Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  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).

  Somebody laughed.

  ‘Stop that,’ said Case.

  Overdriven movement registered as the usual mucoid blur. Waste heat systems undervented, raising the subject’s body temperature slightly above operating norms at 110 degrees fahrenheit; cortisol, androstenedione and estradiol levels rose sharply. After the fourth iteration, a suite of unplanned arm-movements began to be present. No one was able to explain this.

  Throughout, the Pearl remained stable. Viewed as a false-colour display, the folds of its metallic gown fluttered in undetectable drafts. A faint zone of refraction surrounded it, causing the image – now perhaps twice life size – to ripple as if underwater. Its face looked human, then more like a cat’s face. After some minutes there came a shift in the index of refraction, like a little step-change in energy states. At the same time the main research tool came to life: elements of the labyrinth began to realign themselves; a grinding vibration could be felt in the floor. Hologram schematics flickered. Seismic arrays were picking up action at the scale of plate tectonics. ‘VF14/2b is warming up,’ someone announced, and began to reel off phase-space data. Case’s operator said in a calm voice, ‘There’s something massive in the tunnels.’ The overhead lights dimmed and shifted towards the red. ‘You may have to extract me,’ the operator said.

  Then it shouted, ‘Look, look! In the maze! Deep time!’ Nothing was heard from it after that.

  Meanwhile the Pearl opened and closed its mouth, waving its arms above its head in a kind of boneless, astonished panic. It seemed to be falling faster. Thousands of small objects tumbled along with it, as if the air itself were unloading them, glowing embers or stained-glass fragments, bouncing and rattling as energetically as Entreflex dice where they fell. Waves of perfume – cheap, old fashioned and bizarrely sexual, something you might smell on Pierpoint Street at four in the morning – billowed through The Old Control Room. As if disheartened by this display, the policewoman tired visibly. She made a last effort to break Gaines’ behavioural constraints, then raised her left fist to her mouth and bit at the knuckles. She stared over her shoulder at him.

  ‘Help!’ she called (once).

  Then she jumped into the Pearl and vanished. After that, the Pearl vanished too, and everything went dark.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Gaines into the silence.

  He was working out how to distance himself from the project and move on when he saw the tall white flower of light slowly beginning to bloom, and heard the voices and sounds which, to him at least, sounded like the voices and sounds of something, as he put it to himself, arriving, and began to run like everyone else for the back door of the facility and the debatable safety of the labyrinth beyond, trampling as they did so the ageing Case, who had lost both his sticks.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  The Medium is Not the Message

  Aspodoto, Tienes mi Corazon, Backstep Cindy: a name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. Fortunata, Ceres, Berenice. Queenie Key, Calder & Arp, Washburn Guitar. Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet . . .

  When Anna Waterman fell through the summerhouse floor and into the Aleph, it was just before dawn on a damp September morning in London. What time it was for the Aleph would be less easy to record.

  The space she fell through was a confusing colour, like darkness on a windy night. It was too wide to be a tunnel, too confined to be anything else. Its boundary conditions allowed her to topple; they didn’t allow her to touch the sides. The sky quickly contracted to an almost invisible point above her. For a time, the cat was some company. It fell with a comical expression on its face, then seemed to drift in towards her, kneading the air with its front paws and purring loudly, after which they lost sight of one another. ‘James, you nuisance,’ Anna said.

  Up above, something settled, as if the summerhouse, properly on fire this time, had begun to collapse. Rattling down towards her came a shower of objects coloured deep wine and amber or fanned by their speed to the fierce yellow of Barbie hair. These hot dolls, burning coals and melted pill-bottles seemed to be falling much faster than Anna; as they passed they matched her velocity for a moment, so that she felt she could have reached out and touched them; then they accelerated away and were quickly lost to sight.

  In life, she knew, you might: Fall ill. Fall pregnant. Fall from grace.

  God knows she had done all three of those. ‘Mine was a prolonged fall,’ she imagined herself explaining, ‘accompanied by much of the detritus I thought I’d left behind.’ She addressed the cat: ‘Name your jouissance.’

  As she fell, she was aware of her arms waving slowly and bonelessly. Her legs pedalled. The sensation of falling was, she thought, much the same as that of treading water: the more you struggled the less control you maintained. Your heart rate increased, all the effort went to waste. You felt closer to drowning. It was a mistake to allow that idea in. The most important distinction of childhood is the one between falling asleep and falling as death. Long before she had fallen into anorexia, or read Milton on the fall from dawn to dewy eve, or fallen victim to Michael Kearney, Anna had been afraid to fall asleep. As soon as she recognised that, she began to struggle. There followed predictable moments of panic, flickering and buzzing on all sides, anguished flashes of light, after which she found herself in an echoing space, the nature of which she would have been hard put to describe.

  It was very tall; it was dark and light at the same time. It reminded her of a restaurant she and Marnie used to visit for lunch, built into the shell of an abandoned power station in Wapping. She had a sense of dread. She could see a little, but she didn’t know what any of it was. There were people all round her. They gestured and goggled, trying to push their faces close into hers. Their mouths opened and closed, yet it was Anna who felt like the fish in the tank. They were studying her.

