Empty Space

TWENTY FIVE Lowboy Orbits

They put Irene out into space, so she could drift forever through the incredible refuse of the Beach she loved.

Without her they were soon depressed and rudderless. Life swilled about in the bottom of the trough. Communication failed. Lies returned home. The FTL media brought only war news, and every shift of the light reminded them of some better time in their lives. Neither of them could fly the ship. Liv went to Antoyne and said, ‘My mouth is damaged, but my mind is worse.’ Antoyne shrugged: there was no way he could do it. They fucked for comfort, what a mistake that turned out to be. The Nova Swing hung there in the middle of nothing. When she fired up her Dynaflows and set a course of her own, back towards Saudade where it had all begun, they were almost relieved to have things taken out of their hands.

They continued to avoid the main hold. Instead, they slept and slept, living separate lives inside their own guilt about Irene. But once the ship got under way, levels of unconscious activity could only rise: Antoyne dreamed he was fat again, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. He dreamed he was dead. Liv dreamed of ghosts. Sometimes a torn coat seemed to float along the ship’s ill-lit companionways and stairwells (in that dream, she admitted wryly, the coat had secured the ontological high ground: it was Liv who felt like the haunting); other times, as if they sought clarity and kindness, her dreams were all of her glory days at the Venice Hotel on France Chance —

Situated between the sea and the city, a stone’s throw from the rocket-sport port, the Venice — with its tall, uncurtained windows, tranquil shabby rooms and uncarpeted pale oak floors which always captured the waking light — was, for five years the destination of rocket-jockeys all over the Halo. A twenty-four hour carnival unfolded outside the old hotel: bad paint-jobs, bad haircuts, bad planning. People were building their own starships in sheds at the edge of the field. Inside, you could find the most beautiful pilot, nineteen years old, sleeping in an empty bar at four in the afternoon, and soon go up to his room on the fourth floor back corridor. Next morning you woke alone and smiling, wrapped yourself in a pink cellular blanket, which you later stole and kept it with you your whole life, and went to the window, listening to the illegal sonic booms rolling in from seaward as the returning hyperdips performed low level aerobrake re-entries.

A few hours before, these cockleshells with alien engines had been toppling through the France Chance chromosphere (filmed in perfect rights-reserved imagery by virtual hydrogen-alpha filter). Now the boys who flew them were determined to be the first human beings to scrub off more than twenty thousand kilometres an hour at less than five hundred feet above sea level. And the frail, utter certainty of it was: you had done that too, and you still couldn’t get enough of it, and you would do it again and again until you couldn’t do it any more. Later, you found your lovely pilot was the legendary Ed Chianese, and that the two of you were in competition for the Stupidest Achievement of That Year award.

It was from the perspective of this dream that Liv, waking transfixed, understood where she had seen the occupant of the K-tank before. She dialled up Antoyne, who, refusing to leave the crew quarters for three days, played Ya Skaju Tebe on infinite repeat and ate raspberry ice cream with his hands.

‘Fat Antoyne, listen. We have to go into the hold.’

But Antoyne wouldn’t budge.

Walls blacked with graffiti flower shapes; armoured bulkheads deformed not by blast, or even melting, but by enforced transition through unnatural physical states; autorepair media busy over everything: someone, Liv thought, had pressed the wrong switch down there.

A section of the hull remained transparent. It was a wall of nothing. Eerie light from a corner of the Tract lengthened out the main hold so that it seemed more like an exterior than an interior. This illusion was increased by the disarray of the mortsafes. They were hard to count now. They lay tumbled on one another into a kind of distance, like corroded boilers in a scrapyard. Repair work was going on among them, but you couldn’t quite see where. A sputtering sound filled the air. Sparks flew up and rained back down, cutting gold curves on the watching eye, bouncing off the deck as they cooled to dark cherry. Big shadows danced over the bulkheads.

Everything smelled of mould on bread, and of MP Renoko, who slumped like a traditional wood puppet in the unremitting yet unreliable glare of the welding arc, his clothes blackened, his left arm resting at an odd angle in his lap. One side of his face had dripped into the hollow of his clavicle, where it produced a finish resembling melted plastic; the other side boasted a sceptical grin, an appreciative glint in the eye, as if Renoko had only just died — or as if he was still alive, choosing for some reason to remain incommunicado. In this environment even a dead human being was a comfort. Liv stood next to him and peered into the fountain of sparks.

