Empty Space

THREE Swimming with Eels

Saudade, Friday, 4am:

Two agents and a wire jockey were in a holding cell in the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, servicing a client.

It was a small cold room, with a retro-medical decor of cracked white tiles and large, complex overhead lighting. Straps confined the client to a stainless steel table; there were tubes in many of his orifices. They had run the wire up into his brain, and by moving it about drew from him a few warm, puppylike yips and yaps, also some twitching of the limbs. No one expected much. It was a calibration period. Every so often the wire jockey leaned back from the green felt eyepieces of his equipment and massaged the small of his back. He was tired, and he wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Meanwhile the client, a New Man with the characteristic shock of bright red hair, tried out fresh expressions each time the wire moved.

He was naked, had suffered a brief convulsion and was secreting a wide range of pheromones. He seemed eager to please. He would laugh vaguely, then wince. Or his eyes would turn up as if he was trying to look into his own head and he would say, in a tired voice he had copied from some old film: ‘My face is a mess tonight.’

‘We should call an operator,’ the wire jockey suggested. ‘Then whatever this alien knows we know it too.’

The agents looked at one another.

‘So you organise that,’ one of them said.

No one wanted an operator. It would be an admission of failure. While they were talking, they cast nervous glances at the fourth person in the room.

This woman had a fuck-off way of moving achievable only by the heavily tailored. Her white-blond hair was cropped to nothing much. She was statuesque and a frank air of sexual boredom surrounded her, as if she had come down here because there was nothing else to do in the dog hours of a Friday night. Her career had begun a year or two before, under the auspices of Lens Aschemann, SiteCrime’s late, legendary investigator. Though she had never been more than his assistant, she remained in the building even after his death in the Saudade event site. Rumour had it she was connected, but no one knew who to; and on the present occasion none of the agents understood why she was in the basement with them. They were happy enough to defer to her; but they didn’t like the amused way she stared into the bright light and polluted air above the client’s head, so they were relieved when after an hour she got a dial-up.

‘Send my car to the front,’ she said. Then, to the agents: ‘Boys, we must do this again. No, I mean it.’

She was halfway out of the building when the client broke his straps and sat up. At the same time everyone heard a soft voice in the holding cell say:

‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’

At that the situation changed rapidly. The assistant’s tailoring came up and took control of the space, carefully inhibiting any electromagnetic activity except its own. The lights went out. The wire jockey’s signal went bottom-up. The agents found that their tailoring had quit. Six and a half thousand resident nanocameras, drifting in the air like fish semen, all burned out at once. What would they have recorded? Some silvery, mucoid blurs connecting different parts of the room, which, upon analysis, would turn out to be the signature of a single woman moving at abnormal speeds. Each contact she made slowed her down for a fraction of a second, partly resolving this image, freezing her in a curious half-turn; or looking over her shoulder into the upper corner of the room; or with her head at an inhuman angle, face transfigured by a radiant smile.

Fifteen seconds after it had initiated the engagement, her tailoring stood down. The agents lay in opposite corners. The wire jockey sat puffing and blowing on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs stuck out stiffly in front of him. One eyepiece hung on its flex, the other seemed to have been driven into his skull. The body of the New Man rolled slowly off the table and on to the floor at the assistant’s feet. She stared down at it as if waiting for something else to happen, then left. The nanocameras came back on. The holding cell was silent for a while, then you got a small sigh as of final bowel sounds, which was the wire jockey giving up.

Heavy rain fell vertically into the alley off Tupolev, where a man named Toni Reno could be found performing slow fishlike movements eight feet above the pavement in a dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket. Toni was dead. The uniform branch was already on scene, under the supervision of a thin cop called Epstein. Toni faced away from them, up into the weather, his back arched, his arms and legs dangling bonelessly. Water poured off each limb; shaking it off their faces like a cluster of big shapeless animals, the cops in their slickers peered up.

‘This is how you found him,’ the assistant suggested.

‘He started lower down.’

‘You couldn’t start much lower than Toni.’

Epstein ignored this. ‘When I get here,’ he explained, ‘the guy is on the floor like any other dead guy. Then he floats up. Not so quick that you can see it: but when you turn away, next time you look he’s a little higher. It takes maybe twenty minutes.’ The assistant regarded him with not much expression on her face.

He shrugged. ‘Thirty at the outside.’

She said, ‘Get me into one of these houses.’

‘Dead guys don’t float,’ Epstein said.

The uniforms banged on a door until someone let them in. It was a four-floor walk-up designed to have an ambience of shiny brown paintwork and roach smells in passageways. West of Tupolev, over as far as Radia Marelli, all the buildings were like this: warrens falling into the ramified tunnels and flooded cellars underneath, patrolled by crime tourists enjoying an economy of low-rent donkey parlours, futurology joints and tank farms where you could get the bootlegged experience of being a plant from a distant world. The assistant went up to the second floor and opened a window so she could look down on the corpse.

‘What do you notice?’ she said.

