Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

  ‘So you’ve seen these dice guys?’ Antoyne enquired.

  ‘In dreams I have, Fat Antoyne, yes. And when I say that, you need to stop looking at me, in your precise way you’re about to laugh at me. Because a dream is a kind of truth too.’ Antoyne laughed at that, and she pushed him off the bed. ‘They pay and they play, Fat Antoyne. And if they ever stop? Why, their faces slacken and crumple. And those old men weep.’

  Why was that, Antoyne wanted to know.

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘they look out into the same unmeaninged blackness as you and me.’

  Fat Antoyne looked at Irene and thought that he loved her. He wished he could be truer to her, and so did she. She said: ‘What they see, it’s beautiful but it’s dark. And there’s no way to know what it is, not even for them.’

  Just then, alerts rang softly through the ship, and Liv Hula’s voice came out of the speakers.

  ‘We’re here,’ she said.

  Although, she added, she didn’t know where here was.

  MP Renoko’s co-ordinates, a skein of figures and symbols compressing eleven dimensions to a single point in the dark interstellar medium, at first revealed nothing: then an orphaned asteroid drifting towards the Tract, into which it would be absorbed after an uneventful journey of less than half a million years. ‘We’ve got a structure of some sort in orbit around it,’ Liv Hula was able to confirm. And then: ‘It’s a wreck.’

  Later, as she steered an eva suit into the dark, a single riding light glimmered to no purpose against the dim yellow rim of the asteroid. Data flickered in her helmet head-ups. ‘No activity,’ she said. It was as she expected. A very old nuclear powerplant could be detected inside, towards the prow of the wreck. It was lightly shielded, and had been designed with no controls or moving parts, as a single mass, like an Oklo reactor. At the stern end, chemical engines and a Dynaflow driver: first-class equipment bolted on less than fifty years before. It looked as if someone had made an attempt to salvage the wreck, machining new parts at a base on the asteroid, then giving up when test-accelerations broke it in two. ‘I don’t know how they found it in the first place. Modern cosmology tells us that if there’s an arse-end of the universe it’s probably here.’ There was a click. ‘I’m approaching the fracture now.’ After that, communications would remain poor for the duration. Back on the Nova Swing, displays showed the feed from her headpiece cameras failing briefly before offering a series of uninterpretable still pictures of hull plates, detached structural members, and sudden voids which seemed to imply a completely different spatial relationship with the asteroid. Miles of cable had unreeled into space. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s interference in the pipe.’ Then: ‘I’m in now.’ A cross section of the wreck would have revealed brittle, organic-looking structures of tubules and fibres in faded blues, purples, pinks and browns. Inside, however, it was dark. Curiously leaning speleothems divided the passageways, which eventually gave way to more recognisable architecture. ‘Whatever this started out as, it wasn’t a ship. I think it might have been an animal. The ductwork and cabling was laid in by hand. Even the hull is a retrofit. It’s an afterthought. I’m getting near the reactor now.’ There was a long pause, then: ‘Jesus. Holes.’ Fifty million candlepower jittered around an undefinable space, throwing the shadows of pillars at odd angles on to the walls. ‘Are you getting this?’ She was in some sort of chamber. Wherever she looked, perfectly straight, perfectly circular tunnels, half a metre in diameter, had been bored through the ancient organic mass. They displayed the surface glaze of high-temperature events. ‘This is new. About the time of the salvage attempt, or perhaps just before. Fuck. What’s that? What’s that?’

  The light flew about the walls, then went out.

  A further silence.

  ‘Antoyne? Antoyne? Are you getting this? Antoyne, something’s in here with me.’

  Up in the pilot room of the Nova Swing, shadow operators whirled around, their hands to their faces, whispering:

  ‘What has she done now? Oh, what has she done now?’

