmarks of an emergent property. It isn’t complete, but it’s already self-determining. It’s already loose. It’s in the labyrinth again, operating the VF14/2b anomalies as a machine. It’s off on some downward causation adventure, separating itself from what you or I would think of as time.’

  ‘Why?’ Gaines said.

  ‘Because there’s something it doesn’t like about its own past.’

  ‘Reinvention never looked so hard,’ was Gaines’ opinion. He suspected you would have to have fairly low esteem to put yourself through this. ‘What if we brought the policewoman here,’ he suggested.

  Case shook his head to indicate disbelief.

  ‘Keep me out of it if you do,’ he said. Then he laughed.

  ‘You know, the game has changed to such a degree I doubt anything would happen? It hasn’t asked for her since before you were last here. It’s interested in something else now.’

  After they had come to an agreement, the assistant left Epstein to it and drove around the city all day in her Cadillac car. Strange forces were at work. She remembered everyone she killed, but she didn’t remember killing Toni Reno. Eventually, midnight or gone, she turned up at the Tango du Chat with George the tailor on her arm. George looked under the weather, but he allowed her to buy him several drinks and paid real attention to everything she said. It was quiet at the Tango du Chat. The music was over for the night. Edith Bonaventure, who owned the place, sat behind the bar reading one of her father’s diaries. People came in for a late drink, then when they saw the assistant — who was mixing Black Heart rum and bishopsweed, giving everyone those louche amused stares of hers — went out again without having one.

  At around two thirty am she asked George:

  ‘Do you think a person like me can forget killing someone?’

  She began to tell him all the other things she couldn’t remember about herself. For her, she said, talking to George was like talking to a doctor. It was a release. ‘Someone like you knows everything about someone like me.’

  George knew nothing, except that in her present form she had come out of a chopshop tank in Preter Coeur. What he didn’t get was who else had been involved. SportCrime? EMC? Whatever she had been originally, he thought, the dice were loaded against her from that point in the story. Some bunch of charlatans had reinscribed her as a cruel joke. Fourteen-year-old coders and cut-boys, ripped on growth hormone from a native lemur species. He could imagine the smell of their fried food and café électrique. Radio Retro, your Station to the Stars, blaring reconstructed Oort Country tunes across the workshop while they tuned her, laying in a second nervous s
ystem on self-organising nanofibres, throttling up her reflexes, deciding whether to put in radar, already placing bets on her in fights she was too illegal to be entered for. She would never remember who she had been.

  ‘At birth,’ he told her, ‘this is my guess, you were already thirty, thirty-two years old?’

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘This is why I like you, George.’

  Two years later, she said, after a cooling down period to see if she could still be described as human, they had allowed her on stage with all the other walking psychodramas. ‘In my case, the investigated and the investigators.’ She struck an attitude. ‘All those, George, who walk in the shadow. All those who carry a gun. First SportCrime then SiteCrime. I had a hard time adjusting, but I was soon restoring order. I was expected to do well.’ She drank some more rum. ‘George, what’s my reward?’ She grinned at him. ‘It is a wank in the twink tank. A once a week wank,’ she said. ‘It’s very upmarket.’

  ‘Come out of a tank, you spend your life trying to get back in one.’

  She didn’t know about that, she said. ‘But you quickly see that every context has another context wrapped around it, and another one round that.’

  This made her laugh restlessly. A few minutes later, she abandoned the gene tailor to his drink and went out to where the camber of the street tilted her Cadillac into the kerb, its white faux-leather ragtop slicked with fine rain. She got in, moving with the care of all those who are bagged. Started its big, reliable V8 engine and sat looking along Straint. Radio on, she thought. The night was yellow. The narrow perspective of the street phosphoresced away in front of her beneath neon signs — Strait Cuts, New Nueva Cuts, Ambiente Hotel — all the way to the Event site. She would end this night like many others, at the Event site under Kefahuchi stars, staring out across the waste lots and the lonely lovers struggling in the backs of cars just like hers, to where physics outdid even her for strangeness: enabling, for an hour, rest. Liminal zones were her forte, she had boasted to George the tailor. She was a liminal zone herself.