Empty Space (5 page)

Her summerhouse was on fire.

Huge red and gold flames rose at an angle from its conical roof. There was no smoke; and though they cast a great light, and threw long oblique shadows across the pasture, the flames looked
stiff, idealised, as though painted for a Tarot card. For a moment she saw herself on the card too, in the foreground but well to one side so that the focus remained firmly on the burning
building (which could now be seen to be isolated in the field, with a suggestion of a hedge, or perhaps some kind of earthwork, at its base): a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking
floral print dress, running with her mouth open and a paradoxical expression, a mask of dissociated consternation, on her face. No shoes. Her hair, flying back in the wind, painted as a single
mass. Her lips were moving. ‘Go away. Go away from here!’ The flames roared silently up, amid showers of gold sparks. Anna could feel the heat of them, stretching the skin across her
cheekbones. Yet by the time she reached the garden gate everything was dark again; and, despite the heat, nothing had been burned. There wasn’t even a smell of smoke – although
through the summerhouse windows she glimpsed what looked like embers, still whirling about inside, just above the floor.

The door had dropped on its hinges a decade before. Anna dragged it open. Two or three houses’ worth of garden furniture and tools met her gaze. Tim had liked to garden. From an early
age, Marnie had liked to help. They had liked to be in the garden together, around the flowerbeds or the kidney-shaped pond, while Anna watched with a drink. Deckchairs, sunshades,
long-handled pruners. Marnie’s quite expensive ping-pong table. Then, in the shadows, shelves full of half-used garden chemicals. The chemical smells of dusts and powders,
spilled across the floor or gone solid in their tins and packets. Then the smell of cardboard boxes, lax with damp, bulging with everything from photograph albums to ornaments. Something was
spilling off the shelves, in a shower of fantastic sparks! They were just like the sparks from a firework! They paled slowly but didn’t fade. Anna approached. She let them fall through her
upturned hands. She sat on the floor and sifted through them like a child. Light dripped off her fingers, soft-feeling embers like cool sachets of gel, the neon colours of the organs the cat
brought in. After a time these colours leached away, just exactly like heat from embers, to leave a drift of small objects she could barely make out in the dark. Anna sorted through them. She
turned them over uncomprehendingly. She found a shoebox, green, a trusted brand, and shovelled them into it. Opening the summerhouse door she had thought she heard sounds: laughter, music, the
smells of fried food, alcohol and human excitement in a seaside at night. She rubbed the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. Presently, she went outside and looked across the river
pasture, where her own running footprints made an erratic track through the thick dew.

‘Michael?’ she called softly. ‘Michael?’ She called, ‘Is this you? Are you doing this? Michael this is you, isn’t it?’

She slept heavily and did not dream. The next morning, she drank a cup of weak green tea; ate a dessert spoon of honey stirred into Greek yoghurt; upended the shoebox across
the kitchen counter and watched its contents bounce and roll. They were just small things – ordinarily tawdry but in resonant colours – which she thought must once have belonged to
Marnie. She stared at them, strewn across the counter like coloured buttons. Some of them
were
buttons, in different shapes and sizes. Some of them were more like old-fashioned enamel
badges – emblems of someone’s miltary career, or a life in nursing or conducting buses, brought up short by pancreatitis or stroke in the early 1970s. There were things that resembled
Lego bricks, made of a translucent material too substantial to be plastic; two or three pinchbeck rings with interesting symbols; a cluster of tiny porcelain rosebuds you could pin to a frock;
beads, charms, iron-on tattoos, yellowing dice and a pair of moulded plastic lips at the very beginnings of a kiss. Miniature playing cards slipped from a pasteboard box. There was a plastic
mug with a mirrored bottom, so that when you drank from it your own face was revealed. A little red Valentine’s heart with diodes inside that even now lit up when Anna pressed the tiny
button on the back – although God knew how old it must be. They were the kinds of things that turn up in trays at flea markets. Costume jewellery fallen out of a Christmas cracker thirty
years before. Anna was compelled. She phoned Marnie and they had another disagreement.

‘But do try and remember,’ Anna urged. ‘Little 3D pictures! And enamel badges like the ones you wore when you were at Cambridge.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘It is five o’clock in the morning.’

