Empty Space (38 page)

It was very tall; it was dark and light at the same time. It reminded her of a restaurant she and Marnie used to visit for lunch, built into the shell of an abandoned power station in Wapping.
She had a sense of dread. She could see a little, but she didn’t know what any of it was. There were people all round her. They gestured and goggled, trying to push their faces close into
hers. Their mouths opened and closed, yet it was Anna who felt like the fish in the tank. They were studying her.

‘How close can I get?’ they asked one another, and: ‘Do we have any idea where she came from?’

‘We don’t have an idea about anything.’

Laughter.

‘She looks as if she’s falling. Caught falling.’

‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption, Gaines.’

In fact, Anna felt like someone caught going to the lavatory in the middle of Waterloo station in the rush hour. She had a slightly nauseous sense of James the cat, so close she couldn’t
quite bring him into focus. It was embarrassing. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else. There was something the matter with her cheekbones. She
felt smeary and unstable at significant sites, in the manner of a Francis Bacon painting. At the same time she felt as if she had been penetrated by something huge in an inappropriate part of her
body; or, worse, that she had penetrated it. What made her condition so impossible was the nature of this object.

It was her own life.

In Saudade City, the Toni Reno case was duly filed ‘unsolved’.

Not long after, Epstein the thin cop found himself on patrol with a uniform called Grills. It was a mild night. Some rain. The traffic on Tupolev was thinner than usual. For the b-girls, on
parade in their candy-coloured mambo pumps at the corner of Johnson & Chrome, business was slow. Over at Preter Coeur, the fights were slow. From Placebo Heights to the Funnel, from Retiro
Street to Beasley Street, entire entertainment demographics were staying home.

GlobeTown, 2 am: Epstein and Grills found time to talk about the war. Grills believed it could lead to a permanent change in the social landscape. Crime tourism, she said, had tanked; they
also were seeing across-the-board decreases in illegal tailoring, donkey capers, sensorium porn and other personality hacks. But the way Epstein saw it war was only another layer added to a bad
cake – these downward trends she outlined being balanced by the growing market in counterfeit identity chips, food stamps and rackrenting. If personality crime was down, smuggling was up,
seventeen per cent year on year. After a pause to consider this, Grills opined that a lot more crowd control overtime would be available in the months to come; with that Epstein could only agree,
and they left it at that. Suddenly there was a white flash in the sky high up, silent but very sharp, very high-end. Epstein shaded his eyes with one broad hand.

‘Is it an attack?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Grills said. ‘I’ve seen an attack, and there was—’ here, she felt around for the right words ‘—more of it.’

Five hundred miles above their heads, K-ships were disappearing from one orbit to reappear almost immediately in another. Empty space was frying with their communications. A minute ago they
had been administering their flock of rusted hulks: now they were facing into a void. Ten million metric tonnes of psychophysical gunk, welded into receptacles ranging from the size of a coffin
to that of a largish asteroid, had gone missing. The news media were full of it. Some fierce new kind of physics had lit up the sky and in a matter of nanoseconds the entire quarantine orbit of
Saudade had drained away like dirty water in front of people’s eyes. The Quarantine Police were mystified. Everyone else was excited. All over GlobeTown, they came running out of the bars
and Nueva Tango joints to stare up into the rain. Epstein and Grills, glad of the action, kept order. ‘Nothing to see here,’ they admonished; but they stared up too.

‘Who wanted that shit anyway,’ Grills remarked, voicing the general sense of relief that would set in over the next few hours.

Two or three streets away, in a tenement so close to the corporate port that its geometry shifted a little every time a ship came in, things were holding up well for George the gene
tailor.

Perhaps he looked a little bloated. Internal changes had taken place. If you found him, it might not be wise to move him. And he was, of course, dead: so his hold on things had become tenuous.
But he still had what might be described as a footprint there, in the assistant’s old room. At this scale, anyway. If you were able to see the room as a context fixed across a couple of
hundred years, George, like everyone else who had spent time there, would be part of a kind of dark smoke rushing through. However hard they tried to fix an identity for themselves at one scale,
it was taken away from them at another. They thought of themselves as people but they were more like ghosts or ads – anything that flocks or swarms.

Meanwhile, a thousand light years from home, the assistant was undergoing transitions of her own. They were quick and dirty. The world, coming apart into pixels, streamed like
eels then reassembled itself around her. She was looking out, as if through tinted glass, or from a very dissociated position, into a room.

Part of her was a million years old and the size of a brown dwarf; other parts were, for the moment at least, describable only as ‘something else’. She was neither conscious nor
unconscious, dead nor alive. Sediment oozed from the corner of her mouth. If you had asked how she felt, she would have answered, ‘Spread thin.’ There were deep shadows up in the
ceiling. There was a noise like tinnitus. People came and went at the wrong speed, in groups and smears like animated statistics. Some of them were people the assistant had talked to earlier.
Some of them were pushing racks of equipment about. They were all ignoring her. All she could do was wait for them to notice what had happened, wait for the situation to stabilise, and encourage
them to engage with her. She was patient and calm. If she didn’t have a name, she could at least identify herself.

