Empty Space

EIGHT Rocket Jockeys

The Nova Swing had history. Inside, she preserved the sort of worn out light that reminded visitors of a photograph from Old Earth. Her architecture smelled of metal, electricity, animals. There was a lot of time in her for a ship only a hundred years old, the residual time, you felt, of some improbable, uncompleted journey. Even when the dynaflow drivers weren’t running, the plates of her hull reported nauseous low-frequency vibrations, as if the ship were constantly making its way back from somewhere in order that its crew be able to occupy it. Liv Hula felt the same about her life. Early lessons were still working their way through: in consequence, even while she was completing it, an action often felt both tardy and experimental. And then, when you are a pilot, so much of you is externally invested anyway — in the ship, in the dyne fields — and may be increasingly unable to find its way home. ‘Home’ being understood as some secure location of personality in space and time. This sense of displacement, perhaps, is what sensitised her.

Initially it was visible only as disorder in the schematics. At warm-up time, still aware of the thick, used taste of the pilot connexion in her mouth, she received fail reports from minor systems checks. There were fluctuations in power, barely detectible. ‘If we had wires,’ she told Fat Antoyne, ‘there’d be mice in them.’ Later, as she jockeyed the ship out of its parking orbit, she thought she saw someone enter the room behind her — a dark figure, oily and flowing in the way it moved, in and out before she could see who it was, quick but not somehow giving that impression.

‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne,’ she said absently.

‘What?’ said Antoyne, who was a hundred feet lower down the ship, staring out of a porthole at the Kefahuchi Tract, listening to Irene whisper:

‘I will never get tired of these things we see!’

During the journey it stayed down by the holds. The onboard cameras disclosed a passing shadow in 4 or 6, but Liv was always too late to catch what cast it. There was movement at the top of a companionway, or in the central ventilation shaft. Later, she tracked it to the living quarters, but only as a discoloration of the air or a rubbed-out graffiti left by some bored supercargo forty years ago. These were isolated incidents. Saudade to World X proved to be the usual disorienting trudge. Irene fucked Antoyne. Antoyne fucked Irene. Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ’s blood in the firmament. Liv Hula tuned to the Halo media, where the breaking news was never good. Two days out she tipped the ship on its base, put them down neatly less than a hundred yards from the Port Authority building at da Luz Field, and lay there in the pilot couch too tired to disconnect, listening to the fusion engines tick and flex as they cooled.

Half an hour later, she woke up to find herself alone. She gagged ejecting the pilot connexion, threw up a handful of bile, sat disconsolately on the edge of the couch with her arms folded across her stomach. Monitors came to life. The nanocams had caught something in motion in the dark in the junction between two corridors: its appearance was half-finished, as if someone had begun painting a man on the air of the corridor then lost interest. The head, torso and arms were present though in need of work; from there it became notional until, around the navel, only a few shreds and rags of colour remained. It was the right height from the floor to have legs, but they weren’t visible. Not to Liv Hula, anyway. As it began to turn towards her, she saw that the rags and shreds weren’t paint after all but dark hanging strips of flesh. It was real. It was hollow. It was ripped and charred. She ran out of the control room, her arms outstretched in front of her, palms forward, calling, ‘Irene! Antoyne!’ at the top of her voice.

No one heard her, and that gave her time to feel a fool. She stood on the loading platform in the glaring light.

That night she dreamed of her old friend Ed Chianese, incontrovertibly the great rocket jockey of his day. In the dream, it was the morning after Liv’s big dive. Ed lay next to her. They were at the Hotel Venice, home to rocket sport bums of every description, but especially hyperdip jockeys between attempts on the photosphere of France Chance IV. Thick sprays of photons, most of them originating in that same photosphere, poured into the room, over-egging the yellow walls and prompting Liv to wonder out loud what the weather was like in the Bénard cells today. She was so happy. Ed was thinking about breakfast. At the same time the dream had him falling — the way Liv herself had fallen, with only the paper-thin hull of the Saucy Sal between her and it — into France Chance IV. ‘Ed!’ she called, in case he didn’t know. ‘Ed, you’re falling!’ Hot gas raged all about him, putting stark shadows under his handsome cheekbones. Caught in descending plasma at four and half thousand Kelvin, his hyperdip had lost confidence in itself and was breaking up. Those things were a neurosis with an engine.

Ed turned his head slowly and smiled at her. ‘I’ll never stop,’ he said. ‘I’ll always fall.’

Liv woke up wet.

They spent some days waiting for Antoyne’s contact.

