Empty Space (36 page)

‘These days there’s no need to run the maze,’ he told the assistant. But he took her in anyway. Some part of him still needed to show it off.

Back at the beginning it had been a fracturing, disconnective experience, a space flickering with bad light and worse topology. The tunnels, small-bore and intricately turned
one moment, would become huge and simple the next; as full of generated sounds as they were echoes, with no way of telling which was which. ‘Worse,’ Gaines told the assistant as he
led her along, ‘they changed their nature.’ One moment they were tiled with shiny ceramics, next some sort of organic-looking fibre was matted over everything. You could be in a blood
vessel or waiting for a train, or feel yourself running like a fluid between glass plates: it was an archaeology from which anything could be intuited and of which nothing was true. ‘It
wasn’t so much what you might find round the next corner,’ Gaines said, ‘as that you were round the next corner before you knew it was there.’ As a result – at the
start, anyway – the maze had seemed more like a condition than a system. Its objects had seemed abstract.

‘What’s this I’m walking in?’ the assistant said.

Gaines stopped. ‘It’s water. It’s just water.’

He looked down uncertainly.

‘These are the safe parts,’ he said. ‘Back in the day, entire sections would go missing. They’d be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In
circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what’s fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any
confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone’s stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further
in.’ All expeditions, he told her, failed in some way, but they each had a character of their own: and if, for a while, that character seemed like the reality of the explored space, it was
the best you could expect. ‘You learn to work with it. We were total colonialists. Always on the back foot. Always in the thin slice of the present.

‘Who built it?’ he said, as if she had asked him. He shrugged. ‘How would I know? Lizard People from deep time. They were all over the Halo for a while, you find traces of
them even on a dump like Panamax IV.’

The assistant shivered.

As soon as they left the surface she had felt her tailoring come up. Now she looked back along the passage, which just there was full of brown light and had an old monorail running along
it.

‘Something’s in here with us,’ she said.

‘People often think that.’ The labyrinth, Gaines said, was a perfect venue for standing acoustic waves: at around nineteen Hertz these would commonly generate feelings of dread,
bouts of panic, visual defects and hallucinations. ‘Down at twelve you just vomit endlessly.’

Half a mile along, the architecture changed suddenly and they were in primitive, squared-off passageways driven through basalt. When the boys from Earth arrived, there had been no light here
worth speaking of for a hundred millennia. ‘We call it the PCM,’ Gaines said. ‘Pearlant Cultural Minimum. Suddenly you can see the tool marks. These sections may be the oldest
of all, tunnelled into the rocky material before it aggregated, when it was part of something else. Or maybe their civilisation just lost traction on things for a while. Or these areas might have
had a religious purpose. There’s no physics worth speaking of down here, but we get panel art. Look.’ He stopped in front of what appeared to be a section of bas reliefs, which showed
three modified diapsids wearing complex ritual clothing. One of them was strangling a fourth, who lay passively on what looked like a stone bier.

‘These people were a million years ahead of us, but they were still trying to work out how to be rational. I don’t think they ever quite made it. The Aleph was only one of their
projects.’

He took her arm again.‘Are you ready? It’s through that next door.’

On Saudade, Epstein the thin cop got a call to go to one of the bonded warehouses at the noncorporate rocket port. It was 4.20 am. Exactly two minutes earlier, the corpse of
Enka Mercury had vanished. Edits of the nanocam coverage showed a translucent, fish-coloured image of Enka – through which you could make out the ribbed alloy walls of the warehouse –
suddenly replaced by nothing. No matter how many cuts the operator made, there was no transition phase. One minute Enka was clinging on – her expression, when you could see it, as
determined as it had been from the start, the expression of someone who had died but had never given up – the next, she was gone.

