Empty Space

EIGHTEEN It Takes Place in a Vacuum

Some days the shadow operators vanished the moment daylight fell on them. Others, they fluttered up to meet it, swimming about delightedly in the air above her desk. Their behaviour was as opaque to the assistant as hers was to them. They predated the human. They were a form of life you found everywhere: but what they did before human beings arrived in the Galaxy to make use of them, no one knew, not even the shadow operators themselves. If you asked them they grew shy and thoughtful.

‘It’s so nice you’re interested, dear.’

She asked them to list her some names from the files.

They offered Magellan, Radtke and dos Santos. Nevy Furstenberg and John K. Matsuda. They offered the notorious Ephraim Shacklette. They offered MP Renoko.

‘Him,’ the assistant said.

MP Renoko, aka Ronostar Productions, aka Dek Echidna, had begun stripping the assets of Madame Shen’s circus late in 2400, after five consecutive quarters of mixed results. Thereafter you could follow the paper trail across the Halo from South Hemisphere, New Venusport. It led to FUGA-Orthogen — once a thriving EMC subsidiary with interests in mining and recovery, now a single empty Lost & Found office on a badlands planet in the long tail of niche tourism — then trickled away into meaningless local eddies. It was commerce at the edge of viscosity, until Renoko quietly began buying items back. Now he was moving them around under junk certification, using the same ship that had hauled the Halo’s favourite travelling entertainment from planet to planet.

‘So what are we looking at?’ she asked the shadow operators.

They were unable to say at this time.

The assistant, who had expected nothing more, took herself off to New Venusport. The travel lounges were rammed with people trying to get home. War had upped the ante on their lives.

South Hemisphere, NV: underlit smoke poured all night from cheap-and-dirty chemical launchers humping payload into secure EMC orbits. Particle jockeys sweated out their radiation meds under the blackened hulls of K-ships. In the breakers’ yards, indentured New Men — without benefit of a pair of leather gloves, let alone a lead suit — crawled by the thousand over scrapped Alcubiere warpers the size of small towns. Everywhere you looked, you saw machines which would, if their science was turned off for a second, revert instantly to a slurry of nanotech and a few collapsing magnetic fields. Ionisation flickered through clouds of sulphur dioxide and radioactive steam.

What remained of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant — aka The Circus of Pathet Lao — could be found on three acres of fenced-off cement between the rocket pits and the sea. Yard machinery rose up on one side, rippling with bad physics; on the other it was sand dunes steadily absorbing an encrustation of abandoned cabana units, beach bars and hotels — Ivy Mike’s, Deleuze Motel, The Palmer Lounge. The fences dripped with condensation, rattling in an offshore wind. Beneath the chemical signature of the yards, the assistant smelled only salt and dust. Her tailoring, attentive to every breeze, picked up particle dogs, scrambled EMC traffic, low-grade electromagnetic haze from unshielded operations. Otherwise, nothing. Then a K-ship ripped towards the marshalling orbit at Mach 40, its line of fusion product lighting everything in the near ultraviolet: a few alien poppies were revealed growing in the earth at the base of a gate, their crumpled metallic flowerheads nodding in the disturbed air. Life at the circus, NV style. Over in a distant corner of the field stood a three-fin short-hauler, stubby and used-looking, its image still rippling with the heat of a recent re-entry. Nova Swing!

She listened in to its internal comms for a moment. Well, well, she thought. Now you have some talking to do, you three. She was in no hurry. She smiled to herself and sat down not far from the Deleuze Motel; watched the ocean waves break white on luminous indigo, and let a handful of sand run through her fingers. She wondered if she should call herself Queenie, Aspodoto or Tienes mi Corazon. Roxie. Mexie. Maybe Backstep Cindy.

After a minute or two the acid-clouds parted to reveal stars in subtly different arrangements to the ones she knew.

