Empty Space (24 page)

‘Someone went in there,’ he heard her whisper.

‘So they say.’

‘It wasn’t so long ago. I wondered if I should go too.’

Exotic radiation bathed them both, to different ends, for twenty minutes. By the time van Sant emerged from its trailing edge, she had resumed her restless patrol of empty space, and he was
alone again.

Don’t go!
Imps wanted to shout.

He always failed to ask her so many things.

Who are you? What are you? Why are we out here, the two of us? What’s the nature of your dialogue with the universe? What happens next? Is it possible for species as different as us
to fuck?

All of these questions but one were in fact asked of himself, and might have been rephrased:
Will I ever go home?

None of them mattered if you were involved with R.I. Gaines. Everything Rig ever did implied that the real action was happening elsewhere. Some other domain of possibilities was being actively
explored alongside this one. Gaines’ motives were so obscure – his projects went so unreported, even in the hierarchy of EMC – that in the end only your own part in an op could
be described (for the same reason, it could hardly be called a ‘contribution’, since you had no idea what it contributed to). Every time Imps’ alien visitor appeared, she forced
him to query not why Rig Gaines wanted him out here in the middle of nowhere, but what facet of his so-called personality had prompted him to agree to come there in the first place.

Days like that, when she had departed, leaving the lights turned off in van Sant’s head, his instruments showed him nothing but his own cast-off past: Levy flight after Levy flight into
empty space. He had no consolation but the long slow struggle to understand his own course. That and the Tract. Because the Tract is gaining on us, Imps thought: it’s slowly catching up
with the real universe. The first place it would wash over was the Beach. Meanwhile, Imps van Sant was closer to it, he believed, than any other living beachcomber: which meant the first one it
would wash over was him.

A long way off, in the ballroom of the Deleuze Motel, the assistant sat recovering herself. She drank barrel proof rum from the bottle and watched the old men work the
overend on one another at the Ship Game – adjusting their white caps, shooting the cuffs of their formal shirts with sharp economical gestures, whispering, ‘Well now,’ or
‘
Now
you fucked.’ In their opinion, the night was moving along: every so often one of them would cock his head at the sound of the ocean, lean across, and, black eyes as empty
as raisins, assure the assistant that the night was moving right along. Dice rattled and scattered, shedding alien luck as friction brought them to a standstill. The faint smell of vomit coming
and going in the cold air, the assistant realised, originated with her. Three am, the tide was fully out. R.I. Gaines walked in through the sea-facing wall.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘The Ship Game! Make room!’

The old men blinked up at him like lizards. They made room. Something he could do with the bone interested them, they were disposed to admit. Soon, they were taking his money, he was taking
theirs. ‘It’s a redistributive system,’ he proposed. Redistribution, they agreed, was the name of that particular game. The assistant watched these events from a distance, then
walked over to the door. The breeze was onshore. Dawn wasn’t far off. Seeming to notice her for the first time, Gaines jumped to his feet and led her back into the room. He made a gesture
that took in the salt-stained walls, the chandelier with its two dim bulbs, the dusty signs behind the bar.

‘Sometimes you’re quite hard to find,’ he said.

The assistant shrugged. She offered him the rum. ‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to go and sit on my bed together?’

He gave her a thoughtful look.

‘The Aleph stopped asking for you. We wondered if you knew anything about that.’

‘I never know what you’re talking about.’

Gaines grinned. He held up the bottle, studied the label. ‘“Black Heart”,’ he quoted. ‘“All the sweet lacunae of the Caribbean Sea”.’

The assistant looked down at her arm. Nothing was happening there.

‘I wonder if it’s time you two met?’ Gaines asked himself.

The fact was, he couldn’t decide. He had recently come from the Aleph site, where there had been more activity than he expected, reflections of smart displays
fluttering across the shiny carbon floor, smells of ionisation and construction. Case’s people were devising new containment principles. It was a high risk period for them all. They had no
idea what they were dealing with. When Gaines arrived they were arguing if they wanted a bunch of fat cables in here just for the look of it, or do the whole thing tight beam, which, hey, would
be the quick and dirty solution. It was a professionally toxic but busy atmosphere. The reason being, Case told Gaines, that early the same morning Pearl had begun to emit pulsed bursts of
RF.

