Empty Space

TWENTY SEVEN The Medium is Not the Message

Aspodoto, Tienes mi Corazon, Backstep Cindy: a name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. Fortunata, Ceres, Berenice. Queenie Key, Calder & Arp, Washburn Guitar. Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet . . .

When Anna Waterman fell through the summerhouse floor and into the Aleph, it was just before dawn on a damp September morning in London. What time it was for the Aleph would be less easy to record.

The space she fell through was a confusing colour, like darkness on a windy night. It was too wide to be a tunnel, too confined to be anything else. Its boundary conditions allowed her to topple; they didn’t allow her to touch the sides. The sky quickly contracted to an almost invisible point above her. For a time, the cat was some company. It fell with a comical expression on its face, then seemed to drift in towards her, kneading the air with its front paws and purring loudly, after which they lost sight of one another. ‘James, you nuisance,’ Anna said.

Up above, something settled, as if the summerhouse, properly on fire this time, had begun to collapse. Rattling down towards her came a shower of objects coloured deep wine and amber or fanned by their speed to the fierce yellow of Barbie hair. These hot dolls, burning coals and melted pill-bottles seemed to be falling much faster than Anna; as they passed they matched her velocity for a moment, so that she felt she could have reached out and touched them; then they accelerated away and were quickly lost to sight.

In life, she knew, you might: Fall ill. Fall pregnant. Fall from grace.

God knows she had done all three of those. ‘Mine was a prolonged fall,’ she imagined herself explaining, ‘accompanied by much of the detritus I thought I’d left behind.’ She addressed the cat: ‘Name your jouissance.’

As she fell, she was aware of her arms waving slowly and bonelessly. Her legs pedalled. The sensation of falling was, she thought, much the same as that of treading water: the more you struggled the less control you maintained. Your heart rate increased, all the effort went to waste. You felt closer to drowning. It was a mistake to allow that idea in. The most important distinction of childhood is the one between falling asleep and falling as death. Long before she had fallen into anorexia, or read Milton on the fall from dawn to dewy eve, or fallen victim to Michael Kearney, Anna had been afraid to fall asleep. As soon as she recognised that, she began to struggle. There followed predictable moments of panic, flickering and buzzing on all sides, anguished flashes of light, after which she found herself in an echoing space, the nature of which she would have been hard put to describe.

It was very tall; it was dark and light at the same time. It reminded her of a restaurant she and Marnie used to visit for lunch, built into the shell of an abandoned power station in Wapping. She had a sense of dread. She could see a little, but she didn’t know what any of it was. There were people all round her. They gestured and goggled, trying to push their faces close into hers. Their mouths opened and closed, yet it was Anna who felt like the fish in the tank. They were studying her.

‘How close can I get?’ they asked one another, and: ‘Do we have any idea where she came from?’

‘We don’t have an idea about anything.’

Laughter.

‘She looks as if she’s falling. Caught falling.’

‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption, Gaines.’

In fact, Anna felt like someone caught going to the lavatory in the middle of Waterloo station in the rush hour. She had a slightly nauseous sense of James the cat, so close she couldn’t quite bring him into focus. It was embarrassing. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else. There was something the matter with her cheekbones. She felt smeary and unstable at significant sites, in the manner of a Francis Bacon painting. At the same time she felt as if she had been penetrated by something huge in an inappropriate part of her body; or, worse, that she had penetrated it. What made her condition so impossible was the nature of this object.

It was her own life.

. . . Sekhet, Sweet Thing. Minnie. Matty. Mutti. Roses, Radtke, Emily-Misere. Girl Heartbreak! & Imogen. L1 Dominette. I pull one way she pulls the other. That woman will never be part of me. I say fall on your own. Fall on your own you bitch. Not near me. There is a third thing in here with us she says & a fourth and a fifth. It stinks of cat in here, some filthy animal. We’ll never get where we’re going this way. My name is. (Ysabeau, Mirabelle, Rosy Glo. Sweet Thing & Pak 43. Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire. Stormo!, Te Faaturuma.) I fall into the summerhouse & shout the wrong thing. No one listens . . .

In Saudade City, the Toni Reno case was duly filed ‘unsolved’.

