‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’
At that the connection broke. A dark figure appeared in the internal doorway, and after two or three quietly bad-tempered attempts a wheelchair was pushed into the room. Its occupant had deteriorated since Anna last saw him getting into a cab in front of Carshalton station. One corner of his mouth was drawn up rigidly; his bald head, exhibiting the deep uniform tan of ten days on some abandoned Almerian beach, shone with ulcers. He entered sitting upright in the chair – ankles crossed and knees apart, one hand performing an unwittingly hieratic gesture at the level of his chest – but fell forward almost immediately against its restraining harness of broad nylon webbing. His head dropped slackly to the right – this brought into sharp relief the tendon at the side of his neck, and offered his left ear to the white cat on his shoulder, which, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity, adjusted its balance; purred; licked inside the ear with precise delicate motions. All the time Anna had been in the house, he had been there too, slumped in some other empty room, his liver-coloured underlip drooping and one blue eye open in the heat. The harness, with its central quick-release mechanism, looked too robust for any forces the movement of a wheelchair might produce; while the seat itself had bulky, over-engineered qualities, like something in a now-obsolete experiment. She knew she should have recognised him all along. Perhaps she had. Had he recognised her? Impossible to tell. Underneath her amnesia the memory itself lay swaddled. It was the unthought known, always tucked carefully away, a self-deception under a self-deception. How could he have grown so old? The telephone began to ring again, the white cat jumped on to the table and walked about fiercely. There in the water light of the unreconstructed dining room, the Mexican box glimmered like tarnished silver: the dark figure behind the wheelchair reached over to pick it up.
That was enough to send Anna out of the garden, stumbling down the side passage, hurrying away from 121, The Oaks to the relative sanity of the suburban afternoon, all the rest of which she spent wandering confusedly about, up one long street and down the next, heat ringing around her from cracked paving, until she emerged blinking and puzzled, hard by Carshalton Ponds. The High Street lay uneasily under the sun, full of excavations – shallow, affectless scoops, the product of underpowered machinery and half-hearted plans, fenced off behind a long maze of red and white barriers, which, like the cars in the street, resembled plastic toys pumped up to appeal to some infantile aesthetic.
A room the colour of a headache, she thought. And why had the window once been covered with roasting foil?
Her journey home was slow. The train – as poorly maintained as any public machinery since the serial recessions of the 2010s – failed repeatedly, a minute here, two minutes there; then twenty minutes at a station somewhere near Streatham, during which period, a boy and a girl of college age, who had been kissing energetically since they got on, played a complicated little game at the open carriage door. He stood on the platform, while she leaned out towards him from the train. He kept saying: ‘Well, tara, I’ll see you back there.’ She would wait for him to go, then – when he remained standing there on the platform five feet away grinning at her – laugh and say, ‘That’s what you think, is it?’ Then they would both laugh, the boy would half turn away, and they would start again.
‘I’ll see you back there. We’ll decide where to put it then, it’ll be fun.’
‘It won’t go in the corner whatever you say.’
‘I’m off now, anyway.’
‘I bet you are.’
Suddenly the doors began to close. ‘Tara then,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll see you back there.’
‘Tara,’ the girl said, turning away. At the last minute she squeezed between the doors, struggled off the train and threw her arms round him. They took a few stumbling paces along the platform towards the exit, laughing and bumping hips and wrestling at one another’s shoulders. The girl made a fist and scrubbed at the boy’s scalp with it. ‘Hey!’ he said.
By the time Anna got back it was almost dark. Craneflies tumbled into the windows, stumbling and crawling stupidly about the glass, pinned there by the papery force of their own wings. The cat was out. Anna filled his bowl with tuna surprise, and put two goat’s cheese and spinach tartlets in the oven for herself. Marnie rang while they were heating up. ‘What a day!’ she told Anna. ‘Work was just appalling.’ Morning traffic had made her an hour late, she said. ‘The whole of Clerkenwell was at a standstill.’
