Empty Space (11 page)

Everyone, anyway, wanted a piece of it. Alarms were going off. In-house fire teams, weighed down with hand-held  thermobarics and bandoliers of Chambers ammunition, grinned out of
every lift. The assistant took the stairs. Halfway down, something so strange happened  she never reached the basement. An emergency door opened on to the echoing stairwell in front of her
and the figure of a woman emerged on to the landing. She was tall, built, shaven-headed, looking back over her shoulder, finishing a sentence with a word that sounded  like
‘Pearlent.’ At that, the assistant raised her hand. ‘Stop!’ she called. Her tailoring launched but would not come up to operating speed: instead, she saw the world at a
subtle wrong angle, as if she was someone else, with annunciative  light pouring in a dazzle down the stairwell. The figure turned towards her, mouth open in a laugh she couldn’t
interpret, and whispered, ‘Don’t jump, babe!’ Half blind and full of inexplicable dread, she watched  it vanish  round  the  next turn  in  the
 stairs. Footsteps hurried  away. Lower down, a door boomed closed. Nothing else. The assistant sat down, breathing  heavily, nauseous  with waste chemicals from her own
overdriven systems. They had not been interdicted  from outside; they had simply become emotional and confused. They were all right now.

She left the building, and later turned up at Sharp Cuts, a downscale tailor parlour on Straint, where the owner, who had made his way to Saudade City after an accident in an Uncle Zip
franchise nearer the Galactic core, took one look at her and said:

‘I can’t do anything for someone like you.’ At the same time, his clients that morning  – half a dozen gun-kiddies from the beach enclaves of Suicide Point, in
for a midprice growth blocker called
7-4eva
–were leaving by the back door. Five feet from the assistant you could smell the heavy metals in her blood, the hiked ATP transport
 protocols, the immune  system add-ons: they would be enough to drive anyone away. Among other gifts, she could hear naturally to 50 kHz, then process up to 1000 kHz by
frequency-division,  heterodyne   and  expansion  systems,  the  product   of which was delivered as one of a hundred  realtime visual
overlays. Her skin, infra-red  sensitive, reported  to biological chips laid in subdermally on a metamaterial mesh. These kinds of cuts weren’t police, or even SportCrime. She
had Preter Coeur written on her at every biological scale. You could smell the animal smell of the fights, the chemicals in her  tears. She encouraged  the tailor  to come out from
behind his counter and stepped in close to him.

‘Try,’ she said.

He would look at anything but her – out the window, all around his storefront.  His own hormones  had  come up  in some half-forgotten response.
He was trying not to feel helpless. ‘I’ve seen you up and down the street,’ he said. ‘This stuff of yours, it isn’t just some franchise  job.’ She smiled
and  asked him  his name, which he gave as George. She said he shouldn’t talk himself down. He was just the expert she needed. She said she thought she might have an ion channel
problem. ‘You should go to Preter Coeur,’ he tried to persuade her. ‘Here we just do the cheap bolt-ons.’ She made him meet her eyes. He went and found a
six-regime loupe, which looked like a child’s stereopsis toy from the deep historical times, and she jumped up on one of his cutting tables where he could insert probes.

‘I don’t get most of this,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘I’d be scared and confused, I met you on the street.’

‘George, you’re scared and confused in here.’

‘Keep still,’ he cautioned  her. ‘Jesus,’ he said, after a minute more. ‘They wired everything through the amygdala. You ever act without knowing why? Cry a
lot? Use metaphors? Who did this to you?’ He poked around  in her ion channels. ‘Forget I asked that,’ he said. He said she could get up, she might feel as if she had low
blood sugar for a time. It wouldn’t be much. ‘You got Kv12.2 expression issues. When they tuned the neuronal gates for spatial perception, they put Kv12.2 on a hair trigger. Every so
often that’s going to fall over, you‘ll see damping of the potassium  channel. What happens then, the nerve cells fire excessively.’

The assistant stared at him.

‘It’s nice when you talk like that,’ she said.