Not long after, Epstein the thin cop found himself on patrol with a uniform called Grills. It was a mild night. Some rain. The traffic on Tupolev was thinner than usual. For the b-girls, on parade in their candy-coloured mambo pumps at the corner of Johnson & Chrome, business was slow. Over at Preter Coeur, the fights were slow. From Placebo Heights to the Funnel, from Retiro Street to Beasley Street, entire entertainment demographics were staying home.

GlobeTown, 2 am: Epstein and Grills found time to talk about the war. Grills believed it could lead to a permanent change in the social landscape. Crime tourism, she said, had tanked; they also were seeing across-the-board decreases in illegal tailoring, donkey capers, sensorium porn and other personality hacks. But the way Epstein saw it war was only another layer added to a bad cake — these downward trends she outlined being balanced by the growing market in counterfeit identity chips, food stamps and rackrenting. If personality crime was down, smuggling was up, seventeen per cent year on year. After a pause to consider this, Grills opined that a lot more crowd control overtime would be available in the months to come; with that Epstein could only agree, and they left it at that. Suddenly there was a white flash in the sky high up, silent but very sharp, very high-end. Epstein shaded his eyes with one broad hand.

‘Is it an attack?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Grills said. ‘I’ve seen an attack, and there was —’ here, she felt around for the right words ‘ — more of it.’

Five hundred miles above their heads, K-ships were disappearing from one orbit to reappear almost immediately in another. Empty space was frying with their communications. A minute ago they had been administering their flock of rusted hulks: now they were facing into a void. Ten million metric tonnes of psychophysical gunk, welded into receptacles ranging from the size of a coffin to that of a largish asteroid, had gone missing. The news media were full of it. Some fierce new kind of physics had lit up the sky and in a matter of nanoseconds the entire quarantine orbit of Saudade had drained away like dirty water in front of people’s eyes. The Quarantine Police were mystified. Everyone else was excited. All over GlobeTown, they came running out of the bars and Nueva Tango joints to stare up into the rain. Epstein and Grills, glad of the action, kept order. ‘Nothing to see here,’ they admonished; but they stared up too.

‘Who wanted that shit anyway,’ Grills remarked, voicing the general sense of relief that would set in over the next few hours.

Two or three streets away, in a tenement so close to the corporate port that its geometry shifted a little every time a ship came in, things were holding up well for George the gene tailor.

Perhaps he looked a little bloated. Internal changes had taken place. If you found him, it might not be wise to move him. And he was, of course, dead: so his hold on things had become tenuous. But he still had what might be described as a footprint there, in the assistant’s old room. At this scale, anyway. If you were able to see the room as a context fixed across a couple of hundred years, George, like everyone else who had spent time there, would be part of a kind of dark smoke rushing through. However hard they tried to fix an identity for themselves at one scale, it was taken away from them at another. They thought of themselves as people but they were more like ghosts or ads — anything that flocks or swarms.

. . . Lucky Pantera, Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7, ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. Janice. Jenny. Geraldine. You blody polse thing. Fucking in me. Get out! & don’t come in! October falls into November. West London draws round itself & for one second seems comforting. Then Michael comes in & there’s a row. Marnie, seven years old: ‘It’s a dog’s poo in a paper bag & he lit it on fire.’ You aren’t a camera, but you are, in everything you do, a description of the present. We fall into the dark street & kill someone. My name! she calls out. We kill someone again . . .

Meanwhile, a thousand light years from home, the assistant was undergoing transitions of her own. They were quick and dirty. The world, coming apart into pixels, streamed like eels then reassembled itself around her. She was looking out, as if through tinted glass, or from a very dissociated position, into a room.

Part of her was a million years old and the size of a brown dwarf; other parts were, for the moment at least, describable only as ‘something else’. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. Sediment oozed from the corner of her mouth. If you had asked how she felt, she would have answered, ‘Spread thin.’ There were deep shadows up in the ceiling. There was a noise like tinnitus. People came and went at the wrong speed, in groups and smears like animated statistics. Some of them were people the assistant had talked to earlier. Some of them were pushing racks of equipment about. They were all ignoring her. All she could do was wait for them to notice what had happened, wait for the situation to stabilise, and encourage them to engage with her. She was patient and calm. If she didn’t have a name, she could at least identify herself.

