Empty Space

TWO Hard Goods

One piss-wet night in Saudade City a broker called Toni Reno made his way down Tupolev Avenue to the noncorporate space-port, out of which he ran his small but successful operation.

Toni didn’t mind walking in the rain. He could always turn up the collar of his Sadie Barnham work jacket, or, if that sensation got old, flag down a rickshaw. When he looked up between the buildings there were already gaps in the cloud cover, revealing part of the Kefahuchi Tract opened like a map of the city across clear wet sky. The rain would stop in half an hour, the streets would dry out fast in an offshore wind. Meanwhile Toni could enjoy the feeling of weather. He could enjoy the way the monas laughed past him on Tupolev, on their way to the bar they called the Tango du Chat, huddled up in their short fur coats, stepping out bravely in those inappropriate shoes they loved. Nothing new, nothing old, people believed in Toni’s time of the world: everything in that thin yet endless tranche of sensation between the past and the future.

Waiting for traffic at Tupolev and 9, he got a dial-up from his loader, a woman called Enka Mercury who’d been on the Beach longer than Toni was alive. The pipe was poor and Enka sounded as if she was calling from outer space.

‘Your goods you wanted are in the yard,’ she said.

‘That’s good, Enka.’

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘The fucker spoke to me, Toni.’

Toni laughed. ‘What did it say?’

‘Mind your own business. I hope you know what you’re doing here.’

‘Hey kid,’ Toni said: ‘You tell me.’

You knew Toni Reno without ever having seen him before: the usual thirty-year-old hipster with a girlfriend in middle management, he was unconnected, young to be in business on his own. Five per cent earned him a refurb townhouse in the Magellan Ladder and quality off-the-shelf tailoring from a contact he had at Preter Coeur. At that time, which turned out to be his life’s high point, he was brokering cargo from all across the Beach, taking a significant tranche of his profit off interplanetary tax gradients, which — steep, complex and subject to sudden variation — caused him inevitable sleepless nights. For the times he wasn’t working, he and his girlfriend maintained a rewarding but controllable tank habit, an experience called Brass Arm they shared with their cohort all across Saudade.

‘Fucked if I ever saw anything like this,’ Enka said. ‘You’d think it was —’

At that point the pipe went down.

‘Call me if you need to,’ Toni Reno said into the air, in case his loader could still hear him. ‘I’ll be with you in ten.’

Toni rarely looked at a shipment. Live produce from Perkins Rent or Peterburg, alien cultural items from Port Ferry, cold-stored indentured cultivars from Silicon New Turk, they were all the same to him. But he was interested to know what would unnerve Enka Mercury, a woman who had seen it all, so he hailed a rickshaw. The rickshaw rattled off down Cobain with Toni in it, then hung a fast right, trailing ambient music and ads that resembled soft-focus moths in shades both pastel and neon. The rain had stopped but to Toni there still seemed to be plenty of water on the road.

He found the cargo where he expected it, in a long, otherwise empty shed down by the port’s south fence.

It was perhaps twelve feet by three, a sealed tube not quite circular in section, with a porthole at one end over which someone had recently welded a thick plug of different material; and a panel of lights, broken. Left to itself, it tended to float waist-height above the dusty concrete floor, the air immediately around it flickering in a way that made Toni nauseous but which didn’t impede him from touching it. He walked around it. Its surface was dull and ablated as if it had spent time in empty space. It struck him as old, rotten, guilty. In the bills of lading — downloaded from an FTL router thirty-five lights along the Beach — it was logged as ‘hard goods’; but the object itself, though unlabelled, had illegal artefact written all over it.

No point of origin was on record.

‘Enka!’ he called. ‘Where the fuck are you?’

He thought he heard a shout from somewhere out on the windy hard standings in the dark, too far away to be an answer, or to be anything to do with him.

Toni Reno’s percentage always generated itself in a financial space far removed from the physical transaction itself. It was a given for everyone in this kind of arrangement that they never knew how their part of it related to any other. In this case, the paperwork advised him, his responsibility ended when the goods were stowed in the hold of a freighter named the Nova Swing. So when he discovered he could move the object just by pushing it, he decided to load it himself.

It was hard work, like manhandling something in water. Once he manoeuvred it out of the shed, there were six or seven hundred yards to cover. The arcs were off in the whole south sector of the port, the rain coming on again. One moment clouds filled the sky, the next they had passed over and the Tract cast down a bluish light. Reno would push a while; stop and call out, ‘Enka!’ or try to dial her up; then bend down to get his hands and forearms underneath one end of the tube, almost embracing it. That was the position to push from, the embrace. Each time he pushed, the tube dipped and rocked a little on its long axis before moving forward in a slow, oily way. One moment it had more inertia than you expected, the next a breath of wind was enough to send it off course.

The boat they called the Nova Swing stood up against the night sky among all the other short-haulers — tubby, three-finned, brass-looking. Her cargo cradle was out. A man known around the port as Fat Antoyne sat on the cradle rail drinking from a pint of Black Heart, his unzipped leather pilot jacket and oiled pompadour flapping in the wind up there. When he saw Reno he waved. The lift descended its eighty feet slowly, with whining servo noises, and jolted to a halt; at which Reno put in one last embrace and shoved the goods aboard.

