Empty Space

SIX Skull Radio

The assistant rented her room from someone she knew, a woman called Bonaventure who ran a bar on Straint Street near the event site. At night the rocket launches lit the room’s warm air like a bad tank experience, psychic blowback from the engines reinscribing the thoughts and feelings of the people who had lived there before her. They sweated out on to the walls in layers of swirled colours like graffiti written on top of one another. Maps, artefacts, butterflies from another world, all of that kind of thing. For some reason, the assistant didn’t mind. She was used to it. She enjoyed it — although ‘enjoyment’ was a word she had never used much about her own experiences. Sometimes she wondered whose dreams she was having.

The evening after she first heard the word ‘Pearlant’, a man called Gaines walked in through the wall of the room. She understood instantly he was not one of the past’s stories. His appearance made her afraid. In response, her tailoring switched itself on; but something he could do — or didn’t even need to do — switched it off again, so that she came up off the bed hard and fast, then had to stand there in the middle of her own room, feeling naked and displaced, like a child who has made a bad judgement and sees it too late, while he walked around her to the window as if she was a fixed object, something almost interesting in a shop, something that wasn’t in his way.

‘This is a quaint place to live,’ he said, looking down into the street, which had once been gentrified but which was going downhill again. It was late. The bars and nuevo tango joints were opening slowly, their neon-cluttered facades pulsing and sucking. Ads patrolled the pavement with the soft voices of children. Rocket dub basslines thumped in the walls. The street was opening like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night. ‘But all this cultural babble out here, don’t you sometimes want a rest from it?’

‘It’s only what people want,’ the assistant said. She wasn’t sure what people wanted.

‘They mistake it for substance.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

It meant that there was something down underneath all this, Gaines informed her. ‘It means that the world isn’t all signs and surfaces.’

She indicated the walls of the room, still imbricated and flickering with hallucinations, hard sweats, failed or partial communications from other planets. ‘How could there be?’ she said. ‘Anything fixed? In this physics universe?’

He came away from the window then and stood close in to her, calculating and looking her up and down with a new interest. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I know there is because I’ve seen it.’

He laughed. ‘And now it wants to see you,’ he said.

He was one of those men you don’t know if they’re older than they look or younger than they look. He had good skin and a smile which seemed satisfied with all the deficiencies of the world as they had revealed themselves to him. He possessed a deep, withering bitterness he thought he was hiding. Longish grey hair curling into the nape of his neck, maybe a little gelled to stay in place. Chinos and a polo shirt, light canvas shoes whitened with pipeclay — an outfit that meant something, she could see; an outfit that made references the assistant couldn’t follow. He had a carefully trimmed grey beard which thrust the lower part of his face forward into the room. He had a good nose, too. But in the gloom and fading inflorescence of the launch, that was the important part of him, his jaw and his quiet blue eyes.

‘You’re from EMC,’ she guessed.

‘Think that if you like.’

‘I wonder if you’re here at all.’

At that, he smiled again. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ his voice said, from the empty air.

After he’d gone, she went to the window and looked into the street and tried to see what he had seen. Earlier that day there had been an escape of mathematics from the ram-head control loops of one of the visiting cruise ships, a big Creda Starliner. Daughter code, running on a substrate of nanotech and human proteins, had swum into some unlucky rocket-jockey’s vestibular lymph during the night. He had made it through port gate security before it began to change him, then rolled around Saudade sneezing and buying drinks in bars. There would be outbreaks of new behaviour by dawn. The port was shut, and the uniform branch was touring its northern peripheries with sound equipment, advising people to stay in the house.

‘You are all right if you have only touched yourself. You are OK if you have only touched yourself.’

They were giving out a help centre number to call if you thought you were infected: no one would dream of going there, because in the middle term it meant only the quarantine orbit.

Meanwhile, Gaines was reporting to his colleagues at the Aleph Project. As an EMC fixer with a satisfyingly broad remit, Gaines occupied various different kinds of space, most of them electronic; although, as he said, some things he did went a little too fast for normal channels. There were actions he could do, assets he had access to, which didn’t seem very physics. But when he reported to the project, it was in the ordinary way, as a holographic fetch, via a system of private FTL routers.

‘She’s not in touch with it,’ he concluded his report. ‘And if it’s in touch with her, it’s using some part of its personality we haven’t explored yet.’