‘SiteCrime, Saudade City,’ she repeated at every opportunity. ‘Junction of Uniment & Poe. Fifth floor investigator.’

Someone peered in at her from very close quarters.

‘Gaines?’ he said, raising his voice and tilting his head almost horizontally into her field of view: ‘You might be interested in this. It’s asking for something.’

‘There’s a data spike in VF14/2b,’ someone else called.

The assistant was impaled on that spike. It went right through her, and she through it. There was no describing what had happened to either of them.

‘It keeps repeating this address.’

‘Address?’

‘It’s asking for a detective from some hick police service the other side of the Halo.’

. . . It is like enacting yourself as one sentence over & over again. I redline my equipment & make the moves. That bitch comes up fast but she will never be as fast as me. I call out my warning, they don’t want to hear that, so I kill them again. I can’t hear the language they talk between themselves. Do you know what it is to be like me, your condition is unnameable. It is relieved of all previous contexts. This freedom! My goodness when you’re like me even your piss is inhuman . . .

Anna Waterman could watch the soap slip off the edge of the bath one night in 1999.

A white figure knelt in the cooling bathwater, while another figure curled round it from behind. Laughter. The water splashed about and the bath made vigorous but mournful sounds.

Unused to skulking around her own life like this, Anna found its details surprising: not so much in themselves but in that they existed at all. It was exciting, in a way, to see your own naked body walking away from you, or hear yourself say with a laugh, ‘Now, what can we eat?’ But everything had the false clarity you get with a certain kind of photograph. Every surface proved to be microscopically available to her new vantage point; yet they were without meaning. The facts were often different too. The man in the bath, for instance, who she had always remembered as Michael, turned out to be Tim. How embarrassing. Everything was the same but, in the end, quite different. You could count the varieties of toothpaste in the bathroom, which a memory of sex doesn’t normally encourage. She could view every aspect of that event, and of the events surrounding it, and of every other event in her life. A generation later, water poured its yeasty bulk over the Brownlow weir; ponies ran about in a field as if suddenly released; skylarks rose and fell over the South Downs like busy lifts: at exactly the same time, Anna could watch herself, peacefully becalmed in what she had learned to call the Noughties, rapping upon her kitchen window.

‘Marnie,’ she was calling, ‘you annoying child! Leave the hose alone!’

Marnie at six years old. Anna tidying up for Tim. Anna, alone with her life at last, staring out across the field in the June twilight, drinking her fourth glass of Pinot Noir. She called the cat home, ‘James, you old fool. What have you found now?’ She saw herself undress beneath the willows, hide her shoes, wade into the river in the moonlight. But, as bright and precise as if she was viewing them through optical glass, these scenes only reminded her of her present predicament. As she watched herself go up and down the garden — a neat, doll-like, slightly speeded-up figure seen day after day under mixed lighting conditions, moving inevitably towards its own fall — she began to think how the situation might be retrieved. She could connect with any of those moments. She could have a voice in her own past.

Everything that was wrong stemmed from the summerhouse.

What if Anna didn’t fall?

. . . She is always trying to say her name, how she fell out of love with her parents quite early in life, ‘They humiliated me in some way before I was five.’ She was a small, friendly, nervous girl who liked being up early and late. Too anxious on her own, too anxious in company. I was happiest with one other person. I’ve seen things here you would not believe: men with cocks two feet long . . .

All over the Halo, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with an expenditure of energy amounting almost to fanfare, the Quarantine orbits had begun to empty themselves out. Reports conflicted. The situation was confused.

