Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

  No reply.

  ‘And fuck your stories. Fuck that you know more than us, and our lives are suddenly part of some weird deal of yours. Our friend is dead, also what you did to this ship is a fucking big inconvenience to us.’

  The worst thing wasn’t that so much of him was missing, or that the remainder looked like a display of half-cooked meat in an outdoor market at the end of the day. It wasn’t even that he seemed to be only partly aware you were in the room with him. It was that thirty years had passed. Over distances like that, people drive themselves without much deviation towards the simplest expression of what they are. In the meantime you grow out of them. The only feature Ed retained was the weak grin he got when he knew you had found him out. At the Venice Hotel, and for a month or two afterwards, she had interpreted that expression as a measure of how nice he was. Since then, she could see, he had let it become a substitute for raising his game. Why hadn’t she expected that?

  She went back to the crew quarters and explained the situation. ‘Listen Antoyne,’ she said, ‘we have to get him out of here.’

  Antoyne, who smelled strongly of Black Heart, would only grunt. As Irene had often predicted, new things are bound to happen to anyone in the end; but Antoyne was bad with any kind of reversal. He had lost weight except over the upper abs, where, in a matter of days, the ice-cream diet had seated itself in a carcinomatic-looking lump. ‘Ed’s not the man we knew,’ she said. In fact the problem was the reverse of that. Ed – who walked out on Liv because she beat him into the France Chance photosphere; who left Dany LeFebre to die down on Tumblehome; who, when he got as sick of himself as everyone else had, spent fifteen years in the twink tank lapping up some mystery shit the immersion media churn out for kiddies – was exactly the man they knew. ‘Antoyne, wake up! He’s not human any more. He has some plan, it takes no account of us or anyone. Wake up!’ Antoyne opened his eyes and considered Liv for a moment with the beginnings of an interest. Then he belched, turned away and began to weep. After that, recent experience told her, no amount of shaking would get his attention.

  ‘Antoyne, you useless fucker,’ she told him.

  From living with himself, Antoyne knew that to be true. Later, when Liv had gone back up to the control room, he rolled over, puked a little, washed up in the corner sink and stared around the cabin at Irene’s scattered underwear: party semiotics in action. The little action cube of her was playing on repeat, sounding scratchy and cheap and far away. In his head he heard her real voice say, ‘It was a lovely world,’ and then: ‘Antoyne, you got to lose me.’ After he cleaned up, he took himself down to the main hold, where he leaned in the doorway and said:

  ‘So.’

  ‘Hey,’ Ed acknowledged. He was wiping his fingers on an oily rag. ‘It’s the pizza guy! What do I owe you?’

  Antoyne shrugged. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘It’s—’ Ed clicked his fingers ‘—Fat Anthony. Right?’

  ‘That was years ago. They don’t call me that any more.’ He stared at Ed. ‘What the fuck have you done to yourself this time?’ he said.

  Ed grinned. ‘This? I’m not sure. Like it? I picked it up in the Tract.’

  ‘I heard you were there.’

  ‘Fat Anthony, you should go too, while you can.’ Ed said he couldn’t think of a way to describe it. It was the big achievement. In there it was eleven dimensions of everything. ‘The entities who run it, they’re all charisma.’ They were over everything, having fun. ‘Fat Anthony, it’s just so fucking different in there. You know?’

  ‘If it’s that good,’ Antoyne pointed out bleakly, ‘why didn’t you stay?’

  ‘Come back with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come back with me now. None of this is real when you’ve been in the Tract. Come back with me and see.’

  Ed could sell you his own worst dream, caught with an unsteady camera, lit with a bad light. Juice or jouissance, it was always a plunge into something, with a default to the epic, from which, very often, only Ed returned. For a moment Antoyne wondered what decision he would make. Then he said:

  ‘Why would I do that to myself, Ed?’

  The universe went on. Nova Swing ploughed across it, creaking under her own internal stresses. Antoyne cleaned up his act, weaning himself off the peppermint ice over a dog day afternoon. He folded Irene’s underwear and put it away, and in place of that desperate shrine to her constructed another, using the things she salvaged from Perkins Rent. He burned incense there but within days heard her voice telling him not to be a jerk. ‘You make your own life in this life, Antoyne.’