‘Darling,’ Anna said, ‘it’s been at a standstill for twenty years.’
Looking for something equivalent to offer, she told Marnie about the lovers on the train. ‘After they’d gone,’ she finished, ‘I turned to look at the other passengers, and I was the only one smiling.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I felt like a fool,’ Anna replied, without a moment’s thought.
‘Still,’ Marnie said: ‘Romantic.’ Then she said that she had a hospital appointment the next morning. ‘It’s just a scan,’ she said. ‘But I wondered if you’d come with me.’
‘Of course I will!’ Anna said, astonished.
‘It’s nothing, I expect,’ Marnie said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
One in the morning: unable to sleep, Anna switched on the 24 hour news, hoping, though she would not have admitted it to herself, for some indication that Michael Kearney had come home. Nothing overt, she thought; just something casual buried in the coverage of a scientific conference. A clue. All she received was a sense that there were no longer any real events in the world – that, whatever the ‘news’, nothing was actually happening until the camera turned its eye on each short jerky scene. Palm trees – enacting ‘stirred by an evening wind’ –would jump suddenly, almost guiltily, into life as the wire service prepared to objectify them. In the satellite lag before the stringer spoke, you heard a faint, repetitive voice which sounded like gak gak gak. Later she stood in the new bathroom, whispering anxiously:
‘Are you there?’ and, ‘You do like it, don’t you? You did say you liked it!’ Her erratic five-year transit of the suburbs and dormitories of South London – launched after the death of Tim Waterman, accelerating when Marnie left home – was over. The events of the afternoon had proved that. Nothing had been solved. She was still unable to remember what happened all those years ago, the night Michael entrusted her with the pocket drive. She stood by the bedroom window, rooting through her handbag. Out in the garden, a faint mist crept across the meadow from the river to melt among the orchard trees. Eventually she found the drive and held it like a titanium shell to her ear, as if it might have verbal instructions for her. ‘Oh, Michael, I know you’re there. Can’t you just come back and help?’
No answer: except that in front of her the summerhouse burst grandly and silently into flames, as black against the sky as the woodcut illustration in a book of Tarot cards.
SEVENTEEN
Correlation States
When the Kefahuchi Tract expanded, in what came to be known as ‘the Event’, parts of it fell to earth on planets all along the Beach. Event sites appeared everywhere, sometimes in deserts or polar icefields or at the bottom of the sea: but often alongside the cities.
They were assembly-yards of the abnormal – zones where physics seemed to have forgotten its own rules – expanding into the real world via a perimeter of fogs, hallucinations, half-glimpsed movements. From inside could be heard confused laughter, big music, the sound of machinery. Something was being produced in there. Obsolete objects came fountaining out. They were highly energetic and abnormally scaled: rains of enamel badges, cheap rings, windup plastic toys; nuts & bolts, cups & saucers, horses & carts; feathers, doves and black-lacquered boxes, conjuror’s props the size of houses. They burst into the air above the roofline then toppled back and vanished. A blueprint unfolded itself across the sky then folded itself up again and faded away. No one minded these illusions, if illusions they were. But artefacts and inexplicabl
e new technologies came out of the Event sites too, and sought a foothold on our side of things. Some of them were conscious and looked human. They wandered out into the cities and tried to become part of life. That was when things went wrong. EMC took an interest. Razor wire went up. The observation towers went up. SiteCrime and Quarantine (known popularly as QuaPo) became, for a time, the most powerful police forces in the Halo, second only to Earth Military Contracts itself.
Irene and Liv listened to Fat Antoyne Messner explain these recent history facts they already knew, then said as one voice:
‘Antoyne, yadda yadda. What’s in it for us?’
‘Quarantine orbit work,’ Fat Antoyne said, and he told them the story of Andy and Martha.