  ‘How close can I get?’ they asked one another, and: ‘Do we have any idea where she came from?’

  ‘We don’t have an idea about anything.’

  Laughter.

  ‘She looks as if she’s falling. Caught falling.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption, Gaines.’

  In fact, Anna felt like someone caught going to the lavatory in the middle of Waterloo station in the rush hour. She had a slightly nauseous sense of James the cat, so close she couldn’t quite bring him into focus. It was embarrassing. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else. There was something the matter with her cheekbones. She felt smeary and unstable at significant sites, in the manner of a Francis Bacon painting. At the same time she felt as if she had been penetrated by something huge in an inappropriate part of her body; or, worse, that she had penetrated it. What made her condition so impossible was the nature of this object.

  It was her own life.

  . . . Sekhet, Sweet Thing. Minnie. Matty. Mutti. Roses, Radtke, Emily-Misere. Girl Heartbreak! & Imogen. L1 Dominette. I pull one way she pulls the other. That woman will never be part of me. I say fall on your own. Fall on your own you bitch. Not near me. There is a third thing in here with us she says & a fourth and a fifth. It stinks of cat in here, some filthy animal. We’ll never get where we’re going this way. My name is. (Ysabeau, Mirabelle, Rosy Glo. Sweet Thing & Pak 43. Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire. Stormo!, Te Faaturuma.) I fall into the summerhouse & shout the wrong thing. No one listens . . .

  In Saudade City, the Toni Reno case was duly filed ‘unsolved’.

  Not long after, Epste
in the thin cop found himself on patrol with a uniform called Grills. It was a mild night. Some rain. The traffic on Tupolev was thinner than usual. For the b-girls, on parade in their candy-coloured mambo pumps at the corner of Johnson & Chrome, business was slow. Over at Preter Coeur, the fights were slow. From Placebo Heights to the Funnel, from Retiro Street to Beasley Street, entire entertainment demographics were staying home.

  GlobeTown, 2 am: Epstein and Grills found time to talk about the war. Grills believed it could lead to a permanent change in the social landscape. Crime tourism, she said, had tanked; they also were seeing across-the-board decreases in illegal tailoring, donkey capers, sensorium porn and other personality hacks. But the way Epstein saw it war was only another layer added to a bad cake – these downward trends she outlined being balanced by the growing market in counterfeit identity chips, food stamps and rackrenting. If personality crime was down, smuggling was up, seventeen per cent year on year. After a pause to consider this, Grills opined that a lot more crowd control overtime would be available in the months to come; with that Epstein could only agree, and they left it at that. Suddenly there was a white flash in the sky high up, silent but very sharp, very high-end. Epstein shaded his eyes with one broad hand.

  ‘Is it an attack?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Grills said. ‘I’ve seen an attack, and there was—’ here, she felt around for the right words ‘—more of it.’

  Five hundred miles above their heads, K-ships were disappearing from one orbit to reappear almost immediately in another. Empty space was frying with their communications. A minute ago they had been administering their flock of rusted hulks: now they were facing into a void. Ten million metric tonnes of psychophysical gunk, welded into receptacles ranging from the size of a coffin to that of a largish asteroid, had gone missing. The news media were full of it. Some fierce new kind of physics had lit up the sky and in a matter of nanoseconds the entire quarantine orbit of Saudade had drained away like dirty water in front of people’s eyes. The Quarantine Police were mystified. Everyone else was excited. All over GlobeTown, they came running out of the bars and Nueva Tango joints to stare up into the rain. Epstein and Grills, glad of the action, kept order. ‘Nothing to see here,’ they admonished; but they stared up too.

  ‘Who wanted that shit anyway,’ Grills remarked, voicing the general sense of relief that would set in over the next few hours.

  Two or three streets away, in a tenement so close to the corporate port that its geometry shifted a little every time a ship came in, things were holding up well for George the gene tailor.

  Perhaps he looked a little bloated. Internal changes had taken place. If you found him, it might not be wise to move him. And he was, of course, dead: so his hold on things had become tenuous. But he still had what might be described as a footprint there, in the assistant’s old room. At this scale, anyway. If you were able to see the room as a context fixed across a couple of hundred years, George, like everyone else who had spent time there, would be part of a kind of dark smoke rushing through. However hard they tried to fix an identity for themselves at one scale, it was taken away from them at another. They thought of themselves as people but they were more like ghosts or ads – anything that flocks or swarms.

  . . . Lucky Pantera, Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7, ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. Janice. Jenny. Geraldine. You blody polse thing. Fucking in me. Get out! & don’t come in! October falls into November. West London draws round itself & for one second seems comforting. Then Michael comes in & there’s a row. Marnie, seven years old: ‘It’s a dog’s poo in a paper bag & he lit it on fire.’ You aren’t a camera, but you are, in everything you do, a description of the present. We fall into the dark street & kill someone. My name! she calls out. We kill someone again . . .

