Empty Space

SEVENTEEN Correlation States

When the Kefahuchi Tract expanded, in what came to be known as ‘the Event’, parts of it fell to earth on planets all along the Beach. Event sites appeared everywhere, sometimes in deserts or polar icefields or at the bottom of the sea: but often alongside the cities.

They were assembly-yards of the abnormal — zones where physics seemed to have forgotten its own rules — expanding into the real world via a perimeter of fogs, hallucinations, half-glimpsed movements. From inside could be heard confused laughter, big music, the sound of machinery. Something was being produced in there. Obsolete objects came fountaining out. They were highly energetic and abnormally scaled: rains of enamel badges, cheap rings, windup plastic toys; nuts & bolts, cups & saucers, horses & carts; feathers, doves and black-lacquered boxes, conjuror’s props the size of houses. They burst into the air above the roofline then toppled back and vanished. A blueprint unfolded itself across the sky then folded itself up again and faded away. No one minded these illusions, if illusions they were. But artefacts and inexplicable new technologies came out of the Event sites too, and sought a foothold on our side of things. Some of them were conscious and looked human. They wandered out into the cities and tried to become part of life. That was when things went wrong. EMC took an interest. Razor wire went up. The observation towers went up. SiteCrime and Quarantine (known popularly as QuaPo) became, for a time, the most powerful police forces in the Halo, second only to Earth Military Contracts itself.

Irene and Liv listened to Fat Antoyne Messner explain these recent history facts they already knew, then said as one voice:

‘Antoyne, yadda yadda. What’s in it for us?’

‘Quarantine orbit work,’ Fat Antoyne said, and he told them the story of Andy and Martha.

Andy and Martha lived on a planet called Basel Dove. Andy owned a little townhouse, worked human resources for the usual corporate; Martha collected alien ceramics. They had a son they called Bobby, eight that summer, a bright kid if a little needy. Andy found them a young woman, intelligent and ordinary-looking, to tutor Bobby in the afternoons. Her name was Bella. She dressed well but came off a little vague, as if she didn’t quite understand how a house or a family worked. Her commonest expression was of a cheerful puzzlement. Bella had her own room, near the top of the house. She worked out well. You’d find her standing in a hallway early evening, staring ahead of herself and wondering what to do next; but she soon settled in, and Bobby no longer followed Martha about all day complaining he was bored. Instead he sat quietly with Bella, listening in awe as she solved problems of classic harmonic analysis in her head. They got on so nicely! It was, as Martha said, a love affair, ‘Bella and Bobby this, Bella and Bobby that. Always Bella and Bobby.’ Those two were, really, really inseparable. But soon they were more inseparable than you would hope.

Before Bella arrived, the little boy’s mid-afternoon recreation had been to take his clothes off and look at himself in the mirror until he got hard. He rubbed but nothing came out yet. He could feel something coming up but it never arrived. All he got was a sort of shock, a painful little jolt. Bella changed all that. After mathematics she would take him upstairs to her room and style his hair for him. A passive calm came over him at such moments. He loved her smell. With each stroke of the brush, his little cock stuck out harder in his pants. When Bella touched it accidentally with the back of her hand, they looked at one another in wonder. One winter afternoon, Martha found them on the sofa. It was bitterly obvious what had been happening before she came in the room. Bella’s tits were bare. The little boy’s pants were open. Her hand was on his penis. She leaned over him, he stared up at her, growling and whimpering in his little boy voice as he struggled to come.

It was horrible enough that Martha walked in on her eight-year-old son about to ejaculate in the hand of the hired help. But worse was to be revealed. When she tried to pull them apart, they were stuck together. And when Andy came home he found his wife stuck to them too.

One of Martha’s forearms had penetrated Bella’s head. Martha was staring angrily at her hand emerging on the other side. Everything was soft. All three of them were covered in a thin, slippery emulsion; they were pulling away from one another, but that only seemed to make things worse. Andy threw up. He called the Quarantine Bureau. By 10 pm the same day, Bobby, Bella and Martha were a fully-fledged escape — translucent, infectious, a jelly part human, part virus, part daughter code straight from the local Event site. With Andy’s permission, Quarantine sealed this substance into a heavily welded, tapering iron container about seven feet long by three in depth, which they left on the floor of Bella’s room. Since Basel Dove was too quiet to have a quarantine orbit of its own, they explained, the sarcophagus would have to be delivered — within a week and by a licensed operator — to the one at New Venusport. They said they were sorry for Andy’s loss, and left. Andy, numb with grief and puzzlement and unable to find a local firm willing to handle such a tiny cargo, called Saudade Bulk Haulage.

‘He doesn’t want to make the trip himself,’ Antoyne explained. ‘He’s a damaged man. It’s very sad.’

Liv Hula pursed her lips. ‘So we’re undertakers now?’

‘I’m glad to get any kind of work,’ answered Fat Antoyne. ‘Besides, we’re going there anyway.’

