Empty Space (13 page)

Five minutes  later, the night cooled and darkened.  The fields were fields again, washed clean of mystery. The river widened and slowed, pooling into the shape of a long glass, a
champagne flute perhaps. A fierce steady rushing sound filled the night. Anna pulled herself into the bank and listened: water plunging over the old four-foot broadcrest weir at Brownlow,
perhaps a mile outside the village; beyond which the river, bending east to look for a way through  the downs to the sea, would lose confidence and, a few miles further  on, 
somewhere  above Barcombe Mills, submerge its  identity  in  the  Ouse.  Part-beached,  Anna  sat  contentedly in the warm shallows, letting the
water support  her legs so that they  bobbed  and  glimmered  out  in  front  of her,  just  beneath the surface. A small grey moth 
flickered about. She could smell guelder rose, night-scented stocks from some distant garden; and above that the replete, weighted, yeasty scent of tonne after tonne of water pouring over the
weir. I don’t feel in the least tired, she thought. Seeing herself with a sort of loving amusement  from the outside, she wondered what she might do next. A minute or two later she was
crossing the pool step by difficult step, hugging the upstream  side of the weir itself, pummelled  and deafened by the roar, struggling to move her legs against the vast, steady
sideways pressure of the water. Halfway over, something  made her stop. She dipped one hand into the shining flow across the crest – it was like pushing at the shoulder of some big,
steady animal and feeling it push back. What  else was there to do? she would ask herself later. Once you saw a thing could be done, what else could you do but try to do it? Shiver with
excitement, laugh aloud as the water shoved your hand about, stumble out on the other side and walk the mile home along the river bank in your sodden knickers. She had a powerful urge to pee. It
was dark, and who, after all, would see? She felt very calm and satisfied, even when, trudging  back across the pasture with her wet shoes in her hand, she saw that her summerhouse  was
on fire again. Great silent orange and yellow flames went up from the roof at the same odd angle as before. There was no smoke. There was no smell of smoke. The summer-house seemed taller,
and as if it was leaning away from her. Heat shimmer  gave it a squat conical shape like a windmill. Glorious showers of sparks, blown in a strong wind despite the dead calm below, lit up
the crowns of the orchard trees beneath. Beneath the sound of the flames, she thought she heard a voice calling her.

‘Michael?’ she whispered. ‘Is this you? Are you here?’

There was no answer, but Anna smiled as if there had been. She dropped her shoes and opened her arms.

‘Michael,’ she begged him, ‘it’s safe to come back.’

But if it was him, he was as afraid as ever, and as Anna let herself in through the gate, her face turned up and tightening in the heat, the fire went out. She stood there in the dark, caught
between one movement and the next, between one feeling and the next – until, just before dawn, she heard the birds waking up and let herself back into the house.

ELEVEN

Empty Space

Nova Swing
, out from Saudade – via da Luz Field, World X – to an unnamed destination. She chewed and foraged her way along. Her hull shook with dyne fever.
Down in the main hold, the mortsafes lay, old, alien, not good to be around. They had fallen into a sort of synchrony: every time Liv Hula made a course change, they turned  slowly to regain
their  original orientation.  They seemed aware of one another, Liv said, though no one else believed that; they seemed inert until they thought you weren’t looking at them. She
wouldn’t go in the hold alone. She spent her free time plugged into the ship, reviewing the internal surveillance data. Meanwhile, Irene the mona stared out the portholes and marvelled at
all the wonders of space, and you could hear her say:

‘Don’t you know, Fat Antoyne, that three old men in white caps throw dice for the fate of the universe?’

No, Fat Antoyne said, he had never heard that.

‘Their names  are  Kokey Food,  Mr  Freedom  and  The Saint. Another thing: these three play not just for the universe’s fate, but the individual
fates of every person in it.’ They threw the dice, of which, she said, there were a different number according to the day they played on, and at every throw they would say something in a
ritual way, such as ‘Heads over ends!’ or ‘Trent douce’ or ‘Down your side, baby!’, sometimes speaking singly and  sometimes all together. One or all of
them would clap their hands sarcastically, or blow on their  fingers to indicate scorching. Or two of them would smirk at the third and say, ‘You fucked now, sonny,’ which at
least could be understood  by a normal person.

‘So you’ve seen these dice guys?’ Antoyne enquired.

