Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  Laid out under stark light like dirty ice rings round a methane giant, the vast orbit at Mycenae had been for years a destination in itself, drawing tourists from as far away as Bell Laboratories and Anais Anais. The biggest collection of dead people in the universe, it broke up across a day, only to reassemble not long afterwards just outside the system’s heliosheath; flowing away from there into interstellar space, a broad slow river. The K-ships, darting in and out of it like kingfishers, caught nothing: what they saw was not what they got —

  In the cold and dark over New Venusport, the hulks blinked out one by one. Last to go: the tiny cockleshell containing Bobby and Martha, along with the outbreak of rogue code known as Bella. The little boy, who didn’t remember much, assumed his present condition was a phase everyone went through. Life, enticing and inexplicable by turns, had already demonstrated its weirdness. One thing was certain, Bobby thought: you were out the other side of most things in a year. The women knew better. Since the events in her room Bella had been, in a sense, all three of them. Long before that, she had given up on the idea of knowledge: to her, the sarcophagus was as puzzling as the hallway of a house. Martha, meanwhile, alternating between panic and acceptance, awaited resolution.

  . . . Two feet long and not quite rigid, you had no faith a thing like that could penetrate anyone. It was more of a flag than a cock, something to wave at the world. Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Avtomat, the little girl who could crack anything. Frankie Machine and Murder Incorporated. The Markov Property. I get fish, the other says. Don’t go in the summerhouse! I can do something with my mind but for all things catch fire & flowers spring up, nothing else happens. You can keep a cock like that I wouldn’t want it near me. I like their legs better. Little boys, they like my stink but they’re afraid. ‘Is that what you want, hon?’ . . .

  As in all bad dreams, there were physical states forbidden to the assistant: in this case anything she had previously understood as movement.

  At the same time, generous degrees of freedom opened up in other directions. Through the physics of VF14/2b, her ‘life’ — whatever that had been — now lay open to her at all points and along all axes. She soon found herself looping easily and repeatedly into her own past —

  Saudade City on a wet Friday night. In the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, two agents and a wire jockey were servicing a client in the basement. The assistant watched her earlier self leaning in at the basement doorway, attracted by the energy and warmth of the interrogation, experiencing the nearest thing a person like her could feel to a companionable emotion. ‘Boys,’ she heard herself tease the interrogation team, ‘we must do this again!’

  She waited for herself to leave and then stepped into the room. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘my name is Pearlant —’ They stared at her puzzledly, their mouths falling open.

  South Hemisphere, New Venusport. She tracked herself down to the circus ground, where the empty motels shone with light rain in an offshore wind. There was no hurry, but as soon as she heard her prior self call out that way, the seagull cry of ‘Wait!’, that was the moment. Jump up out of the sand. Reach in through the doped protein meshes around the brainstem. Squeeze. Step away. Let those Kv12.2 expression issues do the work — seizure sites propagating across the cortex in cascades, autonomic functions going down one by one. It was supposed to keep her immobile long enough to talk. ‘Listen, honey, listen to me: don’t jump!’ She tried to get her own attention, instead she triggered a built-in EMC shutdown; someone was going to feel some shame over that in the morning.

  It was the same wherever she went —

  Toni Reno gaped and sweated as she came at him from out of time — Toni thought he was state of the art, but he proved to be wrong about that. Poor George the gene tailor in his little shop, both attracted and terrified by the engineered kairomones in her sweat, overcame his fear at last, clutched gratefully at her tits and dropped dead at her feet in the dark. Only a week or two before that, tissue had burst out of Enka Mercury’s armpit like dirty kapok. The assistant just had no luck with these people, and, in a way, even less with herself. She was present in the past: she had a real presence there. But as a communications strategy, communication could never work: not for a person like her. She just wasn’t built for it. No one seemed to understand that she was there to speak to them, that she really had something to say. She couldn’t control her anger at the people who had built her, she couldn’t control her anger at what Gaines had done to her, she couldn’t control her anger at herself. Her victims, meanwhile, couldn’t control their fear. It was a toxic mixture. To these soft targets — ambushed with a thorough, deft, cat-like thoughtlessness then left dismembered, eviscerated, dangling in the tailored but chaotic spacetime eddies of VF14/2b — she brought only the lifetime frustration of the manufactured thing. She was trying to warn everyone in her past about what was coming: but in the end her predictable contribution could only be a corpse and a patch of grainy, dark-bluish air in which the shadows fell at wrong angles because ordinary physics didn’t apply. All she achieved was to become the object of her own investigation, the mystery she could never solve.

