Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  ‘That haulier you boarded,’ he informed her: ‘It’s long gone from Carver Field.’

  She opened the Nova Swing paperwork across one wall. A picture of Epstein’s face appeared on another. ‘What’s a “mortsafe’? It says here they took on a “mortsafe”.’

  ‘You’re the educated one,’ Epstein’s face said.

  He’d been at the Port Authority all morning, drinking java from a paper cup; then in the port itself. ‘Enka Mercury’s still here,’ he said. She was high in the warehouse ceiling now, the colour of oily smoke and tars, as transparent as soap. She was still hanging open under one arm. Still dead. From a distance the flap of skin resembled torn cloth. ‘Get alongside Enka in the cherrypicker, you’ll detect what I’d call a faint but definite smell.’

  ‘She’s still rotating?’

  ‘Toni Reno too,’ the cop confirmed. ‘Although Toni seems a little slower today. I can provide footage of that.’

  The assistant advised him not to bother, and had him wait while she examined the transit manifest. Cargo was given as: mixed cargo. Port of loading, Saudade. Port of discharge: New Miass, on some rock named Kunene, a hundred lights nearer the Tract. ‘Here’s something odd,’ she noted. Shipper, consignee and the ‘notify party’ were all the same: one MP Renoko, trading as FUGA-Orthogen, a limited liability operation with all the quantum uncertainty you expected in the Halo – if you knew who ran it, you didn’t know what it did, and vice versa. She asked Epstein what he thought of that, and Epstein said he had no opinion. FUGA-Orthogen, it turned out, dealt mainly paper – rights to the images of dead minor celebrities, brands no one bought into any more – but also owned the remaining assets of a once-popular travelling entertainment, Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant aka The Circus of Pathet Lao. ‘Fifty years after he picked them up,’ the assistant told Epstein, ‘this man Renoko is moving the assets of a circus around the Halo under the guise of commerce.’ She read on. One of those assets, it seemed, was an HS-HE cargo hauler, sold as-seen five years ago through a third party to Saudade Bulk Haulage: who renamed it Nova Swing.

  ‘Fat Antoyne,’ the assistant said to herself, ‘you are a dark horse.’ She asked Epstein if he had ever been to Kunene. Epstein said he hadn’t, but he thought it wasn’t far up the Beach.

  Unaware of their desultory exchange, Rig Gaines was on a visit to one of his less demanding projects. This corroded cylinder – about fifty feet long by twenty in diameter, cold enough to chill ham, smelling inside of hydrazine and unwashed feet and known to Gaines as ‘the Tub’ – was heading towards the K-Tract at just over walking pace, piloted by his old friend and ally, Impasse van Sant. Though it rarely produced anything marketable, Gaines liked the Tub. He liked to spend a morning there, drinking Giraffe beer while the pilot brought him up to date.

  Keeping in mind EMC’s culture of hip self-presentation – not to say its preference for conservatively leveraged joint venture structures with local partners – Gaines kept silent his collaboration with Imps von Sant. Last of the genuinely human beings, Imps passed his day in shower sandals and cargo shorts, often matched with a slogan T-shirt, which might read SHE’S UP YOU, MAN or YbAlB4 (pronounce that ‘yibble before’). In addition he cultivated a range of mid-20th century conditions from gingivitis to dry skin and had, over the years, grown fat. This old school viewpoint was what Gaines enjoyed about Imps most: his work being more difficult to fathom. Half the experiment – designed off the shelf a hundred years before to identify strange materials in the big dust clouds and expansion fronts at the edges of the Tract – was broken, while the rest produced data not from outside but from in, giving van Sant a running commentary on its own processes he had begun to describe in his reports as ‘a cry for help’. Needles swung across their dials, redlining jerkily until the Tub’s shadow operators woke up murmuring:

  ‘It’s not right, dear,’ and, ‘It’s too much to ask.’

  When Gaines arrived that morning for the weekly performance objectives review, he found van Sant hammering with the heel of his fist on a zinc box about a foot on a side and enamelled green, from which a pair of independent eyepieces dangled on cloth-covered flex.