There was a flicker in the air immediately above Toni Reno, a very pale blue illumination like neon seen at night from the next street along. The Sadie Barnham jacket had fallen away to reveal his ribcage, emphasising its curve up out of the diaphragm. Say what you like, Toni kept himself in shape. His face was waxy, his expression one of surprise. There was no clue to how he was hanging there like that.

‘I notice the rain falling off him,’ Epstein said, ‘but not on to him.’

The assistant smiled briefly. ‘That was Toni’s ambition all his short life,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it gives us a clue to the type of crime we have here.’ As if thinking about this, she stared down at the corpse a minute or two more. Eventually she said:

‘Pull him down if you can. If you can’t, leave someone to watch what happens. I’ll send a SiteCrime team over. Maybe an operator.’

The thought of working with an operator dampened Epstein’s spirits. The uniforms nodded to one another, they had guessed all along it would play this way. Halfway down the street stairs the assistant stopped as if she had forgotten something. ‘You go on,’ she told Epstein. She waited until the uniforms were out of the building then entered the first room she found, where an alien of some kind, bipedal, its strigiform skull drilled for electrical access, lay on a pallet surrounded by drifts of its own feathers. Several small objects — including a pair of Entreflex dice turned up to display the ‘Tower of Cloud’ face; a cheap hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract; and a handful of intricately etched wide-bore titanium needles — were arranged on the nightstand. Two or three weeks ago, the assistant estimated, someone had begun recording these things through the alien’s sensorium, then lost interest. There was a mouldy smell in the room, like pigeons under a bridge. The assistant made two or three dial-up calls, spoke briefly to her office, then stood the way people do when they are waiting for someone to talk to them by holographic fetch. Nothing happened, although for a moment a half-formed shape seemed to flicker in an upper corner of the room.

‘Are you there?’ she said encouragingly.

‘Yes,’ whispered the alien on the pallet. It thrashed about briefly, sending up a cloud of feathers. ‘I am. I am here.’

The assistant maintained an office on the fifth floor of the building at Uniment & Poe. She had staff, she had a budget, she had a ’52 mint-blue Cadillac roadster in the parking garage: no one knew how she achieved this kind of success. You saw the Cadillac outside the bar they called the Tango du Chat where she often spent an evening; two or three times a week she would leave it at the kerb on C-Street and enter Cedar Mountain, an upscale tank farm where they kept several personalised immersive art experiences on file for her, based on the life of a fictitious 20th century housewife called Joan. As Joan, the assistant cooked meals, used ‘cleaning products’ and serviced her man 1956-style, which generally meant he grunted a lot and came on her leg (despite its exoticism, she found this aspect of the experience profoundly calming). Today, though, she chose another Cedar Mountain favourite: the five-star Room 121, based on a tableau of the same name by Sandra Shen, in which she could be a woman — unnamed but still perhaps 20th century — ‘alone’ in a hotel.

It was night. She was lounging in the tropical heat of a single room. She was at the window, a tall woman whose eyes were blue, whose age was hard to tell, whose clothes — a black two-piece with lightly padded shoulders, a striped grey and black blouse of some glazed material — scarcely hid an untidy sexuality. She never did much in the room. She drank rum; she stared out the window, thinking that wherever you are at night in the city you can always see, beyond the roof of the next building, the faint glow of floodlights. The radio played a musing version of a popular tune, `Rhapsody in Blue’. It was all as it should be. It was leading to the moment when her hands went impersonally into her underwear, when it would seem to the assistant that she was not so much having sex with herself as with the room, the song, the hotel: with every object in that instance of the liquid world.

This time, though, Room 121 went dark and dropped sideways. A million silver eels flickered past the windows. Whispers filled each dusty corner. She felt the tank world come apart around her, into dark and streaming pixels: next thing, she was hanging in the parking orbit above a rusty alien artefact the size of a brown dwarf. Things were such an effort. She was swimming with eels, down to the pocked and gouged surface. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath, a woman like herself lay on the allotropic carbon deck, a white paste oozing from the corner of her mouth. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. She was waiting. She came from the past, she came from the future; she was about to speak.

The assistant thrashed about. Lost in space, trying to place herself equidistant from everything else in the universe, she heard her own faint cry in the dark and moved towards it. Yellowish oily liquid filled her mouth. Later she listened tiredly while the twink-tank patched her up. In her anxiety, it told her, she had choked on the tank fluid or ‘proteome’. She had ripped out the main cable. She was losing cerebro-spinal fluid and later today she might experience a little light bleeding from neurotypical energy sites; it wasn’t so bad.

‘Something happened in there,’ she said.

‘Once immersed,’ the tank reminded her, in the voice of a real mother, ‘you should never move or try to shout.’

‘I don’t expect to feel like that.’

Over on the other side of town, Epstein and his soldiers were still trying to bring Toni Reno back to earth. Toni’s reaction seemed coy, especially for a dead man. Every time one of them touched him he bounced gently away, making curious swimmy elastic movements in the air, curving his back in a clean arc, circling some invisible central point as the uniforms jumped and waved their arms twelve feet below him. It was puzzling. It was even elegant. The rain had stopped. Morning traffic clogged Tupolev; downtown was solid.