Empty Space (32 page)

Renoko smiled. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘she did.’

‘You feel good, then?’

‘I feel good,’ Renoko agreed.

‘That’s good,’ the charred man said. He reached into Renoko’s head with one hand.

‘Oh!’ said Renoko. He’d seen something very special.

‘She tries to do her best for everyone.’

Renoko fell back and slipped down the bulkhead with a sigh until he attained a sitting position, after which he began to lose sight of himself. It was an uncanny feeling. In my case, he
reminded himself again, it’s wrong to say ‘I think’: I should always say, ‘I’m thought’. Then he wasn’t. He wasn’t thought any more. Although, as
long as the boys from Earth ate lunch, a tiny part of Renoko would always live on, a fractal memory in the Faint Dime database –
catch & spread light of all kind wan light thru
ripple glass jagged light of pressed chrome reflection film light of pink neon diffused across ceilings formica in fantasy-pastels pressed chrome deco fluting behind the bar a curious cast to
chequerboard floors shiny lime sherbert light on each pink faux leather stool all perfect pressed out in perfect sugar colour like candy every item perfect perfectly itself & perfectly the
same as everything else these weird blue metallic plastic banquettes –
less glitch than resonance, the remains of a stay-resident program printing itself out as a list of aesthetic
possibilities once or twice a year at cash registers across the Halo, with a particular fondness for ‘the Tambourine’ on New Venusport.

Forty seconds later, the main hold filled with light.

Internal comms tanked. Up in the control room, error signals jammed the boards. ‘Accept!’ Liv Hula told the pilot connexion. Nothing. She stuffed the wires into her mouth by hand.
‘Akphept!’ Too late. They were half in, half out when the connect halted. She pushed until she bled, but the system wouldn’t receive. Instead, Liv was snatched out of herself
and began some long, identityless transit.

When things returned, she was seeing them via an exterior camera-swarm. Autorepair media raced along the brass-coloured hull like dust down a hot street. The stern assembly pulsed in and out
of view. Outriggers, fusion pods, the tubby avocado-shaped bulge housing the Dynaflow drive: you could see the stars through them. From a source down there, where the holds and motors had once
been, intermittent, washy-looking streams of plasma curved out into the dark, already an AU long and curved like scimitars. Liv felt sick. With the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into
the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. ‘Antoyne? Hello?’ No one responded. Inside the ship, engine rooms, holds, companionways, ventilator shafts,
stairwells, winked out one by one. Go through the wrong door, who knew what you’d see? Liv was aware but blind. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control
room screens – a kind of luminous darkness where her spaceship had been. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order.

‘Jesus, Antoyne,’ she said. ‘What are you fucking around with now?’

No one heard her.

Antoyne was enjoying a shit. Irene, who trusted Renoko as far as she could throw him, had zipped herself into a lightweight white eva suit, grabbed her favourite Fukushima Hi-Lite Autoloader
from the weapons bar and, with a transparent bubble helmet under one arm, was making her way from the crew quarters to the main hold. Latticed stairways leaned at expressionist angles against the
moody emergency light; in the rear companionways the ship’s gravity had become undependable. Communications were nonexistent. It was hard to tell which way was up. Irene, though, looked
good with her close-fit suit, her determined expression and her flossy blond hair. ‘It’s hot as hell down here,’ she said. ‘Hello?’

She put her ear to the main hold doors.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Liv? Antoyne? I hear something!’ Setting helmet and Hi-Lite on the floor, she opened the door and stepped through.

Just as Liv heard Irene’s strange cries, the missing sections of the ship returned. Antoyne never knew any part of it had been gone. He appeared in the control room
pulling up his trousers and together he and Liv ran through the
Nova Swing
, throwing themselves down stairwells as they tried to avoid pockets of deteriorating physics. The ship
self-reassembled around them. Its hull rang and rang. The door to the main hold slid open on a vertical slice of lemon-yellow light: inside, some unacceptable transition was partially complete.
There were oblique shadows, noises like sacred music, sparks on everything, a voice saying, ‘Fuck!’ Antoyne looked determinedly away from it all and at the same time reached in with
one arm. It was a stretch, and he had to feel around aimlessly for a time, but eventually he got hold of Irene by one ankle and pulled her out.

‘Antoyne,’ she whispered, with a kind of puzzled matter-of-factness, ‘the universe isn’t what we think.’ She reached out a soft hand to Liv Hula, insisted,
‘Nothing here was made for us!’ Then, writhing about in Antoyne’s arms so she could see into his eyes: ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’

‘He didn’t look,’ Liv reassured her.

She wasn’t sure if he did or not. The backs of her gums were bleeding where she had ripped the pilot connexion out. She could feel a lot of loose tissue up there. Sometimes Liv felt she
had died a hundred lights back, on the mystery asteroid. Ever since, her nightmares were of being discovered by retrieval teams, lapped in faint ionising radiation at the junction of two
corridors, an unreadable name stencilled above the faceplate of her eva suit. Day after day, plugged straight into the inner life of the hardware, she lay in the acceleration chair, always too
cold, reviewing the internal surveillance data. Something had been wrong down there from the very first day of the Renoko contract, but with every new artefact they picked up, ship life had been
less easy to observe. She had no idea if the
Nova Swing
could look after itself in its present condition.

‘The mortsafes!’ Irene screamed. ‘The mortsafes!’

Liv Hula slammed the main hold door and backed away from it carefully, holding out Irene’s Autoloader in both hands.