  Those appointments she kept with herself — South Hemisphere NV; the Mambo Rey PostIndustrial Estate, Funene; the back stairs at SiteCrime, Uniment & Poe where the light dazzled down the stairwell like the light in a religious painting of Ancient Earth: what had they achieved in the end? Nothing. It turned out she didn’t even like herself. They couldn’t relate. They were too alike, the two of them. They were too surprised by one another’s speed and perfection not to react badly. Too chafed by one another’s obduracy to talk. She got the edge over that bitch self at New Venusport. Later, poor George’s corpse made her wonder if she’d gone too far.

  ‘Does a person like me kill things too easily?’ she remembered asking him in nicer times.

  . . . He opened my head and put in a hand. It was so gentle. I absolutely melted. After that killing yourself is easy, it’s the unthought known, toothpaste at the corner of the mouth, reflections on a false marble floor. Though as you abandon yr own viewpoint the world so rapidly loses coherence, proves so impossible to understand, that there’s nothing to be gained. Sign on a chemist shop: FA Strange. It’s FA Strange all right. I don’t get it, Michael said. Why should you? I said. Why should you get it, after all? . . .

  Anna’s earlier self was drawn to the summerhouse because the heat she felt in there was her own heat. She was angry in there. She was closer to her own surface. Her attention was easier to attract. But interference proved harder than oversight —

  Summer. Night. The feeling of a storm on the way. The Waterman house sits, as unweathered as an architect’s drawing, hot and airless in the river valley. It’s been a strange, lonely day. Anna Waterman looks at her own hands. She calls the cat. ‘James, you old fool!’ At nine, the phone rings. When she picks it up, expecting to hear her daughter Marnie, there’s no one at the other end. But just as she puts down the receiver she hears an electronic scraping noise and a distant voice shouts: ‘Don’t go in there! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ Within half an hour, the summerhouse has burst into flames and she sees herself — a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking floral print — running towards her from the silent conflagration. Consternation is on this woman’s face. ‘Go away!’ she calls. ‘Go away from here!’

  A few days later, prone to weep suddenly after a debilitating session in Chiswick with Dr Helen Alpert, Anna wakes to moonlight and Moroccan air, with a feeling that someone has just spoken. She enters the river, and the world is suddenly unknown and unknowable. Everything is so full of mystery as she walks back that magic night, to find the summerhouse on fire again! Beneath the sound of the flames, she’s sure she hears a voice. It calls her name, but all she can say in return is:

  ‘Michael? Is this you?’

  So it went, every time Anna tried to communicate. ‘Anna!’ she would shout. ‘Listen to m
e! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ But Anna seemed so dull. She was always so obsessed with herself. You couldn’t get her attention, and that was what made you so impatient, the farce of shouting, ‘Anna! Anna!’ until you were hoarse.

  In addition, physical limitations seemed to apply. The past was clear enough to see, but you felt as if you were engaging with it from too far away. Sometimes speech failed completely, and Anna could make herself known only in other ways, via the weather, for instance, or showers of emotionally-charged objects. It was as if the universe she now inhabited had suffered brain damage, and was experiencing a confusion not between different senses but between different states of energy and matter. She was reduced to a kind of practical synaesthesia. She was reduced to the use of theatre, metaphor, symbols and emotions. She tried eveything, but remained an epiphenomen of her own life, a figure distantly semaphoring tragic news from a hill. She made a nightly beacon of the summerhouse, but her earlier self didn’t get the message. She made a dozen or so copper-coloured poppies spring up on the Downs in the morning sunshine, but the language of flowers simply didn’t work as well as the language of language, and after a while Anna saw that her efforts were only making things worse.

