Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

  ‘These people were a million years ahead of us, but they were still trying to work out how to be rational. I don’t think they ever quite made it. The Aleph was only one of their projects.’

  He took her arm again.‘Are you ready? It’s through that next door.’

  On Saudade, Epstein the thin cop got a call to go to one of the bonded warehouses at the noncorporate rocket port. It was 4.20 am. Exactly two minutes earlier, the corpse of Enka Mercury had vanished. Edits of the nanocam coverage showed a translucent, fish-coloured image of Enka – through which you could make out the ribbed alloy walls of the warehouse – suddenly replaced by nothing. No matter how many cuts the operator made, there was no transition phase. One minute Enka was clinging on – her expression, when you could see it, as determined as it had been from the start, the expression of someone who had died but had never given up – the next, she was gone.

  Epstein stared into the empty air of the warehouse as if his own deep common sense might do better than the technology, then took himself down to the alley off Tupolev, where he arrived in time to see Toni Reno follow his loader into oblivion. It was a cold wet morning, with traffic sparse on Tupolev and light creeping in from the side. As the war re-engaged everyone’s libido, Toni’s following had dropped off. But a couple of thirteen-year-olds – their calculatedly asymmetric caps of black hair and Fantin & Moretti hand-crafted moccasins soaked with rain – still occupied the sidewalk.

  ‘Toni never hurt anyone,’ one of them complained to Epstein. ‘Why does this have to happen to him?’

  ‘Beats me, kid,’ Epstein said.

  ‘You see?’ the boy said to his friend, as if Epstein wasn’t really there. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  He moved them on. He called it in. He tried to get hold of the assistant, but Uniment & Poe were being coy about her whereabouts. Eventually he shrugged and forgot about it. High grade crime tourism was at a low this month, but in and around the new refugee centres in Placebo Heights and White Train Park, misdemeanours of a puzzlingly old-fashioned nature – simple beatings, direct thefts of food or money – were ensuring the uniform cops a sixteen-hour day. No one had seen anything like it. They were having to develop new theory.

  While Epstein made himself busy, the Halo was holding its breath and falling into the mirror. Upper management loved itself at war. In the corporate enclaves – which constructed themselves as little market towns called Saulsignon, Burnham Overy or Brandett Hersham, featuring stone churches and water meadows under blue rainwashed skies, perfect windy weather and ponies on the green – war felt real and grown up, a contingency for which your values and education had prepared you. Although obviously some sacrifices would have to be made.

  Other demographics found themselves less convinced. Alyssia Fignall, who had caught the last shuttle off Panamax IV before the war arrived, ended up with three hundred families in a refugee camp on Alum Rock. It was a small camp, three or four acres of tents on a headland under fine blowing rain. From the fence you could see beet fields stretching away inland. In the early afternoons, tired-looking women congregated between the tents to exchange what little information they had. No one in the camp was allowed access to an FTL router, or even a dial-up, so there wasn’t much. No one knew when they would be taken off.

  ‘Plenty of rumours,’ the women told Alyssia, ‘but no rockets.’ It was clearly something they said a lot.

  On her first day, after the meeting, she lay on her back in her tent, listening to the rain, the sound of a man breaking up wooden pallets with a billhook, the yells of boys as they ran about kicking a ball through other people’s living space. She closed her eyes and tried to doze, while the family next door built a wall of straw bales between her and them, working slowly and with care, talking constantly and patiently to their three-year-old daughter who, though she seemed ill, did her best to help.

  It was a determined statement – language addressed less, perhaps, to Alyssia than to the situation itself. A response to the unstructuredness of the world in which they now all found themselves.

  ‘I’m cooking now!’ the woman called as it got dark.

  Alyssia walked about the site, trying to meet people and get news. Then she tried to leave, only to be turned back at the perimeter. A week later she was still there, among the litter, the flapping, badly-pegged tents, the acrid fires just after sunset, the sudden savage cries and ugly half-musical noises of the adolescent gangs.

  By then, her body, or her clothes, or perhaps simply the whole site, had begun to smell of composting toilets. There were rumours that no one was to be repatriated but the whole camp would be moved somewhere else. She pushed a hole in the wall of bales and asked the woman next door if she could help with the child. Over the following months she often thought about Rig and wondered if he was all right. She knew he would be. He was Rig, after all.

  Out near the Kefahuchi Tract itself, the news was not the war.

  Daily Deals & Huge Savings’s encounter with Panamax IV made excellent media. Syndicated to a thousand planets, with a variety of commentaries and factoid enhancements, it enjoyed a well-deserved three minutes in the sun. The initial collision had generated perhaps 200 trillion trillion ergs of energy, equivalent to the explosion of five or six gigatons of conventional explosives. As Daily Deals & Huge Savings burst out of the iron core, blowback to the tune of a further five thousand gigatons had cut a channel like a beam of light through the super-heated atmospheric gases and crustal debris. While in no way incalculable, the final release of energy, as the core itself exploded into local space, was in human terms almost meaninglessly large. But meaninglessly large energy events are the daily context of the Tract, where eruptions from the central unshielded singularity – if that is what it is – are so powerful they generate in the surrounding gas clouds pressure waves that manifest themselves as sound.