‘In dreams I have, Fat Antoyne, yes. And when I say that, you need to stop looking at me, in your precise way you’re about to laugh at me. Because a dream  is a kind of truth
 too.’ Antoyne laughed at that, and she pushed him off the bed. ‘They pay and they play, Fat Antoyne. And if they ever stop? Why, their faces slacken and crumple. And those old
men weep.’

Why was that, Antoyne wanted to know.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘they look out into the same unmeaninged blackness as you and me.’

Fat Antoyne looked at Irene and thought that he loved her. He wished he could be truer to her, and so did she. She said: ‘What they see, it’s beautiful but it’s dark. And
there’s no way to know what it is, not even for them.’

Just then, alerts rang softly through  the ship, and Liv Hula’s voice came out of the speakers.

‘We’re here,’ she said.

Although, she added, she didn’t know where here was.

MP Renoko’s co-ordinates,  a skein of figures and symbols compressing eleven dimensions to a single point in the dark interstellar medium,  at  first
revealed nothing:  then  an  orphaned  asteroid drifting towards the Tract, into which it would be absorbed after an uneventful journey of less than half a million years.
‘We’ve got a structure  of some sort in orbit around  it,’ Liv Hula was able to confirm. And then: ‘It’s a wreck.’

Later, as she steered an eva suit into the dark, a single riding light glimmered to no purpose against the dim yellow rim of the asteroid. Data flickered in her helmet head-ups. ‘No
activity,’ she said. It was as she expected. A very old nuclear powerplant could be detected inside, towards the prow of the wreck. It was lightly shielded, and had been designed with no
controls or moving parts, as a single mass, like an Oklo reactor. At the stern end, chemical engines and  a Dynaflow driver: first-class equipment  bolted on less than fifty years
before. It looked as if someone had made an attempt to salvage the wreck, machining new parts at a base on the asteroid, then giving up when test-accelerations broke it in two. ‘I
don’t know how they found it in the first place. Modern cosmology tells us that if there’s an arse-end of the universe it’s probably here.’ There was a click.
‘I’m approaching the fracture now.’ After that, communications  would remain poor for the duration.  Back on the
Nova Swing
, displays showed the feed from her
headpiece cameras failing briefly before offering a series of uninterpretable still pictures of hull plates, detached structural members, and sudden voids which seemed to imply a completely
different spatial relationship  with the asteroid. Miles of cable had unreeled  into space. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s interference  in the pipe.’
Then: ‘I’m in now.’ A cross section of the wreck would have revealed brittle, organic-looking  structures  of tubules and fibres in faded blues, purples, pinks and
browns. Inside, however, it was dark. Curiously  leaning  speleothems  divided  the  passageways, which eventually gave way to more recognisable architecture.
‘Whatever this started out as, it wasn’t a ship. I think it might have been an animal. The ductwork and cabling was laid in by hand. Even the hull is a retrofit. It’s an
afterthought.  I’m getting near the reactor now.’ There was a long pause, then: ‘Jesus. Holes.’ Fifty million candlepower jittered around  an undefinable space,
throwing the shadows of pillars at odd angles on to the walls. ‘Are you getting this?’ She was in some sort of chamber. Wherever she looked, perfectly straight, perfectly circular
tunnels, half a metre in diameter, had been bored through the ancient organic mass. They displayed the surface glaze of high-temperature events. ‘This is new. About the  time
 of the  salvage attempt,  or  perhaps  just  before. Fuck. What’s that?
What’s that?
’

The light flew about the walls, then went out.

A further silence.

‘Antoyne? Antoyne? Are you getting this? Antoyne, something’s in here with me.’

Up in the pilot room of the
Nova Swing
, shadow operators whirled around, their hands to their faces, whispering:

‘What has she done now? Oh, what has she done now?’

Fat Antoyne got out of the crew quarters and into the pilot chair without thinking. ‘Accept,’ he told the systems, and then, as the connexion  burrowed  its way up
through  his soft palate, causing him to sneeze then vomit without warning, remembered he was a man who had sworn never to fly again. The systems were all over him as soon as they sensed
that. For a moment, struggling to shut down the navigational software, he felt as if he was seeing in too many directions at once. His identity was gone. He seemed to be throwing up endlessly.
Everything stank of rubber, then – as the ship tried to calm him down – of gag-reflex dampers and some kind of lowgrade norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor it was pumping into
him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he told it thickly. ‘Just get me alongside.’

pSi engines fired in the dark. At the same time, the vacuum took on an ionised look. Phase-changes rippled through  a smart gas of nanodevices, billions of tiny cameras poured 
between the two vessels like milt. Despite that, Fat Antoyne, his connexion still partial and unstabilised, remained blind.