‘Is it, darling?’ Anna said. ‘I thought they were just the type of thing a child might collect,’ she tried to explain. ‘I thought you’d be interested.

‘Do you know something?’ she said. ‘Some of them are
warm
!’

‘Hang up, Anna,’ Marnie advised. ‘I am.’

Anna stared at the items for some minutes, as if they had given her a new lease of life. Then she fetched her handbag from the hall and out of it, after some rummaging, took out Michael
Kearney’s pocket drive. This she put down among all the other stuff, where the light could shine off its slippery titanium surface. While she was staring at it, James the cat came in and
began butting and fussing around her calves, his purr thick and close, breathy and mechanical at the same time. Suddenly he went to his bowl and began to eat tuna as if his life depended on it.
The milkman left the milk. A train went past on the valley line. The phone rang again. She wondered what had really happened to the summerhouse in the night: everything had remained perfectly
silent throughout, she thought, like a fire in a difficult film. She wondered what had happened to her. Eventually, she swept everything back into the shoebox, put the pocket drive in her bag,
and caught the next train up to London, where she expected to spend the afternoon nosying into other people’s houses. For once she rather looked forward to it.

FIVE

Archive Style

In his glory days Fat Antoyne Messner had run a number of petty mules like the
Nova Swing
. All featured illegal propulsion systems, capacious holds and occult service
histories: they were registered out of planets with made-up names. He had operated them, so he claimed, on behalf of numerous Halo celebrities: Emmie-Lou Parang, Impasse van Sant, Margot
Furstenburg, Ed Chianese. Why rocket-sport stars and entradistas like that would need the services of a rusty cargo vessel, when they were up to their eyes in smart carbon and
BMG-composite hulls with salvaged alien machinery bolted the other side of the pilot bulkhead, he never made clear. Maybe it was to haul spare parts. Maybe it made them feel good to have a
fat man around.

Whether you believed these claims or not, one thing was certain: Antoyne was no longer the loser you used to see beached-up in Saudade City, narratising his bad luck, drinking Black Heart
rum, reduced to making small points at the very edge of the game as errand boy for cheap crooks like Vic Serotonin or Pauli DeRaad. He owned his own ship. He had an eye for a transaction. He
wasn’t even fat anymore.

At 4am the morning after he met with Toni Reno, Antoyne made some FTL calls, as a result of which he found himself down in the
Nova Swing
number one hold, re-examining the payload
Toni left behind. On the bills of lading it was described, ‘Delivery, insurance, freight, documents on sight’, which is not to say much. Because of his previous career, Antoyne
experienced a natural anxiety when it came to Port Authority paper. About the payload itself, technology had told him all it could. He concentrated instead on its viewport, situated at the front
end and constructed of three inch quartz glass, opal in colour, elliptical in shape. To obviate reflections, Antoyne had switched off the halogen lights. Every so often he was forced to wipe
condensation from the glass with a piece of rag.

If he cupped his hands round his face, he could make out a greenish object, like something alive viewed under low-power photomultiplication. This object moved about, or maybe not. Antoyne
didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like being in the dark with it, or the way the
Nova Swing
main hold seemed warmer than usual, or the carmine LEDs that occasionally flickered
into life up and down the mortsafe’s lateral line.

Two years before, Antoyne’s company – Bulk Haulage, aka Dynadrive-DF – had won a six month contract to tow hulks in the Vera Rubin’s World
quarantine orbit. Antoyne left the
Nova Swing
at home, hired an 18/42 series Weber tug – the
Pocket Rocket
, old but serviceable – and ran the job out of a
landing-field bar known to its habitués as ‘The East Ural Nature Reserve’. He took a room for the duration, not far down Gravuley Street from the field, and ate with all
the other quarantine dogs at the Faint Dime diner, where he liked the way the light reflected off the chromed faux-Deco panels behind the counter. Early evening would find him at the window
of his room, eyeballing the Neapolitan layers of a late sunset while he waited for the neon to come on. It was a two-storey town on a one-issue planet. Their idea of style was yellow
Argylls and black loafers. Gravuley Street seemed to go on forever, especially at night.

