Empty Space (20 page)

Uptown Six
inserted itself into a stationary eddy in the radiation signature of a trio of neutron  stars, and, judging itself to be safely hidden  for the next thirty-two
 minutes  and forty-eight  seconds or so, upped Carlo’s dosage of atypical antipsychotics; medicating him, in addition, for a twenty minute nap. In the ensuing silence
Gaines switched off the news channels and concentrated  on the images he was receiving from his major project. What he saw, he couldn’t believe. He opened an FTL pipe.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said.

For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse,  new  universes
 awaited,  furled  up  like tiny  dimensions inside each abandoned  technology. Back-engineering became the order  of the day. Everyone could find something
 to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found,  you could find something
 bigger. At the other  end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins,  nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.

Ten per cent of it was still functioning.  Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year
anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the
outset: to them, the Beach was an  interregnum,  a holiday  from  common  sense, an  exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and
the very new, of the vast, extraordinary,  panoramic  instant they congratulated  themselves on living in: the instant  in which everything that went before somehow met and
became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.

It was, in short, a chance to make some money.

2410AD: two Motel Splendido entradistas  ran across an alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf, wobbling its way like a dirty balloon along some gravitational instability at the hot
edge of the Tract. Their names were Galt & Cole. They made a single pass, looked things over and decided it could be done. Two days later their ride broke up in a Kelvin-Helmholtz eddy a
bit further in. Cole, who couldn’t think for alarms going off, went down with the ship; Galt, temporarily stripped of ambition by a plume of gas elevated to eleven million degrees Kelvin
and observable only in the extreme ultraviolet, made it back to the research tool by escape pod.  Five years later, his FTL beacon  drew the  attention  of a Macon 25
long-hauler inbound for Beta Hydrae with ten thousand tonnes of catatonic New Men stacked in the holds like the sacks of harvestable organs they were.

By then Galt was calcium under a weird light. A few shreds of fabric and a polished skull. Who knew where his partner could be said to be? Galt left an autobiography, or maybe a final
statement, or maybe only the name they had decided to give the real estate, scrawled on a stone –
PEARLANT
. They died near their fortune, those two, like all losers: but the name
stuck. Beneath the pocked and gouged surface, choked with God knew how many million years of dust, lay what came to be called the Pearlant Labyrinth.

Two generations of entradistas  hacked their way in. That was a story in itself. Lost expeditions, weird fevers, death. Every side-tunnel  full of ancient  machinery
 incubating  an  acute  sense of injustice. They contended  with fungus spores, cave-ins, passages flooded by non-Abelian  fluids at room  temperature.
 They were driven mad by the feeling of being observed. Worse, the labyrinth, clearly some kind of experiment  in itself, had been constructed with such exquisite fractality that the
term ‘centre’ could only ever be a distraction. The experimental space, through which temporal anomalies ticked and flared in direct response to events deep inside the Tract
(‘As if,’ someone said, ‘it was built to tell the time in there’), would always contain more distance than its outer surface permitted. Eventually a team of
maze-runners  from FUGA-Orthogen – an EMC subsidiary specialising in nuclear explosives, capitalised out of New Venusport on the sale of mining machinery somewhat older than
the labyrinth itself – hacked its way into the vast, ill-defined chamber which would come to be known as The Old Control Room. Their shadows scattered, jittery and spooked, across its
perfectly flat allotropic carbon deck. They gathered at a respectable distance. They cracked their helmets and let fall their thermobaric power tools. They admired the fluttering opalescence of
the Aleph where it lay suspended in its cradle of magnetic fields. They knew they had struck it rich.

Fifteen years later, 3D images of this treasure trove filled Gaines’ dial-up: they were a little scratchy from distance, not to say the passage through three
competing kinds of physics.

Around the time he was in the cloister with Alyssia Fignall, the Aleph had burst – boiling up from the nanoscale like a pocket nova, only to writhe, flicker, and, at the last moment,
become something else. Where the containment  machinery had been there was only the deck. On it lay an artefact of unknown  provenance with the appearance  of a woman, just over
life-size and wearing a gown of grey metallic fabrics. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. A white paste oozed from the corner of her
mouth. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. Gaines stared at her; the woman, her limbs and torso shifting in and out of focus as if viewed through moving water, stared blankly back, her
eyes drained of emotion, her face immobile. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t in the chamber. Whatever effort she was making, it had nothing  to do with him, but went on in silence,
bitter, determined,  undefinable, as if she would never understand what was happening to her yet never give up.She looked, Gaines thought, like someone trying not to die.

‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption,’ his site controller, a man called Case, told him. ‘It assigns values where you might not want them.’ Case had
started out as a serious physicist, then, after a temporal convulsion in the maze aged him sixty years in a day, switched to management. He lived for his work, had written a fictional account of
Galt & Cole called ‘These Dirty Stars’, and though unimaginative did well with multidisciplinary  teams. ‘To me she’s less like a person than a
problem.’

‘How did this happen?’ Gaines said. ‘How can this have happened?’

No one was willing to make a guess.

‘Never mind the Aleph,’ Case said. ‘The labyrinth itself is a million years old. We never knew what it was supposed to do; we never even knew which of them we were talking
to.’

