Empty Space (14 page)

Irene  the  Mona,  though  she loved space, would  often wonder what caused people to want to be out in it. If you asked her, it was almost entirely
a visual experience anyway. Sometimes those billowing towers of gas, infused with hyacinthine light, ripped by shockfronts from, whatever, exploding quasars and like that, were beautiful;
sometimes they only seemed monstrous. Irene preferred warm, solid-earth cities, where on a rainy day the windows of each retro-shop  and tailor parlour  glowed with personal
options. She preferred the lights, the saxophone music, the pink and purple ads like moths, the souls which sprang so readily to meet your own. All phony, all gorgeous. But it was also a fact
that she could not be entirely a stay-home girl. Because someone had to handle the fiscal and aspirational sides of the enterprise that was Saudade Bulk Haulage, not to mention human
resources!

‘So here I am,’ she told herself aloud, ‘out among the stars and galaxies, which I have to say look almost as remarkable as a new pair of Minnie Sittelman fuck-me
pumps.’ Around that time her name was called on the ship speakers: ‘Irene, Irene,’ followed by a noise of gak gak gak.

She found Antoyne lying on the control room couch in a puddle of sick, both hands clutching the bundle of coloured pilot wires as if he had been trying to rip a snake out of his mouth. His
knees were drawn up to his chest and he was shaking. If Antoyne had a secret, Irene believed, it was that he didn’t do well alone; but there were days, too, when he didn’t seem to do
well even when he had people to look after him. ‘Honey,’ she said, lifting his head and tenderly detaching the wires, on the gold tips of which she was able to discern tiny specks of
brain matter, ‘this is not your job, and you really need a shave too.’ Antoyne threw up again and rolled off the acceleration couch.

‘Am I here?’ he said.

‘Yes Antoyne, you are here all right.’

The control-room displays came to life suddenly. In them Irene could see: jerky fragments  of light bobbing  along ribbed  slick-looking tunnels;  shadows
caught  by a panicky glimpse behind; misleading images from the gas of nanocameras  now investing the wreck. Everything was processed to look ‘real’, arriving preassembled
as a narrative from selected points of view, a software psychodrama in which Liv Hula dragged herself along, surrounded by a slow explosion of cable ripped off the walls during the salvage
attempt. Through the eva faceplate her lips could be seen opening and closing, though nothing came out. Behind her, clearly imaged and yet difficult to understand,  something was emerging
from the tunnel wall.

Irene, who had no intention of allowing the ship any time inside
her
, took a moment  to study the manual filter options. Then she shook Fat Antoyne awake.

‘Honey, I need you.’

Antoyne  crawled back  on  the  couch.  He  cleared  his  throat loudly. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘I wish there was time for that, I really do.’

Antoyne adjusted the displays but soon gave up the attempt to interpret what he was seeing. ‘Why is it drilling holes everywhere?’ he said.

‘We can none of us know that, Fat Antoyne.’

Liv Hula found herself at a junction  she recognised. The tunnel split into three.
MENGER
knelt solicitously over
SIERPINSKI
but  wrote 
‘curvature’, as if he was thinking  of something  else. For her part,
SIERPINSKI
stared down at the floor as if it had betrayed her. They had died the way every
entradista  expected, doing what they wanted to do, and now cast three or four shadows each in this tableau of escalating bad luck. It was, in short, the classic entradista
 soul-fuck, which Liv recalled with great contempt. ‘Come
on
,’ she was heard to urge them, looking back over her shoulder: ‘Everyone is culpable here,
guys.’ Then, exactly four minutes  and thirty-two  seconds later: ‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne, I’m back at the reactor housing.’ She was tired. Her
senses were dull. She was running out of air. If she didn’t do something soon, the eva suit would perform an emergency spinal puncture, reduce her metabolic rate by twenty or thirty per
cent, set its FTL beacon and  await extraction.  They would find her sitting on the floor, head slumped, legs splayed,
HULA
stencilled above her faceplate, another identical
fuck-up in the house of fun. Behind the reactor she discovered the rest of the salvage team, tumbled  together in a heap. Unlike M
ENGER &  SIERPINSKI
, her head-ups
 told her, these bodies had high residual radiation  counts. They were armed with hand-held thermobarics, but seemed to have made no attempt to use them. Backed against the reactor
housing, too tired to take any further action, watching a low-grade dosimeter alarm blink on and off in the side of her eye, she tried once more to raise the
Nova Swing
. ‘Hello?
Are you getting this?’ A two-minute  gap, during which she seemed to whisper fractiously to herself before calling out, ‘Christ! The reactor’s heating up again!’
For Liv, yellow light fell through blue. There was a dull buzz, less a sound than a vibration in her central nervous sytem: a moment of vertigo. Then an object half a metre in diameter and two
metres long emerged stealthily from the tunnel  wall beside her. It was made of some slick black ceramic. Along its sides, bizarre reflections from the context could be discerned as a
calligraphy of dim blue splatters. It slipped out of the wall, two or three feet up, blind-looking but with an air of intelligence. It knew she was there. It was at her elbow. When she looked
away, it bumped and pushed at her thigh. Her whole body filled with the taste of metal. She turned her head and tried to puke clear of her faceplate. Nothing  else happened, except that when
she left, the artefact followed her attentively out into empty space, its blunt nose never more than ten inches away from her left hip. Comms sorted themselves as soon as she cleared the wreck.
The first thing she heard was Antoyne’s voice.