A minute or two after that, something shot quickly left to right along the front of a breaking wave eighty metres out, then, half-submerged in turbulence, nosed its way up through the swash on to the beach. A corroded bronze pressure tank — tubular, perhaps three metres by one and recently daubed with crude Jaumann absorbers in a resin base — it featured inlaid circuits and a lateral line of deep blue LEDs. A single quartz port glittered at one end. In a universe boiling with algorithms, anything can behave as if it’s alive; harder, the assistant thought, to look intelligent, even when you were. The mortsafe, if that’s what it was, hunted for some moments through twenty or thirty degrees of arc, as if trying to orient itself; then — hovering three or four feet above the beach, swaying with an oiled resilience in every gust of wind — it slipped inland between the dunes, heading towards the Nova Swing.

‘Wait!’ the assistant called.

Her tailoring redlined, but something much closer than the ship had already begun dismantling it. Whoever it was, they were too quick for her. Structured magnetic fields reached in through the doped protein meshes around her brainstem and squeezed firmly for eight or nine milliseconds. They let her stagger away, choking and dancing. She could feel herself kicking up the sand. Seizure-sites propagated across the cortex in cascades. Proprioception went down. Target acquisition went down. Autonomic functions went down. Everything went down. It wasn’t a Preter Coeur kill. It was something EMC. Just before the system folded, IR and active sonar acquired what she thought might be a human figure leaning over her. After that she got: sensation of a door closing: sensation of something frying in the spinothalamic tract: a smell like rendered fat. Just illusions. All she felt as she fell was a kind of shame. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before.

When she woke up it was still night. The tide was a little further out. She was alone. The smell of burnt rocket fuel blew over the dunes and for a moment she interpreted that, too, as synaesthesia from some cortical fuck-up they had done to her. Best to lie in the marram, fitting and retching while the self-repair kits crawled dispassionately over her brain. She felt worse than at any time since she came out of the chopshop tank in Preter Coeur with her new career and her specialised arm. Eventually she got to her feet and staggered into the Deleuze Motel, where she found a ballroom full of drifted sand. Two low-wattage bulbs alive in the chandelier. At the back, by the bar, three old men in white flat caps and polyester trousers, staring at her. They were playing dice. They had a crate of alcopops and two or three bottles of Black Heart barrel proof rum, which they were drinking on its own, no ice.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ the assistant said. ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll give me some of that.’

Impasse van Sant had come down the Carling Line as just another speck in fifty tonnes of deep-frozen trade gametes. Sperm and egg futures were declining: passed hand to hand for two hundred years, often as a sweetener in some more interesting deal, van Sant was finally thawed out as farmworker potential. After that he couldn’t seem to settle. It was a common enough syndrome in the Halo. Dedicated before birth to the gods of irreversible flight and determined-but-unpredictable motion, Imps now stared into empty space and whispered:

‘Are you out there?’

No answer. Then a momentary flicker, very quick and faint. In response, the research vessel sorted quantum events. Software injected the system with wide-band noise, pumping it by stochastic resonance into the story of some brief imbalance in the vacuum energy. Data built suddenly, crested, fell away fast. The number of objects in local space had suddenly doubled. Half a parsec towards the Core, something banked like a white wing, caught tilted up against the dark as if on some other errand. He didn’t know how many times she had slipped away from him like this before he had time to speak, a huge frail orphan in the substrate of the universe. There were days when he couldn’t bear the possibility. Today was one of them. Whatever shit he shot with Rig Gaines over beer and table tennis, Imps knew he was kidding himself when he thought he could get by in outer space on his own. He worked feverishly to reel her in, his expression suddenly soft and desperate in the old-fashioned glow of the control panel.

‘Hello?’ he called into the dark. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

His heart raced. He tried to think of some way to extend their previous conversations; something certain to keep her attention.

‘What would you be,’ he said, ‘if you could be one other thing?’

‘One thing?’

‘One other thing.’

She turned restlessly in the vacuum. Her shadow fell across him, elegant, high aspect ratio, one thousand metres tip to tip. Sometimes she presented like this, as feathers. Others it would be plasma, superconductors, a tangle of magnetic fields around which raced particles of all energies. Every so often she chose a thick cold slab of flesh instead, it rippled like a manta ray. As if to acknowledge the problems of such diversity, and of the question itself, she answered:

‘I never knew what I was anyway.’