  Fat Antoyne got out of the crew quarters and into the pilot chair without thinking. ‘Accept,’ he told the systems, and then, as the connexion burrowed its way up through his soft palate, causing him to sneeze then vomit without warning, remembered he was a man who had sworn never to fly again. The systems were all over him as soon as they sensed that. For a moment, struggling to shut down the navigational software, he felt as if he was seeing in too many directions at once. His identity was gone. He seemed to be throwing up endlessly. Everything stank of rubber, then – as the ship tried to calm him down – of gag-reflex dampers and some kind of lowgrade norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor it was pumping into him.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he told it thickly. ‘Just get me alongside.’

  pSi engines fired in the dark. At the same time, the vacuum took on an ionised look. Phase-changes rippled through a smart gas of nanodevices, billions of tiny cameras poured between the two vessels like milt. Despite that, Fat Antoyne, his connexion still partial and unstabilised, remained blind.

  ‘Hey, Liv,’ he said. ‘Liv?’

  Nothing. Then static in the pipe, and a distant noise like gak gak gak, the sound of the galaxy talking to itself in FTL bursts.

  ‘Hello? Antoyne?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Antoyne, I’m sorry. There’s nothing here. I got disoriented.’

  Wearily, Antoyne began to close down the pilot connexion.

  ‘Welcome to the club,’ he told Liv Hula.

  ‘Antoyne! Bodies! Bodies!’

  According to the names stencilled above their faceplates, she had found one third of the original salvage crew. Arranged as an element in a tableau installation or primitive waxwork, the title of which might be Death Site XIV or The Final Exploration, MENGER sat, legs splayed wide and shoulders slumped, at the base of the wall, the headpiece of her eva suit nodding forward, hands resting lightly between her thighs. SIERPINSKI, posed awkwardly on one knee as if proposing, proved in fact to be writing on his suit forearm the word ‘curvature’. Was it less an observation, Liv Hula wondered, than a warning? ‘There isn’t a mark on either of them,’ she informed the Nova Swing. Which of them had died first? The woman, certainly, seemed caught in the very act of giving up. Was there an element of solicitude, even tenderness, in the way SIERPINSKI leaned towards her? The tunnel, narrowing here and split into three by curiously marbled and streamlined pillars, curled over their heads like a frozen wave. Unwilling to look into the dulled faceplates, an act which would turn discovery into voyeurism, and frightened less that she would see MENGER & SIERPINSKI than that she wouldn’t, that the suits would prove to be abandoned and empty, Liv skirted them and went on. The dial-up remained open but silent, until she remarked suddenly, ‘The whole wreck’s been penetrated again and again from the outside. Hard to guess when.’ The closer she approached the reactor, the more openings she found. Here and there, yellow Tract light fell from one of them in a slanting beam on to ductwork or a sheaf of cable; low level ionising radiation lent everything else a bluish glow. She heard her own breath: behind that, Fat Antoyne coughing and choking into the dial-up pipe as he tried to extricate himself from the ship systems. Behind Antoyne, the familiar FTL interference everyone describes differently, but which Liv always heard as distant shouts of alarm. ‘I’ve got the reactor in front of me.’ It was in a containment vessel the size of a house, around which the original material of the wreck had tried to grow. Pipes led in and out of this fibrous crystalline mass. ‘They pumped water into a slurry of 235U, it vented itself as superheated steam on a five-hour cycle.’ She consulted her head-ups. ‘Decay levels indicate it was last operating in the Devonian period of Old Earth. It’s not attached to an output device. God knows what it was for. All it ever did was raise its own temperature a couple of hundred degrees. I think it might have been an environment for whatever lived here orginally.’ On the Nova Swing they experienced a long pause. Then: ‘Antoyne, I h
eard the same noise as before.’ A dull buzz, at sufficiently low frequencies to feel as if it had not so much invaded her nervous system as replaced it, this was accompanied by sensations of vertigo and a metallic taste in the mouth. Later, the chaotic pans recorded by her helmet cameras would reveal only a bluish, mucoid blur. ‘I’m heading back.’ As she turned to leave, it was obvious that something was in there with her after all. ‘Antoyne? Are you getting any of this?’ Her visual feed went down, and for a minute or two only broken phrases could be heard from her, ‘shiny lacquerwork’, ‘domed head’ and repeatedly – ‘Antoyne?’ Liv dragged herself and her equipment through the fibrous corridors. It was like being lost inside a major organ. Behind her, she could sense the artefact tunneling its way impassively towards her across the pumice-like structural grain of the wreck, bursting out of one wall only to disappear instantly through another. She imagined it waiting there for four hundred million years. Had it hunted the salvage crew the way it was hunting her?