‘Jesus, Liv, where have you been? Liv, if you can hear me, we believe the thing you saw is the item we were sent to collect.’

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

After they attempted to store it separately, the new cargo drilled its way through the bulkheads until it could float between the other items in the main hold, its surface
spattered with reflections which didn’t quite match the lighting pattern. It seemed newer than the others. It was certainly less knocked around.

‘You could shop for it,’ was Irene the mona’s conclusion.

She licked her finger and touched.  Tiny electric feelings! She liked it for its shiny values and – now that it could be examined more closely – those faint, smooth, organic
deviations from the cylindrical  that  made  its  front  end  such  a  lighthearted  phallic parallel.  Fat  Antoyne  approached
 with  more  caution,  and though the object allowed itself to be examined with a basic six-regime loupe, learned little. He couldn’t date it, he said. It was alien.
It was ceramic all through,  although deep inside he found minutely-structured  variations  in  density  which  he took  to  be high-temperature
superconducting  devices.

‘We’ll never know,’ he said, implying that someone else might.

Still shaken and sweating, with her electrolyte levels shot to hell, Liv Hula refused to enter  the hold, confining herself instead to the pilot cabin and a determined program of
rehydration coupled with shots of Black Heart no ice. These puzzles had such nightmare significance for her, she said, she was reluctant even to join the discussion: but she had revised her
estimate of the object’s age.

‘I think the salvage team brought it with them.’

Although what they had intended to do with it, she had no idea. If, as rumour  had it, MP Renoko had begun stripping the assets of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma
Plant at around that time, perhaps they had acquired it from him, sight unseen as illegal items often were. Maybe it was some kind of mining machine. ‘As for
this
,’ she said,
bringing up a blurred image of the Oklo reactor down in the wreck, ‘what to make of it?’ After four hundred  million years of downtime this crude artefact was back on its five
hour cycle, venting hot steam into empty space for no purpose known to man. ‘I don’t think they were connected with one another at all.’

MENGER & SIERPINSKI
haunted  Liv’s dreams from then on, seen waving to her through a radioactive glow, their headpieces enigmatically empty.

TWELVE

I Am Not Renoko!

R.I. Gaines took his suitcase and left.

In the following days, the assistant tried to forget what she had seen. Routine being as important  to her as ever, she sat in her car, she sat in her office, she sat upright  in the
immersion  tank  on C-Street watching herself come. Everywhere the job took her, she thought  up names for herself. She tried Ysabeau, Mirabelle, she tried Rosy Glo. She tried
Sweet Thing and Pak 43. She was a police detective, in the street and in her car, looking in the wing mirror, signalling left or right. Day and night the town surrounded  her with all the
elements of her profession: gun kiddies cruising the shadows, cutters up to their elbows in the black heart of humanity, trade goods smuggled down from the stars; soft intuitions, sneaking
suspicions. She was taking  notes,  making  reports.  She was sitting at her desk while shadow operators crawled about among the papers like old cobwebs and dusty, unfinished
hands. She tried Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire;  Stormo!  and  Te Faaturuma.  She dialled up the uniform branch and asked for Epstein.