Andy and Martha lived on a planet called Basel Dove. Andy owned a little townhouse, worked human resources for the usual corporate; Martha collected alien ceramics. They had a son they called Bobby, eight that summer, a bright kid if a little needy. Andy found them a young woman, intelligent and ordinary-looking, to tutor Bobby in the afternoons. Her name was Bella. She dressed well but came off a little vague, as if she didn’t quite understand how a house or a family worked. Her commonest expression was of a cheerful puzzlement. Bella had her own room, near the top of the house. She worked out well. You’d find her standing in a hallway early evening, staring ahead of herself and wondering what to do next; but she soon settled in, and Bobby no longer followed Martha about all day complaining he was bored. Instead he sat quietly with Bella, listening in awe as she solved problems of classic harmonic analysis in her head. They got on so nicely! It was, as Martha said, a love affair, ‘Bella and Bobby this, Bella and Bobby that. Always Bella and Bobby.’ Those two were, really, really inseparable. But soon they were more inseparable than you would hope.
Before Bella arrived, the little boy’s mid-afternoon recreation had been to take his clothes off and look at himself in the mirror until he got hard. He rubbed but nothing came out yet. He could feel something coming up but it never arrived. All he got was a sort of shock, a painful little jolt. Bella changed all that. After mathematics she would take him upstairs to her room and style his hair for him. A passive calm came over him at such moments. He loved her smell. With each stroke of the brush, his little cock stuck out harder in his pants. When Bella touched it accidentally with the back of her hand, they looked at one another in wonder. One winter afternoon, Martha found them on the sofa. It was bitterly obvious what had been happening before she came in the room. Bella’s tits were bare. The little boy’s pants were open. Her hand was on his penis. She leaned over him, he stared up at her, growling and whimpering in his little boy voice as he struggled to come.
It was horrible enough that Martha walked in on her eight-year-old son about to ejaculate in the hand of the hired help. But worse was to be revealed. When she tried to pull them apart, they were stuck together. And when Andy came home he found his wife stuck to them too.
One of Martha’s forearms had penetrated Bella’s head. Martha was staring angrily at her hand emerging on the other side. Everything was soft. All three of them were covered in a thin, slippery emulsion; they were pulling away from one another, but that only seemed to make things worse. Andy threw up. He called the Quarantine Bureau. By 10 pm the same day, Bobby, Bella and Martha were a fully-fledged escape – translucent, infectious, a jelly part human, part virus, part daughter code straight from the local Event site. With Andy’s permission, Quarantine sealed this substance into a heavily welded, tapering iron container about seven feet long by three in depth, which they left on the floor of Bella’s room. Since Basel Dove was too quiet to have a quarantine orbit of its own, they explained, the sarcophagus would have to be delivered – within a week and by a licensed operator – to the one at New Venusport. They said they were sorry for Andy’s loss, and left. Andy, numb with grief and puzzlement and unable to find a local firm willing to handle such a tiny cargo, called Saudade Bulk Haulage.
‘He doesn’t want to make the trip himself,’ Antoyne explained. ‘He’s a damaged man. It’s very sad.’
Liv Hula pursed her lips. ‘So we’re undertakers now?’
‘I’m glad to get any kind of work,’ answered Fat Antoyne. ‘Besides, we’re going there anyway.’
So Nova Swing became a quarantine dog, and her crew found themselves sharing space with the remains of Martha, Bobby and Bella. They stowed the sarcophagus in a corner of the main hold. By then the contents had settled into a uniform transparent mass weighing slightly less than its original human components. It was liquid, superconductive at room temperature, and retained some memory of its former state: for instance, the little boy could sometimes be seen behind the armoured viewplate, half-formed, curled foetally with his hands between his legs. It made Irene sad. ‘Oh, his little penis,’ she said. She was not her usual self. She woke hearing dice rattle in the holds and passageways, soft laughter, voices. If a game was being played, Irene wasn’t in it. She opened doors and never found anyone there.
‘It wears you down,’ she complained to Antoyne.
