Empty Space

TWENTY THREE Heart Sounds & Bruits

MP Renoko — that mysterious software entity which, people said, was all that remained of Sandra Shen’s Circus — had returned lately from an inspection of major Quarantine orbits all over the Halo.

He was tired but happy. With these visits, interesting but necessarily clandestine, his contribution was complete. The cargo in place, the client settled in the hold of the ship they called the Nova Swing, his part in things coming to an end, he took a last walk down by the sea, a mile along from the circus ground on South Hemisphere, New Venusport. Away from motel and beach-bar it was all spray and sunshine, the water booming in on a steep shore strewn with rocks the size of white goods, where sunbathing men and women lay like lizards staring blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them. The huge waves, MP Renoko said, might have been in a hologram for all the notice they took of them.

‘You wonder,’ he added, to the ghost by his side, ‘why they have so little common sense.’

‘But look!’ the ghost said. ‘Look!’

She hacked with her heel at the shingle then bent down quickly and prised something loose. After the removal of a bit of seaweed it turned out to be an old round coin with a small square hole in the middle, still somehow bright and untarnished. ‘Down between the rocks,’ she said, ‘spiders make their webs. A foot or two from all that surf! They tremble every time a wave comes in, and we can’t express the sense of anxiety with which this fills us.’ A shrug. ‘Yet every year there are webs and spiders.’

The coin, flipped into the air, glittered briefly.

‘Heads or tails?’ enquired the ghost.

‘You were always the best arguer,’ Renoko acknowledged. ‘I know it’s wrong to say, “I think”. I should say, “I am thought”.’

She took his arm, and gave him her faint little oriental smile.

‘You should,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay long. Back to the circus? Or on to the diner?’

‘I’m ready to go anywhere.’

Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn’t a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet’s housekeeping, stood a sixty by sixteen foot O’Mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine but known to its habitués — edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast — simply as ‘the Tambourine’. By day, the gulls dived and gyred above its deco stainless steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o’ clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass, where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe.

‘On your own here,’ Renoko said, ‘you can hear voices in the tide.’

His weariness amazed him.

Shortly after these events, a strange scene took place on board the Nova Swing. The cabin lights flickered. The Dynaflow drivers ran rough, failed briefly, then came back up, inserting a blank space in the crew’s experience of their lives roughly equal to the effects of a transient ischemic attack.

Down in the main hold, a wave went through the deck plates, as if matter could experience a stroke too. Light and dark became muddled. The mortsafes bumped together like moored boats. The lid of the K-tank blew off violently and clattered away, revealing the proteome inside, which slopped about like dirty salt water at night. Through its surface burst the occupant of the tank, a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican haircut and a couple of snake tattoos, whose body resembled, from the diaphragm down, a charred and tattered coat. His spine was cabled at neurotypical energy sites. Half-drowned, throwing up with the vertigo of aborted interstellar flight, he stared round in panic at the main hold, the gathered mortsafes. Proteome poured off him, smelling of horse glue; rendered fat; the albumen of a bad egg. Whatever he had been dreaming was gone for good. He wasn’t used to a non-electronic presence in the universe: it was some time since he had been available in this form. He looked down at himself.

‘Jesus, Renoko,’ he complained to the empty air. ‘I’ve got no fucking legs. You didn’t tell me that.’

He fell to plucking the thick rubber cables out of his spine. He tried and failed to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

The condition of the K-tank seemed to impress him. ‘Remind me to come the easy way round next time,’ he said. He addressed the mortsafes. ‘Anyone got any tissues, or like that?’

What did they think of this performance?

They were content with it. They were aliens. They had, by now, spent a claustrophobic fortnight in the Nova Swing main hold with its black and yellow warning stripes, loose tool-cupboard doors, injunctions to work safe with plasma. They understood where they were, and they understood why. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Working for Sandra Shen had required, at the least, hundreds of years of travel from distant places. They had performed vital functions at the demise of her Observatorium & Native Karma Plant. They had abandoned sane environments, left behind homes and families, to be part of the faux-Chinese woman’s engine of change. Like her, they were here to work on behalf of others. They were content with the burnt man because they were content with that.

The Nova Swing chewed a long hole between the stars, her doomed crew staring out so that sometimes their faces appeared at the portholes together, sometimes apart. The police were after her on several worlds. The beef: artefact smuggling. Possible Quarantine infringement. Wanted in connection with the death of a Saudade factor going by ‘Toni Reno’. She sneaked from world to world across the Beach. Since she took aboard the crippled K-tank, she had dropped in quietly at Goat’s Eye and the Inverted Swan; fallen across the empty spaces between Radio Bay and the Tract itself; drifted seventy-four hours, all systems powered down, at heavily coded co-ordinates in the notorious dXVII-Channing Oort cloud. MP Renoko was a no-show at all those venues. Then, just when they had given up on him, he poked his head through the crew quarters wall and said to Fat Antoyne, as if continuing a conversation they had started in The East Ural Nature reserve on Vera Rubin’s World:

‘Everyone their own evolutionary project, Fat Antoyne!’

