Empty Space (31 page)

‘On fire again,’ thought Anna. ‘How tiresome.’

This time it presented as a whole series of buildings: it was a sixteenth-century windmill on the Downs, a Dickensian lapboard cottage as tarry as an upturned boat on a beach, a Palladian
folly collapsing into the Pagan site on which it stood. These structures slowly replaced one another in a shifting field of view. They loomed and shrank, as if they were approaching or receding.
Each arrived not simply with its own architectural style but with its own style of mediation, from hard-edge photographic to St Ives impressionist, from construction-paper silhouette to
matchstick hobbyist Gothic. One minute it was a woodcut of a summerhouse, with static flames; the next, impasto rubbed on with someone’s thumb.

Pausing only to remove Kearney’s computer drive from the recycling bin, Anna went out and stood in the orchard, barefoot, naked, quiet, no longer sure what age she might be.

‘Whoever you are,’ she said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

As if in response, the summerhouse cycled through a few more versions of itself, becoming in succession a Tarot card (the Tower, always falling, always in flames, index and harbinger of a life
in transit); a canonical firework from someone’s vanished childhood, a ‘volcano’ wrapped in red and blue paper, pouring out pink-dyed light, smoke, showers of sparks, thick
dribbles of lava; and a sagging fairground marquee, with scalloped eaves and pennants in many different colours. Cartoon bottle-rockets fizzed into the air behind it, bursting in showers of
objects which toppled back to earth with inappropriate noises – plastic crockery that rang like a bell, an Edwardian railway train pumping out the sinewy sound of pigeon wings in an empty
industrial space – folding themselves up and vanishing even as they fell. These objects smelled of leather, frost, lemon meringue pie; they smelled of precursor chemicals. They smelled of
Pears Soap.

Anna approached until the heat began to tighten the skin above her eyes. At that distance, the summerhouse steadied itself. It reverted to the familar. Then a dense spew of smaller items
fountained up from the flowerbeds, poured out of the door, blew off the roof, resolving itself into a display of a thousand fireflies, sleet falling through car headlights, showers of jewels and
boiled sweets, enamelled lapel badges, shards of stained glass. Strings of coloured fairy lights and fake pearls, glittering Christmas baubles. Little mechanical toys – beetles, novelty
swimmers, jumping kangaroos, all powered by rusted-up clockwork from the first great phase of Chinese industrialisation. Parti-coloured juggling balls. A thousand giveaway pens. A thousand cheap
GPS systems that no longer ran. Bells and belts. Birds that really whistled; birds that sang. A million tiny electrical components and bits of ancient circuit boards as if every transistor radio
ever made had been buried in the earth, and with them – like a kind of grave-goods! – the faint music and voices of
Workers’ Playtime
,
Woman’s Hour
or
Journey Into Space
, everything they once had played. A fog of small consumer goods. All the rubbish of a life, or someone else’s life.

Anna Waterman née Selve stopped a pace or two before the summerhouse door. She tilted her head and listened.

‘Hello?’ she said.

She said: ‘Oh, what is it now?’

Everything was very calm and quiet and smelling of the hotel bathroom when she stepped inside and began to fall. She let go of the computer drive in surprise. At the last moment, James the
black and white cat darted between her legs. All three of them, the woman, the animal and the data, fell out of this world together. Glare and dark, strobing into sudden silence and things
switching off busily, up and down the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

TWENTY THREE

Heart Sounds & Bruits

MP Renoko – that mysterious software entity which, people said, was all that remained of Sandra Shen’s Circus – had returned lately from an inspection of
major Quarantine orbits all over the Halo.

He was tired but happy. With these visits, interesting but necessarily clandestine, his contribution was complete. The cargo in place, the client settled in the hold of the ship they called
the
Nova Swing
, his part in things coming to an end, he took a last walk down by the sea, a mile along from the circus ground on South Hemisphere, New Venusport. Away from motel and
beach-bar it was all spray and sunshine, the water booming in on a steep shore strewn with rocks the size of white goods, where sunbathing men and women lay like lizards staring blankly at the
spray as it exploded up in front of them. The huge waves, MP Renoko said, might have been in a hologram for all the notice they took of them.

‘You wonder,’ he added, to the ghost by his side, ‘why they have so little common sense.’

‘But look!’ the ghost said. ‘Look!’

She hacked with her heel at the shingle then bent down quickly and prised something loose. After the removal of a bit of seaweed it turned out to be an old round coin with a small square hole
in the middle, still somehow bright and untarnished. ‘Down between the rocks,’ she said, ‘spiders make their webs. A foot or two from all that surf! They tremble every time a
wave comes in, and we can’t express the sense of anxiety with which this fills us.’ A shrug. ‘Yet every year there are webs and spiders.’

The coin, flipped into the air, glittered briefly.

‘Heads or tails?’ enquired the ghost.

‘You were always the best arguer,’ Renoko acknowledged. ‘I know it’s wrong to say, “I think”. I should say, “I am thought”.’

She took his arm, and gave him her faint little oriental smile.

‘You should,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay long. Back to the circus? Or on to the diner?’

‘I’m ready to go anywhere.’

Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn’t a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot
prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the
cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet’s housekeeping, stood a sixty by sixteen foot O’Mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine
but known to its habitués – edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast – simply as ‘the Tambourine’. By day, the gulls dived and gyred above
its deco stainless steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured
stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o’ clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass,
where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe.

‘On your own here,’ Renoko said, ‘you can hear voices in the tide.’