‘You don’t know what you were?’

‘I was something but I didn’t know what, even then.’

She thought about it. ‘Even then I was on a journey back to something. It was a long time ago,’ she said eventually. ‘If I knew what I was then, that’s what I’d choose to be.’

‘You’ve already been something else?’

‘I can’t explain.’

‘I was never anything but myself. I was always locked in.’

But she wouldn’t help him with that, not this time. In the end she whispered bleakly: ‘We all make bad decisions.’

Just then a random pulse of energy shuddered across the face of the K-Tract. A tenuous shell of something — less than gas, more than nothing, dark matter like a kind of ghost velvet — expanded into the local universe. ‘Oh look!’ she called. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ She manoeuvred herself to face it, her hundred-metre tip feathers curling and separating. Meanwhile the wavefront penetrated the hull of van Sant’s tub, giving rise to events of such subtlety they couldn’t be detected. It touched his face light as lovers’ fingers, and left the wiring confused.

‘Someone went in there,’ he heard her whisper.

‘So they say.’

‘It wasn’t so long ago. I wondered if I should go too.’

Exotic radiation bathed them both, to different ends, for twenty minutes. By the time van Sant emerged from its trailing edge, she had resumed her restless patrol of empty space, and he was alone again.

Don’t go! Imps wanted to shout.

He always failed to ask her so many things.

Who are you? What are you? Why are we out here, the two of us? What’s the nature of your dialogue with the universe? What happens next? Is it possible for species as different as us to fuck?

All of these questions but one were in fact asked of himself, and might have been rephrased: Will I ever go home?

None of them mattered if you were involved with R.I. Gaines. Everything Rig ever did implied that the real action was happening elsewhere. Some other domain of possibilities was being actively explored alongside this one. Gaines’ motives were so obscure — his projects went so unreported, even in the hierarchy of EMC — that in the end only your own part in an op could be described (for the same reason, it could hardly be called a ‘contribution’, since you had no idea what it contributed to). Every time Imps’ alien visitor appeared, she forced him to query not why Rig Gaines wanted him out here in the middle of nowhere, but what facet of his so-called personality had prompted him to agree to come there in the first place.

Days like that, when she had departed, leaving the lights turned off in van Sant’s head, his instruments showed him nothing but his own cast-off past: Levy flight after Levy flight into empty space. He had no consolation but the long slow struggle to understand his own course. That and the Tract. Because the Tract is gaining on us, Imps thought: it’s slowly catching up with the real universe. The first place it would wash over was the Beach. Meanwhile, Imps van Sant was closer to it, he believed, than any other living beachcomber: which meant the first one it would wash over was him.

A long way off, in the ballroom of the Deleuze Motel, the assistant sat recovering herself. She drank barrel proof rum from the bottle and watched the old men work the overend on one another at the Ship Game — adjusting their white caps, shooting the cuffs of their formal shirts with sharp economical gestures, whispering, ‘Well now,’ or ‘Now you fucked.’ In their opinion, the night was moving along: every so often one of them would cock his head at the sound of the ocean, lean across, and, black eyes as empty as raisins, assure the assistant that the night was moving right along. Dice rattled and scattered, shedding alien luck as friction brought them to a standstill. The faint smell of vomit coming and going in the cold air, the assistant realised, originated with her. Three am, the tide was fully out. R.I. Gaines walked in through the sea-facing wall.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘The Ship Game! Make room!’

The old men blinked up at him like lizards. They made room. Something he could do with the bone interested them, they were disposed to admit. Soon, they were taking his money, he was taking theirs. ‘It’s a redistributive system,’ he proposed. Redistribution, they agreed, was the name of that particular game. The assistant watched these events from a distance, then walked over to the door. The breeze was onshore. Dawn wasn’t far off. Seeming to notice her for the first time, Gaines jumped to his feet and led her back into the room. He made a gesture that took in the salt-stained walls, the chandelier with its two dim bulbs, the dusty signs behind the bar.

