Empty Space (35 page)

‘Antoyne, you useless fucker,’ she told him.

From living with himself, Antoyne knew that to be true. Later, when Liv had gone back up to the control room, he rolled over, puked a little, washed up in the corner sink and stared around the
cabin at Irene’s scattered underwear: party semiotics in action. The little action cube of her was playing on repeat, sounding scratchy and cheap and far away. In his head he heard her real
voice say, ‘It was a lovely world,’ and then: ‘Antoyne, you got to lose me.’ After he cleaned up, he took himself down to the main hold, where he leaned in the doorway and
said:

‘So.’

‘Hey,’ Ed acknowledged. He was wiping his fingers on an oily rag. ‘It’s the pizza guy! What do I owe you?’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Very funny.’

‘It’s—’ Ed clicked his fingers ‘—Fat Anthony. Right?’

‘That was years ago. They don’t call me that any more.’ He stared at Ed. ‘What the fuck have you done to yourself this time?’ he said.

Ed grinned. ‘This? I’m not sure. Like it? I picked it up in the Tract.’

‘I heard you were there.’

‘Fat Anthony, you should go too, while you can.’ Ed said he couldn’t think of a way to describe it. It was the big achievement. In there it was eleven dimensions of
everything. ‘The entities who run it, they’re all charisma.’ They were over everything, having fun. ‘Fat Anthony, it’s just so fucking different in there. You
know?’

‘If it’s that good,’ Antoyne pointed out bleakly, ‘why didn’t you stay?’

‘Come back with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come back with me now. None of this is real when you’ve been in the Tract. Come back with me and see.’

Ed could sell you his own worst dream, caught with an unsteady camera, lit with a bad light. Juice or jouissance, it was always a plunge into something, with a default to the epic, from which,
very often, only Ed returned. For a moment Antoyne wondered what decision he would make. Then he said:

‘Why would I do that to myself, Ed?’

The universe went on.
Nova Swing
ploughed across it, creaking under her own internal stresses. Antoyne cleaned up his act, weaning himself off the peppermint ice over
a dog day afternoon. He folded Irene’s underwear and put it away, and in place of that desperate shrine to her constructed another, using the things she salvaged from Perkins Rent. He
burned incense there but within days heard her voice telling him not to be a jerk. ‘You make your own life in this life, Antoyne.’

Ed Chianese, meanwhile, spent his time in the hold, working on the mortsafes. Entities came and went while he was down there. Some looked like angels, some looked like operators. You
didn’t want to be close enough to tell the difference.

Liv Hula, a passenger in her own ship, dozed in the acceleration chair while, outside, the Halo streamed past, broken into futuristic dazzle patterns by physics and war. The news remained bad.
Ed drifted in and out at unpredictable times of day, and hung there staring at the exterior screens. This exasperated her.

‘Can’t you sit down or something?’

‘The day you first came aboard this ship,’ he said, ‘you found surplus code in the navigational system. You couldn’t work out what it did.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

He shrugged.

She remembered the first time she sat in the chair. After all the years away from piloting, she felt so free, even if it was just to swallow the nanofibres and take the ship’s
inventory:

Electronic infrastructure. Propulsion architecture. Communications schematics, including an ageing FTL uplinker which showed, for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected quarantine orbits
from three to a thousand lights along the Beach. Otherwise it was navigation fakebooks, cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking stamps. She remembered advising Fat Antoyne, ‘You
got fifty years of guano in there. Also they used the code to run something my chops don’t get.’

She looked speculatively at Ed. ‘I fenced it off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it crawling up someone’s rectum at night. Especially mine.’

Ed brought up internal views.

‘See that junk you collected in the hold?’ he said. ‘It’s an engine. The
Nova Swing
’s the only ship in the Galaxy with the software to run it. That was
what you found.’

She sighed impatiently.

‘Just tell me why you’re back, Ed. Maybe I can help.’

‘I came to free the people,’ Ed said, making a gesture which, perhaps hoping to take in the whole galaxy, explained nothing. ‘Things are going to get bad out here.’
This war, he said, was the big one. ‘They’ve been working up to it for a hundred and fifty years.’ It would mean a substantial collapse of EMC infrastructure. It would mean that
no one had a right to expect endless progress any more. Quite the reverse. In the long term, that might in itself be good for the boys from Earth. ‘They can start from the ground up, with a
more interesting take on things.’ Meanwhile it would get worse before it got better.

‘Thanks a lot for that prophecy, Ed.’

‘I
was
a prophet once,’ he said, ‘but I left all that behind.’ For a moment he watched the dynaflow medium streaming past. ‘I wish I could talk to Fat
Anthony?’ he said suddenly. ‘But he avoids me.’

‘His name’s Antoyne and he’s a decent man. Back in the glory days he loved you and admired you, the way we all did. I was just the same. You were crazy and beautiful and
that’s what we wanted. If you asked us to be heroes, we would have followed you anywhere. But it’s France Chance, Ed, win or lose every time you open the throttle. Remember
that?’ Then, as soon as he began to answer: ‘And now what? You’re the only one who ever came back from the Tract, big achievement. But what have you brought out of there? You
might be into something good, you might be deeper in shit than ever.’ She smiled; her smile said she couldn’t help him with that. ‘You can have the ship. I don’t think
either of us wants it after what happened, and we can easily get another.’

She looked out the porthole one day not long after that, and saw they were back in the Saudade Quarantine orbit.

The planet turned beneath them like some immense flywheel. Deadlights flickered off the bow. All around, it was offworld warehousing of the unnameable: a million tonnes of a substance half
protein, half code, the waste of human interaction with mathematics.

She got on the internal comms and said, ‘Ed, this is the wrong orbit. Park & Ride is further in. Do you want any help?’ Silence from the main hold. ‘Ed?’ When she
arrived down there, she found the hull back in place and the mortsafes lined up in a neat row.