He listened for a moment, staring into the air, then laughed. ‘She lives in this room,’ he said. ‘You should see it. No, she has no idea what she is — come to think of it, nor do I. She has ten-year-old datableed technology running probability estimates down the inside of her arm. What? Yes, some kind of cheap local police thing. What do you say? Welcome to the Halo, man.’ He laughed again and then his voice went flat.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s too early to bring them together.’

But the next morning he appeared in the assistant’s room again, carrying two plastic cups of coffee — one mocha, one Americano — and some pastries. This time he was wearing a light shortie raincoat, spotted with rain, over twill cargo pants. His bare chest was grizzled, and the skin had slackened around the nipples, over stringy but powerful-looking pectoral muscles. If he was younger than he appeared, some odd things had happened to him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we sit on the bed here?’

That was hard for her to understand. She slept on the bed, she sat in the chair. She didn’t sit on the bed.

When he had got her to understand, he gave her some quite complicated co-ordinates, which even to the assistant implied an object travelling towards the Kefahuchi Tract. ‘If anything strange happens to you,’ he said, while they were eating the pastries. ‘If anything at all odd happens, why don’t you dial me up? Better still,’ he said, ‘why not use this?’ From his raincoat pocket he took out a thing like a cheap pressed-tin box with a skull in it. The box had a glass front. The skull was small, like a child’s. Sometimes it seemed to have a body, like a baby’s, a partial homunculus hanging part way through the back wall of the box; sometimes it didn’t. ‘Skull radio,’ he said to the assistant. ‘It brings down most of the major vibes. Like sucking on the universe through a wide-bore straw. If anything at all odd happens, you give me a call on this.’

‘What for?’ she asked.

Gaines smiled at her. ‘Because you don’t understand yourself,’ he said. ‘Because you’re bored. I’m leaving you the mocha, OK?’ When he was happy, he had a passive, easy look.

The assistant watched him fade back into the walls. The raindrops never dried on his coat, she thought. They stayed fresh. How did a holographic fetch bring coffee? When he had quite vanished, she pushed the tin box as far away from her as she could, until it fell off the end of the bed and on to the floor. She didn’t like it. To be sure Gaines had gone, she waited until she could feel her tailoring come back to normal; then she drank the mocha. She opened a secure pipe to SiteCrime and instructed one of her shadow operators to search the name Gaines. ‘And send me the car,’ she said. She took calls, and as a result of one of them, drove the Cadillac across town to the noncorporate rocket port, locally dubbed Carver Field. She manouevred between the tubby little tramp ships until she arrived at the bonded warehousing facility, where, forty hours after the crime occurred, she found herself staring up at the corpse of Toni Reno’s loader.

Enka Mercury had risen five or six feet higher in the air since Toni Reno found her; but Epstein the thin cop, who had brought in a cherrypicker to get a closer look, thought her rate of ascent was slowing down. Like Toni, she was still joyfully circling some invisible point. Unlike him she had begun to fade somewhat. The colour leached out of her almost as you watched, Epstein said; at the same time she was becoming transparent. In a day or two she might disappear. He had been no more successful with Enka than with Toni. She wouldn’t be caught. Whatever you did, she was out of reach. He stood shrugging apologetically in the chilly space of the warehouse and, indicating the flap of skin dangling from the vic’s armpit, said:

‘At least it looks like she was shot.’

The assistant stepped into the cage of the cherrypicker and manouevred it all around Enka Mercury’s corpse. Puffs of gas were emitted irregularly from its valves. After five minutes she set herself down again.

‘What did you get from the operator I sent?’ she asked Epstein.

Epstein shrugged. Like everyone else, he had been frightened the whole period the shadow operator was in the alley off Tupolev. Even the experienced uniforms had backed off to let it do its work. They’d rather stand in the rain all day at a traffic intersection than get near an operator. Dazzling light poured out of its mouth when it saw the corpse. ‘This is really interesting,’ it said, watching Toni Reno through a couple of revolutions as if he were an expert performer of some kind. It vomited some more light, then approached Epstein. It had to stand on its toes to speak to him. Despite himself, Epstein bent down so he could hear. ‘I’ve got a little secret,’ it whispered in his ear. Nothing else. ‘I’ve got a little secret,’ and off along the alley, turning back once to wave shyly — more at Toni Reno, perhaps, than the cops — before it disappeared into one of the buildings, the vaporous air opalescing briefly around it as if responding to some phase transition. That morning it was running itself on a seven-year-old girl — a local mite dressed in the customary white floor-length frock of white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped with cream lace; also what looked like her mother’s shiny high-heeled pumps — but its voice had three or four separate components, mostly male.