  ‘I used to be able to see something in here.’

  ‘Forget that stuff,’ Gaines advised him, ‘and give me a beer.’

  ‘It was a view of mountains,’ van Sant said.

  He scratched up a quart of Giraffe, then banged the box again. ‘Mountains in one eye, and something else in the other, I forget what. No, wait. A lake! That’s what it looked like to me.’

  ‘Really?’

  Gaines had his doubts about the quality of these images – neither did he believe them to be informative in themselves. The instrument, acquired knock-down at the usual Motel Splendido fire sale, was operator-tuned: there would be some way of seeing, something you did with your head, which performed that trick of cross-correlation. Squint though he might, Imps van Sant had never got the knack. He wasn’t tailored the right way, though a certain natural shrewdness enabled him to observe:

  ‘It was what they added up to that made the difference.’

  ‘You don’t want to worry about that,’ Gaines told him vaguely. ‘Have we discovered anything this week?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  They drank beer, then played table tennis in the crew quarters using a new ball Gaines had brought along. The game being a version of his own devising, its rule-like structures and boundary conditions changing visit by visit, Gaines won. Shortly after that, carbon dioxide levels were raised sharply all the way across the Tub environment. Alarms went off. Van Sant had to suit up and go outside – where the ongoing tantrums of probability self-cancel to vacuum – and hit something twice with a wrench; then they had to dump the greenhouse and start again. By then it began to be time for Gaines to leave.

  ‘Biology,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Don’t you just wish you could do without it?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  After his friend had gone, Impasse van Sant sat tiredly in the bottom half of the eva suit and told himself: ‘I hate going out there. I can feel that thing looking at me.’ He meant the K-Tract. Gaines felt differently about it, he knew. Like everyone else, Imps had very little idea how he fitted into his friend’s schemes: but he sometimes thought that Rig visited the Tub because it was the only place he could relax. Rig loved it out in the dark, away from everything human. Van Sant felt less than comfortable with that. Some time ago – too long ago, perhaps – he had become aware of the Tract hanging up there in front of him, year on year like a huge boiling face – stripped, raw, raddled with Bok globules and dust lanes, flattened and stretched laterally by poorly-understood relativistic effects, heaving with emotions you couldn’t recognise.

  It made him feel routinely anxious. It made him feel alone. So as soon as he was sure Rig Gaines had gone he opened a spread of communications channels and whispered into empty space:

  ‘Hey, babe. Are you out there?’

  No answer today.

  The assistant booked a ticket to Kunene. Tide-locked with its local sun so that one side froze and the other cooked, this medium-sized venue a few lights into the Bay offered a single habitable time-zone known as ‘the Magic Hour’. Rare earth oxides had kick-started Kunene’s first phase of commerce, but it was the Magic Hour’s fixed and subtly graded bands of sunset action that brought in the investment partners: badlands, ghost towns and wreck-littered coastal benches seduced tourist and corporate image-maker alike, confirming Kunene as the Halo’s primo location for everything from amateur wedding holography through ‘existence porn’ to the edgiest of brand initiatives.

  Everyone who enjoys a sunset wishes it would never end; on Kunene, the brochures promised, you could have that wish.

  For half a day the assistant stared out the portholes of the shorthauler Puit Puit Maru, watching dynaflow hallucinations stream past like weed life underwater and telling herself, ‘I don’t like to travel. I don’t like
these cheap seats.’ No one sat near her. The Kunene Port Authority had never heard of the Nova Swing. But the name FUGA-Orthogen seemed familiar to them, and some of the heritage industries still brought machinery in from off-planet: so, because they were overworked and underappreciated, and because after checking her identity not even the police wanted to sit near her, they sent her to the hinterland. There – away from the lightmeter resorts and fuck safaris, towards the unmoving day where landscape began to dissolve in layers of violet and bony grey under the inhospitable glare of late afternoon – the old Kunene Economic Zone had shrunk to a line of semi-derelict processing plants running thirteen thousand miles north to south, coalescing here and there into poverty towns with names like Douglas or Skelton. Fifty years before, at the height of the lanthanides boom, many of these places had featured a rocket field all their own, and it was on one of these the assistant now found herself, the shuttle she came in on a rapidly-fading line of ionisation in clear teal skies.

