Empty Space (18 page)

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

‘I remember you, man. You look like shit.’

‘We both look like shit,’ said MP Renoko, ‘but you look dead.’

A laugh. ‘How we doing otherwise?’

Renoko gestured around  the hold. ‘Well enough. As you can see, a little behind schedule.’

‘You know, I don’t think there’s a schedule as such.’

Renoko seemed to settle in his corner. ‘I’d like to get it over with anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a little tired lately.’

‘Fifty years is a long time, man.’

‘You could say that. I look forward to a holiday.’

‘Kick back a little,’ the newcomer agreed. ‘Sink into the data.’

During this dialogue he had been busy opening a panel in the hull of one of the mortsafes.  Over this he now bent,  his head and shoulders inside, his elbows still visible as he
worked at the exposed engine. Field effects rippled across the hold like luminescence in surf. All three mortsafes blurred, fogging the warm air with physics. Various kinds of musical sounds
could be heard as they exchanged data. MP Renoko observed alien states of matter crawling across the walls as symbols, hallucinatory lights, scenes from his own past. Much of what was going on
made him even tireder than usual. He massaged his left hand with his right. Stood up slowly, suddenly remembering the circus at dawn, some landing field on  a forgotten  planet.
 Every morning  different, every morning  the same. The harsh light on cement, the air full of salt and fried food smells. A tiny Chinese-looking woman with piled up red hair
and a tight emerald cheongsam, swaying like a mirage through the heat haze between the carnie booths, every eye’s focus, human or alien. ‘Can code enjoy sex?’ the media always
ask. MP Renoko remembered something less easy to describe.

‘Do you ever see her?’ he said softly, one ghost to another.

The newcomer  grunted  in surprise  and  shook his head. This simple motion transferred itself to the dangling strips of flesh that comprised his lower half, causing them
to whirl like a skirt.

‘No one sees her now, man. She’s got so much stuff to do. She’s working on behalf of others.’

‘I just wondered.’

‘We’ve all got stuff to do now.’

Shortly afterwards he left, saying only: ‘I’ll be back for you, Jack,’ which he seemed to find funny. MP Renoko, whose name had never been Jack or anything like it, laughed
dutifully. He waited until the mortsafes had calmed down then he too left the hold, walking out the same wall he had entered by. Unaware of these kinds of events except as a localised cluster of
internal surveillance blackouts, the crew of the
Nova Swing
slept, ate, screwed, stared out  the portholes  at the wonders  of space, and  drew closer to their next
destination:  a G-type star, known to the navigational mathematics  as an 11-dimensional mosaic of co-ordinates,  but to the generations who lived and died by its light
as ‘Scinde Dawk’.

By that time, everyone was in a bad temper  with everything: Liv and Antoyne argued over who should clean up the mess in the control room; Irene, bored and with a far-off look in her
blue eyes, crafted for herself outfits in increasingly radical expressions of pink,  which, to  the  consternation  of the  shadow  operators, she wore fifteen
minutes  each before weeping inexplicably and throwing  them about. Forty-eight hours  later these three found themselves in the parking orbit of the Scinde Dawk system’s
only inhabitable  planet  – the  tidally-locked  Funene  – searching  the twilight zone for an abandoned  factory town dubbed  by Irene,
‘some dump called Mambo Rey’. Liv Hula hit the retros, ran three cursory aerobrake cycles to save fuel, and was bringing them down on the customary tail of green flame when the
ship’s instruments picked up surface activity around the Mambo Rey rocket field.

‘Fat Antoyne,’ she said, ‘Something is going on down there.’

Why tell him, Antoyne wanted to know.

‘Don’t sulk! Don’t sulk, Antoyne! I fucking have to work in here! My workplace should not smell of someone else’s puke!’

Antoyne was of the opinion that nothing could smell as bad as the blanket she kept in there.

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

‘The truth often hurts.’

‘Antoyne, sometimes you are as big a cunt as Toni Reno.’

A dry laugh came from the crew quarters.

‘No one is as big a cunt as Toni Reno,’ was Irene’s opinion.

‘We all can  feel the  truth  of  that,’ Liv Hula  admitted.  ‘So Antoyne,’ she said, in as placatory a voice as she could manage,
‘help me out here. I don’t know what I’m seeing.’