  Ed Chianese, meanwhile, spent his time in the hold, working on the mortsafes. Entities came and went while he was down there. Some looked like angels, some looked like operators. You didn’t want to be close enough to tell the difference.

  Liv Hula, a passenger in her own ship, dozed in the acceleration chair while, outside, the Halo streamed past, broken into futuristic dazzle patterns by physics and war. The news remained bad. Ed drifted in and out at unpredictable times of day, and hung there staring at the exterior screens. This exasperated her.

  ‘Can’t you sit down or something?’

  ‘The day you first came aboard this ship,’ he said, ‘you found surplus code in the navigational system. You couldn’t work out what it did.’

  She stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

  He shrugged.

  She remembered the first time she sat in the chair. After all the years away from piloting, she felt so free, even if it was just to swallow the nanofibres and take the ship’s inventory:

  Electronic infrastructure. Propulsion architecture. Communications schematics, including an ageing FTL uplinker which showed, for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected quarantine orbits from three to a thousand lights along the Beach. Otherwise it was navigation fakebooks, cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking stamps. She remembered advising Fat Antoyne, ‘You got fifty years of guano in there. Also they used the code to run something my chops don’t get.’

  She looked speculatively at Ed. ‘I fenced it off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it crawling up someone’s rectum at night. Especially mine.’

  Ed brought up internal views.

  ‘See that junk you collected in the hold?’ he said. ‘It’s an engine. The Nova Swing’s the only ship in the Galaxy with the software to run it. That was what you found.’

  She sighed impatiently.

  ‘Just tell me why you’re back, Ed. Maybe I can help.’

  ‘I came to free the people,’ Ed said, making a gesture which, perhaps hoping to take in the whole galaxy, explained nothing. ‘Things are going to get bad out here.’ This war, he said, was the big one. ‘They’ve been working up to it for a hundred and fifty years.’ It would mean a substantial collapse of EMC infrastructure. It would mean that no one had a right to expect endless progress any more. Quite the reverse. In the long term, that might in itself be good for the boys from Earth. ‘They can start from the ground up, with a more interesting take on things.’ Meanwhile it would get worse before it got better.

  ‘Thanks a lot for that prophecy, Ed.’

  ‘I was a prophet once,’ he said, ‘but I left all that behind.’ For a moment he watched the dynaflow medium streaming past. ‘I wish I could talk to Fat Anthony?’ he said suddenly. ‘But he avoids me.’

  ‘His name’s Antoyne and he’s a decent man. Back in the glory days he loved you and admired you, the way we all did. I was just the same. You were crazy and beautiful and that’s what we wanted. If you asked us to be heroes, we would have followed you anywhere. But it’s France Chance, Ed, win or lose every time you open the throttle. Remember that?’ Then, as soon as he began to answer: ‘And now what? You’re the only one who ever came back from the Tract, big achievement. But what have you brought out of there? You might be into something good, you might be deeper in shit than ever.’ She smiled; her smile said she couldn’t help him with that. ‘You can have the sh
ip. I don’t think either of us wants it after what happened, and we can easily get another.’

  She looked out the porthole one day not long after that, and saw they were back in the Saudade Quarantine orbit.

  The planet turned beneath them like some immense flywheel. Deadlights flickered off the bow. All around, it was offworld warehousing of the unnameable: a million tonnes of a substance half protein, half code, the waste of human interaction with mathematics.

  She got on the internal comms and said, ‘Ed, this is the wrong orbit. Park & Ride is further in. Do you want any help?’ Silence from the main hold. ‘Ed?’ When she arrived down there, she found the hull back in place and the mortsafes lined up in a neat row.

  They didn’t look any less disused than usual. ‘What are you fuckers looking at?’ she asked them. As if in response they separated suddenly, to reveal Ed Chianese lying prone on the deckplates while a very small Chinese woman crouched, knees apart, where the small of his back had once been. Ed’s face was pressed into the floor, her emerald green cheongsam was hiked up round her waist. Her skin was very white. You couldn’t be sure what was happening between them, but white motes the size of clothes moths seemed to be pouring out of her polished little ivory-colored vulva.

