Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

  That lot in the fields weren’t out tonight, so he went on his own. The very first thing, the dogs put up a grey hare, the colour of ash in the light. The boy had never seen that before. The hare seemed to lag, it seemed to wait for him to pay attention. Then the dogs were off and running and the action was so fast he couldn’t keep it in the lamplight.

  ‘I never saw anything like this,’ he told himself.

  The dogs were subdued on the way home. They weren’t sure what they’d caught. A hare more blue than grey, unmarked by death: though empty, its eyes seemed to focus on him when he took it from them. ‘Get up,’ he said to the bitch to cheer her up. ‘Get on with you.’ But she stuck so close he felt her head touch his leg. It was cold in the bothy where he lived with the dogs, up there the far side of Ampney. When he got in he thought for a minute he saw a kind of grey mould on everything. Then, later that night, he woke up out of a dream of the woman he had talked to the afternoon before. He didn’t remember anything about her and now she was leaning over him in his bed, undressed, whispering something he couldn’t catch. Her grey hair was hanging down, her tits thin and white, her eyes the blue of his dog’s eyes. He didn’t like the way she tried to catch his attention. It woke him. He was as hard as wood, and it wouldn’t go away. He yearned to fuck someone, anyone. ‘I’d fuck anything,’ he said to himself. By then, wraiths and dips of mist lay across the fields. He could see all the way to the Arbor barn at Winsthrow, up to its door in mist. Further away, it looked as if something tall had caught fire in that direction, but it was just something in the corner of his eye and when he turned his head it was gone. ‘She wanted to know all about you,’ he teased the dogs.

  They pressed up close to him then, and all the next day followed him about, quiet and unresourceful. ‘Get on with you,’ he said to them. ‘Get on with the both of you.’

  Anna Waterman, meanwhile, had passed the rest of the afternoon at the de Spencer Arms, arriving home about five o’ clock. By six she had twice rung Marnie, to leave confused messages. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she began, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. In a sense, she wasn’t sorry, she was only in a panic. ‘Well, anyway, give me a call.’ Poor Marnie! After that she went round with the vacuum cleaner, and opened all the windows to get rid of the smell of paint. Later, James the cat stalked up and down the arm of the sofa butting his head into her face while she sat in front of the television. ‘James,’ she told him, picking uninterestedly at tuna and baked potato, ‘you’re a nuisance.’ The cat responded with a breathy grinding noise.

  Anna retired early; experienced busy dreams, in which her new bathroom, relocated to the station concourse at Waterloo where it drew the late afternoon commute like a football crowd, became filled with water in the azure depths of which flickered real fish; and woke tangled in her damp nightdress in the deep night, convinced that a strange light and heat, coming and going Chinese red and sunflower yellow outside her window, had winked out the instant she opened her eyes. Feeling as if someone might be staring in at her, she struggled up out of bed and went down to look out of the back door. Only the lawn and flowerbeds, suspended in the cool, milky late-summer dark: but in the distance, somewhere the other side of the river, she could hear the long, belling cries of dogs. Cool air flowed around her ankles. Everything out there was very still. James sat in the middle of the lawn like an illustration; turned his head to look at her, then, as she left the house, stretched amiably and walked off. The sound of the dogs became clearer. Musical but inexplicable, detached from anything you might expect to happen on an ordinary night, it was a sound distant and very close at the same time. It wasn’t coming from across the river. It was coming from Anna’s summerhouse.

  Originally stained a colour Tim Waterman had called ‘Serbian yellow’, which faded over the years to the faintest lemon tint in the fibres of the wood, the summerhouse stood as leached and grey as a beach hut, the earth at its base rioting with exotic flowers again – huge foxglove-like bells in pale transparent pastel browns and pinks, round which fluttered hundreds of dusty-white moths. ‘How beautiful!’ Anna thought, though now the sound of dogs was loud and close. Suspended between delight and dread, she approached the summerhouse and pulled at its door, which stuck then gave. She had time to hallucinate a rolling endless landscape of tall grass, under a lighting effect from the cover of a science fiction novel, and hear a voice say, ‘Leave here. Leave here, Anna!’ Then the dogs were on her. It was hard to count them, jostling and snapping, white teeth and lolling tongues, long hot muscular bodies brindled fawn and violet. It was hard to see what kinds of dogs they were. Before she knew it, the sheer weight and strong smell of them had knocked her off balance, she had stumbled back from the door, she was down on her back on the lawn in the dark, laughing and gasping as they licked her all over. ‘No!’ she said. She laughed. ‘No, wait!’ Too late. The nightdress was up around her waist.