Two hundred miles above Mas d’Elies, showers of shortlived exotic vacuum events were detected, nesting inside the usual quantum froth like pearls in a handful of black lace. Such subtle fireworks, originating deep in the graininess of the universe itself, were normally associated with only the most alien of engines —

Twenty-five fuck-tourists from Keks-Varley III claimed to have seen ‘a wheel of fire’ crossing the nightside sky of Funene. Visible to the naked eye for three hours, it broke up into a series of aurora-like pulses then fell below the horizon. During this period no activity was observed in the quarantine orbit; though shortly afterwards it became invisible to instruments —

Laid out under stark light like dirty ice rings round a methane giant, the vast orbit at Mycenae had been for years a destination in itself, drawing tourists from as far away as Bell Laboratories and Anais Anais. The biggest collection of dead people in the universe, it broke up across a day, only to reassemble not long afterwards just outside the system’s heliosheath; flowing away from there into interstellar space, a broad slow river. The K-ships, darting in and out of it like kingfishers, caught nothing: what they saw was not what they got —

In the cold and dark over New Venusport, the hulks blinked out one by one. Last to go: the tiny cockleshell containing Bobby and Martha, along with the outbreak of rogue code known as Bella. The little boy, who didn’t remember much, assumed his present condition was a phase everyone went through. Life, enticing and inexplicable by turns, had already demonstrated its weirdness. One thing was certain, Bobby thought: you were out the other side of most things in a year. The women knew better. Since the events in her room Bella had been, in a sense, all three of them. Long before that, she had given up on the idea of knowledge: to her, the sarcophagus was as puzzling as the hallway of a house. Martha, meanwhile, alternating between panic and acceptance, awaited resolution.

. . . Two feet long and not quite rigid, you had no faith a thing like that could penetrate anyone. It was more of a flag than a cock, something to wave at the world. Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Avtomat, the little girl who could crack anything. Frankie Machine and Murder Incorporated. The Markov Property. I get fish, the other says. Don’t go in the summerhouse! I can do something with my mind but for all things catch fire & flowers spring up, nothing else happens. You can keep a cock like that I wouldn’t want it near me. I like their legs better. Little boys, they like my stink but they’re afraid. ‘Is that what you want, hon?’ . . .

As in all bad dreams, there were physical states forbidden to the assistant: in this case anything she had previously understood as movement.

At the same time, generous degrees of freedom opened up in other directions. Through the physics of VF14/2b, her ‘life’ — whatever that had been — now lay open to her at all points and along all axes. She soon found herself looping easily and repeatedly into her own past —

Saudade City on a wet Friday night. In the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, two agents and a wire jockey were servicing a client in the basement. The assistant watched her earlier self leaning in at the basement doorway, attracted by the energy and warmth of the interrogation, experiencing the nearest thing a person like her could feel to a companionable emotion. ‘Boys,’ she heard herself tease the interrogation team, ‘we must do this again!’

She waited for herself to leave and then stepped into the room. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘my name is Pearlant —’ They stared at her puzzledly, their mouths falling open.

South Hemisphere, New Venusport. She tracked herself down to the circus ground, where the empty motels shone with light rain in an offshore wind. There was no hurry, but as soon as she heard her prior self call out that way, the seagull cry of ‘Wait!’, that was the moment. Jump up out of the sand. Reach in through the doped protein meshes around the brainstem. Squeeze. Step away. Let those Kv12.2 expression issues do the work — seizure sites propagating across the cortex in cascades, autonomic functions going down one by one. It was supposed to keep her immobile long enough to talk. ‘Listen, honey, listen to me: don’t jump!’ She tried to get her own attention, instead she triggered a built-in EMC shutdown; someone was going to feel some shame over that in the morning.

It was the same wherever she went —

Toni Reno gaped and sweated as she came at him from out of time — Toni thought he was state of the art, but he proved to be wrong about that. Poor George the gene tailor in his little shop, both attracted and terrified by the engineered kairomones in her sweat, overcame his fear at last, clutched gratefully at her tits and dropped dead at her feet in the dark. Only a week or two before that, tissue had burst out of Enka Mercury’s armpit like dirty kapok. The assistant just had no luck with these people, and, in a way, even less with herself. She was present in the past: she had a real presence there. But as a communications strategy, communication could never work: not for a person like her. She just wasn’t built for it. No one seemed to understand that she was there to speak to them, that she really had something to say. She couldn’t control her anger at the people who had built her, she couldn’t control her anger at what Gaines had done to her, she couldn’t control her anger at herself. Her victims, meanwhile, couldn’t control their fear. It was a toxic mixture. To these soft targets — ambushed with a thorough, deft, cat-like thoughtlessness then left dismembered, eviscerated, dangling in the tailored but chaotic spacetime eddies of VF14/2b — she brought only the lifetime frustration of the manufactured thing. She was trying to warn everyone in her past about what was coming: but in the end her predictable contribution could only be a corpse and a patch of grainy, dark-bluish air in which the shadows fell at wrong angles because ordinary physics didn’t apply. All she achieved was to become the object of her own investigation, the mystery she could never solve.

