Empty Space

TWENTY FOUR Spike Train

Three fifty am, the assistant visited Ou Lou Lu’s on Retiro Street, a venue added only recently to her night’s round. There she drank a cup of espresso, holding it in both hands and dancing thoughtfully to the sidewalk music the way R.I. Gaines had taught her, watching out for the flash of pre-dawn light above the city. When it came, she drove back over to Straint Street to talk to her friend and confidant, George the gene tailor. It was fine rain like fog. The Cadillac rolled down Straint, its 1000hp engine already turned off, and came quietly to a halt outside Sharp Cuts. The assistant — let’s call her the Pantopon Rose — tall, white-blond hair cropped to not much of anything — possessing the kind of height and fuck-off good looks which come naturally from the most radical tailoring — stepped out on to the sidewalk.

‘Hey, George!’ she called.

No answer. Her expression grew puzzled. The door hung wide open and the rain was blowing in from the street.

She could smell the dockyards. From the factories she could hear the sound of women clocking on for the early shift. The light had a yellow colour: it picked out the ceramic receiver of the reaction gun she now took out quietly, holding it down alongside her thigh. One instant she was outside, the next she was in, silent and motionless, smiling around. The chopshop seemed empty. Nevertheless she didn’t feel alone. Something was masking itself in the IR, RF, acoustic and active sonar regimes. It was near. She could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, but it wasn’t that. Something was in the room with her. It was impure in the sense it didn’t fit. It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit in and if you failed to grasp that you had already made a mistake. She couldn’t smell it, but she knew it had a smell. She couldn’t locate it, but she knew it had a location. Then came the whisper she almost expected, the amused voice from an empty corner:

‘My name is Pearlent —’

The assistant put a Chambers round exactly where her systems placed the voice. A soft, coughing thud and the corner of the shop burst into rose and grey flames. Heat splashed back. In the shifting lick of that — the warm flicker of geometry followed by dark — she identified an object moving. It was a decoy. It was all over the room. It was all around her with —

— and the low, charismatic laugh of a rebuilt thing.

If it shot back she was dead. It was there, not there: there, not there. Then it was right in her face. Tall, with white-blond hair cropped to nothing much. The fuck-off body language of someone who can run fifty miles an hour and see in sonar. Someone whose very piss is inhuman.

It was herself.

It was gone. It was next to her yet out of range. For an instant everything hung suspended, then fell.

‘Christ!’ the assistant screamed. She redlined her equipment. She was quick enough to get a round off at the blur in the doorway. The round fizzed away like an angry cat and burst in the street. When the assistant arrived out there she found she had shot her own car. Flames were already reflecting in the window of the Tango du Chat, appearing curiously still, like cut-out flames, or flames in an old book. Spooked drinkers stared out. They hadn’t even begun to duck. She could hear running footsteps, but they were unhurried and already three streets away. That was something you might puzzle over later in your room, when you recalled a face just like your own glaring madly into yours from ten inches distance — permitting itself to be seen in five false-colour overlays, teeth bared and laughing with your own perfected fuck-off arrogance — and admitted just how far things had slipped away from you. You would be forced to express it, she thought, in a similar way to this:

But no one is quicker than me!

Back in the chopshop, a few scraps of orange light from the Cadillac fire slipped between the window-boards, barely touching the dusty counter, the shoot-up posters and powered-down proteome tanks. If light could be described as fried, the assistant thought, this was how it would look, this was how it would illuminate a bare resin floor and reveal the open eyes of the corpse. She knelt down. George had bled out an hour ago from a deeply penetrative wound in his right armpit, as if someone had come up from the floor at him — waited there all night, in complete silence in the photon-hungry dark on the dirty floor, then come up at him and driven one of their hands, fingers stiffened to make a cone, deep into his armpit. He looked almost relaxed, as if the worst thing he could imagine — the very thing he was most afraid of — had finally happened, thus relieving him of his anxieties at the same time as it confirmed them.

‘George,’ she whispered. ‘My poor George.’

It was, she imagined, something the Pantopon Rose might have said. If he had been alive, the assistant could have asked George his professional advice: ‘How can a person like me be shaking like this?’

Forty lights down the Beach, EMC’s crack grey ops team was doing a favour for a friend. The Levy Flight comprised a dozen ships, would take on anything. They gave the big No! to the psychopathic conformity of the typical K-pod. Instead they encouraged a shifting membership of ten- to thirteen-year-olds with an interest in Military Collectibilia of Old Earth. Their present mission might seem weird, even unhip, to today’s kids: until you realised that a hundred thousand years ago Panamax IV was inhabited by fuck-off telepathic reptile Aztecs from beyond the universe. That was the draw.