  Irene the Mona, though she loved space, would often wonder what caused people to want to be out in it. If you asked her, it was almost entirely a visual experience anyway. Sometimes those billowing towers of gas, infused with hyacinthine light, ripped by shockfronts from, whatever, exploding quasars and like that, were beautiful; sometimes they only seemed monstrous. Irene preferred warm, solid-earth cities, where on a rainy day the windows of each retro-shop and tailor parlour glowed with personal options. She preferred the lights, the saxophone music, the pink and purple ads like moths, the souls which sprang so readily to meet your own. All phony, all gorgeous. But it was also a fact that she could not be entirely a stay-home girl. Because someone had to handle the fiscal and aspirational sides of the enterprise that was Saudade Bulk Haulage, not to mention human resources!

  ‘So here I am,’ she told herself aloud, ‘out among the stars and galaxies, which I have to say look almost as remarkable as a new pair of Minnie Sittelman fuck-me pumps.’ Around that time her name was called on the ship speakers: ‘Irene, Irene,’ followed by a noise of gak gak gak.

  She found Antoyne lying on the control room couch in a puddle of sick, both hands clutching the bundle of coloured pilot wires as if he had been trying to rip a snake out of his mouth. His knees were drawn up to his chest and he was shaking. If Antoyne had a secret, Irene believed, it was that he didn’t do well alone; but there were days, too, when he didn’t seem to do well even when he had people to look after him. ‘Honey,’ she said, lifting his head and tenderly detaching the wires, on the gold tips of which she was able to discern tiny specks of brain matter, ‘this is not your job, and you really need a shave too.’ Antoyne threw up again and rolled off the acceleration couch.

  ‘Am I here?’ he said.

  ‘Yes Antoyne, you are here all right.’

  The control-room displays came to life suddenly. In them Irene could see: jerky fragments of light bobbing along ribbed slick-looking tunnels; shadows caught by a panicky glimpse behind; misleading images from the gas of nanocameras now investing the wreck. Everything was processed to look ‘real’, arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view, a software psychodrama in which Liv Hula dragged herself along, surrounded by a slow explosion of cable ripped off the walls during the salvage attempt. Through the eva faceplate her lips could be seen opening and closing, though nothing came out. Behind her, clearly imaged and yet difficult to understand, something was emerging from the tunnel wall.

  Irene, who had no intention of allowing the ship any time inside her, took a moment to study the manual filter options. Then she shook Fat Antoyne awake.

  ‘Honey, I need you.’

  Antoyne crawled back on the couch. He cleared his throat loudly. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  ‘I wish there was time for that, I really do.’

  Antoyne adjusted the displays but soon gave up the attempt to interpret what he was seeing. ‘Why is it drilling holes everywhere?’ he said.

  ‘We can none of us know that, Fat Antoyne.’

  Liv Hula found herself at a junction she recognised. The tunnel split into three. MENGER knelt solicitously over SIERPINSKI but wrote ‘curvature’, as if he was thinking of something else. For her part, SIERPINSKI stared down at the floor as if it had betrayed her. They had died the way every entradista expected, doing what they wanted to do, and now cast three or four shadows each in this tableau of escalating bad luck. It was, in short, the classic entradista soul-fuck, which Liv recalled with great contempt. ‘Come on,’ she was heard to urge them, looking back over her shoulder: ‘Everyone is culpable here, guys.’ Then, exactly four minutes and thirty-two seconds later: ‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne, I’m back at the reactor housing.’ She was tired. Her senses were dull. She was running out of air. If she didn’t do something soon, the eva suit would perform an emergency spinal puncture, reduce her metabolic rate by twenty or thirty per cent, set its FTL beacon and await extraction. They would find her sitting on the floor, head slumped, legs splayed, HULA stencilled above her faceplate, another identical fuck-up in the house of fun. Behind the reactor she discovered the rest of the salvage team, tumbled together in a heap. Unlike MENGER & SIERPINSKI, her head-ups told her, these bodies had high residual radiation counts. They were armed with hand-held thermobarics, but seemed to have made no attempt to use them. Backed against the reactor housing, too tired to take any further action, watching a low-grade dosimeter alarm blink on and off in the side of her eye, she tried once more to raise the Nova Swing. ‘Hello? Are you getting this?’ A two-minute gap, during which she seemed to whisper fractiously to herself before calling out, ‘Christ! The reactor’s heating up again!’ For Liv, yellow light fell through blue. There was a dull buzz, less a sound than a vibration in her central nervous sytem: a moment of vertigo. Then an object half a metre in diameter and two metres long emerged stealthily from the tunnel wall beside her. It was made of some slick black ceramic. Along its sides, bizarre reflections from the context could be discerned as a calligraphy of dim blue splatters. It slipped out of the wall, two or three feet up, blind-looking but with an air of intelligence. It knew she was there. It was at her elbow. When she looked away, it bumped and pushed at her thigh. Her whole body filled with the taste of metal. She turned her head and tried to puke clear of her faceplate. Nothing else happened, except that when she left, the artefact followed her attentively out into empty space, its blunt nose never more than ten inches away from her left hip. Comms sorted themselves as soon as she cleared the wreck. The first thing she heard was Antoyne’s voice.