Those appointments she kept with herself — South Hemisphere NV; the Mambo Rey PostIndustrial Estate, Funene; the back stairs at SiteCrime, Uniment & Poe where the light dazzled down the stairwell like the light in a religious painting of Ancient Earth: what had they achieved in the end? Nothing. It turned out she didn’t even like herself. They couldn’t relate. They were too alike, the two of them. They were too surprised by one another’s speed and perfection not to react badly. Too chafed by one another’s obduracy to talk. She got the edge over that bitch self at New Venusport. Later, poor George’s corpse made her wonder if she’d gone too far.

‘Does a person like me kill things too easily?’ she remembered asking him in nicer times.

. . . He opened my head and put in a hand. It was so gentle. I absolutely melted. After that killing yourself is easy, it’s the unthought known, toothpaste at the corner of the mouth, reflections on a false marble floor. Though as you abandon yr own viewpoint the world so rapidly loses coherence, proves so impossible to understand, that there’s nothing to be gained. Sign on a chemist shop: FA Strange. It’s FA Strange all right. I don’t get it, Michael said. Why should you? I said. Why should you get it, after all? . . .

Anna’s earlier self was drawn to the summerhouse because the heat she felt in there was her own heat. She was angry in there. She was closer to her own surface. Her attention was easier to attract. But interference proved harder than oversight —

Summer. Night. The feeling of a storm on the way. The Waterman house sits, as unweathered as an architect’s drawing, hot and airless in the river valley. It’s been a strange, lonely day. Anna Waterman looks at her own hands. She calls the cat. ‘James, you old fool!’ At nine, the phone rings. When she picks it up, expecting to hear her daughter Marnie, there’s no one at the other end. But just as she puts down the receiver she hears an electronic scraping noise and a distant voice shouts: ‘Don’t go in there! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ Within half an hour, the summerhouse has burst into flames and she sees herself — a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking floral print — running towards her from the silent conflagration. Consternation is on this woman’s face. ‘Go away!’ she calls. ‘Go away from here!’

A few days later, prone to weep suddenly after a debilitating session in Chiswick with Dr Helen Alpert, Anna wakes to moonlight and Moroccan air, with a feeling that someone has just spoken. She enters the river, and the world is suddenly unknown and unknowable. Everything is so full of mystery as she walks back that magic night, to find the summerhouse on fire again! Beneath the sound of the flames, she’s sure she hears a voice. It calls her name, but all she can say in return is:

‘Michael? Is this you?’

So it went, every time Anna tried to communicate. ‘Anna!’ she would shout. ‘Listen to me! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ But Anna seemed so dull. She was always so obsessed with herself. You couldn’t get her attention, and that was what made you so impatient, the farce of shouting, ‘Anna! Anna!’ until you were hoarse.

In addition, physical limitations seemed to apply. The past was clear enough to see, but you felt as if you were engaging with it from too far away. Sometimes speech failed completely, and Anna could make herself known only in other ways, via the weather, for instance, or showers of emotionally-charged objects. It was as if the universe she now inhabited had suffered brain damage, and was experiencing a confusion not between different senses but between different states of energy and matter. She was reduced to a kind of practical synaesthesia. She was reduced to the use of theatre, metaphor, symbols and emotions. She tried eveything, but remained an epiphenomen of her own life, a figure distantly semaphoring tragic news from a hill. She made a nightly beacon of the summerhouse, but her earlier self didn’t get the message. She made a dozen or so copper-coloured poppies spring up on the Downs in the morning sunshine, but the language of flowers simply didn’t work as well as the language of language, and after a while Anna saw that her efforts were only making things worse.