‘What does anyone get from an operator?’ Epstein said to the assistant.

‘They live by their own rules,’ the assistant agreed. ‘Was it the one that calls itself The Sea?’

‘I don’t know which one it was,’ Epstein said, meaning he didn’t care to know.

The assistant gave him an oblique smile. ‘It had on red fuck-me pumps,’ she predicted. ‘A seven-year-old kiddie in a wedding dress and red patent leather fuck-me pumps with five-inch heels, what do you say to that, you big hero?’

She dialled up her office and had them pipe over a holographic fetch of Toni Reno’s corpse, so that she could compare Tony and his loader side by side. In those circumstances neither of them appeared exactly real. Enka Mercury was colourless except for the faint bluish tinge to her face and hands. Toni presented as if he had been imperfectly modelled in a mixture of brown, red and yellow tones. While she came across as coy as ever, he only looked preserved and shiny and as if he was made of wood. One of his Fantin & Moretti hand-crafted moccasins had fallen off. The bodies circled at different rates until space seemed to adjust itself to accomodate them and they fell into a synchrony never experienced in life.

‘You see that?’ Epstein said. ‘It’s like they’re aware of one another.’

‘You’re uncomfortable with that.’

He shrugged again. ‘How does it happen?’

‘Perhaps it’s love,’ the assistant said.

Then she said: ‘Ninety per cent of what we see every day is an artefact of some other process. Of the things that are really going on.’ Epstein didn’t know how to reply to that. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said. Then: ‘The investigator must always take account of that.’

She stood companionably next to him for a moment, hands on hips, looking around the mostly empty space as if oil-stained floors and fluorescent warning stripes held an innate interest for her. Epstein didn’t like the way she relaxed. He found her as disturbing at close quarters as the operator had been. She was too hard to avoid. Her tailoring occupied the warehouse like another personality: everything interested it, from a momentary change in Epstein’s breathing to the sound of footsteps half a mile away. Every time its attention shifted, he caught the rank, exciting smell of hormonal gradients. She would smile at you behind that as if remembering something sexual you had enjoyed together, while pictographs ran chaos patterns down the inside of her forearm, from elbow to wrist like print from the historical times. She was some cheap cutter’s idea of the future.

‘I want to know when Enka disappears,’ she told him.

For the same reason, she explained, she would recommend they keep an eye on Toni Reno. In her judgement, she said, they were at a weird place with this. ‘But we won’t know how weird until the next thing happens.’ There wasn’t much else they could do unless The Sea had discovered something. She enquired of her office if Reno had any kind of Port Authority paperwork in process at the time of his death, and, learning that he did, went off to investigate. Epstein watched her leave, asking himself all the same questions her colleagues asked about her in the building at Uniment & Poe. The difference? Epstein’s perspective on it was not SiteCrime perspective. It was cop perspective, and to him she resembled nothing more than some toxic one-shot personality the kids download in Carmody on a Saturday night.

Unaware of these harsh judgements, the assistant made her way across the rainy cement of the noncorporate port.

Toni Reno’s paper trail — chiefly bills of lading, along with some transcripts of FTL uplinker calls — led to a ship called the Nova Swing, a crew-owned HS-SE shorthauler well known to the Port Authority as what they called in those days a ‘petty mule’. Like all those mules, Nova Swing was seen in every port on the Beach; today, the assistant found her parked on the southern edge of Carver Field waiting on freight from some point of origin two or three lights along. The crew of this brassy old three-finner were familiar to her from the Straint Street bars. More significantly perhaps, as far as the assistant went, they were the small change of Lens Aschemann’s last case: a port whore named Irene, who had adopted the mona package early and done well on it; an ex-smuggler everyone still called Fat Antoyne, though he was slim and fit-looking now, tan from all those distant suns he visited; and Liv Hula, a retired rocket jockey. It was this third crew-member the assistant met with, up in the control room alone and just that moment plugging into the ship’s mathematics.

A thin, grey-haired woman about fifty years old, she lay in the pilot couch stripped to a white cotton singlet and simple boy-leg underpants slightly too large for her, while a two-inch bundle of colour-coded wires forced its way into her mouth. Her head was turned to one side as if to facilitate this. Her eyes looked passively away. The wires pulsed and wriggled, inserting themselves deftly through the soft palate and into the lower architecture of the brain. As they connected, a cascade of busy, shivery movements went up and down her body like the beginning of an orgasm. In response there was a chaotic run of lights across the bakelite and grey-paint control consoles; a smell of hot insulation filled the room. Then, in a startlingly accurate imitation of Liv Hula’s voice, the ship’s speakers said:

‘Really, everyone should try this. The sex never fails.’