  Meanwhile, her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left side of her ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee. Her feet were bare. Her arms, outstretched either side of her head, curved towards the ceiling; her hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. From this awkward, uncomfortable viewpoint she was forced to stare out into a dazzling nave of light, across a shiny black surface full of reflections. She was toppling into that space and at the same time through it. Everything smelled of electricity. People were pushing strange equipment around. Or they came up close and began talking about her as if she wasn’t there. ‘We’re catching it in the Planck time,’ they told one another. ‘You can’t see it for longer because it’s already in its own future, already something different.’ They said: ‘Where does the cat fit in?’

  Laughter. Then:

  ‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl.’

  It was just like being in the bloody hospital. She hated them, and whatever ghastly world they belonged to. But worse: over a period of time that might have been seconds or years, she became aware that there was someone else trapped in there with her. Sometimes Anna could feel her bones grate together, there was so little room for them both. It wasn’t James the cat, though she knew he was inside her too, prowling about and layering his own motives over hers. A growing sense of tension and imprisonment pushed everything else out of her mind, and her attempts to communicate with her earlier self ceased. She could hear a voice, distant-sounding but quite clearly inside her own head. It raged and complained. Whoever it was — whatever it was — they fell and fell together. They were aware of one another. Everything became a dull struggle over the body, or what they thought of as the body . . .

  . . . I would want to have love if I knew what that was. You can get a patch for it, it’s more like an app. It’s a mood, very economical, very full of emotion, the love patch down at Uncle Zip for Saturday night. Mary Rose, Moroccan Rose, Mexicali Rose, Rose of Tralee, Rrose Selavi. Immordino, Gianetta, Ona Lukoszaite. There’s evidence, Dr Alpert said, of a couple of tiny strokes, nothing to worry about. Did I lose my memory so I could lose my memories? Put that way it seems not just possible but ordinary . . .

  Alone in the Tub, sucked towards the lee shore of the Kefahuchi Tract by long, gentle gravitational swells, Impasse van Sant lost contact with the management of his little project. Along with Rig Gaines went Imps’s last link to what might laughingly be called humanity. In the absence of supervision, he allowed the research to lapse and instead watched war pursue itself across the halo media:

  Stars tricked-up as nova bombs. Minds tricked-out with logic bombs. Displaced planetary populations on the move. Duelling gamma jets at 50 million degrees Kelvin. Battleships drifting, holed and untenanted, in clouds of rosy gas. K-ships flickering in and out of it all in time-frames no one could imagine, states of consciousness no one could conceive controlled by mathematics no one understood. In the absence of Gaines’ mystery weapon, EMC couldn’t dictate the rules of the game, and had already begun to give ground to a loose alliance of aliens whose motives remained unclear and whose names for themselves all ended in x. To this feverish expenditure of energy, van Sant foresaw only the worst of ends: the boys from Earth, driven out of themselves for one perfect moment by psychodramas of blood, risk, terror, and, hey, being the real victim here, would soon be as desperate as children to be fetched back in again. Even that made them human: unlike Imps, who all his life had seen himself not just as dissociated but as protected in some unfair way by his dissociation.

  Just then the void behind him opened like a huge door. It was filled with ships. There were hundreds of millions of them, a fleet of lights assembling itself from all over the Beach. They streamed in from as far away as Sector 47, da Silva’s Cloud and The Mokite Bench, pooled briefly among the chaotic attractors and gravity-rips of Radio Bay, then poured towards the Kefahuchi Tract. Under magnification they proved to be all sizes and ages, from massy spacetime warpers to last year’s one-man escape pod. All they had in common was their condition. They were hulks. They were banged-up, rusty and half-disassembled yet seamed with brand-new welds. They came trailing clouds of smart autorepair media. Out in the lead raced a single three-fin Dynaflow HS-HE cargo hauler, tubby, brass-looking, brought to a dull polish in some places by particle ablation, streaked with bird shit in others as if it had waited out the last forty years in the second-hand lot of some noncorporate field. On its nose someone had stencilled in letters five feet high the legend SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, then under that, smaller: Nova Swing. The space around its stern was fogged with ironising radiation a relentlessly violet colour, through which could be seen — shuttling in tight, complex and only partially visible orbits, orbits comprising the propulsion topology itself — an unknown number of outboard engines.

  ‘The fuck,’ Imps asked himself, ‘is happening here?’

