Empty Space (10 page)

‘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.’

NINE

Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears

Last practitioner  of a vanishing  technique,  with  specialisms in diplomacy, military archaeology and project development, R.I. Gaines – known
 to younger  colleagues as Rig – had  made  his name as a partly affiliated information  professional during one of EMC’s many small wars. He believed that
while the organisation was fuelled by science, its motor ran in the regime of the imagination. ‘Wrapped up in that metaphor,’ he often told his team – a consciously mongrelised
 group  of policy interns,  ex-entradistas and science academics comfortable along a broad spectrum of disciplines – ‘you’ll always find politics. Action is
political, whether it intends to be or not.’

Some  projects  require  only  an  electronic  presence.  Others plead  for  some  more  passionate  input.  Today
 Gaines  was in-country on Panamax IV, where the local rep Alyssia Fignall had uncovered  dozens of what at first sight seemed like abandoned cities. Microchemical analysis of
selected hotspots, however, had convinced her they were less conurbations  than what she loosely termed ‘spiritual engines’: factories of sacrifice which, a hundred thousand
 years before the  arrival of the  boys from  Earth,  had hummed  and roared day and night for a millennium or more, to bring about change or, more likely, hold it
off.

‘Close to the Tract,’ she said, ‘you find sites like these on every tenth planet. You can map the trauma front direct on to the astrophysics.’

They stood on a low hill, planed to an eerily flat surface about five and a half acres in extent, thick with dust despite the scouring summer winds, and covered with the rounded-off
remains of architecture. There were pockets of vegetation here and there in the avenues between the ziggurats – clumps of small red flowers, groups of shade trees under which
Alyssia’s people gathered each mealtime to rehearse their sense of excitement and optimism. They were discovering new things every day. A white tower of cloud built itself up in the blue
sky above the mountains  to the south; smoke rose from an adjacent hilltop which seemed to be part of some other excavation. In the end, Gaines thought, anything you can say about ritual
sacrifice is just another act of appropriation. It reveals more about you than about history.

‘So what’s different here?’ he said.

Alyssia Fignall glanced away, smiling to herself. Then she said: ‘It worked. They moved the planet.’

Suddenly she was looking direct into Gaines’ eyes, deliberately seeking out his soul, making contact, her own eyes wide with awe. ‘Rig, everyone has been so wrong about this place.
That’s why I called you! A hundred  thousand  years ago, using only sacrifice – mass strangulation,  we think,  of perhaps  half the population – these
people moved  their  planet  
twenty  light minutes
out  of orbit. We think they were trying to keep it in the Goldilocks zone. There’s evidence of increased
stellar output,’ here she shrugged, ‘though to be realistic, it’s not high enough to explain much. In the texts we found, they don’t seem to be able to describe exactly
what they’re afraid of. Soon after that they give up – vanish from the historical record.’

‘Possibly they had some regrets,’ Gaines suggested.

‘Not in the way I think you mean.’

They stared silently across the hilltop, then  she added, ‘They were some sort of diapsid.’

‘Alyssia, this is a result.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you need?’

She laughed. ‘Funding.’

‘I can get you more people,’ he offered.

He received a dial-up from the Aleph project. Alyssia moved away a little out of politeness, her feet kicking up taupe dust with a high content  of wood-ash and wind-ground
 bone. Her people were finding thick bands of the same substance in polar ice cores; there, it was glued together by fats.

She was still excited. That morning, aware she would be seeing Rig again after so many years, she had picked out a short sleeve knit sweater in red botany wool, fastened with a line of tiny
fauxnacre buttons  along one shoulder; pairing  it with a flared calf-length skirt of faded green cotton twill. Her thin tan feet said she was in her forties, but the sunshine and
the clothes celebrated only enthusiasm and youth. Gaines stared at her with a kind of absent pleasure, while spooky action at a distance filled the FTL pipe and a voice he recognised said:

‘About an hour ago we got uncontrolled  period doubling then some kind of convulsion in the major lattices. It’s jumped to another stable state.’

‘Is it still asking for the policewoman?’

‘Like never before.’

‘Anything else?’

An embarrassed pause, then: ‘It wants to know everything about domestic cats. Should we help it with that?’

Gaines laughed out loud ‘Tell it what you like.’ So many years in, and they didn’t even know what the Aleph was. They could be programming  a computer,  they could
be talking to a god. They weren’t even sure who they were working for at EMC. But Gaines had the complex professional philosophy of any good fixer. ‘Keep going,’ he ordered.
‘In a situation  like this all the benefits are at the front end. Later we find a way out of the consequences.’ Most projects seem minor, irrelevant: big or small,
cheap-and-cheerful or funded the planetary level, they always remain oblique to the real world. Others flower when you least expect it. They become your own. They lodge right in your
heart.

‘Get me a K-ship,’ he said.

SiteCrime, fifth floor, Uniment  & Poe: a slow morning.  Bars of light from the slatted window blinds fell like weight across the policewoman’s shoulders.
 Shadow operators  clustered viscously in the ceiling corners. (Once or twice a week, the ghost of her old employer could also be seen there. This apparition  had been less use to
her than she hoped. It consisted only of a face – the face of the older Albert Einstein like a photograph  under  water, its eyes distended, its mouth opening and closing
senselessly – which seemed to be warning her against something.) Her desk was heavy with reports.

In Saudade City, topology itself is the crime. While the rest of the planet can offer nothing  more bizarre than  rape or murder, SiteCrime – the frail human attempt to bring
order to a zone which cannot  be understood  – must deal with boundary-shifts,  abrupt fogs of hallucination, a daily illegal traffic in and out of the event site –
people, memes and artifacts no one can quite describe. The assistant busied herself with these puzzles. Bells rang faintly in the distance. At approximately eleven forty, shouting could be heard
in the corridor outside and she was called to one of the basement interrogation  rooms.  Two or three  days ago, atrocities had occurred down there under cover of a nanocamera
outage only now repaired. The fifth floor was alive with accounts, substantiated and otherwise. ‘It smells like fresh meat,’ someone reported; someone else said it was like war had
broken out in their building.