‘Sometimes you’re quite hard to find,’ he said.

The assistant shrugged. She offered him the rum. ‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to go and sit on my bed together?’

He gave her a thoughtful look.

‘The Aleph stopped asking for you. We wondered if you knew anything about that.’

‘I never know what you’re talking about.’

Gaines grinned. He held up the bottle, studied the label. ‘“Black Heart”,’ he quoted. ‘“All the sweet lacunae of the Caribbean Sea”.’

The assistant looked down at her arm. Nothing was happening there.

‘I wonder if it’s time you two met?’ Gaines asked himself.

The fact was, he couldn’t decide. He had recently come from the Aleph site, where there had been more activity than he expected, reflections of smart displays fluttering across the shiny carbon floor, smells of ionisation and construction. Case’s people were devising new containment principles. It was a high risk period for them all. They had no idea what they were dealing with. When Gaines arrived they were arguing if they wanted a bunch of fat cables in here just for the look of it, or do the whole thing tight beam, which, hey, would be the quick and dirty solution. It was a professionally toxic but busy atmosphere. The reason being, Case told Gaines, that early the same morning Pearl had begun to emit pulsed bursts of RF.

‘It’s not organised, as far as we can tell.’

‘So what is it?’

Case shrugged. ‘It’s not exactly random noise either,’ he said.

‘I’m impressed. Is there anything you guys don’t know?’

‘Rig, we’re doing what we can here,’ Case said tiredly.

His imaging team produced a hologram display that rotated the woman smoothly around every axis so that she looked like virtual false-colour shots of a sculpture, spoiled by some sort of faint, in situ interference. Attempts to clean the interference out had only given her the lines of a Deco portrait, freezing the folds of her gown to create strong contentless curves suggestive of power and energy. Her eyes were rendered the same colour as her face, without pupil or lids. ‘After we took these I had them build a field tomography unit round her,’ Case said. ‘Forget it. It was like looking into nacre.’ As far as X-rays were concerned, she was solid all through. ‘Positron emission feels the same about her. We decided not to try neutrons, in case she bore some slight resemblance to a human being.’

‘She looks as if she’s falling,’ Gaines said. ‘Caught falling.’

Her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left of the ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee; they were as far apart as the skirt of the gown permitted. The feet were bare. The arms, outstretched either side of the head, curved towards the ceiling of the chamber; the hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. The gown fluttered stiffly, as if caught in strong air currents venting through the floor of the control room. The effect was of someone falling sideways from a great height.

‘How close can I get?’ Gaines asked.

‘Close as you like,’ Case said.

To Gaines she had that inner focus possessed by the very sick. When he whispered, ‘Hey, who are you? What is it you don’t like about yourself?’ she only looked through him, contorting herself slowly, trying to alter her position around the fall-line, her expression full of fear and rage. He stepped in and knelt down until eighteen inches of air separated their faces, but he couldn’t force himself any closer — he experienced the sensation of inappropriately invading someone’s personal space, but worse. And where he had expected to feel the air moving around her, fluttering her gown, it was just the opposite, very still.

‘I can feel heat radiating off her,’ he told Case.

‘Other people think they hear a voice,’ Case said, ‘ too far away to make out words. Or they smell something, maybe perfume. We think everyone’s trying to describe the same sensation, but so far no one’s got near enough to find out. You’ve done better than most.’

‘Before, there was some kind of paste coming out of her mouth?’

‘That’s on and off,’ Case said. As for the RF transmission, he added, it was very low power. It had a very local reach. ‘If she’s hooked up with anything, it’s already arrived. It’s in the maze.’

‘Jesus, Case. Do we have any idea at all where she came from?’

Case looked amused.

‘No,’ he said. ‘One other thing: sometimes there’s a convulsion. She dribbles — we can’t collect any of it, whatever it is — and there’s a lot of shifting and partial fading. Just for a moment she looks like a much older woman. Nothing’s finished here.’