They didn’t look any less disused than usual. ‘What are you fuckers looking at?’ she asked them. As if in response they separated suddenly, to reveal Ed Chianese lying prone
on the deckplates while a very small Chinese woman crouched, knees apart, where the small of his back had once been. Ed’s face was pressed into the floor, her emerald green cheongsam was
hiked up round her waist. Her skin was very white. You couldn’t be sure what was happening between them, but white motes the size of clothes moths seemed to be pouring out of her polished
little ivory-colored vulva.

‘Ed?’

Ed seemed too preoccupied to answer. The woman, if that’s what she was, chuckled and looked over at Liv. Liv turned and ran before she could be made to look closer, before she could be
made to understand more. From that moment, she felt, everything in her life would depend on not interpreting what she had seen there. It would depend on remembering no more than a wink, a
cigarette, a smile on very red lips. Ed caught up with her in the companionway outside.

‘Jesus, Liv. You could at least knock.’

‘Get us down to Saudade City,’ Liv said. ‘And then piss off.’

An hour later, the three of them stood on the loading platform, looking out across the damp cement of Carver Field towards the Port Authority buildings and over them to the
city itself. It was raining. The new day had a used light all over it; a light which might be described as pre-enjoyed on its passage from Retiro Street to the Church on the Rock. In the crime
tourism quarter, the hotel neons weren’t quite done, but they’d faded to pastels of themselves. Ed Chianese leant on the loading platform rail, his ragged lower half rattling faintly
in the wind.

‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’

Liv found him a smile. ‘You’ve walked through one too many walls, Ed. Look at the state of you.’

‘I’ve got used to a life,’ was all Antoyne could think of to say.

When Ed had gone the two of them were left on the cement, craning their necks as the
Nova Swing
groaned her way back to the Quarantine orbit on her tail of smoke. They watched until she
was a fading green glow in the cloudbase. ‘Those fucking old engines!’

Liv Hula said.

‘But she was a boat.’

‘She was a dog, Antoyne.’

They laughed, then they turned towards Saudade City. The streets had a new excitement, they were packed with refugees and military police. Lightning flashed – a K-ship, splitting the
sky, trailing thunder! She took his arm, folded it under her own, hugged it against her side, the way she used to walk with Irene.

‘Where to next?’ she said.

‘Some place where Crab Nebula is a main course not a destination.’

TWENTY SIX

Lizard People from Deep Time

Uptown Six
took the dynaflow highway halfway across the Halo. It was a fast uncluttered trip. Viewed from inside, the dyne fields are just like a human being – a
kind of bad-natured origami, accordion-folded to contain more than seems possible or advisable. Is this how the universe dreams of itself? Eels flickering in shoals through some velvet medium?
Splashes of coloured light drawn sideways suddenly by the unimaginable stresses of not really being there? The assistant, who felt similar stresses herself, sat uncomfortably by the porthole in
the human quarters trying to comprehend these phenomena.

‘I don’t like to travel like this,’ she told the shadow operators, ‘with those fish outside the window.’ She didn’t like the food on the
Uptown Six
.
She didn’t like the Vicente Fernandez lowrider music Carlo played, with its heavy reliance on traditional ranchera stylings. When he turned it off, she didn’t like a noise she thought
the air-conditioning made which no one else could hear. Every time the ship changed course she said, ‘Is it supposed to sound like that?’ Her problem wasn’t travel itself. It
was that she couldn’t feel comfortable away from Saudade. The shadow operators – obsessed by anything new and dysfunctional, and thus already deeply invested – took on the grey,
slightly translucent appearance of mourning women, rubbed their bony, work-roughened hands together, and begged her:

‘Would you prefer something different to eat, dear?’

The cabin was filled briefly with their smell of violets and Vinolia Soap.

‘Can we fetch you a blanket?’

An hour or two into the journey R.I. Gaines opened the FTL routers and tried to refamiliarise himself with Galactic events. He fell asleep instead and dreamed he was in a rocket port
surrounded by refugees. They resembled people, but they also resembled something like a swarm of bats or locusts too – or even a swarm of shadow operators, with a similar kind of sadness to
their voracity and yearning. They were an ongoing process yet they never seemed to change. Gaines sat at a table with his hands in his lap. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind him,
laughing and shrieking. He didn’t know what to do or think next. Adverts fluttered overhead like moths: his eyes followed them. People went in and out of the travel terminal doors: his head
turned that way. Listening to the chimes of the public address system, he realised that, quite literally, he was not himself. He was someone he knew, but he couldn’t remember who.
Eventually his number was called and he got to his feet and walked towards the gate.

While Gaines was dealing with these issues, whatever they were, Carlo – whose meds had flattened him off nicely for the day – tried to lure the assistant into the pilot tank with
him. Though she seemed interested, even after she had lifted the lid, she would only do sex inside an immersive art experience called
Joan in 1956
, which apparently featured an old car and
something she described as ‘waisted cotton briefs’. Carlo wasn’t disheartened.

‘I’m so fucking in love,’ he told Gaines when Gaines woke up.

By then they were under the shoulder of the Tract itself, tumbling down a thirty-light-year well between high temperature gas clouds. Soon, Galt & Cole’s big score filled the
screens, not quite a planet, not quite a machine: a geological madhouse with aspects of both, having the gravitational signature of a low density rubble pile but eye-watering Mohr-Coloumb
figures. It was as porous as sponge yet nothing could pull it apart. The highly cratered surface sported a uniform orange colour, slightly too pale for rust. Across it roiled deep cobalt shadows
and strange-looking rivers of dust.

‘Home again,’ Gaines said.

‘Keep watching the skies, Carlo,’ he called as they left the ship.