‘Hey, Liv,’ he said. ‘Liv?’

Nothing. Then static in the pipe, and a distant noise like gak gak gak, the sound of the galaxy talking to itself in FTL bursts.

‘Hello? Antoyne?’

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Antoyne, I’m sorry. There’s nothing here. I got disoriented.’

Wearily, Antoyne  began to close down  the  pilot connexion.

‘Welcome to the club,’ he told Liv Hula.

‘Antoyne! Bodies! Bodies!’

According  to  the  names  stencilled  above  their  faceplates, she had  found  one third  of the original salvage crew.
Arranged  as an element  in a tableau installation  or  primitive  waxwork, the title of which might be
Death Site XIV
or
The Final Exploration
,
MENGER
sat, legs splayed wide and shoulders slumped, at the base of the wall, the headpiece of her eva suit nodding  forward, hands  resting lightly between her thighs.
SIERPINSKI
,  posed awkwardly on  one  knee  as if proposing,  proved  in  fact to  be writing on his suit forearm the word ‘curvature’.
Was it less an observation, Liv Hula wondered,  than  a warning? ‘There isn’t a mark on either of them,’ she informed the
Nova Swing
. Which of them had died
first? The woman, certainly, seemed caught in the very act of giving up. Was there an element of solicitude, even tenderness,  in the way
SIERPINSKI
 leaned towards  her?
The tunnel, narrowing here and split into three by curiously marbled and streamlined pillars, curled over their heads like a frozen wave. Unwilling to look into the dulled faceplates, an act
which would turn discovery into voyeurism, and frightened less that she would see
MENGER & SIERPINSKI
than that she wouldn’t, that the suits would prove to be abandoned  and
empty, Liv skirted them and  went  on.  The dial-up  remained  open  but  silent, until  she remarked  suddenly,  ‘The whole
wreck’s been  penetrated  again and again from the outside. Hard to guess when.’ The closer she approached  the reactor, the more openings she found. Here and there,
yellow Tract light fell from one of them in a slanting beam on to ductwork or a sheaf of cable; low level ionising radiation lent everything else a bluish glow. She heard her own breath: behind
that, Fat Antoyne coughing and choking into the dial-up pipe as he tried to extricate himself from the ship systems. Behind Antoyne, the familiar FTL interference everyone describes
differently, but which Liv always heard as distant  shouts of alarm. ‘I’ve got the reactor in front of me.’ It was in a containment  vessel the size of a house, around
which the original material of the wreck had tried to grow. Pipes led in and out of this fibrous crystalline mass. ‘They pumped water into a slurry of 235U, it vented itself as superheated
steam on a five-hour cycle.’ She consulted her head-ups. ‘Decay levels indicate it was last operating in the Devonian period of Old Earth. It’s not attached to an output
 device. God knows what it was for. All it ever did was raise its own temperature  a couple of hundred  degrees. I think it might have been an environment  for whatever lived
here orginally.’ On the
Nova Swing
they experienced a long pause. Then: ‘Antoyne, I heard  the same noise as before.’ A dull buzz, at sufficiently low frequencies to
feel as if it had not so much invaded her nervous system as
replaced
it, this was accompanied by sensations of vertigo and a metallic taste in the mouth. Later, the chaotic pans recorded
by her helmet cameras would reveal only a bluish, mucoid blur. ‘I’m heading back.’ As she turned  to leave, it was obvious that something was in there with her after all.
‘Antoyne? Are you getting any of this?’ Her visual feed went down, and for a minute  or two only broken  phrases could be heard from her, ‘shiny lacquerwork’,
‘domed head’ and repeatedly – ‘Antoyne?’ Liv dragged herself and her equipment through the fibrous corridors. It was like being lost inside a major organ. Behind
her, she could sense the artefact tunneling its way impassively towards her across the pumice-like structural  grain of the wreck, bursting out of one wall only to disappear instantly
through another. She imagined it waiting there for four hundred million years. Had it hunted the salvage crew the way it was hunting her?