Empty Space (26 page)

She left a similar message with her daughter. ‘I’m not sure I can explain. I’m just not such hard work for myself as I used to be.’ She searched for something else to
say. ‘I saw a lot of cats in the garden this evening!’ Since this didn’t seem to approach the facts, or give any feeling of the rest of her day, she added: ‘And, Marnie, I
met someone, but I don’t know if you’ll like him.’

She put the phone down and looked for Michael Kearney’s computer drive. Excavated from the litter at the bottom of her bag, it lay on the kitchen counter like an enchanted egg, its
surface rich with wear, magically transforming ordinary reflected domestic light into year upon year of guilt. Anna Waterman had no idea if the old man in South London was really Brian Tate. She
would have to accept that her memory of the scandals surrounding Michael’s death and Tate’s downfall would always be clouded; that her struggles with Michael – like her
struggles with herself – would grow increasingly meaningless. At a certain age, she now understood, you owe the past nothing except to recognise it as the past. Michael could go to hell, if
he wasn’t already there. Tomorrow she would take the pocket drive to Carshalton and, one way or another, relinquish responsibility for whatever data it contained; and that would be
that.

TWENTY

Modern Luminescence

‘It came out of nowhere.’

‘Nothing comes out of nowhere.’

‘Ha ha. What is it?’

‘It says “biological content”.’

The tank had been through some recent high-temperature event, after which it pitched into empty space a light minute off the
Nova Swing
’s bow, where it hung in a dissipating froth
of zero-point energy and junk matter until Fat Antoyne fetched it on board. It was scarred and scraped, losing colour rapidly through a palette of Christmas reds through light plum to the matt
grey you would associate with a military asset. Much of the exterior work had vaporised; the remaining fitments made no sense unless it had been an internal component of some other structure.
Once it was cool enough to touch Antoyne unbolted the porthole cover.

‘Shine the light.’

Liv Hula shone the light. ‘Out of nowhere!’ she repeated. ‘I nearly flew into it.’ She was excited until she saw what was inside.

Cable trailed from the core-points in the spine. The skin stretched over the skull like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. No flesh remained between that and the bone beneath. The
withered lips drew back over large uneven teeth. The eyes, bloodshot and bugged up past life size, glared from tarry sockets. Something was wrong with the hair. It was hard to make out the rest.
The tank proteome – thirty thousand protein species like warm spit – swirled sluggishly about it.

Liv turned away in disgust.

‘It’s not an alien,’ she said. ‘It’s a K-captain.’

For her, that meant a metaphor for the condition of sky-pilots everywhere: dissociation, hallucination, invasive surgery, the surrendering of humanity for a way of life so worthless it made
you laugh.

‘Throw it back,’ she advised.

Antoyne didn’t want to get into that. He heard it all before. To change the subject he said, ‘I almost think I recognise this guy.’

Liv took another look: shrugged.

‘They’re all the same. Scoliosis. Pseudo-polio. Half the organs gone, wires everywhere.’ And when Antoyne wondered what unimaginable forces had blown this one out of his
ship: ‘Don’t assume it’s male. More than half of them sign up as girls. It’s the thinking twelve-year-old’s alternative to anorexia.’

Antoyne moved the inspection lamp around. It was like a wreck under water in there. Fine silt fell through the beam.

‘Is it dead yet?’ Irene the mona called from the crew quarters.

They were thirty lights from anywhere, in the voids by the Tract itself. The big argument they had, which went back and forth while Antoyne screwed the porthole cover back on, was if they had
come upon the tank by accident, or whether it was another item on MP Renoko’s cargo manifest. It was a measure of how weird their sense of reality had got, Liv Hula insisted, that they
couldn’t decide. They stood there for a time, arguing back and forth, then left the hold.As soon as the bulkhead door closed behind them, bursts of high-speed code issued from the K-tank
– chirps and stutters, odd runs of simple calculus, fragments of ordinary language mysterious yet emphatic – as if the occupant was trying to make contact but couldn’t remember
how. The other items in the hold were inappropriately excited by this, flashing and winking in return, humming with subsonics, emitting brief flashes of ionising radiation. After perhaps an hour
– its baroque ribs and lumps of melted inlet pipe making it look like a child’s coffin decorated with mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons – the newcomer seemed to calm
down.

‘We should dump it in the nearest sun,’ said Liv.

The day you enlist for the K-ships, you haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours. They give you the injections, and within twenty-four hours your blood is teeming with pathogens, artificial
parasites, tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down. Over the next three days the shadow operators, running on nanomech, take your
sympathetic nervous system to pieces, flushing the waste out continually through the colon. They pump you with a paste of ten-micrometre-range factories, protein farms and metabolic monitors.
They core your spine. You remain awake throughout, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits don’t make it past that point. If you do, they
bolt you into the tank at the front of the ship. By then most of your organs are gone. You’re blind and deaf. A kind of nauseous surf is rolling through you. They’ve cut into your
brain so that it will accept the hardware bridge known as ‘the Einstein Cross’. You connect with the ship math. You will soon be able to consciously process 15 petabytes of data per
second: but you will never walk again. You will never touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself.