  Administration was an eight-acre lot, thick with low-rise accommodation. Blue and white striped awnings creaked in the wind. Heavily blistered signs advertised commodities long past. All seemed deserted: but at reception in a single storey structure reprising the moderne suburban carport of 1959, the assistant found a short, skinny old man wearing golf cap, box-cut shirt and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers, idly throwing Entreflex dice on the polished wooden counter. A thousand faded bills of lading were pinned upon the wall. A switched-off sign read:

  PERDIDOS E ACHADOS

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘we’re closed.’

  ‘I came a hundred light years to hear that.’

  ‘Things are tough all over,’ the old man said. He threw the dice, which fell Vegan Snake Eyes, the Levy Flight, the Tower of Cloud. ‘Closed half a century next Thursday,’ he reflected. ‘But you want a drink with me, there’s a bar across the way.’ She laughed.

  ‘That’s your dream, buy drinks for a woman from another world?’

  ‘Everyone has to have a dream,’ he told her, ‘and it’s true you look a lot like mine.’

  He had run this office, he said, through the whole of the lanthanides boom. ‘A man called Renoko had it before me. It was as good as owning a mine, but less work. Our lives were different then.’ He rested his elbows on the counter and arranged the dice in a high-scoring line. The whites of his eyes were curded with age; his hands, big and soft with their crumpled knuckles and nicely-kept nails, were never still. ‘They were mambo days, but I don’t need tell you that.’

  ‘I’m looking for a ship,’ the assistant said.

  In reply, he took a green cardboard box off a shelf and emptied it in front of her. Hundreds of dice – some alien, some human, some single, some in pairs – rattled and bounced across the counter. All colours and materials, from bone to ruby plastic, they glittered with buried lights and embedded physics. He passed his hands above them and suddenly it was nothing but win. They were all the same way up. ‘What we lose is ourselves,’ he said, sweeping the dice back in the box then spilling them out again. ‘I seen luggage and pictures. A parcel of rusty knives. Once a thing that looks like a shoe but I find it’s alive. I took delivery of lost kiddies, lost coats, lost antiques including, as you see, these dice of all kinds.’ He shrugged. ‘A rocket ship’s too big for this office.’

  The assistant put her hands over his and held them still.

  ‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ she urged. ‘Black Heart rum is the drink I like, and I take my time over its burnt sugar flavours. That ship I’m after’s called the Nova Swing?’

  The old man looked at her.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said.

  ‘Lost dice,’ she called after him: ‘Unlucky for the finder!’

  She waited ten minutes then twenty.

  Behind the counter he kept it neat: just the box on the shelf, the yellowed waybills on the wall. Everything was very clean. There was a locked back room; there was a back door, opening on to fresh views of the Kunene Economic Zone. When he didn’t return in half an hour, the assistant went out and walked around calling, ‘Hello?’ Intense afternoon light threw shadows across the empty avenues between the buildings. At the end of one silent perspective the rare earth hills revealed themselves; at the end of another, the cracked cement of the landing field. She was in a maze: silent and static, self-similar in all directions, with the air of temporary habitation made permanent by the forces of commerce and psychic decline. ‘Hello?’ Confused by the sameness of things, her tailoring began to hallucinate objects bigger than the spaces they occupied: she switched it to standby. A few minutes later the old man crossed an intersection fifty or sixty yards in front of her. He was pushing some long, heavy, tubular object, leaning into its weight as if into a strong wind. She could hear him groaning with the effort.

  When he caught sight of her, he gave a little skip of fear.

  ‘I am not Renoko!’ he called.

  His shirt billowed out behind him. By the time she reached the intersection he had vanished: thereafter she only ever saw him at a remove, dwarfed by the maze, his attempts to run producing comical slow-motion. Eventually, a muted wailing noise rose, as of a painful incident at the most distant edge of the landing field; in the same moment, she rounded a corner to find him hanging eight feet above the ground, revolving in a slow, loose double loop. His white cap was missing. He was smiling. He was dead. Whatever he had been pushing was gone.