Antoyne said, ‘Jesus.’

‘Who’s this little old cunt?’ Irene wanted to know. She looked Renoko over, her irises dark with satire. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Antoyne, get off me.’ It was not Renoko’s chinbeard she hated; or even his 1960s paedophile look, which she admitted was chic enough. It was the sense she had that he was always keeping something of himself in reserve. Or not even something: everything. ‘Come in,’ she invited, resettling on her hips some items of dress: ‘We got your cargo of meaningless toys.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ Renoko said.

‘That won’t work here, Renoko. The only thing that will work here is this —’ making the universal sign for money ‘ — then you go, taking the rusty pipework with you.’ If you were driven by unknown forces, her body language implied, best not be around Irene.

Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘Why kill Toni Reno?’ he asked Renoko. ‘I don’t get it.’

Renoko looked puzzled.

‘We didn’t do that,’ he said.

Irene held out her hand again, palm up. She said, ‘Well it wasn’t us either.’

‘Thanks for the information,’ Renoko said. ‘I’ll make arrangements,’ he told Antoyne.

He winked, and his face went back through the wall. He didn’t mean money, but Antoyne wasn’t to know that. Just before his face vanished it added, ‘You might have some communications problems in the next hour or so. Don’t panic.’ Down in the main hold where he next materialised, he found the charred man working on one of the mortsafes with a pulsed-spray welding set four hundred years old. Sparks flew everywhere. In their heat and light, this shabby enclosed space seemed like the very forge of God. Renoko watched for a minute or two in an impressed way and then said, ‘Is that Metal Active Gas?’

The charred man pushed back his goggles and shook his head.

‘MIG,’ he said. ‘You weld?’

‘Never,’ Renoko admitted. ‘But I love to watch.’

The charred man nodded. He heard that all the time, his nod said, but he still appreciated the compliment. Not everyone can weld. After they had allowed a little time to pass around this shared enthusiasm, he said, ‘Hey, what a shit body you found for me!’

‘It’s your own,’ Renoko pointed out.

‘I don’t remember doing this to it.’

‘It will serve the purpose,’ Renoko said. ‘She says you can begin any time. They’re ready for you in the quarantine orbits.’

The charred man scratched his Mohican. ‘If not now, when?’ he asked himself. But he looked as if he had reservations. Then he shrugged and laughed and clapped Renoko’s shoulder. ‘Hey, so she came to say goodbye to you after all, La Chinoise?’

Renoko smiled. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘she did.’

‘You feel good, then?’

‘I feel good,’ Renoko agreed.

‘That’s good,’ the charred man said. He reached into Renoko’s head with one hand.

‘Oh!’ said Renoko. He’d seen something very special.

‘She tries to do her best for everyone.’

Renoko fell back and slipped down the bulkhead with a sigh until he attained a sitting position, after which he began to lose sight of himself. It was an uncanny feeling. In my case, he reminded himself again, it’s wrong to say ‘I think’: I should always say, ‘I’m thought’. Then he wasn’t. He wasn’t thought any more. Although, as long as the boys from Earth ate lunch, a tiny part of Renoko would always live on, a fractal memory in the Faint Dime database — catch & spread light of all kind wan light thru ripple glass jagged light of pressed chrome reflection film light of pink neon diffused across ceilings formica in fantasy-pastels pressed chrome deco fluting behind the bar a curious cast to chequerboard floors shiny lime sherbert light on each pink faux leather stool all perfect pressed out in perfect sugar colour like candy every item perfect perfectly itself & perfectly the same as everything else these weird blue metallic plastic banquettes — less glitch than resonance, the remains of a stay-resident program printing itself out as a list of aesthetic possibilities once or twice a year at cash registers across the Halo, with a particular fondness for ‘the Tambourine’ on New Venusport.

Forty seconds later, the main hold filled with light.

Internal comms tanked. Up in the control room, error signals jammed the boards. ‘Accept!’ Liv Hula told the pilot connexion. Nothing. She stuffed the wires into her mouth by hand. ‘Akphept!’ Too late. They were half in, half out when the connect halted. She pushed until she bled, but the system wouldn’t receive. Instead, Liv was snatched out of herself and began some long, identityless transit.