Nanoscale  footage  presented  the  field-collapse as a  kind  of topological suicide. Picoseconds in, the Aleph resembled less a teardrop than a perished
rubber ball, first folding to make a comic mouth, then rushing away towards a point beyond representation. ‘You aren’t looking at the event itself,’ Case warned Gaines.
‘Only the stuff we could pick up.’ In the aftermath  of the deflation, a full nanosecond  later, the containment  apparatus  itself could be seen softening,
flowing – this was visible on cameras run realtime outside the containment  facility – and then evaporating into light. Out of the light the artefact emerged,
but could not be
observed emerging
: Case thought this important. ‘No matter what timescale we look at these recordings – no matter how slow we run them – no smooth process can be
detected.’ First the Aleph was there, then the woman was there instead. Her struggle had already begun. ‘For all we know, she could be an artefact in the other sense,’ Case
said: ‘An illusion of our data-gathering methods.’

‘She looks so alive.’

‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl,’ Case said, to show he could understand  that.

‘What does this mean for the field weapon?’

‘The field weapon?’ Case looked at Gaines as if he was mad. ‘It’s fucked. That whole line of research is fucked. I don’t think there ever was a field weapon,
Rig.’ He stared around him, into the dark of the old control room. ‘I think the labyrinth had its own agenda all along.’

‘Don’t let upper management know about this.’

SIXTEEN

Carshalton Shangri-La

‘I’m having some strange dreams,’ Anna Waterman  said, a few days after her brush with dogs. She had arrived late for Dr Alpert due to a missed
connection, but seemed pleased with herself. She sat down immediately and without  any indication  that  she was changing the subject, went on: ‘Do you know where I’d
live, if I had the chance?’

‘I don’t know. Where?’

‘I’d live in the covered bridge that goes over the platforms at Clapham station.’

‘Mightn’t it be a bit draughty?’

‘I’d keep it as one big space. Every so often you’d come upon a bit of carpet, some chairs, a bed. My furniture! I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she
decided, the way you might say: ‘I’d encourage birds to visit the garden.’ She thought  for a moment. ‘Just for the company. But Clapham would no longer be a stop.
People would have to understand  that.’ She smiled and sat back expansively in her chair, her body language that of someone who, having made a very fair offer, expects a positive
response.

Helen Alpert smiled too. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were happy with your own house now?’

Anna nodded. ‘Less unhappy,’ she agreed.

The doctor made a note. ‘And Marnie?’ she enquired. ‘How are you getting on with Marnie?’

Around the bathroom  issue, and the deeper issues represented by it, Marnie  and  Anna  had  developed  a kind  of considerate wariness. Marnie had phoned
the next day, anxious to apologise. In return, Anna sent a card, a kingfisher bursting out of the water with a small silver fish in its beak. Next time she arrived, Marnie brought flowers, a
thick bunch of white stocks, blue delphiniums and sunflowers which they made into an arrangement  together. One of the sunflowers was left over so Anna put it in a jug in the new bathroom.
 Every time she went to the loo she felt light and warmth pouring from it, and found herself full of the slow, lazy happiness  she had  been used to as a child, before things
 went wrong. The problem with Marnie, Anna had begun to suspect, was that for her nothing had ever really gone wrong.

‘I’m not sure Marnie is as grown up as she thinks she is.’

The doctor  left a pause in case Anna wanted to develop this insight, then when nothing further emerged, enquired:

‘And the dreams?’

‘The dreams are a nightmare.’

In the last few days she had seen everything. Half the time she hadn’t even been sure she was asleep. In the dream she could be most certain of – the one in which she was most
clearly dreaming – she was up on the Downs again, viewing herself from outside and slightly above: a woman  carrying a child’s empty coat across her arms as if it were the child
itself. This woman was bent forward from the waist, looking into the middle distance at the white chalk paths, then down again at the coat. Her expression was one of neither joy nor musing.
Skylarks sang. Hawthorn trees clustered on the hillside below. People appeared and disappeared on long, rising horizons. There were tiny blue flowers in the turf. Quite slowly, she passed out of
the picture, vanishing over one of the immense skylines of the Downs.

Carrying a child: perhaps it was a dream about Marnie, perhaps it wasn’t. If, in the doctor’s consulting room, you acknowledged a dream like that, what might you be admitting to?
You couldn’t be sure. Anna therefore kept it to herself. But it was always possible to be frank about her standard dream:

The unknown  woman  lay on the black marble floor in some vast echoing space, dressed in a Givenchy gown; someone very old, unchanging but not yet herself; someone, essentially,
waiting to change. Sometimes there was a kind of leaden buzzing noise, less a noise in fact than something that had seeped into you as you dreamed. Or you might hear a kind of high, distant
ringing inside the floor, a kind of tinnitus at the heart of things. Sometimes there was the sense of an audience: someone – it might be you, it might be not – had started  to
clean her teeth then cut her wrists in a hotel bathroom, only then looking up to find tiers of fully-booked seats stretching up into darkness like a university lecture theatre. These were
deranged but self-limiting images you could throw all day like sticks for Helen Alpert to chase – both doctor and patient got plenty of exercise out of that. So today Anna began
refabricating a version of the dream she had once had while Michael was still alive, in which the first false-colour imagery of the Kefahuchi Tract – a new astronomical discovery for a
brand new Millennium – had seemed to detach itself from the television screen and drift up into the dark air of their Boston motel room, where it hung like jewellery in a cheap illusion
then slowly faded away. By that time the room was vast.