  Lost and found, the assistant thought.

  A voice in her ear whispered, ‘Hi, my name is Pearlent and—’

  Her chops came back up in a rush. The context blurred. The assistant smelled target chemistry, tailored kairomones characteristically sweet and rank. A monster like herself, something fixed up by cutters with an adolescent view of the future, it darted away in front of her in random evasion patterns: stinking of HPA hyperactivity; emitting frequencies she could detect but not produce – 27 to 40 gHz, some kind of local surveillance medium; and uploading in an unfocused FTL scream to destinations she couldn’t guess. They duelled between the buildings, thirty or forty seconds without coming to terms. When the assistant paused to listen, the creature froze and shut down its systems; otherwise it stayed in the shadows, kept up the momentum, entered one structure even as it seemed to exit from another, smashing down a door whilst bursting out of a sidewall twenty yards away in a suspended explosion of clapboard fragments. It was faster than her. It was angrier. It had made no attempt to identify or engage her. Instead it seemed to be engaged in an argument with itself. Eventually she gave up. Listened to its footfalls thud and rage away into the distance, where the tilted wrecks of space ships– victims as much of commodity prices as of the high-energy astrophysics out in Radio Bay – sank into badland sediments laced with unexposed ore. The creature spurted off between them, churning up plumes of rotten earth until it vanished, two or three kilometres off, into a line of low hills. Not running away, she thought, so much as struggling to contain its own responses. She went back to the corpse.

  The sun beat down. Along the avenue, loose asbestos panels banged in the permanent four o’clock wind. The old man lay on the warm air – one arm outstretched, opposite leg bent, as if demonstrating how to swim sidestroke – leaving a faint blissful wake. He was a little higher up now. His smile had secretive qualities, and he seemed to be straining his eyes to look over his shoulder. Two or three dice floated around his head. In addition he’d attracted an advertisment, which, blown fifty miles from some promateur image-safari in the edges of the twilight zone, swooped and fluttered in counterpoint to his lazy, horizontal figure-of-eight. ‘Amid the perpetual shadows of the terminator,’ it was informing him when the assistant arrived, ‘technical challenge abounds for amateur and professional alike: but to those most in harmony with its subtleties, Kunene Golden Hour is first choice for all the haunting, sometimes disturbing moods we most love.’

  R.I. Gaines remained a mystery to her.

  ‘Skull Radio,’ he had told her, ‘brings do
wn most of the major vibes.’ But when she looked into the device he’d left her, it was like looking in a cheap souvenir. He hadn’t told her how to work it. Her shadow operators discovered nothing. ‘We’re happy to help, dear, of course we are,’ they said: but if Gaines was a name, no one had used it since 2267, the year their kind of records began. ‘So happy to help,’ they said. Meanwhile, EMC was a firewall; it was imperturbable. No other agency claimed him. He was a man with the dress sense of another age. He walked through walls. The assistant sat on the bed in her room and held up the radio at eye level. The little baby skull stared back at her, nested in red lace and drifting sequins.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Hey!’ the radio said excitedly, in R.I. Gaines’s voice.

  Next, it folded open in some way so that it contained her – though she could still feel it like a solid object in her hands. She heard a kind of music. Sequins floated out of the skull’s mouth and through the assistant into her room, where walls and floor absorbed them. It was a process. Gaines swam into view shortly afterwards. He seemed nervous. She couldn’t quite see what was going on behind him, but she had the idea it was happening in a very large space. ‘Hey!’ he said again.

  He said he was a little busy right then.

  ‘Something happened,’ the assistant told him. Skull Radio, reaching out along the airwaves, running on all the base inconsistencies of the universe, warmed to flesh heat in her hands. The baby seemed to be looking at her now. More of it was in view at the back of the box. It was less bony than she liked, a fat little baby’s body hanging into the box with its legs open. ‘Do you know about this thing called Pearlant?’