Empty Space (9 page)

‘While I was in the summerhouse,’ Marnie said suddenly, ‘I thought I heard something moving about.’

‘That James!’ Anna complained.

‘I don’t think it was him. I haven’t seen him since I arrived. If this is boring you, Anna, we could always watch one of those old films you like.’

Anna shuddered. ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said.

She thought she would call in the cat, then go to bed. She felt as if today had been too much for her. She couldn’t forget the boy with the book, that was one thing – it was as if
she had found him creeping around outside her own house: but there was more—

Huddled on the platform that afternoon, waiting for the service from Carshalton back into central London, she had watched rain spill out of a clear sky while a train from Waterloo pulled in on
the other side and the station announcer warned everyone on board, ‘This is Carshalton. This is Carshalton.’ And when the train pulled away again, it had deposited half a dozen
commuters, among whom she made out the old man she had encountered some days before in the café at Norbiton station.

He seemed disoriented. Long after the other passengers had gone, he stood trembling on the platform, looking bemusedly about, his underlip hanging loosely. The afternoon light slicked off his
bald skull. His raincoat was undone. In one ropy-veined hand he clutched his walking stick; in the other, a damp-looking brown paper bag, which, every so often, he seemed to offer vaguely
to the empty air, as if expecting someone to take it from him. Eventually, two men did come and try to help him. He began to argue with them immediately, though he seemed to know them. While they
were persuading him to leave the platform, Anna went out through the ticket hall and stood on the pavement outside. She couldn’t have explained why. A single minicab waited in the parking
area: after perhaps five minutes, the old man, now minus his paper bag, was ushered out by the railway staff, who manhandled him gently but firmly into the back of it. For a minute or two nothing
happened except that he wound his window down and stared out into the rain.

‘Found anything real yet?’ Anna was prompted to call.

He gave her a cold, alert look and wound the window up again. The driver turned round to speak to him, but he didn’t seem to answer. Taking a right into North Street, the cab was balked
by traffic; as soon as things started moving, it vanished towards Grove Park. Anna imagined the old man sitting in the back alone, looking from side to side as the vehicle slipped between
Carshalton Ponds, listening for the faint action of his own blood. She wondered where he was going. She imagined him being driven back to a house like the one she had seen that afternoon. She
imagined him meeting the boy with the bad hair there and though the picture was incongruous found that it had lodged itself as solidly in her world-view as Carshalton itself.

After a few minutes, the voice of the station announcer drifted out on to the forecourt again – ‘This is Carshalton. This is Carshalton.’ – its bland yet rawly
self-conscious accents clearly recognisable as those of a fictional 1940s radio-operator, pumped up with the importance and strangeness of a brand new official medium. It had sounded,
Anna now tried to explain to Marnie, as if he was auditioning for a part in an as-yet unmade Powell and Pressburger film. But Marnie, who had never been convinced by Powell and Pressburger,
didn’t seem interested.

‘Can we turn this off, darling?’ Anna said, piqued. ‘Because I find it rather depressing.’

‘England calling,’ she had expected to hear the announcer say. England calling, into night, bad weather and bad reception. England begging, with that desperate but almost
imperceptible interrogative lift of the last two syllables, ‘Is anyone out there?’

EIGHT

Rocket Jockeys

The
Nova Swing
had history. Inside, she preserved the sort of worn out light that reminded visitors of a photograph from Old Earth. Her architecture smelled of metal,
electricity, animals. There was a lot of time in her for a ship only a hundred years old, the residual time, you felt, of some improbable, uncompleted journey. Even when the dynaflow drivers
weren’t running, the plates of her hull reported nauseous low-frequency vibrations, as if the ship were constantly making its way back from somewhere in order that its crew be able to
occupy it. Liv Hula felt the same about her life. Early lessons were still working their way through: in consequence, even while she was completing it, an action often felt both tardy and
experimental. And then, when you are a pilot, so much of you is externally invested anyway – in the ship, in the dyne fields – and may be increasingly unable to find its way home.
‘Home’ being understood as some secure location of personality in space and time. This sense of displacement, perhaps, is what sensitised her.