‘They put a control loop in but someone like me can’t unpick it. You hear any voices when this fault happens? Speak in tongues? See anything odd?’

‘Everything I see is odd.’

‘Kv12.2,’ the cutter said, ‘is a very old gene.’

He washed his hands under a tap he had at the back of the store.

‘Even a fish has it. Are you going to kill me?’

‘Not today, hon.’

She left, but almost immediately came back.

‘Hey, look, Tango du Chat is just over the road!’ she said, as if she had only just discovered that fact about the world.

The parlour filled up with her rank smell again. Outside, the sun warmed each shabby frontage, picking out the unlit bar sign across the street – a black and white cat dancing on its
hind legs – while two monas in pencil skirts and seamed nylon stockings gossiped at the intersection  of Straint and dos Santos; inside, it was matt black walls, dust. There was a
smell of stale lipids in the air around the proteome tanks, with their rows of LEDs and torn posters for year-old fights, long-dead fighters. The tailor, rigid with disquiet, looked away
from her as hard as he could. His anxiety flipped suddenly into depression. ‘You got Preter Coeur written all through you,’ he said, ‘but no one signed the work. This
isn’t something they would do for a sport fighter. There’s military stuff in there too.’

‘So do you want to get a drink sometime, George?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Yes you do,’ the assistant said.

Later, as puzzled by her own motives as anyone else’s, she left him in the bar listening to Edith  Bonaventure  play the sentimental accordion solo from
Ya
Skaju Tebe
– 2450’s favourite song – and drove herself up Straint Street, through  acre after acre of industrial dereliction and out on to the Lots, where she slipped
her ’52 Cadillac quietly into the row of cars already parked there, on the cracked expanse of weed-grown cement in a long curve facing the Event site.

The cloudbase was down since lunch, Saudade City afternoon rain coming on. Fifty yards into the gloom, she saw rubble and sagging razor wire. Beyond that the landscape crawled constantly, as
if uncomfortable with itself, or as if you were viewing it through water flowing on glass. Further  away, you could make out unfamiliar objects being tossed up into the air by a silent but
convulsive force. This force, though it had been given many names, was as impossible to understand  as the objects themselves, which, scaled in incongruous ways – giant crockery, huge
shoes, ornaments and jewellery, bluebirds and rainbows, tiny bridges, tiny ships and tiny public buildings  – were so unconstrained  by context  that  they seemed less
objects than images, collaged on to a further  image of bad weather and ruined landscape. They rose, floated, toppled, thrown up as if by the hands of a gigantic, bad-tempered, invisible
child. The assistant shook her head over all this. Cars came and went around her; something big broke the cloud cover and settled near her briefly. (It brought an extra pressure to the air, along
with heat, feelings of invasion, the stink of metamaterials  and intelligent nanoresins. Then it was gone.) Finally, she started up the car and drove off at walking pace across the
cement.

Every afternoon  was the same: rickshaws and  sedans arrived from all over the city to take part in this drive-in of the Saudade soul. By 3pm the Lots were rammed. A fluttering,
soft-focus carnival of mothy adverts filled the air above each car. In the darkened rear seats, someone always had their floral print  up round  their waist, laughing and grunting
at the same time as their friend drove them  into  a corner  in the luxury smell of leather. No one was afraid of the site any more. They came openly, just to enjoy a fuck in its
aureole of weirdness. It was quantum  sex, the news media said, and could even be good for you. Some of them were going as far as to leave their vehicles and wander the empty streets and
piles of rubble in the mist beyond the wire, picking up objects they thought might make souvenirs.

These were not precisely crimes. What was she to do?