Planetary interdiction would normally require one of the Flight to lay off at the L2 point and from there co-ordinate the operations of the others. The mayhem at Panamax IV discouraged this. There being at least four parties to the conflict not counting the pod itself, fighting was going on in several locations at once, from five lights out in the neighbouring system — catalogued as Alpha 5 Flexitone — to the lower reaches of the Panamax parking orbit. EMC heavy assets thugged it out realtime with the Nastic 8th Fleet in a classic exchange of bumps which had already set fire to a nearby gas giant. Two dozen Denebian dipships mined the local sun. Dissident indigenes were arming scramjets and flying them into partial orbits straight off the factory floor; while a gut-shot Alcubiere battleship — the Daily Deals & Huge Savings, run by a privateer crew of New Men under the leadership of two Shadow Boys who shared the name ‘Fermionic Joe’ — tried to aerobrake its way down to the surface of the planet. That was how half the Levy pod, including Whiskey Bravo, Pizza Night, Fat Mickey from Detroit and Uptown Six, found itself banging about in atmosphere — no one’s preferred medium — at Mach 2 and below, negotiating airspace with one another as well with hostiles. The other half, strung out between Flexitone and the Panamax Oort cloud, ran interference, making all the usual plays through curled-up dimensions at picosecond speeds, flipping in and out of the 3D world as circumstance demanded.

‘ — incoming, four degrees over the ecliptic, two lights out.’

‘I have him.’

‘Steady. In contact. Steady, steady —’

‘Right underneath you, Fat Mickey.’

‘All his bases are ours.’

Viewing the Flight’s efforts — which, in quotidian time, came to him as little more than a coloured dapple of flat-plane lightning across hologram images of empty space, a few quiet voices in an FTL pipe, a historical record of things that had happened a million nanoseconds ago an astronomical unit away — R.I. Gaines was impressed by their calmness and skill. There was so much work for them out there, you got the feeling they were embarrassed. The quiet rhythms and stresses of their exchanges returned language to something reliable. By contrast, the embedded journalism AIs, their commentary piped in by the pilots themselves from commercial routers, were reporting: ‘There’s no let up for the Levy Flight. These boys wouldn’t want one. They want to work.’

‘Levy Flight are here to work,’ Peat Teeter told Tanky LaBrom. ‘Work improves the way they feel about themselves.’

By any measure they were too late. Alyssia Fignall’s hilltop dig had been vaporised before they arrived. Her house, too, was blowing around in the clouds of oily black grit produced by large-scale thermobaric exchanges. The fountain, the stone arches, the long cool spaces and luminous grey shadows of the cloister: all gone and maybe Alyssia with them. Below him now lay his last chance of finding her.

The town had aged since Gaines last saw it, like a photograph of a ruin subsiding into coastline. Somewhere upstream a dam had burst, forcing a million tonnes of water through La Cava in an hour. The karst system had fallen in on itself: the town had fallen into that. He couldn’t see how anyone could survive down there. But Carlo the K-captain had manoeuvred Uptown Six to within fifty feet of the greyish-brown turbulence, so Gaines gave him the respect of searching every remaining nook of stone. Right and left, other elements of the pod edged nervously about, trying not run into one another, so low they were dashed with spray. They looked wrong — like a lot of executioners at a birthday party, with an intense interest in people’s weight or how muscular their necks were — but they were doing their best to help, a class of behaviour that did not occur naturally to them. Daylight came and went suddenly and without reason. Incoming gamma would light up the local sky, take the top off a hill, dig a trench a kilometre long; then it would get dark again. At moments like that the K-ships shivered and hunted, outlines blurring as their stealth options cut in, weapons extruding with a kind of sluggish ferocity. Incoming gamma was more their kind of environment.

‘It’s mayhem down there,’ Carlo remarked. Then he warned one of the other ships, ‘Tanky, you’ve still got me off your starboard stern. Ten metres and closing. Keep up.’

Gaines watched the floating junk bouncing off buildings and bridges on its way down to the sea. ‘There’s nothing left here,’ he was forced to admit.

‘Jesus, Rig, I’m really sorry,’ Carlo said. ‘Hey, we can go lower! How would it be if we went lower?’

‘Get us out of here, Carlo.’

Carlo switched on the f-Ram drivers. All around the Uptown Six, the other ships were torching up. The Levy Flight stood on its stern and ascended through the clouds of radioactive ash at Mach 40. They spent a moment or two in the parking orbit, looking down. Someone up there — someone not so far away, with access to top-shelf assets — had lost their temper: Panamax, as Tanky LaBrom put it, was fucked. High volume X-ray devices quartered the crust, vaporising the first fifty metres on contact, then steadily melting the rest. Surface features higher than a couple of hundred feet were already a kind of geological paste, fairground scarlet at the leading edge and forcing itself across the remains of the landscape like a tongue between your lips. Plate tectonic activity was up. The atmosphere roared and whistled with heated gases. Gaines stared down, wishing he had understood his daughter as well as she had understood him. He remembered her saying, ‘Rig, these people were so old!’ and he wished there could be one single patch of unburnt ground left somewhere down there. As he thought about Alyssia, the Nastic cruiser — on the other side of the planet now, and only 50,000 feet up — switched on its gravity engine and drove itself into the softening crust. Physics ran wild. A huge bulge began to form on the surface beneath Uptown Six.