  This gigantic uproar, resonating through million-cubic-parsec cavities in the constituent gas, is the citizen journalism of the Tract; the loops and scribbles left by the shockfronts are its headlines. So for Imps van Sant’s instruments the news was not the destruction of Panamax IV. It was a series of discordant and complex groans 60 octaves below middle C.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Imps, who had never heard anything like it.

  Sometimes your situation becomes too plain to you. Strange forces are at work. Imps tore off the headphones and beat them against the instrument panel until the bakelite cracked: the Tract seemed to keep on roaring at him anyway, like a huge face, its expression indescribable in human terms. Rage, elation, despair – even, he thought, some kind of vast weird parental love. It was all of those things and none of them. As for the physics: no one had ever had any idea of that. Some people said it was the physics of the early universe, still running in a leaky envelope, a cyst caught in a very long moment of bursting – the right physics but not in its right time. Imps didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. To him it was the physics of a face. He leaned back from the console and rubbed his eyes. He thought he might try and have a shower, then a beer. He was just lumbering up out of his chair when he heard a whisper from the broken headset. He grabbed it up.

  ‘Hello?’

  George the gene tailor lay where the assistant had left him in her room in GlobeTown, the blankets pulled up lovingly to his chin. George was dead, but not alone in that. Spaceships lit the room’s warm air, psychic blowback from their weird science reinscribing on the walls – in layers of swirled colours like graffiti – the thoughts and feelings of everyone who had expired there before he arrived. Did dead George take comfort from these maps, butterflies, and other partially-depicted items from alien worlds? Was he aware of the street below, flowering like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night? Rokit Dub basslines spreading as waves across the city? The bars and nuevo tango joints opening slowly, their facades pulsing and sucking? Even if he was, these things are so much cultural babble. If they want anything, the dead want a rest from all of that.r />
  Though she never had a name, the assistant was used to being someone. People were, for instance, frightened of her, on the fourth floor at Uniment & Poe, on Straint Street or Tupolev, on the sidewalk by the cake stall on Retiro Street. The assistant was used to having a presence in places like that. Here it wasn’t the same. Everyone was EMC. They spoke and walked as if they were thinking about something else. She was just someone who had arrived with Rig Gaines. When they came up to talk to him, they ignored her. Her chemistry didn’t work on them the way it worked on Epstein or her friend George. For instance a man called Case came up and said:

  ‘Is this her? Jesus.’

  Case looked as if he had outlived himself. A tall man, with an air of once being heavily built, he walked bent over and bearing down awkwardly on two sticks. Both hips had gone. Like anyone else he could have had himself fixed but he had left it too long, out of carelessness or even some kind of inverted vanity, and now preferred this cooked, hairless look. His hands were ropy with veins, the skin over them shiny and slack. His brown head seemed too big for his neck; his underlip, the texture of braised liver, drooped in exhausted surprise at finding himself still alive. He stood in front of the assistant, staring greedily at her but at the same time with a curious lack of interest, as if he remembered women but his body didn’t. He whispered to himself. After a moment or two he leaned forward and tapped her forearm sharply.

  ‘Rig tells me you have some Kv12.2 expression issues,’ he said.

  ‘Is he talking to me?’ she asked Gaines.

  ‘We could help with that,’ Case said. ‘It’s just a small design flaw. Do you understand? Effectively, you have epilepsy.’ When she didn’t answer, he asked Gaines, ‘Does she understand anything?’

  ‘Honey, you could breathe through your mouth less,’ the assistant said.

  Case blinked at her.

  ‘I never expected any sense out of you, Rig,’ he said to Gaines, ‘but this is moronic. You have no idea what will happen if we do this.’

  Gaines’ response was to shrug. One way or another, he supposed, they would get some science out of it. This bland assumption turned into an argument in which Case’s team joined. They all talked at once. ‘Science?’ Case shouted at one point. He held both his sticks in one hand so he could make a contemptuous gesture with the other. ‘Science is off. It’s been off ever since you and Emil walked into this fucking place!’

  Laughter all round.

  ‘I don’t like these people,’ the assistant said loudly.

  Everyone stopped talking.

  Gaines took her by the arm. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s OK, really.’ They stood looking at one another, while Case and his team stared at them. Rig gave her one of his wryest smiles and while he was still smiling at her said to someone nearby:

  ‘We could probably get some coffee here?’

  The guy said sure. He could fetch that if they liked. They could get regular with milk or they could get regular without.

  ‘You don’t need to stay with us,’ Gaines told the assistant when the coffee arrived. ‘Have a look around. Have a look at everything.’ After that she was left alone with herself to an unfamiliar degree.

  The room was as big as a travel terminal, dark but with islands of activity. Vehicles drove about, some quite heavy. Over near the middle of the space they had something isolated under powerful lights. It was moving in a sporadic way, like something natural, but she couldn’t see what it was. She found a place to sit, sprawled her legs wide and smiled at some of Case’s people until they looked away. She thought of names for herself: Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7 and ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. She looked down at her forearm: it was registering No Data. Meanwhile, Case’s people brought up new equipment, which they organised inside the circle of light. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to the assistant.