So Nova Swing became a quarantine dog, and her crew found themselves sharing space with the remains of Martha, Bobby and Bella. They stowed the sarcophagus in a corner of the main hold. By then the contents had settled into a uniform transparent mass weighing slightly less than its original human components. It was liquid, superconductive at room temperature, and retained some memory of its former state: for instance, the little boy could sometimes be seen behind the armoured viewplate, half-formed, curled foetally with his hands between his legs. It made Irene sad. ‘Oh, his little penis,’ she said. She was not her usual self. She woke hearing dice rattle in the holds and passageways, soft laughter, voices. If a game was being played, Irene wasn’t in it. She opened doors and never found anyone there.

‘It wears you down,’ she complained to Antoyne.

Antoyne, thinner than ever, cultivated a stubble. He feared living hand to mouth. The ordered world being defined for him now by Liv and Irene, he was afraid he would fall out of it and return to his old ways. Irene thought him vague lately, especially since that afternoon at Mambo Rey, and wondered out loud if he was recalling some other lover. ‘Because that would be all right,’ she told him. ‘We all remember the other loves we had.’ Antoyne looked blank at this and didn’t seem to agree. Of course, it was quite a long list for her, Irene admitted, so each one had to work harder to stand out. She had a vision suddenly: men in an endless line, each one awaiting the opportunity to step up and impress her again. One thought he danced well. Another thought his cock was pretty big, but it would never bring tears to her eyes like the cock of that little dead boy. Of course, they weren’t really lovers.

‘Antoyne,’ she said in a rush, ‘what if this rocket was haunted?’

He touched her wrist. ‘All rockets are haunted,’ he said. ‘I assumed you knew that.’

Liv Hula could only smile at these naive exchanges. Tapped into the pilot systems while everyone else slept, she’d seen the way MP Renoko’s mortsafes clustered around the new cargo when they thought they weren’t being watched. They sniffed it like dogs, perhaps deciding it wasn’t quite their species. On the fifth day out from Basel Dove, Nova Swing had sight of New Venusport, a fully Earthlike planet in terms of biome, military presence and fiscal architecture. The Quarantine Authority hailed on all wavelengths. There were automated warnings. Vast shapes drifted in the void, blinking with dim lights. Antoyne dragged the sarcophagus to an airlock and consigned it to empty space, where it fell into the general hidden turmoil and vanished.

‘That poor little thing,’ Irene whispered.

‘Honey, there are two grown women in the casket with him,’ Liv Hula reminded her. ‘Ask yourself who put them there.’

Life in quarantine: a hundred yards away, someone in an eva suit could be seen welding steel plates over a hatch; further in, pSi engines fired up as two or three hulks worked to phase-lock with the local flow. In the brief strobing flashes, Liv made out the skeleton of a pipeliner, two centuries old, three miles long. She allowed the ship to drift further in, then out again. Renoko’s next load awaited them only a few hundred miles beneath. As they departed, a K-ship nosed out from between the hulks and followed them down, at one point fitting itself so closely into the curves of the old freighter’s hull that they could feel waste heat radiating from the internal processes it made no attempt to mask. Its signals traffic alone could have cooked a city. It wanted them to know it was there. It wanted them to know that they were a question it could answer if it wanted to; anything it wanted, it could have. It matched them through one and a half cycles of their aerobrake program, then became interested in something else and spun away. Liv, who had felt the K-captain crawling in and out of her brain through the wires in her mouth, shuddered.

‘I hate those things,’ she said.

There was a silence. Then a faint voice, already four lights down the Beach, whispered:

‘Well I’ve never said an unkind word about you, sweetie.’

New Venusport South Hemisphere, 3am: Madame Shen’s old premises, a three-acre strip of cement between the sea and the rocket yards. For a minute or two after the Nova Swing came down there was silence. Then the night sounds returned, bustle from the yards, chain link fences rattling in the offshore breeze. Fat Antoyne Messner stood on the loading platform, looking across a thin layer of marine fog doped with pollution from the yards. It would clear rapidly with the approach of dawn; meanwhile the motors ticked and cooled, and Antoyne relished the damp air in his face. The curve of the bay was lined with clapboard beach motels, blind pigs and empty sex joints — Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge — their cinder lots full of drifted sand. Waves rumbled in from the horizon.

‘Look!’ Liv Hula said. ‘No, there!’

A figure was making its way along the line of buildings, silhouetted against the faint luminescence of the waves: female, tall, full of the unresolved tensions of the heavily-tailored. Faceless and quiet, she leaned for a moment on the siding of the Deleuze Motel, one arm straight out from the shoulder, palm flat against the wall. The wind smelled of chemicals. She raised her head to it like a dog, looking out to sea, then sat down at the edge of the concrete apron and began pouring sand from one cupped hand to the other: someone who, arriving too late for a meeting, regrets having come at all.

‘I know that woman,’ Liv whispered, ‘but I can’t think where from.’

Antoyne was unable to help. He had seen so many people like that, in bars from here to the Core. After you had yourself rebuilt to such a degree, body language was enough to tell whatever two-dimensional story you had left. You were so wired to yourself you no longer knew what you were. Every response ramped up, every surface tuned to receive rays from space: designed for looks, speed, confidence and security at point of use.