‘It’s not organised, as far as we can tell.’

‘So what is it?’

Case shrugged. ‘It’s not exactly random noise either,’ he said.

‘I’m impressed. Is there anything you guys don’t know?’

‘Rig, we’re doing what we can here,’ Case said tiredly.

His imaging team produced a hologram display that rotated the woman smoothly around every axis so that she looked like virtual false-colour shots of a sculpture, spoiled by some sort of faint,
in situ interference. Attempts to clean the interference out had only given her the lines of a Deco portrait, freezing the folds of her gown to create strong contentless curves suggestive of
power and energy. Her eyes were rendered the same colour as her face, without pupil or lids. ‘After we took these I had them build a field tomography unit round her,’ Case said.
‘Forget it. It was like looking into nacre.’ As far as X-rays were concerned, she was solid all through. ‘Positron emission feels the same about her. We decided not to try
neutrons, in case she bore some slight resemblance to a human being.’

‘She looks as if she’s falling,’ Gaines said. ‘Caught falling.’

Her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left of the ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly
back from the knee; they were as far apart as the skirt of the gown permitted. The feet were bare. The arms, outstretched either side of the head, curved towards the ceiling of the chamber; the
hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. The gown fluttered stiffly, as if caught in strong air currents venting through the floor of the control room. The
effect was of someone falling sideways from a great height.

‘How close can I get?’ Gaines asked.

‘Close as you like,’ Case said.

To Gaines she had that inner focus possessed by the very sick. When he whispered, ‘Hey, who are you? What is it you don’t like about yourself?’ she only looked through him,
contorting herself slowly, trying to alter her position around the fall-line, her expression full of fear and rage. He stepped in and knelt down until eighteen inches of air separated their
faces, but he couldn’t force himself any closer – he experienced the sensation of inappropriately invading someone’s personal space, but worse. And where he had expected to feel
the air moving around her, fluttering her gown, it was just the opposite, very still.

‘I can feel heat radiating off her,’ he told Case.

‘Other people think they hear a voice,’ Case said, ‘ too far away to make out words. Or they smell something, maybe perfume. We think everyone’s trying to describe the
same sensation, but so far no one’s got near enough to find out. You’ve done better than most.’

‘Before, there was some kind of paste coming out of her mouth?’

‘That’s on and off,’ Case said. As for the RF transmission, he added, it was very low power. It had a very local reach. ‘If she’s hooked up with anything,
it’s already arrived. It’s in the maze.’

‘Jesus, Case. Do we have any idea at all where she came from?’

Case looked amused.

‘No,’ he said. ‘One other thing: sometimes there’s a convulsion. She dribbles – we can’t collect any of it, whatever it is – and there’s a lot
of shifting and partial fading. Just for a moment she looks like a much older woman. Nothing’s finished here.’

NINETEEN

Anyone Can Make a Mistake

‘Look at all these women,’ Anna Waterman said.

Nine in the morning, and the radiography reception area at St Narcissus, Farringdon was full of them, their anxiety expressed as a tendency to text. Their thumbs brushed the keys of their
phones at ferocious speeds; they weren’t going to look up, in case that meant admitting something about their predicament. The reception area helped. It was less a waiting room than a
stylised version of one – a quiet postmodern whimsy about lines of chairs against a wall – featuring upholstery in calm warm shades of blue-grey, uplighters like white porcelain cups,
clean little round tables piled with the terrestrial editions of property and gossip magazines which no one read any more. Framed on the walls were silhouettes of a cat, which, when you looked at
them in a certain way, proved to resemble 2-dimensional slices through the animal, a joke cooked up between the radiologists and St Narcissus’ artist-in-residence. But underneath the joke
everything it referred to remained, and when you looked up there was a stain on the ceiling tiles, shaped, according to your mood, either like the map of a distant island or a section through
someone’s tumour.