They dragged Irene back to the crew quarters. She was hanging by a thread the whole way, hallucinating and crying out. When they got there she made Fat Antoyne dress her in her newest clothes
and carry her to a porthole. They couldn’t find a single mark on her, but she was slipping away so fast you could feel her go past you and out into empty space.

‘Those stars! So beautiful!’ she said, and closed her eyes. Her skin had a lead-coloured glaze. Antoyne, whose arm had felt weird since he thrust it into the hold, looked down at
her and concluded she was already dead. But after a while she smiled and said: ‘Antoyne, promise me you won’t get a cultivar of me. If I have to die I want to die forever, here and
now in this utterly for-real place.’ She seemed to think about it for a moment. Then she clutched his arm and said, ‘Hey, and I want you to find someone else! Of course I do! We
should never be alone in this life, Antoyne, because that is what human beings are for, and you will have many experiences of love yet. But honey, I want you to lose me. Can you understand
that?’

Antoyne, dumb with it already, said he could.

‘Good,’ she said.

She sighed and smiled as if that weight was off her mind. ‘Look out at those stars,’ she urged Antoyne again. And then, in a change of subject he could not follow: ‘All the
shoes you can eat!’ She pulled herself up with her hands on his shoulders to get a look around the crew quarters.

‘Oh, Liv,’ she said. ‘And our lovely, lovely rocket!’

Antoyne felt himself begin to cry. All three of them were crying after that.

TWENTY FOUR

Spike Train

Three fifty am, the assistant visited Ou Lou Lu’s on Retiro Street, a venue added only recently to her night’s round. There she drank a cup of espresso, holding
it in both hands and dancing thoughtfully to the sidewalk music the way R.I. Gaines had taught her, watching out for the flash of pre-dawn light above the city. When it came, she drove back over
to Straint Street to talk to her friend and confidant, George the gene tailor. It was fine rain like fog. The Cadillac rolled down Straint, its 1000hp engine already turned off, and came quietly
to a halt outside Sharp Cuts. The assistant – let’s call her the Pantopon Rose – tall, white-blond hair cropped to not much of anything – possessing the kind of height and
fuck-off good looks which come naturally from the most radical tailoring – stepped out on to the sidewalk.

‘Hey, George!’ she called.

No answer. Her expression grew puzzled. The door hung wide open and the rain was blowing in from the street.

She could smell the dockyards. From the factories she could hear the sound of women clocking on for the early shift. The light had a yellow colour: it picked out the ceramic receiver of the
reaction gun she now took out quietly, holding it down alongside her thigh. One instant she was outside, the next she was in, silent and motionless, smiling around. The chopshop seemed empty.
Nevertheless she didn’t feel alone. Something was masking itself in the IR, RF, acoustic and active sonar regimes. It was near. She could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, but it
wasn’t that. Something was in the room with her. It was impure in the sense it didn’t fit. It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit in and if you failed to grasp that you had
already made a mistake. She couldn’t smell it, but she knew it had a smell. She couldn’t locate it, but she knew it had a location. Then came the whisper she almost expected, the
amused voice from an empty corner:

‘My name is Pearlent—’

The assistant put a Chambers round exactly where her systems placed the voice. A soft, coughing thud and the corner of the shop burst into rose and grey flames. Heat splashed back. In the
shifting lick of that – the warm flicker of geometry followed by dark – she identified an object moving. It was a decoy. It was all over the room. It was all around her
with—

—and the low, charismatic laugh of a rebuilt thing.

If it shot back she was dead. It was there, not there: there, not there. Then it was right in her face. Tall, with white-blond hair cropped to nothing much. The fuck-off body language of
someone who can run fifty miles an hour and see in sonar. Someone whose very piss is inhuman.

It was herself.

It was gone. It was next to her yet out of range. For an instant everything hung suspended, then fell.

‘Christ!’ the assistant screamed. She redlined her equipment. She was quick enough to get a round off at the blur in the doorway. The round fizzed away like an angry cat and burst
in the street. When the assistant arrived out there she found she had shot her own car. Flames were already reflecting in the window of the Tango du Chat, appearing curiously still, like cut-out
flames, or flames in an old book. Spooked drinkers stared out. They hadn’t even begun to duck. She could hear running footsteps, but they were unhurried and already three streets away. That
was something you might puzzle over later in your room, when you recalled a face just like your own glaring madly into yours from ten inches distance – permitting itself to be seen in five
false-colour overlays, teeth bared and laughing with your own perfected fuck-off arrogance – and admitted just how far things had slipped away from you. You would be forced to express it,
she thought, in a similar way to this:

But no one is quicker than me!

Back in the chopshop, a few scraps of orange light from the Cadillac fire slipped between the window-boards, barely touching the dusty counter, the shoot-up posters and powered-down proteome
tanks. If light could be described as fried, the assistant thought, this was how it would look, this was how it would illuminate a bare resin floor and reveal the open eyes of the corpse. She
knelt down. George had bled out an hour ago from a deeply penetrative wound in his right armpit, as if someone had come up from the floor at him – waited there all night, in complete
silence in the photon-hungry dark on the dirty floor, then come up at him and driven one of their hands, fingers stiffened to make a cone, deep into his armpit. He looked almost relaxed, as if
the worst thing he could imagine – the very thing he was most afraid of – had finally happened, thus relieving him of his anxieties at the same time as it confirmed them.