  Outside the lighted area they had some basic chopshop fitments – a brand new proteome tank enamelled the colour of white goods in 1953, a cutting table and some surgical instruments. She was comfortable with all that. When she had finished her coffee, Gaines led her over there and said, ‘While we’re waiting, why don’t we have a look at this seizure activity of yours? Hop up on the table.’ She hopped up on the table and let him get a couple of probes into her at neurotypical sites. One of them slipped into her chest cavity, high up. She felt it rest momentarily against the collarbone as it pressed past. A sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. Soon she experienced pleasantly warm and lethargic feelings, with everything retreating to a distance as if it had nothing to do with her. ‘That’s great,’ Gaines told her, ‘just relax. Fuck,’ he said, to someone else. ‘These guys, whoever they were! Look at this. And this.’ He touched something and colours flew about in her head like small birds. She heard herself laugh. ‘Oops,’ Gaines said. ‘Wrong switch. Did you like that?’ She tasted metal, then two or three workshop spaces seemed to open inside her. Gaines began working in one of them. Later Case arrived to have a look.

  ‘I don’t want him here,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Gaines said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I want you to wake me up now,’ the assistant said.

  Gaines bent over her and she saw him smile.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to strangle me?’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’

  After that she never seemed to be properly conscious again. She could tell what was happening, but it didn’t involve her. ‘Did you know you’ve got a 27 to 40 gHz radar option?’ Gaines said. His voice came from inside her now, with a clear echo, as if they were back in the tunnels. ‘Short range local surveillance medium. Not bad. Would you like it switched on?’ He switched it on and she saw everything in the control room filmy grey. Case’s people rolled the table over into the middle of the space, under the brightest light, where they left it. She lay in a comfortable haze, lighted internally by the 27 to 40 gHz radar, which Gaines had left switched on. She could detect people coming and going but not move her head. Eventually they swung the inspection table on its axis and did something to the probes so that her unforced sensory systems came back on. The assistant saw what was under the lights and why she had been brought here.

  Two or three days earlier, after a minor convulsion ripped up the containment area, the object known to Case’s team as ‘Pearl’ or ‘the Pearl’ had begun to fall again. This process – less motion than an attempt to express motion in a static medium – seemed as wilful as it was stylised. Her body language, Gaines thought, was that of a sustained struggle against circumstances no one else could be allowed to understand. Case had a different view.

  ‘Fuck that,’ he said. It would be wise to remember that the falling woman was neither falling nor a woman. It was a monster, heavily misrepresented from the data. It was the nearest guess the instruments could make about what was actually going on. ‘Much like the universe itself, it’s a useless analogy for an unrepresentable state,’ he said, and laughed. This led to an argument between the two men about the original nature of the Aleph. Case believed they had been wrong about that, too.

  ‘It never contained a fragment of the Tract,’ he said.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It contained the whole of it. It still does.’

  Once they had the policewoman disabled and in position, the Aleph team brought up their final item of equipment. Shiny one moment, indistinct the next, it was still assembling itself from a nervous slurry of materials – carbon nanofibres, non-Abelian superconductors held at ambient temperatures, fast-evolving AI swarms running on picotech. Next an operator was introduced. It took the form of a young girl, thin and tan, perhaps eight years old, dressed in the dark blue shorts and short-sleeved Aertex shirt of an endless summer holiday in St Steven’s Withy or Burnam Agnate, who reminded Gaines of his daughter at that age. The operator was quick to sense this.

  ‘Oh, Rig!’ it said, taking his hands and laughing up at him.
Its feet were bare. ‘What have you got for us this time!’

  It winked. Raw white light poured out its eyes, mouth and nose. Then it seemed to break up into a shower of sparks and enter the machine. Musical sounds emerged. A single awed voice said: ‘Strange forces are at work here.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Case,’ Gaines said. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

  Case’s people pressed the tit.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then the policewoman jumped off the table, swaggered three paces away from it and attempted to switch on her tailoring. Whatever Gaines had done to her switched it off again.

  She shouted angrily and tried again, and was switched off again. Visual records showed two or three iterations of this behaviour occurring in a single five-second period, as the assistant’s housekeeping systems laid new neural pathways around the blocks put in by Gaines. Learning rates were impressive but capped out quickly: within two minutes she was able to remain overdriven for periods up to twelve seconds, but her repertoire – and her range – of movements became fixed. Anxiety pushed the repertoire through several iterations, during which the subject was observed to:

  Jump off the cutting table (once); crouch on the floor and move her head rapidly side to side, emitting active sonar between 200 and 1000 kHz (three times); perform other target-seeking behaviours (twice); become aware of the Pearl in front of her (twice); vomit a white liquid (once); throw up her hands and shout something indistinct (four times); turn left and run three paces (four times); turn left and run four paces (three times); decelerate abruptly (every time); and scream (every time).