His weariness amazed him.

Shortly after these events, a strange scene took place on board the
Nova Swing
. The cabin lights flickered. The Dynaflow drivers ran rough, failed briefly, then came
back up, inserting a blank space in the crew’s experience of their lives roughly equal to the effects of a transient ischemic attack.

Down in the main hold, a wave went through the deck plates, as if matter could experience a stroke too. Light and dark became muddled. The mortsafes bumped together like moored boats. The lid
of the K-tank blew off violently and clattered away, revealing the proteome inside, which slopped about like dirty salt water at night. Through its surface burst the occupant of the tank, a
wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican haircut and a couple of snake tattoos, whose body resembled, from the diaphragm down, a charred and tattered coat. His spine was cabled at
neurotypical energy sites. Half-drowned, throwing up with the vertigo of aborted interstellar flight, he stared round in panic at the main hold, the gathered mortsafes. Proteome poured off him,
smelling of horse glue; rendered fat; the albumen of a bad egg. Whatever he had been dreaming was gone for good. He wasn’t used to a non-electronic presence in the universe: it was some
time since he had been available in this form. He looked down at himself.

‘Jesus, Renoko,’ he complained to the empty air. ‘I’ve got no fucking legs. You didn’t tell me that.’

He fell to plucking the thick rubber cables out of his spine. He tried and failed to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

The condition of the K-tank seemed to impress him. ‘Remind me to come the easy way round next time,’ he said. He addressed the mortsafes. ‘Anyone got any tissues, or like
that?’

What did they think of this performance?

They were content with it. They were aliens. They had, by now, spent a claustrophobic fortnight in the
Nova Swing
main hold with its black and yellow warning stripes, loose
tool-cupboard doors, injunctions to work safe with plasma. They understood where they were, and they understood why. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Working for Sandra Shen
had required, at the least, hundreds of years of travel from distant places. They had performed vital functions at the demise of her Observatorium & Native Karma Plant. They had abandoned
sane environments, left behind homes and families, to be part of the faux-Chinese woman’s engine of change. Like her, they were here to work on behalf of others. They were content with the
burnt man because they were content with that.

The
Nova Swing
chewed a long hole between the stars, her doomed crew staring out so that sometimes their faces appeared at the portholes together, sometimes apart. The
police were after her on several worlds. The beef: artefact smuggling. Possible Quarantine infringement. Wanted in connection with the death of a Saudade factor going by ‘Toni Reno’.
She sneaked from world to world across the Beach. Since she took aboard the crippled K-tank, she had dropped in quietly at Goat’s Eye and the Inverted Swan; fallen across the empty spaces
between Radio Bay and the Tract itself; drifted seventy-four hours, all systems powered down, at heavily coded co-ordinates in the notorious dXVII-Channing Oort cloud. MP Renoko was a no-show at
all those venues. Then, just when they had given up on him, he poked his head through the crew quarters wall and said to Fat Antoyne, as if continuing a conversation they had started in The East
Ural Nature reserve on Vera Rubin’s World:

‘Everyone their own evolutionary project, Fat Antoyne!’

Antoyne said, ‘Jesus.’

‘Who’s this little old cunt?’ Irene wanted to know. She looked Renoko over, her irises dark with satire. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Antoyne, get off
me.’ It was not Renoko’s chinbeard she hated; or even his 1960s paedophile look, which she admitted was chic enough. It was the sense she had that he was always keeping something of
himself in reserve. Or not even something: everything. ‘Come in,’ she invited, resettling on her hips some items of dress: ‘We got your cargo of meaningless toys.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ Renoko said.

‘That won’t work here, Renoko. The only thing that will work here is this—’ making the universal sign for money ‘—then you go, taking the rusty pipework
with you.’ If you were driven by unknown forces, her body language implied, best not be around Irene.

Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘Why kill Toni Reno?’ he asked Renoko. ‘I don’t get it.’

Renoko looked puzzled.

‘We didn’t do that,’ he said.

Irene held out her hand again, palm up. She said, ‘Well it wasn’t us either.’

‘Thanks for the information,’ Renoko said. ‘I’ll make arrangements,’ he told Antoyne.

He winked, and his face went back through the wall. He didn’t mean money, but Antoyne wasn’t to know that. Just before his face vanished it added, ‘You might have some
communications problems in the next hour or so. Don’t panic.’ Down in the main hold where he next materialised, he found the charred man working on one of the mortsafes with a
pulsed-spray welding set four hundred years old. Sparks flew everywhere. In their heat and light, this shabby enclosed space seemed like the very forge of God. Renoko watched for a minute or two
in an impressed way and then said, ‘Is that Metal Active Gas?’

The charred man pushed back his goggles and shook his head.

‘MIG,’ he said. ‘You weld?’

‘Never,’ Renoko admitted. ‘But I love to watch.’

The charred man nodded. He heard that all the time, his nod said, but he still appreciated the compliment. Not everyone can weld. After they had allowed a little time to pass around this
shared enthusiasm, he said, ‘Hey, what a shit body you found for me!’

‘It’s your own,’ Renoko pointed out.

‘I don’t remember doing this to it.’

‘It will serve the purpose,’ Renoko said. ‘She says you can begin any time. They’re ready for you in the quarantine orbits.’

The charred man scratched his Mohican. ‘If not now, when?’ he asked himself. But he looked as if he had reservations. Then he shrugged and laughed and clapped Renoko’s
shoulder. ‘Hey, so she came to say goodbye to you after all,
La Chinoise
?’