You sign up in a private room at a pleasant temperature: nevertheless, you can’t get warm. You say goodbye to your parents. They give you the emetics whether you’ve eaten or not.
Then it’s an hour or two to wait before the injections start. Forty years ago – shivering on the edge of a bed, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a
hospital gown that fell open constantly at the back – it had come to Liv Hula that she would be able to choose the Einstein Cross, but that she would never, ever be able to unchoose it. So
she had put the bowl down carefully, and, speaking to no one, got dressed again and gone back to her life.

What had upset her so on New Venusport, she refused to say.

Fat Antoyne had found her a mile from the Deleuze Motel, teetering at the end of a line of footprints on the hard wet sand. It was the hour before dawn. She’d lost her bag, also one of
her best shoes. Her face and hands were cold and salt. Overcome in ways he couldn’t explain, he tried to put his arms around her. But though Irene had the expression of someone ready to
seek help anywhere it could be found, she only stepped away.

‘Antoyne, no,’ she said.

Aboard the
Nova Swing
once more, she kept to herself. Even safe in empty space, she couldn’t sleep. On the beach before Antoyne arrived, she had been trying to imagine Madame
Shen’s Circus in its glory days: music, alien shows, marzipan, white frocks, fresh sunshine on the midway. People laughing and fucking on the very sand where Irene stood! But she
couldn’t forget that she had wet herself looking into the mysteries of the STARLIGHT ROOM, where the three ghastly white-capped figures of Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint cast their
dice; and when her wonderful, warm man found her, her neck was stiff from staring as hard as she could in the opposite direction to that dispiriting place. ‘Change your game you change your
luck,’ she told Liv Hula, ‘that’s everything I used to believe in life.’ The past was gone. Only the present could affect the future, and the future was always open for
business: that was how she had always seen it. ‘But Liv, now I recognise each change of heart is just another scam performed upon yourself!’

Now she could only conclude that the long haul, with its concomitant emptiness and anxiety, had proved as debilitating as the short, which wears you down by insisting you forget everything you
knew last week. She was tired, she said. She wanted to go home. Perhaps she would feel better if she saw her old home.

Liv Hula said she could help with that.

Perkins Rent IV, known to its inhabitants as New Midland, supported an agriculture of beet, potatoes and a local variety of squash grown year round under plastic. New
Midlanders worked for offworld money. A handful of FTZs in closed compounds – precision assembly plants working from bulk metal glass components – clustered on the major continent,
each served by a town of fifty to seventy-five thousand souls where bi-yearly surveys revealed a reassuringly high incidence of obsessive-compulsive traits and, ideologically, a kind of
Janteloven
prevailed. The only other way of earning a living on New Midland was to work the ghost train.

This line of abandoned alien vehicles, all sizes between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, hung nose to tail in a cometary orbit that reached halfway to the nearest star. Their rindlike
hulls presented dusty, lustreless grey. Whoever they belonged to had parked them and walked away before proteins appeared on Planet Earth. They boasted the shapes of asteroids – potato
shapes, dumbell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them. By contrast their nautiloid internal spaces were pearly and disorienting, as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there.
Every so often a short segment of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the system gas giant. New Midlanders mined them like any other resource. Nobody knew what the ships
did, or how they got here, or how to work them: so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them through sub-contractors to a corporate in the Core. It made an economy. It was the simple,
straight line thing to do. They were broken up from inside out. The used-up ones attracted unpredictably-shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one
wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. Above the rest bustled the industrial arcologies and futuristic bubble-worlds – factories, refineries, sorting
facilities, starship docks busy round the clock.

Liv Hula slipped in from high above the plane of the ecliptic, intending to hide in the debris-belt of her choice. What she found changed her mind.

‘Antoyne, look at this.’

‘What?’

‘Someone fought here. Perhaps half a day ago?’

The ghost train had been derailed. Its industries now took the form of a complex metallic vapour through which toppled everything from nuggets of melted aluminium to entire ore-crushers.
Shockfronts were still swinging through this medium, here and there compressing it to wispy arcs the colour of mercury. The routers had gone down under the weight of distress traffic –
transponder signals from eva suits and escape pods, trickles of RF leaking like the air from punctured living quarters, the papery voices of the already-dead filling the pipes with intimate,
matter-of-fact panic. They were saying what the dead always say: ‘No one’s left but me.’ One moment they were trying to reason with the problem, the next they were begging the
guys to pull them out of there. The ghost ships had fared no better: they toppled about, laid open like water-stained illustrations of the Fibonacci spiral. Some of the larger ones, accelerated
by hits from high-end ordnance, were wobbling into the distance on interesting new trajectories. Several fragments fifty metres diameter and above had found their way down to the surface of New
Midland.

As a result the FTZs were matchwood. Thing Fifty, the little coastal town Irene remembered so well, had begun its day by leaning away from a fifty megaton airburst about two hundred kilometres
inland and twelve kilometres high. A hot blue light went across the sky. The heat was so fierce people assumed their hair had caught fire. During this period, fences, trees, houses, low density
warehousing, utility poles and pylons all took on an ordered slant. Half an hour later, a huge ocean surge boiled inland, floated the wreckage and aggregated it in the shallow valleys on the edge
of town, piling everything on top of everything else. By the time
Nova Swing
arrived, Thing Fifty was less a place than a list of building materials.