‘Hey, Fat Antoyne,’ he said.

Fat Antoyne said hey. He said, ‘What’s this?’

Reno brushed down his Sadie Barnham coat. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

He felt rain cooling the back of his neck and his scalp. It darkened the surface of the tube, the way rain soaks a little into any porous surface; which he somehow didn’t expect. You didn’t think about this object — which he now saw had faint remains of moulded features, worn down to bulges and vague crockets long ago — as being subject to weather. The two of them contemplated it for a moment, then compared paperwork in case that helped. Fat Antoyne had ‘mortsafe’. ‘You know what a “mortsafe” is?’ he asked Toni Reno.

Reno admitted he had never heard that word. His lading bills had ‘hard goods’, that was all.

Antoyne chuckled. ‘Hard goods is right,’ he said. ‘I’ll sign off on that.’ Close up, you saw his chinos, tailored for comfort in some kind of twill, had grease stains down the front. He was on his own tonight, he said. His crew were getting rest and relaxation in a bar they liked, he wasn’t so keen himself. He offered Reno a drink, but Reno regretfully declined.

‘You take care,’ Reno told him.

When Reno had gone, Fat Antoyne put the cap back on the bottle and put the bottle in his jacket.

‘Asshole,’ he said.

He hoisted the tube up into his number one hold. ‘Mortsafe,’ he said, and chuckled. That was a word he could get used to. When he touched the tube, it was cold. He knelt down and carefully passed his hands underneath, feeling the faint resistance you feel when you try to press two magnets together. He studied its surface with the help of a loupe designed to operate in three different regimes, making a clicking noise with his tongue as if he was thinking. Then he shrugged — because what did he know? — secured it, and left. After the arcs went off in the hold, and Fat Antoyne had closed the hatch, and his footsteps had gone away inside the ship, the tube seemed to settle a little in its restraints. A few minutes went by, then a few more. A couple of lights flickered suddenly on the panel up by the porthole.

When Reno got back to the warehouse to have one more look for his loader, he found her hanging some feet in the air above the place where the artefact had been. She was turned towards him as he entered, her face presenting upside down, her back arched as if he had caught her in the middle of a suspended moment of jouissance, a sort of unpremeditated back-flip. She was naked.

‘Christ, Enka,’ Reno said. He wondered if she had been there all along.

The patch of air around her was dark and bluish, despite the lights being on, and in it the shadows fell at wrong angles both to one another and to the shadows in the rest of the shed. This gave Enka an effect of being snatched from the world inhabited by people like Reno to another, colder, more complex regime, as if in seeking release she had exchanged one set of predictabilities for another. Her arms and legs were still moving slowly. Although that action caused her to rotate a little, it seemed to make no difference to her position in the air; or to her essential plight. Her expression was one of understanding, the slow understanding that will lead to panic in another moment. At an undetermined point before this understanding set in, something had inserted itself powerfully at a diagonal from her left armpit to the lower part of her ribcage on the opposite side. A long triangular flap of tissue was hanging down, but it was a white and fishy colour unsuited to a human being. If he stood on his toes and extended his reach, Toni could catch the end of it, but it had a rubbery touch that made it hard to hold, and when he got sufficient grip to pull on it nothing seemed to happen. If her new state shared enough of the boundary conditions of the normal to anchor her there, it was also different enough for Enka to be unreachable by Toni Reno.

Toni couldn’t think how it happened.

‘Fuck you, Enka,’ he said aloud. ‘For getting yourself into this.’

As if in answer a voice said: ‘My name is Pearlent and I come from the future.’

The shed was empty under the arcs. Enka swam backwards towards him through her new reality, like someone suspended in a low-grade hologram.

Toni ran out the shed, past the Nova Swing — now closed and dark — and across the noncorporate port in the wind. He would have run all the way home to his refurb in the Magellan Ladder if a woman — or what he thought of as a woman — hadn’t come at him in a side street off Tupolev. She came at him very fast and at an odd angle out of the shadows — as if before Toni arrived she had been lying down in the shadows at the base of a building — and took hold of him round the upper body. Toni’s tailoring was state of the art, but a millisecond or two after it cut in, her tailoring somehow switched it off again. Toni was ramped — nerve propagation speeds were up all over his body, his haemoglobin structures were retuning themselves in the picosecond range — but he never landed a punch. He felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He was behind the action. He was still seeing her come up from the pavement when she wrapped her left arm almost lovingly round his head and pushed the barrel of a weapon up into his armpit.

‘So what do you want to do next?’ she asked him, in a voice which seemed really interested to know.

When Toni moved his head fractionally to be able to speak, she pressed the trigger and that was that. A couple of b-girls on their way back from a night at the Ivory Coast found him very early the next morning. Apparently he was surrounded by black and white cats. ‘We’re knee deep in them,’ one of the b-girls explained to the police detectives. ‘So cute. But then we find this guy.’ When Toni’s girlfriend heard later how suddenly he died, she said it was the way Toni would have liked it. He dug his existence in this world but he didn’t cling to it. Toni’s belief, she said, was that if you could get your life down to a nanometre thick it would stretch out forever.

She added: ‘As far as you were concerned, obviously.’