‘That haulier  you boarded,’ he informed  her: ‘It’s long gone from Carver Field.’

She opened the
Nova Swing
paperwork across one wall. A picture of Epstein’s face appeared on another. ‘What’s a “mortsafe’? It says here they took on a
“mortsafe”.’

‘You’re the educated one,’ Epstein’s face said.

He’d been at the Port Authority all morning, drinking java from a paper cup; then in the port itself. ‘Enka Mercury’s still here,’ he said. She was high in the
warehouse ceiling now, the colour of oily smoke and tars, as transparent  as soap. She was still hanging open under one arm. Still dead. From a distance the flap of skin resembled  torn
 cloth. ‘Get alongside Enka in the cherrypicker, you’ll detect what I’d call a faint but definite smell.’

‘She’s still rotating?’

‘Toni Reno too,’ the cop confirmed. ‘Although Toni seems a little slower today. I can provide footage of that.’

The assistant  advised him  not  to  bother,  and  had  him  wait while she  examined  the  transit  manifest.  Cargo  was
given as: mixed cargo. Port  of loading, Saudade. Port  of discharge: New Miass, on some rock named Kunene, a hundred  lights nearer the Tract. ‘Here’s something
odd,’ she noted. Shipper, consignee and the ‘notify party’ were all the same: one MP Renoko, trading as FUGA-Orthogen, a limited liability operation with all the quantum
uncertainty  you expected in the Halo – if you knew who ran it, you didn’t know what it did, and vice versa. She asked Epstein what he thought  of that,  and
 Epstein said he had  no  opinion. FUGA-Orthogen, it turned out, dealt mainly paper – rights to the images of dead minor celebrities, brands no one bought into any more
– but also owned the remaining  assets of a once-popular travelling entertainment, Sandra Shen’s Observatorium  & Native Karma Plant aka The Circus of Pathet 
Lao. ‘Fifty years after he picked them up,’ the assistant told Epstein, ‘this man Renoko is moving the assets of a circus around the Halo under the guise of commerce.’ She
read on. One of those assets, it seemed, was an HS-HE cargo hauler, sold as-seen five years ago through a third party to Saudade Bulk Haulage: who renamed it
Nova Swing
.

‘Fat Antoyne,’ the assistant said to herself, ‘you are a dark horse.’ She asked Epstein if he had ever been to Kunene. Epstein said he hadn’t, but he thought it
wasn’t far up the Beach.

Unaware of their desultory exchange, Rig Gaines was on a visit to one of his less demanding projects. This corroded cylinder – about fifty feet long by twenty in
diameter, cold enough to chill ham, smelling inside of hydrazine  and  unwashed  feet and  known  to Gaines as ‘the Tub’ – was heading towards the
K-Tract at just over walking pace, piloted by his old friend and ally, Impasse van Sant. Though it rarely produced anything marketable, Gaines liked the Tub. He liked to spend a morning
 there, drinking  Giraffe beer while the pilot brought him up to date.

Keeping in mind EMC’s culture of hip self-presentation – not to  say its preference  for conservatively leveraged joint  venture structures  with local
partners  – Gaines kept silent his collaboration  with Imps  von Sant. Last of the genuinely human  beings, Imps passed his day in shower sandals and  cargo shorts,
often matched  with  a slogan  T-shirt,  which  might  read  
SHE’S  UP YOU,  MAN
 or
 YbAlB4
 (pronounce
 that  ‘yibble before’). In addition  he cultivated  a range  of mid-20th  century  conditions from gingivitis to dry skin and had, over the
years, grown fat. This old school viewpoint was what Gaines enjoyed about Imps most: his work being more difficult to fathom. Half the experiment  – designed off the shelf a hundred
 years before to identify strange materials in the big dust clouds and expansion fronts at the edges of the Tract – was broken, while the rest produced data not from outside but from
in, giving van Sant a running commentary on its own processes he had begun to describe in his reports as ‘a cry for help’. Needles swung across their dials, redlining jerkily until
the Tub’s shadow operators woke up murmuring: