Empty Space (34 page)

Down in the street, someone was playing
Ya Skaju Tebe
in a minor key, with pauses a fraction too drawn out. It was sentimental for the people, music for giving things up to, wartime
music. Starliners, now converted to troopships, came and went at the port, rays of coloured light pouring off them to wheel across the assistant’s walls, leaving small active patches of
ruby-red fluorescence which crawled about like living tattoos. Three kinds of psychic blowback lit George’s thin face, one after the other, and for a moment it looked as if he might say
something despite being dead.

That was how things rested until it got dark. George looked as if he might speak. The assistant sat on the side of the bed waiting to hear. Then R.I. Gaines walked in through the wall, combat
pants rolled halfway up his thin, suntanned calves.

Over those he had his signature lightweight shortie raincoat with the sleeves similarly rolled to the elbows. He was carrying a canvas poacher bag with a feature of tan leather fastenings,
from which protruded the grip and part of the receiver of a Chambers gun. His feet were bare. He looked tired. ‘Oh hi,’ he said to the assistant, as if he hadn’t expected to
find her there. They stared at one another and he said: ‘Skull radio.’ They spent a few minutes searching through her possessions. When she found the radio, he couldn’t make it
work. He knelt down and banged it on the floor until the glass broke and the baby’s lower jaw fell out. A few white motes drifted here and there. ‘Good enough,’ he said. He
engaged in a conversation his side of which finished, ‘You know it’s almost like we’re in a real world out here. Maybe you should think of it like that too.’ He threw the
radio into a corner. ‘Upper management,’ he said to the assistant: “What can you do with them?” Next he caught sight of poor dead George, staring at the ceiling with the
blankets up to his neck.

‘What’s this?’

‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘We all make mistakes.’ Gaines examined the corpse. ‘Were you trying to have sex with him?’

‘It happened across the city.’

Suspecting more than a malfunction, Gaines took her hand and encouraged her to stand by the window, where he could examine the data scrolling down her forearm. Still visible: but in that light
the Gothic blacks and Chinese reds weakened to faint grey and orange, and her skin was the colour of old ivory. He sniffed the palm of her hand then let her go. ‘You’ve got a Kv12.2
expression problem,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ She stared down at her own hand, then up into Gaines’s face – as if, he thought, she was trying to understand the exchange
as emotional rather than diagnostic – and after a moment asked:

‘Do you want to sit on the bed and talk?’

‘You really are someone’s project,’ he said.

Which of them was the cypher? They sat on the bed, with George the tailor behind them, and both of them stared at the wall. Gaines felt tired after Panamax IV, suddenly the only scene he could
remember from his whole life was him and Emil Bonaventure in the PEARLANT labyrinth, dragging along some dead entradista whose suit visor was caked an inch thick with the remains of his own
lungs. After a moment or two, he put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I’m going to need you to do something for me,’ he said.

TWENTY FIVE

Lowboy Orbits

They put Irene out into space, so she could drift forever through the incredible refuse of the Beach she loved.

Without her they were soon depressed and rudderless. Life swilled about in the bottom of the trough. Communication failed. Lies returned home. The FTL media brought only war news, and every
shift of the light reminded them of some better time in their lives. Neither of them could fly the ship. Liv went to Antoyne and said, ‘My mouth is damaged, but my mind is worse.’
Antoyne shrugged: there was no way he could do it. They fucked for comfort, what a mistake that turned out to be. The
Nova Swing
hung there in the middle of nothing. When she fired up her
Dynaflows and set a course of her own, back towards Saudade where it had all begun, they were almost relieved to have things taken out of their hands.

They continued to avoid the main hold. Instead, they slept and slept, living separate lives inside their own guilt about Irene. But once the ship got under way, levels of unconscious activity
could only rise: Antoyne dreamed he was fat again, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. He dreamed he was dead. Liv dreamed of ghosts. Sometimes a torn coat seemed to float along the
ship’s ill-lit companionways and stairwells (in that dream, she admitted wryly, the coat had secured the ontological high ground: it was Liv who felt like the haunting); other times, as if
they sought clarity and kindness, her dreams were all of her glory days at the Venice Hotel on France Chance—

Situated between the sea and the city, a stone’s throw from the rocket-sport port, the Venice – with its tall, uncurtained windows, tranquil shabby rooms and uncarpeted pale oak
floors which always captured the waking light – was, for five years the destination of rocket-jockeys all over the Halo. A twenty-four hour carnival unfolded outside the old hotel: bad
paint-jobs, bad haircuts, bad planning. People were building their own starships in sheds at the edge of the field. Inside, you could find the most beautiful pilot, nineteen years old, sleeping
in an empty bar at four in the afternoon, and soon go up to his room on the fourth floor back corridor. Next morning you woke alone and smiling, wrapped yourself in a pink cellular blanket, which
you later stole and kept it with you your whole life, and went to the window, listening to the illegal sonic booms rolling in from seaward as the returning hyperdips performed low level aerobrake
re-entries.

A few hours before, these cockleshells with alien engines had been toppling through the France Chance chromosphere (filmed in perfect rights-reserved imagery by virtual hydrogen-alpha filter).
Now the boys who flew them were determined to be the first human beings to scrub off more than twenty thousand kilometres an hour at less than five hundred feet above sea level. And the frail,
utter certainty of it was: you had done that too, and you still couldn’t get enough of it, and you would do it again and again until you couldn’t do it any more. Later, you found your
lovely pilot was the legendary Ed Chianese, and that the two of you were in competition for the Stupidest Achievement of That Year award.

It was from the perspective of this dream that Liv, waking transfixed, understood where she had seen the occupant of the K-tank before. She dialled up Antoyne, who, refusing to leave the crew
quarters for three days, played
Ya Skaju Tebe
on infinite repeat and ate raspberry ice cream with his hands.

‘Fat Antoyne, listen. We have to go into the hold.’

But Antoyne wouldn’t budge.

A section of the hull remained transparent. It was a wall of nothing. Eerie light from a corner of the Tract lengthened out the main hold so that it seemed more like an exterior than an
interior. This illusion was increased by the disarray of the mortsafes. They were hard to count now. They lay tumbled on one another into a kind of distance, like corroded boilers in a scrapyard.
Repair work was going on among them, but you couldn’t quite see where. A sputtering sound filled the air. Sparks flew up and rained back down, cutting gold curves on the watching eye,
bouncing off the deck as they cooled to dark cherry. Big shadows danced over the bulkheads.

Everything smelled of mould on bread, and of MP Renoko, who slumped like a traditional wood puppet in the unremitting yet unreliable glare of the welding arc, his clothes blackened, his left
arm resting at an odd angle in his lap. One side of his face had dripped into the hollow of his clavicle, where it produced a finish resembling melted plastic; the other side boasted a sceptical
grin, an appreciative glint in the eye, as if Renoko had only just died – or as if he was still alive, choosing for some reason to remain incommunicado. In this environment even a dead
human being was a comfort. Liv stood next to him and peered into the fountain of sparks.

‘You can come out now, Ed,’ she called.

‘
Liv?
Liv Hula?’

For weeks she had watched him drift aimlessly around the ship when he thought everyone was asleep; now he floated towards her with a big smile, his arms wide. Over the years the memory of him
had worn down inside her. It was smooth from use and bore little resemblance to the figure he cut at this end of his life. But the Halo is a wall-to-wall freak show: why should Ed Chianese be any
different? The ragged flaps and ribbons of his braised organs trailed out behind him.

‘Is that you, Liv? Jesus!’

When she didn’t respond, Ed looked unhappy; as if, though he had got her name right, he had mistaken her for someone else. For instance a more recent admirer. Focusing slightly to the
left of her, he said:

‘I’m sorry.’

‘About what?’ she said. ‘What happened to you, Ed?’

‘Just the usual wear and tear.’

