Empty Space

TWENTY Modern Luminescence

‘It came out of nowhere.’

‘Nothing comes out of nowhere.’

‘Ha ha. What is it?’

‘It says “biological content”.’

The tank had been through some recent high-temperature event, after which it pitched into empty space a light minute off the Nova Swing’s bow, where it hung in a dissipating froth of zero-point energy and junk matter until Fat Antoyne fetched it on board. It was scarred and scraped, losing colour rapidly through a palette of Christmas reds through light plum to the matt grey you would associate with a military asset. Much of the exterior work had vaporised; the remaining fitments made no sense unless it had been an internal component of some other structure. Once it was cool enough to touch Antoyne unbolted the porthole cover.

‘Shine the light.’

Liv Hula shone the light. ‘Out of nowhere!’ she repeated. ‘I nearly flew into it.’ She was excited until she saw what was inside.

Cable trailed from the core-points in the spine. The skin stretched over the skull like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. No flesh remained between that and the bone beneath. The withered lips drew back over large uneven teeth. The eyes, bloodshot and bugged up past life size, glared from tarry sockets. Something was wrong with the hair. It was hard to make out the rest. The tank proteome — thirty thousand protein species like warm spit — swirled sluggishly about it.

Liv turned away in disgust.

‘It’s not an alien,’ she said. ‘It’s a K-captain.’

For her, that meant a metaphor for the condition of sky-pilots everywhere: dissociation, hallucination, invasive surgery, the surrendering of humanity for a way of life so worthless it made you laugh.

‘Throw it back,’ she advised.

Antoyne didn’t want to get into that. He heard it all before. To change the subject he said, ‘I almost think I recognise this guy.’

Liv took another look: shrugged.

‘They’re all the same. Scoliosis. Pseudo-polio. Half the organs gone, wires everywhere.’ And when Antoyne wondered what unimaginable forces had blown this one out of his ship: ‘Don’t assume it’s male. More than half of them sign up as girls. It’s the thinking twelve-year-old’s alternative to anorexia.’

Antoyne moved the inspection lamp around. It was like a wreck under water in there. Fine silt fell through the beam.

‘Is it dead yet?’ Irene the mona called from the crew quarters.

They were thirty lights from anywhere, in the voids by the Tract itself. The big argument they had, which went back and forth while Antoyne screwed the porthole cover back on, was if they had come upon the tank by accident, or whether it was another item on MP Renoko’s cargo manifest. It was a measure of how weird their sense of reality had got, Liv Hula insisted, that they couldn’t decide. They stood there for a time, arguing back and forth, then left the hold.As soon as the bulkhead door closed behind them, bursts of high-speed code issued from the K-tank — chirps and stutters, odd runs of simple calculus, fragments of ordinary language mysterious yet emphatic — as if the occupant was trying to make contact but couldn’t remember how. The other items in the hold were inappropriately excited by this, flashing and winking in return, humming with subsonics, emitting brief flashes of ionising radiation. After perhaps an hour — its baroque ribs and lumps of melted inlet pipe making it look like a child’s coffin decorated with mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons — the newcomer seemed to calm down.

‘We should dump it in the nearest sun,’ said Liv.

The day you enlist for the K-ships, you haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours. They give you the injections, and within twenty-four hours your blood is teeming with pathogens, artificial parasites, tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down. Over the next three days the shadow operators, running on nanomech, take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces, flushing the waste out continually through the colon. They pump you with a paste of ten-micrometre-range factories, protein farms and metabolic monitors. They core your spine. You remain awake throughout, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits don’t make it past that point. If you do, they bolt you into the tank at the front of the ship. By then most of your organs are gone. You’re blind and deaf. A kind of nauseous surf is rolling through you. They’ve cut into your brain so that it will accept the hardware bridge known as ‘the Einstein Cross’. You connect with the ship math. You will soon be able to consciously process 15 petabytes of data per second: but you will never walk again. You will never touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself.

You sign up in a private room at a pleasant temperature: nevertheless, you can’t get warm. You say goodbye to your parents. They give you the emetics whether you’ve eaten or not. Then it’s an hour or two to wait before the injections start. Forty years ago — shivering on the edge of a bed, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a hospital gown that fell open constantly at the back — it had come to Liv Hula that she would be able to choose the Einstein Cross, but that she would never, ever be able to unchoose it. So she had put the bowl down carefully, and, speaking to no one, got dressed again and gone back to her life.