  On they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, flowing out of the dark and parting around the research vessel, of which they took little more notice than the void itself. SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, its hull shuddering with the approach of some catastrophic event — the phase change, the leap to the next stable state — aimed itself at the heart of the singularity, which seemed to shift and boil in response with realtime bursts of high-energy photons. The alien engines shuttled faster and faster, producing curious slick pulses that presented to the observer not as light but as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth, a vibration in the walls, a perpetual but perpetually decaying echo effect in the context of things. The fleet paused a second, hung in silhouette, then hurled itself in.

  For a moment after they had vanished, the vacuum still seemed inhabited. Then it was nothing again. Imps van Sant stared into the eyepieces of his obsolete instruments. Deep in explicatory failure, he had no way of placing himself with regard to what he had witnessed. Man, he thought. Who were those guys? They seemed full of madness and a direct rejection of anything he might have called humanity. It made him lonelier than ever. He was considering this when empty space whispered at him.

  ‘Hello?’ it said.

  She hung out there, a kilometre long and clean as a herring gull over a windy beach. You looked at her and you could taste salt, ice cream, iodine. Feel for a second fully inside yourself.

  ‘I can be anything I want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want that. I want to be the one thing I am.’

  And when van Sant couldn’t think of an answer:

  ‘What do you remember best?’

  ‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t a regular kid.’ He rummaged through the litter of empty beer cans,
broken table tennis balls and repro 1970s wank mags around his pilot chair until he found some real estate brochures. ‘I don’t remember anything, but I want to live somewhere like this.’ Holding up a picture so she could see, a Sandra Shen tableau entitled, Airstream trailers beside the Salton Sea, 2001. ‘Or this,’ he said: picture of two Japanese-looking people fucking in surf. She’s wearing a wedding dress. In the background, mountains. ‘Or I quite like this.’ A wooden house with a pier going out into a lake: three brown pelicans diving for fish. Then his favourite, the ice-cream parlour at Roswell, New Mexico, Old Earth. Pastel neon mints and pinks against lightly etched aluminium columns: a holy twilight in the parking lot.

  ‘It’s the real McCoy,’ Imps said.

  ‘I don’t recall anything like that,’ she said. Then, almost immediately: ‘What would you be if you could be one other thing?’

  ‘One other thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d be gone from here.’

  ‘I want to go home too,’ she said. ‘Let’s start soon.’

  Just then, off in a corner of the Tub’s main display, as in some hallucination accompanying neurological disorder, there bloomed a soft white explosion like a puff of fibres or a cloud of spores. It was low yield, less than a light-day away in the direction of Radio Bay. Not quite as far out as Imps van Sant, but far enough. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ For a moment he thought the war had caught up with them. On examination, though, it proved to be just some abandoned old research tool which had gone mad after a million years staring into nothing and blown itself up. This close to the Tract, it was always happening. What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories?

  . . . I said, you made your life a description of the present moment, the warm neon of pizza huts and pubs, blurred by a slight rain and repeating in every shallow puddle; she said she could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, no one believed that. She says: what is time anyway? Don’t give me that, I know what time is. Don’t, whatever you do, you bitch, give me that. Night’s here. It’s about being a meme. I light up in RF, radar and batshit 27-40 kHz, immediately get a response from the dunes, come in on the sonar ping & there she is: it’s love patch, baby, love patch. In this world we’re the remains of our own humanity. Don’t jump! I’m calling. I’m calling out to her, The summerhouse! I’m calling, Don’t start all this! Don’t become part of this! She doesn’t hear. Anyway all we can do is kill. Elise, Ellis and Elissa, the Blister Sisters. Elissa Mae. Ruby Mae. Lula Mae. Ruby Tuesday. Mae West and May Day. She’s the One, Two Dollar Radio, Flamingo Layne. KM, LM, KLF. A Member of the Wedding. Spanky. Misty. The best little engine in the world. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Olga Tovyevski. M3 in Orion. ‘Sabiha Gokce’. Pauline Gower and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Sfascamenta. My name is Pearlant! My name is Pearlant and I come from the future! Never mind darling she tells the other one. Please try to be a bit calmer. At least we’re alive. It’s not much but it’s better than being dea