  FOURTEEN

  Enantiodromic Zones

  The Halo is rich with hauntings of one sort or another. They occupy many different kinds of space.

  Two of them held a short meeting in the Nova Swing main hold. First to arrive was the entity calling itself MP Renoko. Though presently operating himself by FTL transmission from a Faint Dime cashout terminal on the south hemisphere of New Venusport, Renoko self-identified as human; and when he walked through the wall of the hold, he certainly resembled – down to his white stubble, grubby short raincoat and bare ankles – the same individual who had commissioned Fat Antoyne, insulted Irene’s sense of business, and argued so fiercely with Ruby Dip about the nature of kitsch. His first act was to inspect the mortsafes, which greeted him with a kind of biddable skittishness.

  Renoko patted them like the thoroughbreds they were, whistling in the tuneless but familiar carnie manner. Occasionally he gave a nod of approval. To the smallest of them, he said with a laugh, ‘I see you’ve been back at the old game!’ Then, opening his arms as if he could embrace all three at once, ‘It’s a real treat to see you together again!’

  He busied himself about, using his breath and the sleeve of his raincoat to wipe down a viewport here or buff up a brass detail there. But after a while he sat down suddenly in a corner of the hold. Both his facial expression and his body language collapsed into vacancy. He seemed to be prepared to wait. The mortsafes settled down again. It would be difficult to reproduce Renoko’s state of consciousness during this period. He identified as a human being, but he could not be said to be one. Based on a few lines of code last separately aware of itself in the glory days of Sandra Shen’s circus, he was now in all senses an emergent property: not of a single cash register, or indeed a single diner, but of the whole Halo-wide Faint Dime chain (in itself a subsidiary of FUGA-Orthogen), including its wholesaling and accountancy software, its transport and construction departments, its human resources and, especially, their day to day viral loading. The progress of a modified herpes infection through the staff of a given diner did as much to generate, maintain and express MP Renoko as the progress of a restocking order for ketchup or the decision to press forward with a new outlet. These different kinds of events implied, added up to or gave rise to him. In a sense he was nothing more than a list of instructions left behind by Madame Shen herself when she abandoned the Circus. But you can’t accrete fifty years of history without becoming some sort of identity in your own right. That was a guarantee of sorts, Renoko sometimes believed: though of what he wasn’t sure.

  After perhaps an hour, some activity began in the opposite corner of the hold. A few pale green motes of light floated about near the floor, then vanished. When they reappeared, it was to drift lazily towards one another, whirl together like flies on a hot afternoon, separate, then whirl together again – until over a period of minutes they had assembled themselves into a rough, recognisable shape. This figure hung, slightly over life-size, its shoulders six feet from the deckplates, like a compromise between a man, some strips of meat and a charred coat. It had arms,
but was without legs. ‘Hey,’ it said softly. At this the mortsafes woke up. They jostled and nudged at one another. LEDs of every colour flashed urgently down their sides. If Renoko had charmed their alien hearts, the newcomer charged them with a strange, immediate, nervous energy. The hold filled up with such a mixture of electromagnetic styles and motives that MP Renoko’s hair stood on end. He stirred and sat up. His mind came back from wherever it had been. A private-looking smile passed across his features, so that for a moment he seemed quite human.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘I remember you, man. You look like shit.’

  ‘We both look like shit,’ said MP Renoko, ‘but you look dead.’

  A laugh. ‘How we doing otherwise?’

  Renoko gestured around the hold. ‘Well enough. As you can see, a little behind schedule.’

  ‘You know, I don’t think there’s a schedule as such.’