‘You can come out now, Ed,’ she called.

‘Liv? Liv Hula?’

For weeks she had watched him drift aimlessly around the ship when he thought everyone was asleep; now he floated towards her with a big smile, his arms wide. Over the years the memory of him had worn down inside her. It was smooth from use and bore little resemblance to the figure he cut at this end of his life. But the Halo is a wall-to-wall freak show: why should Ed Chianese be any different? The ragged flaps and ribbons of his braised organs trailed out behind him.

‘Is that you, Liv? Jesus!’

When she didn’t respond, Ed looked unhappy; as if, though he had got her name right, he had mistaken her for someone else. For instance a more recent admirer. Focusing slightly to the left of her, he said:

‘I’m sorry.’

‘About what?’ she said. ‘What happened to you, Ed?’

‘Just the usual wear and tear.’

‘I can see.’ And, when he didn’t follow that up: ‘I called, but you never got in touch.’ She left a silence but he didn’t want to fill that either. ‘Hey!’ she tried. ‘Someone told me you hijacked a K-ship and flew it into the Tract!’

‘That was years ago,’ Ed said, as though apologising for having once been in the past. ‘Anyone could do it.’

‘Fuck off, Ed. No one comes back from there.’

‘I did,’ he said, with such a tone of regret that she believed him instantly. ‘I didn’t want to — once you’ve been in there you’ll do anything to stay — but here I am.’ After some thought he added, as if determined to produce a fair and balanced account: ‘Actually, the K-ship hijacked me.’

‘So now you’re hijacking the Nova Swing.’

‘Is that what they call her these days?’ He looked around vaguely. ‘Nice name,’ he said.

‘It’s cheap, Ed,’ Liv said. ‘That’s why you like it.’

She said: ‘What do you mean, “these days”? Are you Ed Chianese?’

‘Who else could be this fucked up?’

‘Fair point, Ed.’

Somewhere among the piled mortsafes, the MIG welder was working again. Or perhaps it wasn’t that. Sparks, anyway, were fountaining up, so bright the Tract paled into invisibility behind them. There was a sound like a lot of drowsy flies. ‘Is there someone else in here?’ Liv said. Suddenly, Ed had her by the shoulders. His odd, not-unpleasant smell, more ozone than halal, filled the space between them. ‘Get out!’ he said.

His hands hurt. ‘Fuck, Ed!’ Liv said. But though she struggled and kicked, and though he wasn’t what you could call all there, he had no difficulty propelling her towards the door. Liv, straining to looked back over her shoulder, saw something beautiful and strange beginning to form itself out of the sparks. ‘What’s that? Ed, what’s that?’

‘Don’t look!’ he said, and pushed her out.

The door slid closed, then open again. Ed’s head protruded, lower down than you would expect.

‘Let’s talk soon,’ he said.

‘Don’t let’s bother,’ said Liv, who thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the hold behind him. ‘Just fuck you, Ed,’ she shouted.

No reply.

‘And fuck your stories. Fuck that you know more than us, and our lives are suddenly part of some weird deal of yours. Our friend is dead, also what you did to this ship is a fucking big inconvenience to us.’

The worst thing wasn’t that so much of him was missing, or that the remainder looked like a display of half-cooked meat in an outdoor market at the end of the day. It wasn’t even that he seemed to be only partly aware you were in the room with him. It was that thirty years had passed. Over distances like that, people drive themselves without much deviation towards the simplest expression of what they are. In the meantime you grow out of them. The only feature Ed retained was the weak grin he got when he knew you had found him out. At the Venice Hotel, and for a month or two afterwards, she had interpreted that expression as a measure of how nice he was. Since then, she could see, he had let it become a substitute for raising his game. Why hadn’t she expected that?

She went back to the crew quarters and explained the situation. ‘Listen Antoyne,’ she said, ‘we have to get him out of here.’