‘Fucking shit, guys,’ Carlo said, ‘he’s coming all the way through.’

The Levy Flight weren’t going to miss that.

You can originate from a freezer, Impasse van Sant believed, and still make an identity for yourself: but the thing is, you never feel sited. Day after day he hung in empty space, wondering not so much why he had no news from home as where his home had been. He knew there was a war on, but he didn’t know who to side with. That made him feel both unreal and nostalgic. How can you be nostalgic for something you never had? Wow, he caught himself thinking: a war at home! It must be something, to have all your certainties knocked over in that way. He caught fragments of media here and there. Wrecked ships slowly tumbling in hard light; long views of planets he never heard of. Children singing something against a black background. A headline that just said —

WAR

It gave him a warm feeling — like ‘Christmas’ or ‘growing up’ — to think that other people were having this most humanising of experiences, losing everything they cared about, everything that made them what they were. The majority of Imps’ news came from the K-Tract, as data he couldn’t decode, and was only news if you were interested in high energy magnetic fields. He was thinking about this when the shadow of his friend fell across him. One monitor wasn’t enough to display her; she hung there in high aspect ratio across three of them, allowing the K-tract to paint her tip feathers mint-blue and rose-pink.

‘Hey,’ Imps breathed.

‘What do you want,’ she said.

‘You look beautiful today.’

‘You broadcast every frequency. You call me up. You stare into the dark until you find me there. What do you want from me?’

Imps thought.

He felt he should tell her, ‘My day is crap when we don’t talk,’ or, ‘I think you’re lonely too,’ but both of those were too close to the truth. So he decided to say the next thing that came into his head. Sometimes he made lists of the places he might have come from. For instance he liked the sound of Acrux, Adara, Rigil Kentaurus and, particularly, Mogliche Walder. But Motel VI was his favourite. Motel life, as he understood it, wasn’t too demanding. It was a lot closer-in than empty space, but still comfortably on the edge of things. It sounded like a good compromise between what he experienced now and some sort of full humanity. He wanted to ease himself into that. He had downloaded a brochure entitled Mobile Homes of the Galaxy, which also featured dwellings based on the classic Moderne hamburger joint — all pastel neon, pressed and ribbed aluminium — set against sunsets and mountain dawns. He showed her some of these.

‘I want you to help me go back,’ he said.

‘You came here of your own accord.’

‘Did I?’

She considered this. ‘Now you want to go back where you came?’

‘I came too far,’ he said.

‘You thought this was what you wanted.’

‘Peer pressure brought me here. It would be too much to suffer the disapprobation of my friends.’

Rig and Emil and Fedy von Gang, hacking busily away at the mysteries in Radio Bay; Ed Chianese who, it was rumoured, had himself plugged into a K-ship and fired into the Tract itself, as dumb a thing as anyone had ever done. The entradistas, the sky-pilots like Billy Anker and Liv Hula. People who called their ship Blind by Light, or Hidden Light, or 500% Light, or anything with Light in it. People who left a note by the bed, a message in the parking orbit: Torched out, catch you later. Who were wired up wrong from the first. Whose engines cooked with hard X-rays. Who went out unassuagable and came back rich or mad, towing a derelict starship from another galaxy. Rocket jockeys the Halo knew by their first names. Imps shrugged. He excused himself and got a beer. When he came back to his seat she was still there, and he said: ‘Out here thirty years, and I find I was never like them. Whoa! What’s this? Imps, you want to go back, find your home? Stop looking in the dark for stuff no one’s ever going to understand?’

‘You came too far,’ she mused.

Van Sant didn’t know if she was agreeing with him, or what. When he looked up at the monitor again, she had vanished.

She was gone two days, and when she returned it was only so that they could regard one another in a kind of continuing puzzlement — honest on his side, Imps thought, angry on hers.

‘What?’ he said.

Another screen came to life and began generating images of the war. Naked bodies in vacuum, rows of K-craft so long they vanished in blackness. An entire planet with a hole through it. Chaotic scenes of the displaced. Tourists who had passed this way a week ago, off to make fuck-footage in the twilight zone of Kunene, who now found themselves dirty and sleepless on the concourse of the very terminal which had promised so much. Or were pictured, still dressed in the easy to wear greige stylings of the moment, anxiously disembarking from a chartered shorthaul flight a hundred light years from their point of origin, to be bussed into temporary cities already crammed with refugees, media, aid-agency reps and dysfunctional gap-year adolescents drawn to the inferno for reasons they didn’t understand.