  Meanwhile, a thousand light years from home, the assistant was undergoing transitions of her own. They were quick and dirty. The world, coming apart into pixels, streamed like eels then reassembled itself around her. She was looking out, as if through tinted glass, or from a very dissociated position, into a room.

  Part of her was a million years old and the size of a brown dwarf; other parts were, for the moment at least, describable only as ‘something else’. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. Sediment oozed from the corner of her mouth. If you had asked how she felt, she would have answered, ‘Spread thin.’ There were deep shadows up in the ceiling. There was a noise like tinnitus. People came and went at the wrong speed, in groups and smears like animated statistics. Some of them were people the assistant had talked to earlier. Some of them were pushing racks of equipment about. They were all ignoring her. All she could do was wait for them to notice what had happened, wait for the situation to stabilise, and encourage them to engage with her. She was patient and calm. If she didn’t have a name, she could at least identify herself.

  ‘SiteCrime, Saudade City,’ she repeated at every opportunity. ‘Junction of Uniment & Poe. Fifth floor investigator.’

  Someone peered in at her from very close quarters.

  ‘Gaines?’ he said, raising his voice and tilting his head almost horizontally into her field of view: ‘You might be interested in this. It’s asking for something.’

  ‘There’s a data spike in VF14/2b,’ someone else called.

  The assistant was impaled on that spike. It went right through her, and she through it. There was no describing what had happened to either of them.

  ‘It keeps repeating this address.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘It’s asking for a detective from some hick police service the other side of the Halo.’

  . . . It is like enacting yourself as one sentence over & over again. I redline my equipment & make the moves. That bitch comes up fast but she will never be as fast as me. I call out my warning, they don’t want to hear that, so I kill them again. I can’t hear the language they talk between themselves. Do you know what it is to be like me, your condition is unnameable. It is relieved of all previous contexts. This freedom! My goodness when you’re like me even your piss is inhuman . . .

  Anna Waterman could watch the soap slip off the edge of the bath one night in 1999.

  A white figure knelt in the cooling bathwater, while another figure curled round it from behind. Laughter. The water splashed about and the bath made vigorous but mournful sounds.

  Unused to skulking around her own life like this, Anna found its details surprising: not so much in themselves but in that they existed at all. It was exciting, in a way, to see your own naked body walking away from you, or hear yourself say with a laugh, ‘Now, what can we eat?’ But everything had the false clarity you get with a certain kind of photograph. Every surface proved to be microscopically available to her new vantage point; yet they were without meaning. The facts were often different too. The man in the bath, for instance, who she had always remembered as Michael, turned out to be Tim. How embarrassing. Everything was the same but, in the end, quite different. You could count the varieties of toothpaste in the bathroom, which a memory of sex doesn’t normally encourage. She could view every aspect of that event, and of the events surrounding it, and of every other event in her life. A generation later, water poured its yeasty bulk over the Brownlow weir; ponies ran about in a field as if suddenly released; skylarks rose and fell over the South Downs like busy lifts: at exactly the same time, Anna could watch herself, peacefully becalmed in what she had learned to call the Noughties, rapping upon her kitchen window.

  ‘Marnie,’ she was calling, ‘you annoying child! Leave the hose alone!’

  Marnie at six years old. Anna tidying up for Tim. Anna, alone with her life at last, staring out across the field in the June twilight, drinking her fourth glass of Pinot Noir. She called the cat home, ‘James, you old fool. What have you found now?’ She saw herself undress beneath the willows, hide her shoes, wade into the river in the moonlight. But, as bright and precise as if she was viewing them through optical glass, these scenes o
nly reminded her of her present predicament. As she watched herself go up and down the garden – a neat, doll-like, slightly speeded-up figure seen day after day under mixed lighting conditions, moving inevitably towards its own fall – she began to think how the situation might be retrieved. She could connect with any of those moments. She could have a voice in her own past.

  Everything that was wrong stemmed from the summerhouse.

  What if Anna didn’t fall?

  . . . She is always trying to say her name, how she fell out of love with her parents quite early in life, ‘They humiliated me in some way before I was five.’ She was a small, friendly, nervous girl who liked being up early and late. Too anxious on her own, too anxious in company. I was happiest with one other person. I’ve seen things here you would not believe: men with cocks two feet long . . .

  All over the Halo, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with an expenditure of energy amounting almost to fanfare, the Quarantine orbits had begun to empty themselves out. Reports conflicted. The situation was confused.

  Two hundred miles above Mas d’Elies, showers of shortlived exotic vacuum events were detected, nesting inside the usual quantum froth like pearls in a handful of black lace. Such subtle fireworks, originating deep in the graininess of the universe itself, were normally associated with only the most alien of engines—

  Twenty-five fuck-tourists from Keks-Varley III claimed to have seen ‘a wheel of fire’ crossing the nightside sky of Funene. Visible to the naked eye for three hours, it broke up into a series of aurora-like pulses then fell below the horizon. During this period no activity was observed in the quarantine orbit; though shortly afterwards it became invisible to instruments—