Everywhere they stopped after that, the talk was war. Provocation was heaped on provocation. Every rhetoric had its counter-rhetoric, every history was self-revised. Riots erupted across Halo cities. Out near Panamax IV, two unidentified cruisers ambushed a helpless K-ship. It was a major flashpoint: the boys from Earth had dropped the ball. Nastic assets roared into known space. Their manoeuvres out near Coahoma and the Red Revenues hadn’t been the bumbling, half-hearted adventures presented by EMC: rather they revealed pattern, a cold, technical mind, deft new kinds of hit-and-run, workouts for a major offensive. It was, in a sense, the perfect psychodrama of betrayal. Whole star systems were gas in half a day. Refugees were already on the move. Irene stared at the news and found herself martyred to empathy and nonrecreational mood swings. One moment she would be saying: ‘I will never get tired of this, all our adventures with these cosmic winds, and tides roaring through space!’, the next it was, ‘We all got a black heart to our personality, Antoyne.’

What had upset her so on New Venusport, she refused to say.

Fat Antoyne had found her a mile from the Deleuze Motel, teetering at the end of a line of footprints on the hard wet sand. It was the hour before dawn. She’d lost her bag, also one of her best shoes. Her face and hands were cold and salt. Overcome in ways he couldn’t explain, he tried to put his arms around her. But though Irene had the expression of someone ready to seek help anywhere it could be found, she only stepped away.

‘Antoyne, no,’ she said.

Aboard the Nova Swing once more, she kept to herself. Even safe in empty space, she couldn’t sleep. On the beach before Antoyne arrived, she had been trying to imagine Madame Shen’s Circus in its glory days: music, alien shows, marzipan, white frocks, fresh sunshine on the midway. People laughing and fucking on the very sand where Irene stood! But she couldn’t forget that she had wet herself looking into the mysteries of the STARLIGHT ROOM, where the three ghastly white-capped figures of Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint cast their dice; and when her wonderful, warm man found her, her neck was stiff from staring as hard as she could in the opposite direction to that dispiriting place. ‘Change your game you change your luck,’ she told Liv Hula, ‘that’s everything I used to believe in life.’ The past was gone. Only the present could affect the future, and the future was always open for business: that was how she had always seen it. ‘But Liv, now I recognise each change of heart is just another scam performed upon yourself!’

Now she could only conclude that the long haul, with its concomitant emptiness and anxiety, had proved as debilitating as the short, which wears you down by insisting you forget everything you knew last week. She was tired, she said. She wanted to go home. Perhaps she would feel better if she saw her old home.

Liv Hula said she could help with that.

Perkins Rent IV, known to its inhabitants as New Midland, supported an agriculture of beet, potatoes and a local variety of squash grown year round under plastic. New Midlanders worked for offworld money. A handful of FTZs in closed compounds — precision assembly plants working from bulk metal glass components — clustered on the major continent, each served by a town of fifty to seventy-five thousand souls where bi-yearly surveys revealed a reassuringly high incidence of obsessive-compulsive traits and, ideologically, a kind of Janteloven prevailed. The only other way of earning a living on New Midland was to work the ghost train.

This line of abandoned alien vehicles, all sizes between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, hung nose to tail in a cometary orbit that reached halfway to the nearest star. Their rindlike hulls presented dusty, lustreless grey. Whoever they belonged to had parked them and walked away before proteins appeared on Planet Earth. They boasted the shapes of asteroids — potato shapes, dumbell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them. By contrast their nautiloid internal spaces were pearly and disorienting, as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often a short segment of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the system gas giant. New Midlanders mined them like any other resource. Nobody knew what the ships did, or how they got here, or how to work them: so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them through sub-contractors to a corporate in the Core. It made an economy. It was the simple, straight line thing to do. They were broken up from inside out. The used-up ones attracted unpredictably-shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. Above the rest bustled the industrial arcologies and futuristic bubble-worlds — factories, refineries, sorting facilities, starship docks busy round the clock.

Liv Hula slipped in from high above the plane of the ecliptic, intending to hide in the debris-belt of her choice. What she found changed her mind.

‘Antoyne, look at this.’

‘What?’

‘Someone fought here. Perhaps half a day ago?’