  Renoko seemed to settle in his corner. ‘I’d like to get it over with anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a little tired lately.’

  ‘Fifty years is a long time, man.’

  ‘You could say that. I look forward to a holiday.’

  ‘Kick back a little,’ the newcomer agreed. ‘Sink into the data.’

  During this dialogue he had been busy opening a panel in the hull of one of the mortsafes. Over this he now bent, his head and shoulders inside, his elbows still visible as he worked at the exposed engine. Field effects rippled across the hold like luminescence in surf. All three mortsafes blurred, fogging the warm air with physics. Various kinds of musical sounds could be heard as they exchanged data. MP Renoko observed alien states of matter crawling across the walls as symbols, hallucinatory lights, scenes from his own past. Much of what was going on made him even tireder than usual. He massaged his left hand with his right. Stood up slowly, suddenly remembering the circus at dawn, some landing field on a forgotten planet. Every morning different, every morning the same. The harsh light on cement, the air full of salt and fried food smells. A tiny Chinese-looking woman with piled up red hair and a tight emerald cheongsam, swaying like a mirage through the heat haze between the carnie booths, every eye’s focus, human or alien. ‘Can code enjoy sex?’ the media always ask. MP Renoko remembered something less easy to describe.

  ‘Do you ever see her?’ he said softly, one ghost to another.

  The newcomer grunted in surprise and shook his head. This simple motion transferred itself to the dangling strips of flesh that comprised his lower half, causing them to whirl like a skirt.

  ‘No one sees her now, man. She’s got so much stuff to do. She’s working on behalf of others.’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘We’ve all got stuff to do now.’

  Shortly afterwards he left, saying only: ‘I’ll be back for you, Jack,’ which he seemed to find funny. MP Renoko, whose name had never been Jack or anything like it, laughed dutifully. He waited until the mortsafes had calmed down then he too left the hold, walking out the same wall he had entered by. Unaware of these kinds of events except as a localised cluster of internal surveillance blackouts, the crew of the Nova Swing slept, ate, screwed, stared out the portholes at the wonders of space, and drew closer to their next destination: a G-type star, known to the navigational mathematics as an 11-dimensional mosaic of co-ordinates, but to the generations who lived and died by its light as ‘Scinde Dawk’.

  By that time, everyone was in a bad temper with everything: Liv and Antoyne argued over who should clean up the mess in the control room; Irene, bored and with a far-off look in her blue eyes, crafted for herself outfits in increasingly radical expressions of pink, which, to the consternation of the shadow operators, she wore fifteen minutes each before weeping inexplicably and throwing them about. Forty-eight hours later these three found themselves in the parking orbit of the Scinde Dawk system’s only inhabitable planet – the tidally-locked Funene – searching the twilight zone for an abandoned factory town dubbed by Irene, ‘some dump called Mambo Rey’. Liv Hula hit the retros, ran three cursory aerobrake cycles to save fuel, and was bringing them down on the customary tail of green flame when the ship’s instruments picked up surface activity around the Mambo Rey rocket field.

  ‘Fat Antoyne,’ she said, ‘Something is going on down there.’

  Why tell him, Antoyne wanted to know.

  ‘Don’t sulk! Don’t sulk, Antoyne! I fucking have to work in here! My workplace should not smell of someone else’s puke!’

  Antoyne was of the opinion that nothing could smell as bad as the blanket she kept in there.

  ‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

  ‘The truth often hurts.’

  ‘Antoyne, sometimes you are as big a cunt as Toni Reno.’

  A dry laugh came from the crew quarters.

  ‘No one is as big a cunt as Toni Reno,’ was Irene’s opinion.

  ‘We all can feel the truth of that,’ Liv Hula admitted. ‘So Antoyne,’ she said, in as placatory a voice as she could manage, ‘help me out here. I don’t know what I’m seeing.’