When things returned, she was seeing them via an exterior camera-swarm. Autorepair media raced along the brass-coloured hull like dust down a hot street. The stern assembly pulsed in and out of view. Outriggers, fusion pods, the tubby avocado-shaped bulge housing the Dynaflow drive: you could see the stars through them. From a source down there, where the holds and motors had once been, intermittent, washy-looking streams of plasma curved out into the dark, already an AU long and curved like scimitars. Liv felt sick. With the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. ‘Antoyne? Hello?’ No one responded. Inside the ship, engine rooms, holds, companionways, ventilator shafts, stairwells, winked out one by one. Go through the wrong door, who knew what you’d see? Liv was aware but blind. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control room screens — a kind of luminous darkness where her spaceship had been. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order.

‘Jesus, Antoyne,’ she said. ‘What are you fucking around with now?’

No one heard her.

Antoyne was enjoying a shit. Irene, who trusted Renoko as far as she could throw him, had zipped herself into a lightweight white eva suit, grabbed her favourite Fukushima Hi-Lite Autoloader from the weapons bar and, with a transparent bubble helmet under one arm, was making her way from the crew quarters to the main hold. Latticed stairways leaned at expressionist angles against the moody emergency light; in the rear companionways the ship’s gravity had become undependable. Communications were nonexistent. It was hard to tell which way was up. Irene, though, looked good with her close-fit suit, her determined expression and her flossy blond hair. ‘It’s hot as hell down here,’ she said. ‘Hello?’

She put her ear to the main hold doors.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Liv? Antoyne? I hear something!’ Setting helmet and Hi-Lite on the floor, she opened the door and stepped through.

Just as Liv heard Irene’s strange cries, the missing sections of the ship returned. Antoyne never knew any part of it had been gone. He appeared in the control room pulling up his trousers and together he and Liv ran through the Nova Swing, throwing themselves down stairwells as they tried to avoid pockets of deteriorating physics. The ship self-reassembled around them. Its hull rang and rang. The door to the main hold slid open on a vertical slice of lemon-yellow light: inside, some unacceptable transition was partially complete. There were oblique shadows, noises like sacred music, sparks on everything, a voice saying, ‘Fuck!’ Antoyne looked determinedly away from it all and at the same time reached in with one arm. It was a stretch, and he had to feel around aimlessly for a time, but eventually he got hold of Irene by one ankle and pulled her out.

‘Antoyne,’ she whispered, with a kind of puzzled matter-of-factness, ‘the universe isn’t what we think.’ She reached out a soft hand to Liv Hula, insisted, ‘Nothing here was made for us!’ Then, writhing about in Antoyne’s arms so she could see into his eyes: ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’

‘He didn’t look,’ Liv reassured her.

She wasn’t sure if he did or not. The backs of her gums were bleeding where she had ripped the pilot connexion out. She could feel a lot of loose tissue up there. Sometimes Liv felt she had died a hundred lights back, on the mystery asteroid. Ever since, her nightmares were of being discovered by retrieval teams, lapped in faint ionising radiation at the junction of two corridors, an unreadable name stencilled above the faceplate of her eva suit. Day after day, plugged straight into the inner life of the hardware, she lay in the acceleration chair, always too cold, reviewing the internal surveillance data. Something had been wrong down there from the very first day of the Renoko contract, but with every new artefact they picked up, ship life had been less easy to observe. She had no idea if the Nova Swing could look after itself in its present condition.

‘The mortsafes!’ Irene screamed. ‘The mortsafes!’

Liv Hula slammed the main hold door and backed away from it carefully, holding out Irene’s Autoloader in both hands.

They dragged Irene back to the crew quarters. She was hanging by a thread the whole way, hallucinating and crying out. When they got there she made Fat Antoyne dress her in her newest clothes and carry her to a porthole. They couldn’t find a single mark on her, but she was slipping away so fast you could feel her go past you and out into empty space.

‘Those stars! So beautiful!’ she said, and closed her eyes. Her skin had a lead-coloured glaze. Antoyne, whose arm had felt weird since he thrust it into the hold, looked down at her and concluded she was already dead. But after a while she smiled and said: ‘Antoyne, promise me you won’t get a cultivar of me. If I have to die I want to die forever, here and now in this utterly for-real place.’ She seemed to think about it for a moment. Then she clutched his arm and said, ‘Hey, and I want you to find someone else! Of course I do! We should never be alone in this life, Antoyne, because that is what human beings are for, and you will have many experiences of love yet. But honey, I want you to lose me. Can you understand that?’

Antoyne, dumb with it already, said he could.

‘Good,’ she said.

She sighed and smiled as if that weight was off her mind. ‘Look out at those stars,’ she urged Antoyne again. And then, in a change of subject he could not follow: ‘All the shoes you can eat!’ She pulled herself up with her hands on his shoulders to get a look around the crew quarters.

‘Oh, Liv,’ she said. ‘And our lovely, lovely rocket!’

Antoyne felt himself begin to cry. All three of them were crying after that.