Antoyne, who smelled strongly of Black Heart, would only grunt. As Irene had often predicted, new things are bound to happen to anyone in the end; but Antoyne was bad with any kind of reversal. He had lost weight except over the upper abs, where, in a matter of days, the ice-cream diet had seated itself in a carcinomatic-looking lump. ‘Ed’s not the man we knew,’ she said. In fact the problem was the reverse of that. Ed — who walked out on Liv because she beat him into the France Chance photosphere; who left Dany LeFebre to die down on Tumblehome; who, when he got as sick of himself as everyone else had, spent fifteen years in the twink tank lapping up some mystery shit the immersion media churn out for kiddies — was exactly the man they knew. ‘Antoyne, wake up! He’s not human any more. He has some plan, it takes no account of us or anyone. Wake up!’ Antoyne opened his eyes and considered Liv for a moment with the beginnings of an interest. Then he belched, turned away and began to weep. After that, recent experience told her, no amount of shaking would get his attention.

‘Antoyne, you useless fucker,’ she told him.

From living with himself, Antoyne knew that to be true. Later, when Liv had gone back up to the control room, he rolled over, puked a little, washed up in the corner sink and stared around the cabin at Irene’s scattered underwear: party semiotics in action. The little action cube of her was playing on repeat, sounding scratchy and cheap and far away. In his head he heard her real voice say, ‘It was a lovely world,’ and then: ‘Antoyne, you got to lose me.’ After he cleaned up, he took himself down to the main hold, where he leaned in the doorway and said:

‘So.’

‘Hey,’ Ed acknowledged. He was wiping his fingers on an oily rag. ‘It’s the pizza guy! What do I owe you?’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Very funny.’

‘It’s —’ Ed clicked his fingers ‘ — Fat Anthony. Right?’

‘That was years ago. They don’t call me that any more.’ He stared at Ed. ‘What the fuck have you done to yourself this time?’ he said.

Ed grinned. ‘This? I’m not sure. Like it? I picked it up in the Tract.’

‘I heard you were there.’

‘Fat Anthony, you should go too, while you can.’ Ed said he couldn’t think of a way to describe it. It was the big achievement. In there it was eleven dimensions of everything. ‘The entities who run it, they’re all charisma.’ They were over everything, having fun. ‘Fat Anthony, it’s just so fucking different in there. You know?’

‘If it’s that good,’ Antoyne pointed out bleakly, ‘why didn’t you stay?’

‘Come back with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come back with me now. None of this is real when you’ve been in the Tract. Come back with me and see.’

Ed could sell you his own worst dream, caught with an unsteady camera, lit with a bad light. Juice or jouissance, it was always a plunge into something, with a default to the epic, from which, very often, only Ed returned. For a moment Antoyne wondered what decision he would make. Then he said:

‘Why would I do that to myself, Ed?’

The universe went on. Nova Swing ploughed across it, creaking under her own internal stresses. Antoyne cleaned up his act, weaning himself off the peppermint ice over a dog day afternoon. He folded Irene’s underwear and put it away, and in place of that desperate shrine to her constructed another, using the things she salvaged from Perkins Rent. He burned incense there but within days heard her voice telling him not to be a jerk. ‘You make your own life in this life, Antoyne.’

Ed Chianese, meanwhile, spent his time in the hold, working on the mortsafes. Entities came and went while he was down there. Some looked like angels, some looked like operators. You didn’t want to be close enough to tell the difference.

Liv Hula, a passenger in her own ship, dozed in the acceleration chair while, outside, the Halo streamed past, broken into futuristic dazzle patterns by physics and war. The news remained bad. Ed drifted in and out at unpredictable times of day, and hung there staring at the exterior screens. This exasperated her.

‘Can’t you sit down or something?’

‘The day you first came aboard this ship,’ he said, ‘you found surplus code in the navigational system. You couldn’t work out what it did.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

He shrugged.

She remembered the first time she sat in the chair. After all the years away from piloting, she felt so free, even if it was just to swallow the nanofibres and take the ship’s inventory:

Electronic infrastructure. Propulsion architecture. Communications schematics, including an ageing FTL uplinker which showed, for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected quarantine orbits from three to a thousand lights along the Beach. Otherwise it was navigation fakebooks, cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking stamps. She remembered advising Fat Antoyne, ‘You got fifty years of guano in there. Also they used the code to run something my chops don’t get.’

She looked speculatively at Ed. ‘I fenced it off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it crawling up someone’s rectum at night. Especially mine.’

Ed brought up internal views.

‘See that junk you collected in the hold?’ he said. ‘It’s an engine. The Nova Swing’s the only ship in the Galaxy with the software to run it. That was what you found.’

She sighed impatiently.

‘Just tell me why you’re back, Ed. Maybe I can help.’