Antoyne  didn’t know either. A rooster-tail  of disturbed  dust billowed its way between the low hills surrounding  the port. At its head could be made out a
fierce mote of energy.
Nova Swing
’s arrays were detecting short range RF, broad spectrum  FTL transmissions,  and  some  kind  of radar:  nothing
 anyone  could understand.  Neither  was there  any logic to the object’s course. It resembled a spark racing along a carelessly-laid fuse, or some weird
science particle tangled and looping through invisible fields. Thirty miles into the badlands, it abruptly disappeared. The dust settled slowly. No matter how many times he re-ran the
footage, Antoyne couldn’t make out what was going on. The object was too small to be a vehicle. It was too fast to be a human being.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

By then they were on the ground. Irene, who had knowledge of fifty planets before she was fourteen, recognised a dump when she saw one. Mambo Rey was a place no one wanted, except to hologram
themselves getting sex against a collapsing industrial shed in clever light. It was less a world than a lifestyle accessory. ‘Having a great fuck, wish you were here!’ 35 degrees
Celsius, humidity nil. A metal taste filled the mouth: rare earth dust, rotting even as it separated out of the ancient strata, blew across the concrete on the wind, silting up the corners of the
wooden terminal buildings. As the surrounding  mesas eroded, they had exposed the remains of early life in that part of the Halo – huge, bare, cryptic, radioactive forms that looked
less like bones than pieces of architecture. Elsewhere in the subtle gradations of Funene’s twilight zone, hallucinatory giant insects strode the horizon on long, fragile legs.

‘Jesus,’ Irene said: ‘Roach planet.’ And then, bending down suddenly, ‘Hey! I found a heart-shaped stone!’

After a brief argument  with Liv, who claimed it was no more than  a tooth  washed out  of some ancient  alluvial deposit,  she presented  it to Fat Antoyne,
and the women set out to find the Snakebite bar. Antoyne watched them trudge off across the hot cement – laughing and arguing arm in arm, an image sharpened and  rendered  almost
 unbearable  by the  glare of the  perpetual afternoon – then went back inside the
Nova Swing
and examined the stone. It was pink, translucent, full of small
bubbles suspended in a web of hazy fracture planes. It wasn’t a tooth. He rubbed it with his thumb, then dialled up MP Renoko.

‘We’re here,’ he said.

‘Hello?’ a voice replied. ‘Hello?’

The pipe was bad. If it was Renoko, he sounded  as if he was already talking to someone else.

‘Are you there?’ Antoyne said.

‘Hello!’ the voice shouted. ‘For a moment I thought you’d gone!’

‘Is this Renoko?’

‘Who’s that? Is that you, Antoyne?’

‘We can take delivery of those goods of yours,’ Antoyne said. At this, he thought he felt Renoko’s attention focus suddenly. ‘Hello?’

‘You’ll find us in the old lost property office.’

‘Are you here, then?’

‘Well,’ said Renoko. ‘That depends  what you mean.  Do you need me to be there?’

‘I’m at Mambo Rey,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Antoyne?’ Renoko interrupted.  ‘This is a bad pipe, Antoyne.

Hello?’ Another  pause. ‘Find the  lost property  office,’ he said.

‘Someone will take care of you.’

‘I’m here,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

‘PERDIDOS Y ACHADOS!’ shouted Renoko.

Directions   followed,  then   the   dial-up   collapsed.  Antoyne looked around the control room, with its homely smells of vomit, fried
 food  and  electrical  fields. Wondering  what  Renoko  had meant when he described himself as ‘here’, he got up abruptly and searched the ship
from top to bottom.  It took an hour to check every companionway. Sometimes Antoyne felt the need go back and check the ductwork  too. Only when he was sure the
Nova Swing
was
empty did he feel safe enough to leave.

Deep in the eight-acres of the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate, a curiously self-similar grid of buildings, he found the lost property office. Its door hung open. No one had been there
for weeks. Dust had drifted across the floor and gathered as a thin film in the curls and creases of the yellowing waybills pinned to the walls. Antoyne called ‘Hello?’ and receiving
no answer sat down on a chair to wait. He read some of the paper. ‘Ambo Danse VI, d.i.f. Details at site.’ Over this someone had written, ‘Fedy wants to know where this
is!’ A thousand  dice were scattered on the counter, some of them lighting up dimly from inside if you passed your hand above them.  Antoyne sat, turning  the
heart-shaped  stone between his fingers and listening to the wind bang about outside as if it had misplaced something. He felt uneasy just sitting there. He found another room: nothing.
He poked his head out of the back door, which was off its top hinge, and looked up and down the street. Nothing.