‘That,’ said Anna, who hated hospitals, ‘is the giveaway.’

Marnie laughed.

‘I quite like the uplighters,’ she said, then: ‘Mum, I’ve just got to send a text.’

‘No one can like uplighters, surely?’

‘Mum—’

The receptionist interrupted them. ‘It’s an IUV appointment, isn’t it?’ he shouted at Anna.

‘Excuse me?’ Anna said. ‘I’m not the patient.’

‘You’ve had your kidneys done, dear, haven’t you? Last week? Now look, why don’t you just read this leaflet for me while you wait?’

‘Why? Can’t you read it yourself?’ She glanced at the leaflet, made out the words, ‘Please attend promptly at the Radiology reception desk,’ and repeated with
ominous clarity, leaving plenty of space between the words: ‘I’m not the patient.’

During the exchange that followed, Marnie’s scan was called. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised. ‘Why not sit there, where you can watch the TV?’

‘Don’t you start.’

While she waited, Anna leafed through the magazines.
Homes You Can’t Afford
offered high definition photography of listed buildings in Surrey and Perthshire. Old issues of
Mine
and
Get
brought her the clothes, gadgets and, especially, the elective surgeries of the rich. The eight-year-old male heir to one of the bigger hedge-fund operations of the
2010s had persuaded the family surgeons to fit him with the uterus and womb of ‘an unknown East Asian donor’ for a month; while his mother, upon having her skin genetically modified
to produce downy feathers a calculated charcoal-grey colour, announced with satisfaction that she had ‘achieved the look she had always wanted’, as if she’d done the procedures
herself at home. She looked a little like a Porsche. Mother and son smiled languidly out of the papagraphs, thoroughly warmed by themselves. September’s
Watchtowe
r, meanwhile,
promised Comfort For The Elderly. Anna stared at it with dislike. Then, because she had been awake all night, she fell asleep and dreamed about sex. Marnie woke her not long later, and they went
across the road to a branch of Carluccio’s to drink cioccolata calda, ‘nun’s revenge’, a favourite of Marnie’s since she was eight. Anna ordered an almond croissant,
but instead of almond paste it turned out to have a kind of thin, rather unpleasant custard in it.

‘Well, I’m glad that’s over,’ Marnie said. She put her hand on Anna’s. ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said. ‘Really.’

‘Just remind me what kind of scan it was?’

Marnie took her hand away. She looked despondent. ‘You might at least try and keep up with my life.’

‘I think you probably told me but I forgot.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘I don’t feel as if you have any kind of grip on things.’

‘If you’re still upset about the bathroom—’

‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘Marnie, anyone can make a mistake.’

‘It isn’t the bathroom.’

‘Well then what?’

Marnie turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I’m ill and you pick a quarrel with the receptionist.’

‘He was patronising me.’

‘I’m ill,’ Marnie said stubbornly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone for a scan if I felt well.’

‘I thought you said it was nothing.’

‘It is nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But that’s not the point. I tell you not to worry and you just accept that?’ Marnie made a dismissive gesture. Suddenly she
pushed back her chair. ‘We don’t seem to live in the same world any more, Anna,’ she said. She got up and walked out.

For some time after she had gone, Anna sat at the table with her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to do or think next. Outside the huge windows of Carlucci’s, rain poured
down through the sunshine, turning Farringdon – for the first and last time, you imagined – into a romantic film of itself. People hurried by, laughing; Anna watched them until the
rain stopped. Across the road, an optician’s sign blinked and shifted: her eyes followed that. When the coffee machine hissed, her head turned that way. She listened to the people at the
table next to her. Other people went in and out of the doors. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind her, laughing and shrieking. People never seem to grow up or change, she thought.
After about half an hour, Marnie came back and said she was sorry, and went off again to work. Anna took the tube to Waterloo and was home by midday.