The ghost train had been derailed. Its industries now took the form of a complex metallic vapour through which toppled everything from nuggets of melted aluminium to entire ore-crushers. Shockfronts were still swinging through this medium, here and there compressing it to wispy arcs the colour of mercury. The routers had gone down under the weight of distress traffic — transponder signals from eva suits and escape pods, trickles of RF leaking like the air from punctured living quarters, the papery voices of the already-dead filling the pipes with intimate, matter-of-fact panic. They were saying what the dead always say: ‘No one’s left but me.’ One moment they were trying to reason with the problem, the next they were begging the guys to pull them out of there. The ghost ships had fared no better: they toppled about, laid open like water-stained illustrations of the Fibonacci spiral. Some of the larger ones, accelerated by hits from high-end ordnance, were wobbling into the distance on interesting new trajectories. Several fragments fifty metres diameter and above had found their way down to the surface of New Midland.

As a result the FTZs were matchwood. Thing Fifty, the little coastal town Irene remembered so well, had begun its day by leaning away from a fifty megaton airburst about two hundred kilometres inland and twelve kilometres high. A hot blue light went across the sky. The heat was so fierce people assumed their hair had caught fire. During this period, fences, trees, houses, low density warehousing, utility poles and pylons all took on an ordered slant. Half an hour later, a huge ocean surge boiled inland, floated the wreckage and aggregated it in the shallow valleys on the edge of town, piling everything on top of everything else. By the time Nova Swing arrived, Thing Fifty was less a place than a list of building materials.

Liv Hula put down in the suburbs, and they wandered about while Irene tried to find her old home. The wreckage resembled a heap of opened-out cardboard boxes. Everything had equal value — dead animals knotted in branches, water gurgling back to the sea along hidden sloughs and creeks, plastic chairs. At your feet a thousand pieces of broken tile; middle distances of uprooted garden shrubs and shattered wooden spars: behind that, in a curious reversal of perspective, the houses tilted and slumped into each other as if they were still floating. Above the high water mark the streets were full of soft toys. Every so often you saw a single figure in the distance; or a dog made its way along the street sniffing everything with enthusiasm, as if any moment it expected to be reunited with what it knew. Everything was entangled. Everything stank of sewage and the sea. There was no ground plan. You didn’t know where to assign value. The tarry light didn’t seem to come from the sun, diffused by haze, but to leak out of the wreckage itself. Irene sat at the kerb. She looked around at it all. Then she drew up her knees, wrapped her arms about them and wept.

‘Come on now, love,’ Liv said: ‘I can see everything you’ve got.’

Irene wiped her eyes. She tried to laugh. ‘Everyone in the Halo’s seen it anyway,’ she whispered.

She took Fat Antoyne’s hand and put the back of it next to her cheek, then pushed it away again suddenly. Her skin was wan, her expression indistinct, as if she’d been rinsed out of her own face. The things she missed about this town were gone. They had never been here anyway. They had vanished not into the current disaster, but years ago, into her own. The past wasn’t real but it was all she had: that’s how you feel when your life has faltered. She stood up and tugged her skirt straight. ‘I’ll just go into this house here,’ she said.

‘Irene!’

It was a building caught in the complex process of kneeling into its own yard. Windows full of broken glass gave on to rooms where the light fell in new and unexpected directions. Irene brightened up after she found an unopened bottle of cocktail mix. She began dragging things into the centre of rooms where she could examine them. ‘Oh look!’ she said, as if Liv and Antoyne were in there with her. ‘Oh look!’ They made faces at one another and shrugged, Don’t ask me. They heard her feet scraping about. They heard her murmuring to herself as she used the broken toilet. ‘You guys could help if you liked,’ she called. ‘Or don’t you want a —’ She checked the label of the bottle ‘ — Kyshtym Cream? They’re good!’ When she emerged at last, her arms were full of clothes, kiddie’s toys and household items.

‘And look!’ she said. ‘After all these years!’

It was a toddler’s My First Experience skirt, in traditional neotony pink.

‘I had one just like this.’

Liv stared in disbelief then shook her head. ‘Irene,’ she wanted to know, ‘is this actually your old house?’

‘It could be,’ Irene said. ‘Yes, it easily could be.’

‘Because if it isn’t —’

‘They don’t want the stuff, Liv,’ Irene said. ‘You should see the condition they’re in. Really.’