Abandoned fifteen years earlier, after inexplicable climate shifts and abrupt changes in range and distribution of native species, World X’s single continent was now a commercial limbo, its pastel spintronics factories and EMC-funded radio frequency observatories mothballed, its lower management dormitories and holiday resorts closed down. Da Luz Field continued to operate, but at reduced traffic volumes. The Port Authority maintained an oversight staff. The single small bar and pâtisserie, L’Ange du Foyer, was little more than a handful of stamped aluminium tables set out in the blazing sun, at one or another of which Irene the mona could be found every morning after breakfast, wearing huge black sunglasses and drinking chilled marzipan-flavour latte. Toni Reno’s paperwork, weighted down by an empty cup, fluttered in the warm wind. By the third day it was grubby from being handled, covered with brown rings; by the fourth it seemed like an obsolete connection to another world.

Irene drank. Antoyne fixed the fusion engines. Everyone was bored. Liv Hula walked restlessly around the da Luz hinterland, a few acres of heat-bleached scrub and building projects fallen into disuse before completion. Thin black and white cats hunted across it, concentrating minutely among the rubbish and broken glass. Liv felt unusually centred, unusually herself; yet at the same time unable to shake her sense of being haunted. North, in the port suburbs, a few New Men still lived, treating the single storey white houses like nodes in a warren. They bred happily, but — quiet and subdued, uncertain what to do next — kept to the old suburban boundaries. The population remained at replacement rate. The males lay on the patios all day, masturbating in the unrelenting sunlight, and at night scoured the well-planned streets, ranging ten or fifteen miles at a time at a steady loping pace. What they were looking for they were unsure. On Nova Swing’s fifth day in da Luz, a group of women appeared at the port itself, to stand patiently outside the terminal buildings as if waiting, Liv thought, for tourists who no longer came.

When she said this aloud, Irene smiled.‘We’re the tourists, hon,’ she said. She removed her sunglasses, looked around in satisfaction, then slid them back on to her nose again.

The women brought with them a boy, Liv thought six or seven years old, thin and white, with a large round head on which the features seemed too small and delicate. He had wide eyes and an expression somehow both inturned and outgoing. He pottered about in the landing field dust, then, picking up what seemed to be a dead bird, came and stood as close as he dared to L’Ange du Foyer.

‘Hello,’ Liv said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Careful, hon,’ said Irene.

The boy sat down in front of them and played with the bird, looking up occasionally as if for approval. The bird was grey and desiccated, its beak fixed open in a pained little gape. Its head lolled eyeless. Extended, its wings revealed iridescent bars of colour, green and dark blue, over which could be seen crawling hundreds of minute parasites. ‘Jesus,’ said Irene. The women stood twenty yards from L’Ange du Foyer, listlessly watching this performance through the heat of the afternoon; then one of them came over suddenly, picked up the boy by his armpits and swung him away, saying something Liv didn’t understand. She seemed to be trying to take the bird from him. The boy struggled grimly to keep it and, being set down, ran off.

Later, they all left. ‘It’s cooler now,’ said Irene. ‘Why don’t we have an ice cream?’

Later still, with the sunset lodged in the sky above the central massif, the boy slipped out from where he had been hiding. Before Liv could say anything, he had dropped the bird at her feet and run off. Without quite understanding herself, she followed. Irene the mona stared after them, shaking her head.

The boy made his way quickly through the suburbs. Every so often he stopped and beckoned. His feet were bare. A mile or two south of da Luz lay a line of steep undercut cliffs, the buff-coloured guardians of some ancient fossil beach. He ran to and fro along the base for a minute looking for the way up; finding it, he turned and waved his arms. ‘Not so quickly!’ Liv called. He vanished. The cliffs swallowed the last of the light. The boy stared down at her as she climbed steps in a gully. All she could see was his head against the sky. ‘Infierno,’ he said quietly at one point. ‘Infierno.’ Above the cliffs long ridges of yellow earth rose to the dry central massif, where at noon the heat would ring in the dusty aromatic gullies and across the rocky pavements. Now it was faint night winds in the lava tunnels that threaded the country like collapsed veins. She stood at the lip of a jameo, listened to water thirty feet down, threading its way through the tumble of fallen rocks. Paths glowed in the starlight, so clever in their use of the contours that after a while she seemed to be finding her way without the boy. He was leading her, but he was less obviously there. She came upon him from time to time, squatting on a rock, or made him out half a mile away, a pale flicker against a hillside. If the route became difficult, he fell back; otherwise, she was on her own under the blaze of stars. In this way he brought her to a plateau strewn with rocks, the only feature of which was a low, ramshackle structure — bits of bleached, unshaped wood, stones piled on one another, a door banging in the wind — built over a jameo.

‘I’m not going in there,’ Liv Hula said.

The boy smiled at her then, turning away and pulling down his pants, pissed loudly against the stones, sighing every so often, straddling his legs and tightening his buttocks, staring over his shoulder at her with a grin. It seemed to take a long time. When he turned back he had left his little white penis hanging out.

‘Put that away,’ Liv said.

He laughed. ‘Here,’ he said, beckoning and holding open the door.