‘SiteCrime, Saudade City,’ she repeated at every opportunity. ‘Junction of Uniment & Poe. Fifth floor investigator.’

Someone peered in at her from very close quarters.

‘Gaines?’ he said, raising his voice and tilting his head almost horizontally into her field of view: ‘You might be interested in this. It’s asking for
something.’

‘There’s a data spike in VF14/2b,’ someone else called.

The assistant was impaled on that spike. It went right through her, and she through it. There was no describing what had happened to either of them.

‘It keeps repeating this address.’

‘Address?’

‘It’s asking for a detective from some hick police service the other side of the Halo.’

Anna Waterman could watch the soap slip off the edge of the bath one night in 1999.

A white figure knelt in the cooling bathwater, while another figure curled round it from behind. Laughter. The water splashed about and the bath made vigorous but mournful sounds.

Unused to skulking around her own life like this, Anna found its details surprising: not so much in themselves but in that they existed at all. It was exciting, in a way, to see your own naked
body walking away from you, or hear yourself say with a laugh, ‘Now, what can we
eat
?’ But everything had the false clarity you get with a certain kind of photograph. Every
surface proved to be microscopically available to her new vantage point; yet they were without meaning. The facts were often different too. The man in the bath, for instance, who she had always
remembered as Michael, turned out to be Tim. How embarrassing. Everything was the same but, in the end, quite different. You could count the varieties of toothpaste in the bathroom, which a
memory of sex doesn’t normally encourage. She could view every aspect of that event, and of the events surrounding it, and of every other event in her life. A generation later, water poured
its yeasty bulk over the Brownlow weir; ponies ran about in a field as if suddenly released; skylarks rose and fell over the South Downs like busy lifts: at exactly the same time, Anna could
watch herself, peacefully becalmed in what she had learned to call the Noughties, rapping upon her kitchen window.

‘Marnie,’ she was calling, ‘you annoying child! Leave the hose alone!’

Marnie at six years old. Anna tidying up for Tim. Anna, alone with her life at last, staring out across the field in the June twilight, drinking her fourth glass of Pinot Noir. She called the
cat home, ‘James, you old fool. What have you found now?’ She saw herself undress beneath the willows, hide her shoes, wade into the river in the moonlight. But, as bright and precise
as if she was viewing them through optical glass, these scenes only reminded her of her present predicament. As she watched herself go up and down the garden – a neat, doll-like, slightly
speeded-up figure seen day after day under mixed lighting conditions, moving inevitably towards its own fall – she began to think how the situation might be retrieved. She could connect
with any of those moments. She could have a voice in her own past.

Everything that was wrong stemmed from the summerhouse.

What if Anna didn’t fall?

All over the Halo, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with an expenditure of energy amounting almost to fanfare, the Quarantine orbits had begun to empty themselves out. Reports
conflicted. The situation was confused.

Two hundred miles above Mas d’Elies, showers of shortlived exotic vacuum events were detected, nesting inside the usual quantum froth like pearls in a handful of black lace. Such subtle
fireworks, originating deep in the graininess of the universe itself, were normally associated with only the most alien of engines—

Twenty-five fuck-tourists from Keks-Varley III claimed to have seen ‘a wheel of fire’ crossing the nightside sky of Funene. Visible to the naked eye for three hours, it broke up
into a series of aurora-like pulses then fell below the horizon. During this period no activity was observed in the quarantine orbit; though shortly afterwards it became invisible to
instruments—

Laid out under stark light like dirty ice rings round a methane giant, the vast orbit at Mycenae had been for years a destination in itself, drawing tourists from as far away as Bell
Laboratories and Anais Anais. The biggest collection of dead people in the universe, it broke up across a day, only to reassemble not long afterwards just outside the system’s heliosheath;
flowing away from there into interstellar space, a broad slow river. The K-ships, darting in and out of it like kingfishers, caught nothing: what they saw was not what they got—

In the cold and dark over New Venusport, the hulks blinked out one by one. Last to go: the tiny cockleshell containing Bobby and Martha, along with the outbreak of rogue code known as Bella.
The little boy, who didn’t remember much, assumed his present condition was a phase everyone went through. Life, enticing and inexplicable by turns, had already demonstrated its weirdness.
One thing was certain, Bobby thought: you were out the other side of most things in a year. The women knew better. Since the events in her room Bella had been, in a sense, all three of them. Long
before that, she had given up on the idea of knowledge: to her, the sarcophagus was as puzzling as the hallway of a house. Martha, meanwhile, alternating between panic and acceptance, awaited
resolution.