  ‘Jesus, Liv, where have you been? Liv, if you can hear me, we believe the thing you saw is the item we were sent to collect.’

  ‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

  After they attempted to store it separately, the new cargo drilled its way through the bulkheads until it could float between the other items in the main hold, its surface spattered with reflections which didn’t quite match the lighting pattern. It seemed newer than the others. It was certainly less knocked around.

  ‘You could shop for it,’ was Irene the mona’s conclusion.

  She licked her finger and touched. Tiny electric feelings! She liked it for its shiny values and – now that it could be examined more closely – those faint, smooth, organic deviations from the cylindrical that made its front end such a lighthearted phallic parallel. Fat Antoyne approached with more caution, and though the object allowed itself to be examined with a basic six-regime loupe, learned little. He couldn’t date it, he said. It was alien. It was ceramic all through, although deep inside he found minutely-structured variations in density which he took to be high-temperature superconducting devices.

  ‘We’ll never know,’ he said, implying that someone else might.

  Still shaken and sweating, with her electrolyte levels shot to hell, Liv Hula refused to enter the hold, confining herself instead to the pilot cabin and a determined program of rehydration coupled with shots of Black Heart no ice. These puzzles had such nightmare signifi
cance for her, she said, she was reluctant even to join the discussion: but she had revised her estimate of the object’s age.

  ‘I think the salvage team brought it with them.’

  Although what they had intended to do with it, she had no idea. If, as rumour had it, MP Renoko had begun stripping the assets of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant at around that time, perhaps they had acquired it from him, sight unseen as illegal items often were. Maybe it was some kind of mining machine. ‘As for this,’ she said, bringing up a blurred image of the Oklo reactor down in the wreck, ‘what to make of it?’ After four hundred million years of downtime this crude artefact was back on its five hour cycle, venting hot steam into empty space for no purpose known to man. ‘I don’t think they were connected with one another at all.’

  MENGER & SIERPINSKI haunted Liv’s dreams from then on, seen waving to her through a radioactive glow, their headpieces enigmatically empty.

  TWELVE

  I Am Not Renoko!

  R.I. Gaines took his suitcase and left.

  In the following days, the assistant tried to forget what she had seen. Routine being as important to her as ever, she sat in her car, she sat in her office, she sat upright in the immersion tank on C-Street watching herself come. Everywhere the job took her, she thought up names for herself. She tried Ysabeau, Mirabelle, she tried Rosy Glo. She tried Sweet Thing and Pak 43. She was a police detective, in the street and in her car, looking in the wing mirror, signalling left or right. Day and night the town surrounded her with all the elements of her profession: gun kiddies cruising the shadows, cutters up to their elbows in the black heart of humanity, trade goods smuggled down from the stars; soft intuitions, sneaking suspicions. She was taking notes, making reports. She was sitting at her desk while shadow operators crawled about among the papers like old cobwebs and dusty, unfinished hands. She tried Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire; Stormo! and Te Faaturuma. She dialled up the uniform branch and asked for Epstein.