Meanwhile, her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left side of her ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee. Her feet were bare. Her arms, outstretched either side of her head, curved towards the ceiling; her hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. From this awkward, uncomfortable viewpoint she was forced to stare out into a dazzling nave of light, across a shiny black surface full of reflections. She was toppling into that space and at the same time through it. Everything smelled of electricity. People were pushing strange equipment around. Or they came up close and began talking about her as if she wasn’t there. ‘We’re catching it in the Planck time,’ they told one another. ‘You can’t see it for longer because it’s already in its own future, already something different.’ They said: ‘Where does the cat fit in?’

Laughter. Then:

‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl.’

It was just like being in the bloody hospital. She hated them, and whatever ghastly world they belonged to. But worse: over a period of time that might have been seconds or years, she became aware that there was someone else trapped in there with her. Sometimes Anna could feel her bones grate together, there was so little room for them both. It wasn’t James the cat, though she knew he was inside her too, prowling about and layering his own motives over hers. A growing sense of tension and imprisonment pushed everything else out of her mind, and her attempts to communicate with her earlier self ceased. She could hear a voice, distant-sounding but quite clearly inside her own head. It raged and complained. Whoever it was — whatever it was — they fell and fell together. They were aware of one another. Everything became a dull struggle over the body, or what they thought of as the body . . .

. . . I would want to have love if I knew what that was. You can get a patch for it, it’s more like an app. It’s a mood, very economical, very full of emotion, the love patch down at Uncle Zip for Saturday night. Mary Rose, Moroccan Rose, Mexicali Rose, Rose of Tralee, Rrose Selavi. Immordino, Gianetta, Ona Lukoszaite. There’s evidence, Dr Alpert said, of a couple of tiny strokes, nothing to worry about. Did I lose my memory so I could lose my memories? Put that way it seems not just possible but ordinary . . .

Alone in the Tub, sucked towards the lee shore of the Kefahuchi Tract by long, gentle gravitational swells, Impasse van Sant lost contact with the management of his little project. Along with Rig Gaines went Imps’s last link to what might laughingly be called humanity. In the absence of supervision, he allowed the research to lapse and instead watched war pursue itself across the halo media:

Stars tricked-up as nova bombs. Minds tricked-out with logic bombs. Displaced planetary populations on the move. Duelling gamma jets at 50 million degrees Kelvin. Battleships drifting, holed and untenanted, in clouds of rosy gas. K-ships flickering in and out of it all in time-frames no one could imagine, states of consciousness no one could conceive controlled by mathematics no one understood. In the absence of Gaines’ mystery weapon, EMC couldn’t dictate the rules of the game, and had already begun to give ground to a loose alliance of aliens whose motives remained unclear and whose names for themselves all ended in x. To this feverish expenditure of energy, van Sant foresaw only the worst of ends: the boys from Earth, driven out of themselves for one perfect moment by psychodramas of blood, risk, terror, and, hey, being the real victim here, would soon be as desperate as children to be fetched back in again. Even that made them human: unlike Imps, who all his life had seen himself not just as dissociated but as protected in some unfair way by his dissociation.

Just then the void behind him opened like a huge door. It was filled with ships. There were hundreds of millions of them, a fleet of lights assembling itself from all over the Beach. They streamed in from as far away as Sector 47, da Silva’s Cloud and The Mokite Bench, pooled briefly among the chaotic attractors and gravity-rips of Radio Bay, then poured towards the Kefahuchi Tract. Under magnification they proved to be all sizes and ages, from massy spacetime warpers to last year’s one-man escape pod. All they had in common was their condition. They were hulks. They were banged-up, rusty and half-disassembled yet seamed with brand-new welds. They came trailing clouds of smart autorepair media. Out in the lead raced a single three-fin Dynaflow HS-HE cargo hauler, tubby, brass-looking, brought to a dull polish in some places by particle ablation, streaked with bird shit in others as if it had waited out the last forty years in the second-hand lot of some noncorporate field. On its nose someone had stencilled in letters five feet high the legend SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, then under that, smaller: Nova Swing. The space around its stern was fogged with ironising radiation a relentlessly violet colour, through which could be seen — shuttling in tight, complex and only partially visible orbits, orbits comprising the propulsion topology itself — an unknown number of outboard engines.