A week after he arrived, Antoyne watched something strange emerge from a boarded-up building not far from the Faint Dime: the naked body of a baby, magnified to adult size and the same
olive-drab colour as the frontage. At first, looking up from the sidewalk to the second floor, he had it as some kind of novelty sign. What would you advertise with a giant baby? He
didn’t know. Any kind of baby was a mystery to Antoyne. He didn’t like them much. This one, which appeared perhaps three months old, protruded at an odd angle, so that its pudgy legs
lolled apart. It was a girl. Antoyne averted his gaze, as if he had seen some kind of porn not to his taste. He thought he heard a faint, squeezing rustle: when he made himself look again the
baby had forced itself out a millimetre or two more. It was working its way into Antoyne’s world. A voice from beside him said without preamble:

‘Have you ever been inside a quarantine hulk?’

This voice belonged to MP Renoko, a man you often met at The East Ural Nature Reserve, where he would begin a conversation by saying: ‘You agree there’s no neccessity to confuse a
practical tool with a theory of the world?’ Renoko came and went, but always bought rounds of drinks.

‘I’m relieved to see you,’ Antoyne said. ‘Considering this.’

‘Considering what?’

‘That,’ Antoyne said, pointing above his head; but the baby was gone. He looked up, around, behind him: nothing.

Gravuley Street offered no aid. To the left lay darkness and the empty planet; to the right, the savagely lighted window of the Faint Dime. He could see every item of interior decoration,
pressed-out and perfect in candy colours. Someone was drinking Ovaltine with rum. Someone else was getting a big-size ham on rye sandwich with fries. Antoyne wiped his mouth. The hair
went up on his neck. One o’ clock in the morning, and a light wind blew dust in ribbons down the middle of the street.

‘Something was here,’ he asserted. ‘Why don’t we get a drink?’

‘I’m buying,’ said MP Renoko. ‘It seems to me you’ve had some sort of shock.’

Renoko looked like a photograph of Anton  Chekhov, if Chekhov had aged more and come to favour a little white chin-beard. Otherwise his look sucessfully teamed used raincoats with
grey worsted trousers five inches too short. His hair – white, swept back to a grubby collar – always seemed full of light. He was small-boned, and intense in manner. His clothes
came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘soup’. On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went
unwashed. As soon as he and Fat Antoyne had settled themselves in the comparative safety of The East Ural Nature Reserve, he returned to his original subject as if he had never left it:

‘“Everyone their own evolutionary project,” we tell each other here in the Halo. Excuse me, this can only be an element of cultural self-dramatisation, even in times like
ours.’ His smile meant he was prepared to forgive that. ‘But if there
is
a new species,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s up there in those quarantine hulks.’

Fat Antoyne said he didn’t get it.

Renoko smiled. ‘You get it,’ he said.

Leaked navigational nanoware or eleven-dimensional imaging code slips up someone’s anus at night and discovers it can run on a protein substrate. In a similar way, ads, memes,
diseases and algorithms escape into the wild. They can run on your neurones, they can run inside your cells. They perform a default conversion. Suddenly the cops are out with the loudhailers,
‘Stay inside! Stay indoors!’ but it’s too late: on your street, in your house, everything collapses suddenly into an unplanned slurry of nanotech, half-tailored viruses and
human fats – your husband, your two little girls in their identical dresses, you. ‘Entire planetary populations,’ Renoko said, ‘are converting to this stuff. Is it an
end-state?’ He threw up his little hands. ‘No one knows! Is it a new medium? No one is willing to say! It’s as beautiful as water in strong sunlight, yet it stinks like
rendered fat, and can absorb an adult human being in forty seconds. The hulks are full of it, the quarantine orbit is full of hulks. Men like you keep it safe.’ Obsolete pipeliners that
worked the Carling Line, decommissioned Alcubierre warps the size of planetisimals, anything with a thick hull, especially if it’s easy to reinforce further: Fat Antoyne had a sudden clear
image of those pocked relics in the interplanetary darkness – used-up ships mysterious with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs, pinwheeling around on near-chaotic
operator-controlled trajectories.