  ‘Ed?’

  Ed seemed too preoccupied to answer. The woman, if that’s what she was, chuckled and looked over at Liv. Liv turned and ran before she could be made to look closer, before she could be made to understand more. From that moment, she felt, everything in her life would depend on not interpreting what she had seen there. It would depend on remembering no more than a wink, a cigarette, a smile on very red lips. Ed caught up with her in the companionway outside.

  ‘Jesus, Liv. You could at least knock.’

  ‘Get us down to Saudade City,’ Liv said. ‘And then piss off.’

  An hour later, the three of them stood on the loading platform, looking out across the damp cement of Carver Field towards the Port Authority buildings and over them to the city itself. It was raining. The new day had a used light all over it; a light which might be described as pre-enjoyed on its passage from Retiro Street to the Church on the Rock. In the crime tourism quarter, the hotel neons weren’t quite done, but they’d faded to pastels of themselves. Ed Chianese leant on the loading platform rail, his ragged lower half rattling faintly in the wind.

  ‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’

  Liv found him a smile. ‘You’ve walked through one too many walls, Ed. Look at the state of you.’

  ‘I’ve got used to a life,’ was all Antoyne could think of to say.

  When Ed had gone the two of them were left on the cement, craning their necks as the Nova Swing groaned her way back to the Quarantine orbit on her tail of smoke. They watched until she was a fading green glow in the cloudbase. ‘Those fucking old engines!’

  Liv Hula said.

  ‘But she was a boat.’

  ‘She was a dog, Antoyne.’

  They laughed, then they turned towards Saudade City. The streets had a new excitement, they were packed with refugees and military police. Lightning flashed – a K-ship, splitting the sky, trailing thunder! She took his arm, folded it under her own, hugged it against her side, the way she used to walk with Irene.

  ‘Where to next?’ she said.

  ‘Some place where Crab Nebula is a main course not a destination.’

  TWENTY SIX

  Lizard People from Deep Time

  Uptown Six took the dynaflow highway halfway across the Halo. It was a fast uncluttered trip. Viewed from inside, the dyne fields are just like a human being – a kind of bad-natured origami, accordion-folded to contain more than seems possible or advisable. Is this how the universe dreams of itself? Eels flickering in shoals through some velvet medium? Splashes of coloured light drawn sideways suddenly by the unimaginable stresses of not really being there? The assistant, who felt similar stresses herself, sat uncomfortably by the porthole in the human quarters trying to comprehend these phenomena.

  ‘I don’t like to travel like this,’ she told the shadow operators, ‘with those fish outside the window.’ She didn’t like the food on the Uptown Six. She didn’t like the Vicente Fernandez lowrider music Carlo played, with its heavy reliance on traditional ranchera stylings. When he turned it off, she didn’t like a noise she thought the air-conditioning made which no one else could hear. Every time the ship changed course she said, ‘Is it supposed to sound like that?’ Her problem wasn’t travel itself. It was that she couldn’t feel comfortable away from Saudade. The shadow operators – obsessed by anything new and dysfunctional, and thus already deeply invested – took on the grey, slightly translucent appearance of mourning women, rubbed their bony, work-roughened hands together, and begged her:

  ‘Would you prefer something different to eat, dear?’

  The cabin was filled briefly with their smell of violets and Vinolia Soap.

  ‘Can we fetch you a blanket?’

  An hour or two into the journey R.I. Gaines opened the FTL routers and tried to refamiliarise himself with Galactic events. He fell asleep instead and dreamed he was in a rocket port surrounded by refugees. They resembled people, but they also resembled something like a swarm of bats or locusts too – or even a swarm of shadow operators, with a similar kind of sadness to their voracity and yearning. They were an ongoing process yet they never seemed to change. Gaines sat at a table with his hands in his lap. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind him, laughing and shrieking. He didn’t know what to do or think next. Adverts fluttered overhead like moths: his eyes followed them. People went in and out of the travel terminal doors: his head turned that way. Listening to the chimes of the public address system, he realised that, quite literally, he was not himself. He was someone he knew, but he couldn’t remember who. Eventually his number was called and he got to his feet and walked towards the gate.