‘You could not pay me enough money,’ the assistant said. ‘First it violates your mouth, then it crawls in your ear at night? And you die?’

The pilot laughed. In some phenomenological sense she was now the self of the Nova Swing, its identity. She was housekeeping its motors and systems, watching distant events with its senses. Being the boat, she sometimes said, relieved her of the burden of having a self of her own. To the assistant she boasted, ‘These are the pussiest mathematics. You should see what the grown-up stuff does.’ As she spoke, ki-gas primers fired off in one of the outboard fusion pods; servos ran up to a clingy high-pitch whine then shut down abruptly. ‘Fuck it,’ Liv Hula complained. ‘Boundary layer turbulence. Antoyne?’ she called. ‘Are you down there? Your fucking old machinery is on the fritz again.’ When no answer came she asked the assistant, ‘I wonder if you met Antoyne anywhere on your way up through the ship? Because as you see I am busy, and he could help you better than I can at this time.’ When she talked, a clotted buzz emerged from around the pilot wires, as if she was still trying to form the words with her mouth like an ordinary human being; her hands made small unrelated movements. Her body looked tired, fallen in on itself. ‘Could you find something to put over me? I’m cold.’

The assistant smiled and nodded. It was forty degrees in the control room; humid. She said:

‘I’m interested in your relationship of commerce with Toni Reno.’

Liv Hula claimed she did not deal with that side of things. She added, in an aside, that Toni Reno was a well-known cunt, and a bad dresser besides. ‘You would have to ask Fat Antoyne about him. If you didn’t see Antoyne on your way up here, he is probably having sex with Irene in their cabin. It’s their habit this time of day.’

‘Captain, I’m interested to know if you loaded anything of Toni’s recently.’ The ki-gas primers fired again. This time the fusion engine came to life, its deep groans of self-pity resonating in the vessel’s gamma-ablated hull. Liv Hula laughed. ‘I’m not the captain!’ She cut the engine and when it was quiet again, added: ‘My father gave me the soundest advice, “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” For the Nova Swing we decided not to have a captain that way. It was a decision we all made.’

‘This is the paper on Toni Reno’s cargo. Maybe you recognise it.’

‘Could you find something to cover me?’ Liv Hula asked again.

The assistant went to the control room door, looked up and down the passageway outside, as if she might find what was needed out there. When you touched things in a rocket like this, your fingers came away slick with the generic talc of other worlds. ‘I see the three of you in the Straint Street bars,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get on so well together. Two or three nights a week you’ll find me down there. Since Aschemann vanished, those bars are my responsibility.’ She had depended on Aschemann. His ghost, which lived among the shadow operators clustered in the ceiling corners of her office, was less use. Most of the time it was just a face. It often seemed to be warning her against something. ‘He taught me to look inward, at places like the Tango du Chat; then, in places like this, outward at the stars. I can never make my mind up what it is I see.’ In the end she found a pink cellular blanket at the foot of the command couch. It smelled as if someone had wrapped an animal in it. ‘Be sure and ask Fat Antoyne to dial me up over this Toni Reno problem. I’m always available, always interested in the things you do.’

She drew the blanket tenderly up over Liv Hula’s body. ‘Warmer now?’ she said; and, pausing at the door before she left, ‘A space captain like you can afford nicer pants than those, honey.’

The assistant thought of herself as someone unafraid to meet her own eyes. She looked into them every day but did not necessarily see anything there. She had her predictable circuit, at work or leisure. Mid-day, she could be found walking between the booths at Preter Coeur, where she knew by heart the fighters, the cutters, the chops; they were like an old-time collection of ‘stamps’ or ‘cigarette cards’ to her. Early mornings she parked her big pink repro car on the Saudade Lots, where the event site bled into its own aureole and something large but not quite visible could often be sensed repositioning itself in the rags of mist. In the evening it was the bars on Straint or the tank farm on C-Street — or she sat in her GlobeTown room, looking in the mirror, watching rocket-port physics crawl over the walls and trying out names for herself.

She tried ‘Sekhet’, she tried ‘Sweet Thing’. She tried ‘Roses’, ‘Radtke’, ‘Emily-Misere’. She tried ‘Girl Heartbreak!’ and ‘Imogen’.

She tried ‘L1 Dominette’.

She looked in the mirror and said: ‘She is too pretty not to get married.’