‘I can see.’ And, when he didn’t follow that up: ‘I called, but you never got in touch.’ She left a silence but he didn’t want to fill that either.
‘Hey!’ she tried. ‘Someone told me you hijacked a K-ship and flew it into the Tract!’

‘That was years ago,’ Ed said, as though apologising for having once been in the past. ‘Anyone could do it.’

‘Fuck off, Ed. No one comes back from there.’

‘I did,’ he said, with such a tone of regret that she believed him instantly. ‘I didn’t want to – once you’ve been in there you’ll do anything to stay
– but here I am.’ After some thought he added, as if determined to produce a fair and balanced account: ‘Actually, the K-ship hijacked me.’

‘So now you’re hijacking the
Nova Swing
.’

‘Is that what they call her these days?’ He looked around vaguely. ‘Nice name,’ he said.

‘It’s cheap, Ed,’ Liv said. ‘That’s why you like it.’

She said: ‘What do you mean, “these days”?
Are
you Ed Chianese?’

‘Who else could be this fucked up?’

‘Fair point, Ed.’

Somewhere among the piled mortsafes, the MIG welder was working again. Or perhaps it wasn’t that. Sparks, anyway, were fountaining up, so bright the Tract paled into invisibility behind
them. There was a sound like a lot of drowsy flies. ‘Is there someone else in here?’ Liv said. Suddenly, Ed had her by the shoulders. His odd, not-unpleasant smell, more ozone than
halal, filled the space between them. ‘Get out!’ he said.

His hands hurt. ‘Fuck, Ed!’ Liv said. But though she struggled and kicked, and though he wasn’t what you could call all there, he had no difficulty propelling her towards the
door. Liv, straining to looked back over her shoulder, saw something beautiful and strange beginning to form itself out of the sparks. ‘What’s that? Ed,
what’s
that?
’

‘Don’t look!’ he said, and pushed her out.

The door slid closed, then open again. Ed’s head protruded, lower down than you would expect.

‘Let’s talk soon,’ he said.

‘Don’t let’s bother,’ said Liv, who thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the hold behind him. ‘Just fuck you, Ed,’ she shouted.

No reply.

‘And fuck your stories. Fuck that you know more than us, and our lives are suddenly part of some weird deal of yours. Our friend is dead, also what you did to this ship is a fucking big
inconvenience to us.’

The worst thing wasn’t that so much of him was missing, or that the remainder looked like a display of half-cooked meat in an outdoor market at the end of the day. It
wasn’t even that he seemed to be only partly aware you were in the room with him. It was that thirty years had passed. Over distances like that, people drive themselves without much
deviation towards the simplest expression of what they are. In the meantime you grow out of them. The only feature Ed retained was the weak grin he got when he knew you had found him out. At the
Venice Hotel, and for a month or two afterwards, she had interpreted that expression as a measure of how nice he was. Since then, she could see, he had let it become a substitute for raising his
game. Why hadn’t she expected that?

She went back to the crew quarters and explained the situation. ‘Listen Antoyne,’ she said, ‘we have to get him out of here.’

Antoyne, who smelled strongly of Black Heart, would only grunt. As Irene had often predicted, new things are bound to happen to anyone in the end; but Antoyne was bad with any kind of
reversal. He had lost weight except over the upper abs, where, in a matter of days, the ice-cream diet had seated itself in a carcinomatic-looking lump. ‘Ed’s not the man we
knew,’ she said. In fact the problem was the reverse of that. Ed – who walked out on Liv because she beat him into the France Chance photosphere; who left Dany LeFebre to die down on
Tumblehome; who, when he got as sick of himself as everyone else had, spent fifteen years in the twink tank lapping up some mystery shit the immersion media churn out for kiddies – was
exactly the man they knew. ‘Antoyne, wake up! He’s not human any more. He has some plan, it takes no account of us or anyone. Wake up!’ Antoyne opened his eyes and considered
Liv for a moment with the beginnings of an interest. Then he belched, turned away and began to weep. After that, recent experience told her, no amount of shaking would get his attention.