‘The fuck,’ Imps asked himself, ‘is happening here?’

On they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, flowing out of the dark and parting around the research vessel, of which they took little more notice than the void itself. SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, its hull shuddering with the approach of some catastrophic event — the phase change, the leap to the next stable state — aimed itself at the heart of the singularity, which seemed to shift and boil in response with realtime bursts of high-energy photons. The alien engines shuttled faster and faster, producing curious slick pulses that presented to the observer not as light but as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth, a vibration in the walls, a perpetual but perpetually decaying echo effect in the context of things. The fleet paused a second, hung in silhouette, then hurled itself in.

For a moment after they had vanished, the vacuum still seemed inhabited. Then it was nothing again. Imps van Sant stared into the eyepieces of his obsolete instruments. Deep in explicatory failure, he had no way of placing himself with regard to what he had witnessed. Man, he thought. Who were those guys? They seemed full of madness and a direct rejection of anything he might have called humanity. It made him lonelier than ever. He was considering this when empty space whispered at him.

‘Hello?’ it said.

She hung out there, a kilometre long and clean as a herring gull over a windy beach. You looked at her and you could taste salt, ice cream, iodine. Feel for a second fully inside yourself.

‘I can be anything I want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want that. I want to be the one thing I am.’

And when van Sant couldn’t think of an answer:

‘What do you remember best?’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t a regular kid.’ He rummaged through the litter of empty beer cans, broken table tennis balls and repro 1970s wank mags around his pilot chair until he found some real estate brochures. ‘I don’t remember anything, but I want to live somewhere like this.’ Holding up a picture so she could see, a Sandra Shen tableau entitled, Airstream trailers beside the Salton Sea, 2001. ‘Or this,’ he said: picture of two Japanese-looking people fucking in surf. She’s wearing a wedding dress. In the background, mountains. ‘Or I quite like this.’ A wooden house with a pier going out into a lake: three brown pelicans diving for fish. Then his favourite, the ice-cream parlour at Roswell, New Mexico, Old Earth. Pastel neon mints and pinks against lightly etched aluminium columns: a holy twilight in the parking lot.

‘It’s the real McCoy,’ Imps said.

‘I don’t recall anything like that,’ she said. Then, almost immediately: ‘What would you be if you could be one other thing?’

‘One other thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be gone from here.’

‘I want to go home too,’ she said. ‘Let’s start soon.’

Just then, off in a corner of the Tub’s main display, as in some hallucination accompanying neurological disorder, there bloomed a soft white explosion like a puff of fibres or a cloud of spores. It was low yield, less than a light-day away in the direction of Radio Bay. Not quite as far out as Imps van Sant, but far enough. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ For a moment he thought the war had caught up with them. On examination, though, it proved to be just some abandoned old research tool which had gone mad after a million years staring into nothing and blown itself up. This close to the Tract, it was always happening. What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories?

. . . I said, you made your life a description of the present moment, the warm neon of pizza huts and pubs, blurred by a slight rain and repeating in every shallow puddle; she said she could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, no one believed that. She says: what is time anyway? Don’t give me that, I know what time is. Don’t, whatever you do, you bitch, give me that. Night’s here. It’s about being a meme. I light up in RF, radar and batshit 27-40 kHz, immediately get a response from the dunes, come in on the sonar ping & there she is: it’s love patch, baby, love patch. In this world we’re the remains of our own humanity. Don’t jump! I’m calling. I’m calling out to her, The summerhouse! I’m calling, Don’t start all this! Don’t become part of this! She doesn’t hear. Anyway all we can do is kill. Elise, Ellis and Elissa, the Blister Sisters. Elissa Mae. Ruby Mae. Lula Mae. Ruby Tuesday. Mae West and May Day. She’s the One, Two Dollar Radio, Flamingo Layne. KM, LM, KLF. A Member of the Wedding. Spanky. Misty. The best little engine in the world. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Olga Tovyevski. M3 in Orion. ‘Sabiha Gokce’. Pauline Gower and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Sfascamenta. My name is Pearlant! My name is Pearlant and I come from the future! Never mind darling she tells the other one. Please try to be a bit calmer. At least we’re alive. It’s not much but it’s better than being dea