Epstein stared into the empty air of the warehouse as if his own deep common sense might do better than the technology, then took himself down to the alley off Tupolev, where he arrived in
time to see Toni Reno follow his loader into oblivion. It was a cold wet morning, with traffic sparse on Tupolev and light creeping in from the side. As the war re-engaged everyone’s
libido, Toni’s following had dropped off. But a couple of thirteen-year-olds – their calculatedly asymmetric caps of black hair and Fantin & Moretti hand-crafted moccasins soaked
with rain – still occupied the sidewalk.

‘Toni never hurt anyone,’ one of them complained to Epstein. ‘Why does this have to happen to him?’

‘Beats me, kid,’ Epstein said.

‘You see?’ the boy said to his friend, as if Epstein wasn’t really there. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

He moved them on. He called it in. He tried to get hold of the assistant, but Uniment & Poe were being coy about her whereabouts. Eventually he shrugged and forgot about it. High grade
crime tourism was at a low this month, but in and around the new refugee centres in Placebo Heights and White Train Park, misdemeanours of a puzzlingly old-fashioned nature – simple
beatings, direct thefts of food or money – were ensuring the uniform cops a sixteen-hour day. No one had seen anything like it. They were having to develop new theory.

While Epstein made himself busy, the Halo was holding its breath and falling into the mirror. Upper management loved itself at war. In the corporate enclaves – which constructed
themselves as little market towns called Saulsignon, Burnham Overy or Brandett Hersham, featuring stone churches and water meadows under blue rainwashed skies, perfect windy weather and ponies on
the green – war felt real and grown up, a contingency for which your values and education had prepared you. Although obviously some sacrifices would have to be made.

Other demographics found themselves less convinced. Alyssia Fignall, who had caught the last shuttle off Panamax IV before the war arrived, ended up with three hundred
families in a refugee camp on Alum Rock. It was a small camp, three or four acres of tents on a headland under fine blowing rain. From the fence you could see beet fields stretching away inland.
In the early afternoons, tired-looking women congregated between the tents to exchange what little information they had. No one in the camp was allowed access to an FTL router, or even a dial-up,
so there wasn’t much. No one knew when they would be taken off.

‘Plenty of rumours,’ the women told Alyssia, ‘but no rockets.’ It was clearly something they said a lot.

On her first day, after the meeting, she lay on her back in her tent, listening to the rain, the sound of a man breaking up wooden pallets with a billhook, the yells of boys as they ran about
kicking a ball through other people’s living space. She closed her eyes and tried to doze, while the family next door built a wall of straw bales between her and them, working slowly and
with care, talking constantly and patiently to their three-year-old daughter who, though she seemed ill, did her best to help.

It was a determined statement – language addressed less, perhaps, to Alyssia than to the situation itself. A response to the unstructuredness of the world in which they now all found
themselves.

‘I’m cooking now!’ the woman called as it got dark.

Alyssia walked about the site, trying to meet people and get news. Then she tried to leave, only to be turned back at the perimeter. A week later she was still there, among the litter, the
flapping, badly-pegged tents, the acrid fires just after sunset, the sudden savage cries and ugly half-musical noises of the adolescent gangs.

By then, her body, or her clothes, or perhaps simply the whole site, had begun to smell of composting toilets. There were rumours that no one was to be repatriated but the whole camp would be
moved somewhere else. She pushed a hole in the wall of bales and asked the woman next door if she could help with the child. Over the following months she often thought about Rig and wondered if
he was all right. She knew he would be. He was Rig, after all.

Out near the Kefahuchi Tract itself, the news was not the war.

Daily Deals & Huge Savings
’s encounter with Panamax IV made excellent media. Syndicated to a thousand planets, with a variety of commentaries and factoid enhancements, it
enjoyed a well-deserved three minutes in the sun. The initial collision had generated perhaps 200 trillion trillion ergs of energy, equivalent to the explosion of five or six gigatons of
conventional explosives. As
Daily Deals & Huge Savings
burst out of the iron core, blowback to the tune of a further five thousand gigatons had cut a channel like a beam of light
through the super-heated atmospheric gases and crustal debris. While in no way incalculable, the final release of energy, as the core itself exploded into local space, was in human terms almost
meaninglessly large. But meaninglessly large energy events are the daily context of the Tract, where eruptions from the central unshielded singularity – if that is what it is – are so
powerful they generate in the surrounding gas clouds pressure waves that manifest themselves as sound.