‘I’m not going in there,’ she repeated. Then — as if she had arrived on World X for this purpose alone; as if the logic of every journey she’d made, including the brief pointless dive into the photosphere of France Chance IV, led here — she pushed past him. Inside, steps led down from the lip of the jameo to the floor of a lava tube perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Looking up at her with his arms stretched wide was a New Man, tall and thin, with a shock of red hair standing up from a wedge-shaped head. His limbs had the characteristic articulation, wooden in one joint, pliable in another. He looked anxious, like someone trying to act, in all good faith, an emotion they have experienced only as a set of instructions.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Come down!’ the New Man said. ‘Come in!’ The wind closed the door behind her, opened it again. ‘If you have come for cock,’ he said, ‘you have come to the right place!’

He had it there, in his hand. Liv stared at it, then back up at his face, then around his house, the uneven walls of which, niched, limewashed and in places caulked with bundles of vegetable fibre, seemed clean and dry. He had used the old flow-ledges as shelves. There was a bare table with a white bowl and a ewer; some items of the sort the New Men collected, believing them to be from their lost home planet — perhaps art, perhaps just toys or ornaments. At one end a curtain, at the other a mattress, next to which he had laid out clean towels, candles, aromatic oils in handmade pots.

‘You’re the last of tourist trade,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They come for our cock. Look, look. Our cocks are a little different than yours.’

‘They are,’ Liv Hula said.

‘But they work nicely. They work well for you.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘We can fuck you,’ he said, as if quoting from an advert.

He had the resinous, warm New Man smell, a little like creosote, but not entirely unpleasant. His cock was, after you had got used to it, just a cock. What Liv enjoyed was the surprising calm he made her feel despite his own anxieties, a kind of temporary erasing of her own life that had nothing to do with sex. It was an easing of the memory of herself. In the end, she thought, perhaps I came here for that. When she woke in the morning, the lava tube was empty. There was a trickle of water behind the curtain, which she used to wash in. She wandered along the flow shelves as if she was in a shop, picking up his things and putting them down. She left money on the table. The child reappeared and led her back down to the rocket port at da Luz, which she saw with proprietary amazement a long way off through cool air and soft, floury light. There was the Nova Swing, standing up on its fins like the flying buttresses of a brassy little cathedral! Under daylight the landscape wasn’t so barren as she had imagined. The gullies and lava tunnels were often full of cool green vegetation: shafts of sunlight fell on constant little rills and trickles of water. She soon outdistanced the boy, who seemed preoccupied.

Just before noon, crossing the cement field through the heat ripples, she saw Fat Antoyne and Irene outside L’Ange du Foyer, talking to a small, old-looking man she took to be MP Renoko. No one was sitting down. There was a lot of gesticulating and raised voices. Antoyne waved Toni Reno’s paperwork about and said something; the small man shook his head no. He wore a shortie single-breasted raincoat over a yellowed woollen singlet and tapering red trousers which ended halfway down his calves; black loafers. His agreement with Toni Reno, he said, was that no one got paid until all the items were delivered to an as-yet-undetermined location. He had the second one here now. That was the way it was. Irene snatched the paper off Antoyne, made eye contact with MP Renoko and tore it in half. He smiled and shrugged. She put the pieces down on one of the aluminium tables with exaggerated care before walking off.

Liv Hula, unwilling to become involved, avoided everyone’s eyes and went into L’Ange, where she ordered frozen yoghurt.

Irene came in behind her and said, ‘I’ll have one of those too, but I’m getting vodka in mine.’ They sat down and watched Fat Antoyne and MP Renoko walk off towards the edge of the landing field, still arguing.

‘Who does that little shit think he is?’ Irene asked.

Liv said she didn’t know. ‘Well I do,’ the mona said, as if she had won an argument. ‘I do.’

‘I don’t like the beard he has.’

‘Who does?’ said Irene. ‘I suppose you had a good time last night?’

When Liv smiled and looked down at her yoghurt it was already full of flies. Later, the three of them stood in the Nova Swing main hold examining what Renoko had left them: another mortsafe, a metre or two longer than the first and floating a few inches higher off the floor, tapered to both ends and much more knocked about.

‘There should be a viewing plate,’ Antoyne said, ‘but I don’t find it.’

You saw these things in all the old travelling shows, MP Renoko had explained. They were pressure vessels. The carnie narrative was they contained an alien being: people paid to stare in, maybe their kids would bang on the tank with a stick, everyone went away happy. This one, riveted like an old zinc bucket, had streaks of corrosion, sublimated sulphur and char along its sides, as if it had been through a recent low temperature fire or failed industrial process: some event, Fat Antoyne said, with barely enough energy to boil a kettle. After that it had been stored in damp conditions. It was more work to move about than the first one. And if you put your hand underneath it — which he didn’t recommend anyone did that — it would be microwaved.

Liv Hula shivered.

‘Sometimes I hate it in here,’ she said.

Irene laughed darkly. ‘“As-yet-undetermined”,’ she said. ‘That cunt Toni Reno has let us in for it again.’