  Antoyne didn’t know either. A rooster-tail of disturbed dust billowed its way between the low hills surrounding the port. At its head could be made out a fierce mote of energy. Nova Swing’s arrays were detecting short range RF, broad spectrum FTL transmissions, and some kind of radar: nothing anyone could understand. Neither was there any logic to the object’s course. It resembled a spark racing along a carelessly-laid fuse, or some weird science particle tangled and looping through invisible fields. Thirty miles into the badlands, it abruptly disappeared. The dust settled slowly. No matter how many times he re-ran the footage, Antoyne couldn’t make out what was going on. The object was too small to be a vehicle. It was too fast to be a human being.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

  By then they were on the ground. Irene, who had knowledge of fifty planets before she was fourteen, recognised a dump when she saw one. Mambo Rey was a place no one wanted, except to hologram themselves getting sex against a collapsing industrial shed in clever light. It was less a world than a lifestyle accessory. ‘Having a great fuck, wish you were here!’ 35 degrees Celsius, humidity nil. A metal taste filled the mouth: rare earth dust, rotting even as it separated out of the ancient strata, blew across the concrete on the wind, silting up the corners of the wooden terminal buildings. As the surrounding mesas eroded, they had exposed the remains of early life in that part of the Halo – huge, bare, cryptic, radioactive forms that looked less like bones than pieces of architecture. Elsewhere in the subtle gradations of Funene’s twilight zone, hallucinatory giant insects strode the horizon on long, fragile legs.

  ‘Jesus,’ Irene said: ‘Roach planet.’ And then, bending down suddenly, ‘Hey! I found a heart-shaped stone!’

  After a brief argument with Liv, who claimed it was no more than a tooth washed out of some ancient alluvial deposit, she presented it to Fat Antoyne, and the women set out to find the Snakebite bar. Antoyne watched them trudge off across the hot cement – laughing and arguing arm in arm, an image sharpened and rendered almost unbearable by the glare of the perpetual afternoon – then went back inside the Nova Swing and examined the stone. It was pink, translucent, full of small bubbles suspended in a web of hazy fracture planes. It wasn’t a tooth. He rubbed it with his thumb, then dialled up MP Renoko.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Hello?’ a voice replied. ‘Hello?’

  The pipe was bad. If it was Renoko, he sounded as if he was already talking to someone else.

  ‘Are you there?’ Antoyne said.

  ‘Hello!’ the voice shouted. ‘For a moment I thought you’d gone!’

  ‘Is this Renoko?’

  ‘Who’s that? Is that you, Antoyne?’

  ‘We can take delivery of those goods of yours,’ Antoyne said. At this, he thought he felt Renoko’s attention focus suddenly. ‘Hello?’

  ‘You’ll find us in the old lost property office.’

  ‘Are
you here, then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Renoko. ‘That depends what you mean. Do you need me to be there?’

  ‘I’m at Mambo Rey,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Antoyne?’ Renoko interrupted. ‘This is a bad pipe, Antoyne.

  Hello?’ Another pause. ‘Find the lost property office,’ he said.

  ‘Someone will take care of you.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘PERDIDOS Y ACHADOS!’ shouted Renoko.

  Directions followed, then the dial-up collapsed. Antoyne looked around the control room, with its homely smells of vomit, fried food and electrical fields. Wondering what Renoko had meant when he described himself as ‘here’, he got up abruptly and searched the ship from top to bottom. It took an hour to check every companionway. Sometimes Antoyne felt the need go back and check the ductwork too. Only when he was sure the Nova Swing was empty did he feel safe enough to leave.

  Deep in the eight-acres of the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate, a curiously self-similar grid of buildings, he found the lost property office. Its door hung open. No one had been there for weeks. Dust had drifted across the floor and gathered as a thin film in the curls and creases of the yellowing waybills pinned to the walls. Antoyne called ‘Hello?’ and receiving no answer sat down on a chair to wait. He read some of the paper. ‘Ambo Danse VI, d.i.f. Details at site.’ Over this someone had written, ‘Fedy wants to know where this is!’ A thousand dice were scattered on the counter, some of them lighting up dimly from inside if you passed your hand above them. Antoyne sat, turning the heart-shaped stone between his fingers and listening to the wind bang about outside as if it had misplaced something. He felt uneasy just sitting there. He found another room: nothing. He poked his head out of the back door, which was off its top hinge, and looked up and down the street. Nothing.