Antoyne, thinner than ever, cultivated a stubble. He feared living hand to mouth. The ordered world being defined for him now by Liv and Irene, he was afraid he would fall out of it and return to his old ways. Irene thought him vague lately, especially since that afternoon at Mambo Rey, and wondered out loud if he was recalling some other lover. ‘Because that would be all right,’ she told him. ‘We all remember the other loves we had.’ Antoyne looked blank at this and didn’t seem to agree. Of course, it was quite a long list for her, Irene admitted, so each one had to work harder to stand out. She had a vision suddenly: men in an endless line, each one awaiting the opportunity to step up and impress her again. One thought he danced well. Another thought his cock was pretty big, but it would never bring tears to her eyes like the cock of that little dead boy. Of course, they weren’t really lovers.
‘Antoyne,’ she said in a rush, ‘what if this rocket was haunted?’
He touched her wrist. ‘All rockets are haunted,’ he said. ‘I assumed you knew that.’
Liv Hula could only smile at these naive exchanges. Tapped into the pilot systems while everyone else slept, she’d seen the way MP Renoko’s mortsafes clustered around the new cargo when they thought they weren’t being watched. They sniffed it like dogs, perhaps deciding it wasn’t quite their species. On the fifth day out from Basel Dove, Nova Swing had sight of New Venusport, a fully Earthlike planet in terms of biome, military presence and fiscal architecture. The Quarantine Authority hailed on all wavelengths. There were automated warnings. Vast shapes drifted in the void, blinking with dim lights. Antoyne dragged the sarcophagus to an airlock and consigned it to empty space, where it fell into the general hidden turmoil and vanished.
‘That poor little thing,’ Irene whispered.
‘Honey, there are two grown women in the casket with him,’ Liv Hula reminded her. ‘Ask yourself who put them there.’
Life in quarantine: a hundred yards away, someone in an eva suit could be seen welding steel plates over a hatch; further in, pSi engines fired up as two or three hulks worked to phase-lock with the local flow. In the brief strobing flashes, Liv made out the skeleton of a pipeliner, two centuries old, three miles long. She allowed the ship to drift further in, then out again. Renoko’s next load awaited them only a few hundred miles beneath. As they departed, a K-ship nosed out from between the hulks and followed them down, at one point fitting itself so closely into the curves of the old freighter’s hull that they could feel waste heat radiating from the internal processes it made no attempt to mask. Its signals traffic alone could have cooked a city. It wanted them to know it was there. It wanted them to know that they were a question it could answer if it wanted to; anything it wanted, it could have. It matched them through one and a half cycles of their aerobrake program, then became interested in something else and spun away. Liv, who had felt the K-captain crawling in and out of her brain through the wires in her mouth, shuddered.
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br /> ‘I hate those things,’ she said.
There was a silence. Then a faint voice, already four lights down the Beach, whispered:
‘Well I’ve never said an unkind word about you, sweetie.’
New Venusport South Hemisphere, 3am: Madame Shen’s old premises, a three-acre strip of cement between the sea and the rocket yards. For a minute or two after the Nova Swing came down there was silence. Then the night sounds returned, bustle from the yards, chain link fences rattling in the offshore breeze. Fat Antoyne Messner stood on the loading platform, looking across a thin layer of marine fog doped with pollution from the yards. It would clear rapidly with the approach of dawn; meanwhile the motors ticked and cooled, and Antoyne relished the damp air in his face. The curve of the bay was lined with clapboard beach motels, blind pigs and empty sex joints – Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge – their cinder lots full of drifted sand. Waves rumbled in from the horizon.
‘Look!’ Liv Hula said. ‘No, there!’
A figure was making its way along the line of buildings, silhouetted against the faint luminescence of the waves: female, tall, full of the unresolved tensions of the heavily-tailored. Faceless and quiet, she leaned for a moment on the siding of the Deleuze Motel, one arm straight out from the shoulder, palm flat against the wall. The wind smelled of chemicals. She raised her head to it like a dog, looking out to sea, then sat down at the edge of the concrete apron and began pouring sand from one cupped hand to the other: someone who, arriving too late for a meeting, regrets having come at all.
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