‘But who can say what back door access the tailor left?’ he concluded.

Liv found this critique unhelpful. ‘I know her from somewhere,’ she said. Then: ‘Look! Antoyne! In the breaks!’

Two hundred yards away, a long cylindrical object was beating up out of the sea, dipping and rolling in the salt spray. In three or four minutes it had found its way on to the beach. It looked like a mine from a forgotten war, rusty, steaming and throwing off curious dark rainbows while it decided where to go next. The woman by the Deleuze Motel was watching it too. She stood up and dusted off her hands. When the mortsafe showed signs of moving away into the dunes, she called out and began running after it at a rate no human being could sustain, becoming in three or four paces a mucoid blur. Almost immediately, she was in collision with an identical blur, which had lunged up at her from a shallow hiding place down in the sand and marram grass. Both of them shrieked loudly. It was as if she had run full tilt into a mirror. Every movement she made, her double matched. Sand flew up around them so it became impossible to tell which was which. Then one of them slowed down suddenly and strode around looking puzzled with her hands to her head. She sat down hard. Fell forward slowly from the waist. Leaving her there motionless, the survivor went fizzing away among the dunes, tearing up the marram grass, startling the shoreline birds.

‘They’ve killed her!’ said Liv.

Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘This isn’t to do with us.’

A third figure, some shadowy little old guy in a shortie raincoat, had watched the encounter from the dunes, clapping his hands, looking round as if appealing to the rest of the audience on a lively evening at the Preter Coeur fights. His face was a white oval. He had the look of an enthusiast. If there had been a way to bet, you thought, he would have set his money down. After a minute or two he approached the dead woman, knelt down near her head and busied himself about there, chuckling. Then he retreated into the dunes a little way and waited, his stillness such that he became difficult to see, until the woman woke up. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ they heard her complain distinctly. She rolled over, too late to avoid puking an evil pink fluid copiously on herself. She got to her feet and staggered to the side door of the Deleuze Motel, above which blinked a flamingo-coloured neon reading STARLIGHT ROOM with, above that, two stylised palm trees intertwined. Leaning against her own shadow on the blistered wall, she threw up again, more carefully this time, and went inside. The man in the raincoat, meanwhile, had walked off towards the sea without looking back once.

‘Fat Antoyne, this is so wrong!’

By now Antoyne had something else to think about. Down at the base of the Nova Swing, just outside the harsh glare of the loading lights, the fifth mortsafe awaited him, quiet, unobtrusive, smelling of the sea.

He went down to fetch it and found the usual corroded tin can, leaking its unknown past like a physical substance. This time someone had daubed it with nondrying anti-radar paint, into which a meaningless line of letters and numbers had then been impressed using some kind of stencil. It was warmer than the others. When he had got it stowed away, he found that Irene had left the ship. Liv didn’t know where. The two of them went out into the dunes and called around, but Irene didn’t answer. ‘You’d better go and find her,’ Liv told Antoyne. Then shouted after him, ‘She’s not happy, Antoyne.’ The wind blew harder and the moon was up. Squalls were headed in across the bay.

Raised on an agricultural planet, Irene had questions from the start, mainly about her ability to empathise. But when you sign for the package they offer you a heart of gold, because it makes you happier in the work. It’s free. Really, it’s a cheap tweak. No one loses, not you, not your customer. Irene opted in and never regretted it, though maybe her heart was over-tuned now for the quarantine orbit, because here on South Hemisphere NV, made more upset than she could allow herself to understand by the story of the little boy in the sarcophagus, she needed a bar, a bottle of Black Heart, and the company of people she didn’t know.

But the other side of the fence things only deteriorated. Seaward in the fog, you could feel distance growing in everything. From Lizard Sex to The Metropole, the shutters were up all along the strip. The old-fashioned signs banged in the wind; rust ran down from blisters in the paintwork. Outside the joint they called 90-Proof & Boys, the air tasted of salt. Ivy Mike’s lay silent and unoccupied. The circus wasn’t in town, and it was coming on to rain.

Eventually she heard voices. The front doors of the Deleuze Motel, flanked by frosted glass windows and scoured wood panels with tinpot ads, were padlocked shut. She shook them. A wan yellow light could be seen inside. ‘Hello!’ No one answered. They didn’t even stop what they were doing. There were distinct rattling sounds and, every so often, outbreaks of a kind of subdued shouting. The yellow light came and went, as if someone was walking jerkily to and fro in front of it. Irene could hear ordinary sounds too: a chair scraped back, ice clattering in a glass. She patted the door as if it was someone’s arm. ‘So hey,’ she said, ‘you’re having a good time in there.’ She went round the side and found, under the pink and mint neon STARLIGHT ROOM, another pair of doors, loosely latched and shifting in the wind. Without a thought she put her eye to the gap, where the paint was slick with rain. Whatever she saw in there made her take one startled pace backwards then run away as fast as a b-girl can.