  While Gaines was dealing with these issues, whatever they were, Carlo – whose meds had flattened him off nicely for the day – tried to lure the assistant into the pilot tank with him. Though she seemed interested, even after she had lifted the lid, she would only do sex inside an immersive art experience called Joan in 1956, which apparently featured an old car and something she described as ‘waisted cotton briefs’. Carlo wasn’t disheartened.

  ‘I’m so fucking in love,’ he told Gaines when Gaines woke up.

  By then they were under the shoulder of the Tract itself, tumbling down a thirty-light-year well between high temperature gas clouds. Soon, Galt & Cole’s big score filled the screens, not quite a planet, not quite a machine: a geological madhouse with aspects of both, having the gravitational signature of a low density rubble pile but eye-watering Mohr-Coloumb figures. It was as porous as sponge yet nothing could pull it apart. The highly cratered surface sported a uniform orange colour, slightly too pale for rust. Across it roiled deep cobalt shadows and strange-looking rivers of dust.

  ‘Home again,’ Gaines said.

  ‘Keep watching the skies, Carlo,’ he called as they left the ship.

  ‘These days there’s no need to run the maze,’ he told the assistant. But he took her in anyway. Some part of him still needed to show it off.

  Back at the beginning it had been a fracturing, disconnective experience, a space flickering with bad light and worse topology. The tunnels, small-bore and intricately turned one moment, would become huge and simple the next; as full of generated sounds as they were echoes, with no way of telling which was which. ‘Worse,’ Gaines told the assistant as he led her along, ‘they changed their nature.’ One moment they were tiled with shiny ceramics, next some sort of organic-looking fibre was matted over everything. You could be in a blood vessel or waiting for a train, or feel yourself running like a fluid between glass plates: it was an archaeology from which anything could be intuited and of which nothing was true. ‘It wasn’t so much what you might find round the next corner,’ Gaines said, ‘as that you were round the next corner before you kn
ew it was there.’ As a result – at the start, anyway – the maze had seemed more like a condition than a system. Its objects had seemed abstract.

  ‘What’s this I’m walking in?’ the assistant said.

  Gaines stopped. ‘It’s water. It’s just water.’

  He looked down uncertainly.

  ‘These are the safe parts,’ he said. ‘Back in the day, entire sections would go missing. They’d be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what’s fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone’s stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in.’ All expeditions, he told her, failed in some way, but they each had a character of their own: and if, for a while, that character seemed like the reality of the explored space, it was the best you could expect. ‘You learn to work with it. We were total colonialists. Always on the back foot. Always in the thin slice of the present.

  ‘Who built it?’ he said, as if she had asked him. He shrugged. ‘How would I know? Lizard People from deep time. They were all over the Halo for a while, you find traces of them even on a dump like Panamax IV.’

  The assistant shivered.

  As soon as they left the surface she had felt her tailoring come up. Now she looked back along the passage, which just there was full of brown light and had an old monorail running along it.

  ‘Something’s in here with us,’ she said.

  ‘People often think that.’ The labyrinth, Gaines said, was a perfect venue for standing acoustic waves: at around nineteen Hertz these would commonly generate feelings of dread, bouts of panic, visual defects and hallucinations. ‘Down at twelve you just vomit endlessly.’

  Half a mile along, the architecture changed suddenly and they were in primitive, squared-off passageways driven through basalt. When the boys from Earth arrived, there had been no light here worth speaking of for a hundred millennia. ‘We call it the PCM,’ Gaines said. ‘Pearlant Cultural Minimum. Suddenly you can see the tool marks. These sections may be the oldest of all, tunnelled into the rocky material before it aggregated, when it was part of something else. Or maybe their civilisation just lost traction on things for a while. Or these areas might have had a religious purpose. There’s no physics worth speaking of down here, but we get panel art. Look.’ He stopped in front of what appeared to be a section of bas reliefs, which showed three modified diapsids wearing complex ritual clothing. One of them was strangling a fourth, who lay passively on what looked like a stone bier.