He opened his dial-up and said, ‘Hi!’ but all he could hear in the pipe was a sound like very distant canaries.

‘Renoko?’

Halfway  through  the  afternoon,  he  gave up  and  went  out into  the  avenues between the  buildings.  Everything  seemed
to hang suspended in the late afternoon light, static and fried. Even Antoyne’s movements were reluctant. They were the movements of a fatter man. The Mambo  Rey Postindustrial
 State, stripping away his pretensions,  had resolved him as an earlier version of himself. It was the story of his life. All the buildings were neglected. In addition some of them were
curiously damaged. Splintered wood,  deformed   aluminium   siding.  Cracked  asbestos  panels flung about. In each case it was as if something had burst
into the structure  from one avenue and out of it into the next. Antoyne could smell the broken wood in the air. He wandered about until he found himself on the edge of the estate where, the
other side of a weed-grown strip of cement, the skeletal sheds and rusting hoppers of abandoned  lanthanide  workings stretched away between empty evaporation ponds and wrecking
yards so silted up that the ancient ships seemed to lean at angles out of a milky grey sea. The light was a resin coating on all of it.

Antoyne trudged up one slope of dust, down the next, craned his neck at the stripped hull of an early Creda Starliner, leaned in through a second floor factory window to find somewhere he
could shit. Some people go to the tailor early in life and have themselves cut so they don’t need to do that. Antoyne wasn’t one of those. A shit was a shit for Antoyne, that’s
what he always said: it was a sensation he enjoyed. Although sometimes, given the product, you wondered what was going on inside you. He squatted between some items  of abandoned
 machinery  for a couple  of minutes, groaning, then  became aware that  something  was in there with him. It was very close. Perhaps it was even kneeling right next
to him, almost brushing his shoulder, and smelling ranker, whatever it was, than Antoyne’s bowel movement. It was amused by him. Full of passive terror, he stared hard away from where he
thought it was until it had gone, then pulled up his chinos and fastened his belt. He went into a corner and threw up. Then he left the factory and stared out across the sea of dust, above which,
at the horizon, floated mesa after rotting mesa the colour of pigeon’s wings. Sex, he thought. It reeked of sex. There were no tracks in the dust but his own. He had neither seen nor heard
anything. On his way back through the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate he spotted the item they were supposed to pick up, floating motionlessly at a street intersection in the distance.

It was a bone colour, on the yellow side of white. Closer inspection revealed it to be twelve feet long, longitudinally ribbed for about two thirds of its length, with a blunt sloping point at
one end. It seemed to be made of porcelain with the hair-fine brown craqueleur of an ageing urinal. It was very warm to the touch, like anything  left standing  in the afternoon
 sun. Antoyne  shoved it along, up and down the avenues, looking for the landing field. It wasn’t hard work but it wasn’t easy either. Soon he came upon Liv Hula, standing
in the middle of the street staring up at a corpse which hung in the air about four feet above her head. When Fat Antoyne arrived all she said was, ‘What do you think of this?’

Antoyne stopped pushing the mortsafe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said.

‘You get dead people,’ Liv Hula agreed, ‘but they don’t float.’

The corpse was of an old guy, snappily dressed in a loose shirt worn outside bronze pleat-front  plus fours, with tan loafers, no socks and a white golf cap. He had a quiet smile on
his face as if to say, ‘Being dead means less to me than than you’d think,’ and he was swimming in the air, like an instructor  in some new kind of meditational
 discipline, tracing a slow, graceful butterfly symbol. Two or three dice drifted in loose orbits round  his head, and a worn-out advertisement from one of the fuck-resorts
further into the twilight zone was trying to draw him into a conversation about photography. A hot wind blew up and down the street. Otherwise things were completely silent. Antoyne said:

‘I’m sorry I threw up in your pilot chair.’

He offered Liv the heart-shaped  stone  Irene  had  given him, which she took absently, still staring up at the corpse.

‘Do you want some help with that thing?’ she said.

They got round  the back of the mortsafe  and  leaned into  it. Pushing was much  easier with two. Halfway across the landing field, Liv handed him back the stone.