When she opened the door, he was laughing and running  his hands over his scalp. The shoulders of his coat were wet – this time it looked real. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I
hate the rain, and I bet you do too.’ Behind him, the port was full of activity. The shadows and lights of alien, fiercely contradictory  theories-of-everything  poured
across the field: three ships landing at once, one of them  the General Systems ‘New World’ starliner  
Pantopon Rose
, in from a four-week tour of Boudeuse,
O’Dowd and Feduccia XV. Gaines, too, gave the impression of having just arrived back from somewhere. His skin was a little more tan. He wore a bit of bright red cotton as a neckscarf and
carried, in a loose bunch, some dusty-looking flowers the same colour. A small cheap suitcase rested on the floor by his leg, as if he had just set it down. The assistant, who felt nothing at
all about the rain, stood in the doorway and stared at him.

‘First you open the door,’ Gaines coaxed her, ‘then you let me in.’

‘Why?’

He held out the flowers.

‘Because I brought something for you.’

Eventually she took the flowers and turned  them over in her hands. She had never seen a red quite like it; but the stems were flimsy and brittle, already dry. One or two fell on the
floor.

‘I’ll sit on the bed,’ she said. ‘You can sit in the chair.’

Gaines gave her an alert look. ‘Have you invented  irony?’ he wondered  aloud.  In  her  room,  by contrast  with  the  mayhem over at
the port, some fleeting piece of physics had washed and softened the light. He placed the suitcase carefully on the bed: its clasps being snapped, complex fields sprang to life, radar  green
on a velvety black backdrop, unwinding in endless strings around a  strange  attractor.  Additionally,  the  case contained  generous lengths of scabby rubberised
flex and a pair of bakelite headphones clearly included for show. ‘Look inside,’ Gaines said. ‘See this?’

‘Are you really here this time?’

‘First look in the suitcase,’ Gaines said, ‘then we can discuss that.’

She looked.

Immediately she felt herself transported  a thousand  light years from Saudade City, out somewhere in Radio Bay, inside an EMC outpost  so secret even R.I. Gaines had difficulty
finding it. Her viewpoint toppled  about  at high speed. It was jerky and full of interference; once stabilised, it had a curiously assembled feel, as if it had been built up from
three-dimensional layers. What the assistant saw was this: a trembling grey space with echoes and a sense of walls far back, and somehow suspended inside it a single perfect teardrop of light
so bright she had to look away. It was the tiniest instant.  Even her tailoring couldn’t slow it down. A tear, immobile but constantly falling, so bright you couldn’t really see
it. Then darkness came down, the viewpoint gave the impression of tilting violently, and the image of the tear repeated again. By the third or fourth repetition, ‘tear’ had somehow
translated in her mind to ‘rip’: at that everything stopped, as if such understanding could be, in itself, a switch.

She felt elated. ‘I don’t know what that was!’ she said. ‘Do you?’

‘It’s a thing no one should admit to knowing about. Not you,’ here, Gaines gave a wry smile, ‘not even me.

‘We call it the Aleph. We believe it’s very old. When we found it, no one had been near it for a million years – perhaps more. When we ask it about itself, it asks for
you.’ It was an artefact at least a million years old, he said, the deepest problem anyone had encountered  to date in Radio Bay: a built object as far as could be understood,  a
machine constructed  at the nanometre  length, the purpose of which was
to contain a piece of the Kefahuchi Tract itself
. ‘You see it like that, as a series of
repetitions,’ he said, ‘because we’re catching it in the Planck time. You can’t see it for longer because it’s already in its own future, already something
different. The pause between images is lag, as the instrument  tracks it quantum to quantum.’

The Aleph, he said, was buried inside an abandoned  research tool the size of a small star: and recently the thing it most asked for was her. The assistant stared at him, then down at the
suitcase.

‘Is it in there?’

Gaines shook his head. ‘It thought for a week, then it asked for a police detective on a planet no one had ever heard of.’ ‘I don’t understand  what I was looking
at.’

‘For now,’ Gaines said, ‘we think it’s wise to keep the two of you apart.’ He closed the suitcase. ‘Given the weirdness of this.’ He added, in a kind
of aside: ‘When we use the word “constructed”, we don’t rule out the idea of self-construction.’ Then he said:

‘We had some trouble finding you from the description it gave.’

TEN