Her mood, which had remained elevated on the way back to the ship, dipped as soon as the Kyshtym Cream wore off. Disposed about her quarters, the repro radio, false-colour hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract and collection of cast iron casserole-ware looked less fun than they had in situ. ‘Disaster chic,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’ Antoyne didn’t think anything. She sighed. ‘Antoyne, are we bored of each other at last?’ Unable to answer that either, he became alert but very still. Irene used her thumb to enlarge a split in the seams of a soft toy shaped like a cockroach, then asked him so suddenly and abjectly if he thought life was worth it that he could only hug her roughly and insist:

‘Your life is what you make it in this world.’

‘I think that’s what I mean, Antoyne.’

History, the boys from Earth believed, is bunk.

The Angel of History may look backwards, but that pose will make no difference to the storm that blows it into the future. No wonder it has such a surprised expression!

This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what ‘where’ meant.

It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archaeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them — AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine.

But though, as a whole, the human race soon knew how to find its way around, it still had no idea where it was: so that, in Irene the mona’s day, the paradigm for individual motion remained a blind if not quite random jump. Before she took the mona package and did so well with it, Irene touched down on fifty worlds.

Thirteen years old, she was already tall and bony. She loved fucking but she had an awkward walk and big feet. She did her hair the way they all did then, in lacquered copper waves so complex they could receive the test tone of Radio Universe. When she smiled her gums showed; when she boarded that rocket she never looked back. Worked her way down through the Swan and out to Stevenson’s Reach. Then on to Lila y Flag, L’Avventura, McKie, LaFuma RSX, where she hit the wall a little and was forced to rest a year with a sweet alien boy from You’re Worth It. There she took the package, opting — from the hundreds of Monroes on offer — for the soft-look Marilyn photographed in black and white by Cecil Beaton at the Ambassador Hotel, 1956. Suddenly she was five foot three, with a kind of receptive liveliness and flossy blond easycare hair that always smelled of peppermint shampoo. After that the journey got easier for her: its inner and outer trajectories seemed to match. She was so happy! Magellan to O’Dowd, Pixlet to Oxley; The Discoveries, The Fourth Part, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista; Massive 49 to Meniere’s World; Tregetour, Charo, Entantiodroma, Max Party, Gay Lung and Ambo Danse. American Polaroid, American Diner, American Nosebleed. Oxi, Krokodil, Waitrose Two and Santa Muerte. By then, her suitcase contained: tampons, fourteen pairs of high heel shoes, the dress she left home in, yellow rayon with a faux-Deco feel, which she never wore again. That girl had a sweet way of laughing. Drunk, she’d explain, ‘I love shoes.’ She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else, until she’d scattered herself like small change across the Halo and down into Radio Bay. There, where the Beach stars fell away like a cliff over nothing, she fell away too, with a laugh on her face and her arms spread wide to everything.

If you asked Irene to describe her favourite memory, she would bring out a little hologram cube about an inch on a side —

Four am, under a weird grey-blue neon. Raucous laughter. Three and a half minutes of the B-girl life. It had been a long night for whoever captured the pictures. Shadows flickered, the camera looked here and there without purpose. The angles were inventive. Irene began with her back to the camera and her feet planted in the gutter. You could hear her say, ‘Kinny, take that away! Oh, Kinny, you bugger!’ She got her dress part way up and her thong part way down before she started to piss, but after twenty seconds slowly tipped forward into the road and began to throw up, smoothly and loosely, from the other end. Steam rose in the cold air. After a minute or so of that, she seemed to pass out. Her body tipped forward a little further, arching the lower back and pushing her face into the road, then after a moment or two of equilibrium, subsided sideways and curled up into the foetal position. Her hat fell off and rolled cheerily back and forth. The camera tried to follow it, then there was more laughter and everything went black.

‘It’s very sentimental I know,’ she told Fat Antoyne now. ‘But I loved that hat. And the bolero, with its little satin bows.’ Clothes like that weren’t really clothes at all, she tried to explain: they were semiotics in action. ‘Party semiotics in action.’ She sighed and put her hand over his. ‘It was a lovely world, and sometimes — like now, with you and me in our comfortable little ship, with all these new ornaments — it still is.’ She had been having such a good time in those pictures that she remembered nothing of it. ‘Sometimes I’m not even sure it’s me!’

He had to laugh, Fat Antoyne said. ‘Everyone deserves a good time,’ he added. ‘Their lives are hard enough.’

He smiled and closed her hand over the little cube.

‘You keep that safe,’ he said.