This gigantic uproar, resonating through million-cubic-parsec cavities in the constituent gas, is the citizen journalism of the Tract; the loops and scribbles left by the shockfronts are its
headlines. So for Imps van Sant’s instruments the news was not the destruction of Panamax IV. It was a series of discordant and complex groans 60 octaves below middle C.

‘Fuck,’ said Imps, who had never heard anything like it.

Sometimes your situation becomes too plain to you. Strange forces are at work. Imps tore off the headphones and beat them against the instrument panel until the bakelite cracked: the Tract
seemed to keep on roaring at him anyway, like a huge face, its expression indescribable in human terms. Rage, elation, despair – even, he thought, some kind of vast weird parental love. It
was all of those things and none of them. As for the physics: no one had ever had any idea of that. Some people said it was the physics of the early universe, still running in a leaky envelope, a
cyst caught in a very long moment of bursting – the right physics but not in its right time. Imps didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. To him it was the physics of a face. He
leaned back from the console and rubbed his eyes. He thought he might try and have a shower, then a beer. He was just lumbering up out of his chair when he heard a whisper from the broken
headset. He grabbed it up.

‘Hello?’

George the gene tailor lay where the assistant had left him in her room in GlobeTown, the blankets pulled up lovingly to his chin. George was dead, but not alone in that.
Spaceships lit the room’s warm air, psychic blowback from their weird science reinscribing on the walls – in layers of swirled colours like graffiti – the thoughts and feelings
of everyone who had expired there before he arrived. Did dead George take comfort from these maps, butterflies, and other partially-depicted items from alien worlds? Was he aware of the street
below, flowering like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night? Rokit Dub basslines spreading as waves across the city? The bars and nuevo tango joints opening slowly,
their facades pulsing and sucking? Even if he was, these things are so much cultural babble. If they want anything, the dead want a rest from all of that.

Though she never had a name, the assistant was used to being someone. People were, for instance, frightened of her, on the fourth floor at Uniment & Poe, on Straint
Street or Tupolev, on the sidewalk by the cake stall on Retiro Street. The assistant was used to having a presence in places like that. Here it wasn’t the same. Everyone was EMC. They spoke
and walked as if they were thinking about something else. She was just someone who had arrived with Rig Gaines. When they came up to talk to him, they ignored her. Her chemistry didn’t work
on them the way it worked on Epstein or her friend George. For instance a man called Case came up and said:

‘Is this her? Jesus.’

Case looked as if he had outlived himself. A tall man, with an air of once being heavily built, he walked bent over and bearing down awkwardly on two sticks. Both hips had gone. Like anyone
else he could have had himself fixed but he had left it too long, out of carelessness or even some kind of inverted vanity, and now preferred this cooked, hairless look. His hands were ropy with
veins, the skin over them shiny and slack. His brown head seemed too big for his neck; his underlip, the texture of braised liver, drooped in exhausted surprise at finding himself still alive. He
stood in front of the assistant, staring greedily at her but at the same time with a curious lack of interest, as if he remembered women but his body didn’t. He whispered to himself. After
a moment or two he leaned forward and tapped her forearm sharply.

‘Rig tells me you have some Kv12.2 expression issues,’ he said.

‘Is he talking to me?’ she asked Gaines.

‘We could help with that,’ Case said. ‘It’s just a small design flaw. Do you understand? Effectively, you have epilepsy.’ When she didn’t answer, he asked
Gaines, ‘Does she understand anything?’

‘Honey, you could breathe through your mouth less,’ the assistant said.

Case blinked at her.

‘I never expected any sense out of you, Rig,’ he said to Gaines, ‘but this is moronic. You have no idea what will happen if we do this.’