‘All over the Halo people are losing their way of life,’ van Sant whispered. He meant: ‘How lucky is that?’

She took it some other way.

‘I remember all these atrocities you’re looking at,’ she said. Then: ‘I’ve done worse.’ And finally: ‘Is it right to think so much about yourself?’

Imps got the wrong end of this; felt hurt. ‘Hey, I was careful to ask you things! You claimed you don’t remember!’ But she was already sailing away again, banking white and narrow against the absolute arc of the vacuum. ‘Are we having our first quarrel?’ Imps called after her. The reply arrived too faint to hear, as if she had slipped out of more than local space.

After she found the dead man, the assistant stayed on at Sharp Cuts for an hour, unsure how to proceed. Once or twice she got up from George’s side to look between the window-boards into the street. Eventually she made a call to Epstein the thin cop. She didn’t want him too close to the problem, she said, but she could do with some help. Epstein said it was fine with him, but he had heard she would soon run out of favours elsewhere. The uniform branch arrived to disperse the morning drinkers and extinguish the Cadillac fire. A little later, they towed the shell.

‘I loved that engine,’ she said absently.

The fourth floor at Uniment & Poe sent her a new vehicle from the motor pool. She loaded George into the front seat and drove him across the city to her room by the rocket port in GlobeTown. ‘It’s not much of a car, this one,’ she told him as they passed The Church on the Rock. ‘Look at the church, George.’ Each turn they went round, George’s upper body sagged to one side or the other. In the end she was driving with one hand and using the other to prop him up. Though moving a corpse about was nothing much for a person like her, it was at least something to do. It was something you could throw yourself into. ‘George, you’re too easy to carry,’ she laughed. ‘You should eat more, really. Do less drugs.’ She bore him up two flights of stairs and laid him on her bed. Then she took his clothes off, washed him with a damp towel, paying attention to the clots round his armpit, and got him under the covers. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see?’ George lay there collapsed-looking and stared at the ceiling.

Down in the street, someone was playing Ya Skaju Tebe in a minor key, with pauses a fraction too drawn out. It was sentimental for the people, music for giving things up to, wartime music. Starliners, now converted to troopships, came and went at the port, rays of coloured light pouring off them to wheel across the assistant’s walls, leaving small active patches of ruby-red fluorescence which crawled about like living tattoos. Three kinds of psychic blowback lit George’s thin face, one after the other, and for a moment it looked as if he might say something despite being dead.

That was how things rested until it got dark. George looked as if he might speak. The assistant sat on the side of the bed waiting to hear. Then R.I. Gaines walked in through the wall, combat pants rolled halfway up his thin, suntanned calves.

Over those he had his signature lightweight shortie raincoat with the sleeves similarly rolled to the elbows. He was carrying a canvas poacher bag with a feature of tan leather fastenings, from which protruded the grip and part of the receiver of a Chambers gun. His feet were bare. He looked tired. ‘Oh hi,’ he said to the assistant, as if he hadn’t expected to find her there. They stared at one another and he said: ‘Skull radio.’ They spent a few minutes searching through her possessions. When she found the radio, he couldn’t make it work. He knelt down and banged it on the floor until the glass broke and the baby’s lower jaw fell out. A few white motes drifted here and there. ‘Good enough,’ he said. He engaged in a conversation his side of which finished, ‘You know it’s almost like we’re in a real world out here. Maybe you should think of it like that too.’ He threw the radio into a corner. ‘Upper management,’ he said to the assistant: “What can you do with them?” Next he caught sight of poor dead George, staring at the ceiling with the blankets up to his neck.

‘What’s this?’

‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘We all make mistakes.’ Gaines examined the corpse. ‘Were you trying to have sex with him?’

‘It happened across the city.’

Suspecting more than a malfunction, Gaines took her hand and encouraged her to stand by the window, where he could examine the data scrolling down her forearm. Still visible: but in that light the Gothic blacks and Chinese reds weakened to faint grey and orange, and her skin was the colour of old ivory. He sniffed the palm of her hand then let her go. ‘You’ve got a Kv12.2 expression problem,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ She stared down at her own hand, then up into Gaines’s face — as if, he thought, she was trying to understand the exchange as emotional rather than diagnostic — and after a moment asked:

‘Do you want to sit on the bed and talk?’

‘You really are someone’s project,’ he said.

Which of them was the cypher? They sat on the bed, with George the tailor behind them, and both of them stared at the wall. Gaines felt tired after Panamax IV, suddenly the only scene he could remember from his whole life was him and Emil Bonaventure in the PEARLANT labyrinth, dragging along some dead entradista whose suit visor was caked an inch thick with the remains of his own lungs. After a moment or two, he put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I’m going to need you to do something for me,’ he said.