‘I came to free the people,’ Ed said, making a gesture which, perhaps hoping to take in the whole galaxy, explained nothing. ‘Things are going to get bad out here.’ This war, he said, was the big one. ‘They’ve been working up to it for a hundred and fifty years.’ It would mean a substantial collapse of EMC infrastructure. It would mean that no one had a right to expect endless progress any more. Quite the reverse. In the long term, that might in itself be good for the boys from Earth. ‘They can start from the ground up, with a more interesting take on things.’ Meanwhile it would get worse before it got better.

‘Thanks a lot for that prophecy, Ed.’

‘I was a prophet once,’ he said, ‘but I left all that behind.’ For a moment he watched the dynaflow medium streaming past. ‘I wish I could talk to Fat Anthony?’ he said suddenly. ‘But he avoids me.’

‘His name’s Antoyne and he’s a decent man. Back in the glory days he loved you and admired you, the way we all did. I was just the same. You were crazy and beautiful and that’s what we wanted. If you asked us to be heroes, we would have followed you anywhere. But it’s France Chance, Ed, win or lose every time you open the throttle. Remember that?’ Then, as soon as he began to answer: ‘And now what? You’re the only one who ever came back from the Tract, big achievement. But what have you brought out of there? You might be into something good, you might be deeper in shit than ever.’ She smiled; her smile said she couldn’t help him with that. ‘You can have the ship. I don’t think either of us wants it after what happened, and we can easily get another.’

She looked out the porthole one day not long after that, and saw they were back in the Saudade Quarantine orbit.

The planet turned beneath them like some immense flywheel. Deadlights flickered off the bow. All around, it was offworld warehousing of the unnameable: a million tonnes of a substance half protein, half code, the waste of human interaction with mathematics.

She got on the internal comms and said, ‘Ed, this is the wrong orbit. Park & Ride is further in. Do you want any help?’ Silence from the main hold. ‘Ed?’ When she arrived down there, she found the hull back in place and the mortsafes lined up in a neat row.

They didn’t look any less disused than usual. ‘What are you fuckers looking at?’ she asked them. As if in response they separated suddenly, to reveal Ed Chianese lying prone on the deckplates while a very small Chinese woman crouched, knees apart, where the small of his back had once been. Ed’s face was pressed into the floor, her emerald green cheongsam was hiked up round her waist. Her skin was very white. You couldn’t be sure what was happening between them, but white motes the size of clothes moths seemed to be pouring out of her polished little ivory-colored vulva.

‘Ed?’

Ed seemed too preoccupied to answer. The woman, if that’s what she was, chuckled and looked over at Liv. Liv turned and ran before she could be made to look closer, before she could be made to understand more. From that moment, she felt, everything in her life would depend on not interpreting what she had seen there. It would depend on remembering no more than a wink, a cigarette, a smile on very red lips. Ed caught up with her in the companionway outside.

‘Jesus, Liv. You could at least knock.’

‘Get us down to Saudade City,’ Liv said. ‘And then piss off.’

An hour later, the three of them stood on the loading platform, looking out across the damp cement of Carver Field towards the Port Authority buildings and over them to the city itself. It was raining. The new day had a used light all over it; a light which might be described as pre-enjoyed on its passage from Retiro Street to the Church on the Rock. In the crime tourism quarter, the hotel neons weren’t quite done, but they’d faded to pastels of themselves. Ed Chianese leant on the loading platform rail, his ragged lower half rattling faintly in the wind.

‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’

Liv found him a smile. ‘You’ve walked through one too many walls, Ed. Look at the state of you.’

‘I’ve got used to a life,’ was all Antoyne could think of to say.

When Ed had gone the two of them were left on the cement, craning their necks as the Nova Swing groaned her way back to the Quarantine orbit on her tail of smoke. They watched until she was a fading green glow in the cloudbase. ‘Those fucking old engines!’

Liv Hula said.

‘But she was a boat.’

‘She was a dog, Antoyne.’

They laughed, then they turned towards Saudade City. The streets had a new excitement, they were packed with refugees and military police. Lightning flashed — a K-ship, splitting the sky, trailing thunder! She took his arm, folded it under her own, hugged it against her side, the way she used to walk with Irene.

‘Where to next?’ she said.

‘Some place where Crab Nebula is a main course not a destination.’