Initially it was visible only as disorder in the schematics. At warm-up time, still aware of the thick, used taste of the pilot connexion in her mouth, she received fail reports from minor
systems checks. There were fluctuations in power, barely detectible. ‘If we had wires,’ she told Fat Antoyne, ‘there’d be mice in them.’ Later, as she jockeyed the
ship out of its parking orbit, she thought she saw someone enter the room behind her – a dark figure, oily and flowing in the way it moved, in and out before she could see who it was, quick
but not somehow giving that impression.

‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne,’ she said absently.

‘What?’ said Antoyne, who was a hundred feet lower down the ship, staring out of a porthole at the Kefahuchi Tract, listening to Irene whisper:

‘I will never get tired of these things we see!’

During the journey it stayed down by the holds. The onboard cameras disclosed a passing shadow in 4 or 6, but Liv was always too late to catch what cast it. There was movement at the top of a
companionway, or in the central ventilation shaft. Later, she tracked it to the living quarters, but only as a discoloration of the air or a rubbed-out graffiti left by some bored supercargo
forty years ago. These were isolated incidents. Saudade to World X proved to be the usual disorienting trudge. Irene fucked Antoyne. Antoyne fucked Irene. Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of
non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ’s blood in the firmament. Liv Hula tuned to the Halo media, where the breaking news was never good. Two days out she tipped the ship on its
base, put them down neatly less than a hundred yards from the Port Authority building at da Luz Field, and lay there in the pilot couch too tired to disconnect, listening to the fusion engines
tick and flex as they cooled.

Half an hour later, she woke up to find herself alone. She gagged ejecting the pilot connexion, threw up a handful of bile, sat disconsolately on the edge of the couch with her arms folded
across her stomach. Monitors came to life. The nanocams had caught something in motion in the dark in the junction between two corridors: its appearance was half-finished, as if someone had
begun painting a man on the air of the corridor then lost interest. The head, torso and arms were present though in need of work; from there it became notional until, around the navel, only a few
shreds and rags of colour remained. It was the right height from the floor to have legs, but they weren’t visible. Not to Liv Hula, anyway. As it began to turn towards her, she saw that the
rags and shreds weren’t paint after all but dark hanging strips of flesh. It was real. It was hollow. It was ripped and charred. She ran out of the control room, her arms outstretched in
front of her, palms forward, calling, ‘Irene! Antoyne!’ at the top of her voice.

No one heard her, and that gave her time to feel a fool. She stood on the loading platform in the glaring light.

That night she dreamed of her old friend Ed Chianese, incontrovertibly the great rocket jockey of his day. In the dream, it was the morning after Liv’s big dive. Ed lay next to her. They
were at the Hotel Venice, home to rocket sport bums of every description, but especially hyperdip jockeys between attempts on the photosphere of France Chance IV. Thick sprays of photons, most of
them originating in that same photosphere, poured into the room, over-egging the yellow walls and prompting Liv to wonder out loud what the weather was like in the Bénard cells today.
She was so happy. Ed was thinking about breakfast. At the same time the dream had him falling – the way Liv herself had fallen, with only the paper-thin hull of the
Saucy Sal
between her and it – into France Chance IV. ‘Ed!’ she called, in case he didn’t know. ‘Ed, you’re falling!’ Hot gas raged all about him, putting stark
shadows under his handsome cheekbones. Caught in descending plasma at four and half thousand Kelvin, his hyperdip had lost confidence in itself and was breaking up. Those things were a neurosis
with an engine.

Ed turned his head slowly and smiled at her. ‘I’ll never stop,’ he said. ‘I’ll always fall.’

Liv woke up wet.

They spent some days waiting for Antoyne’s contact.

Abandoned fifteen years earlier, after inexplicable climate shifts and abrupt changes in range and distribution of native species, World X’s single continent was now a commercial limbo,
its pastel spintronics factories and EMC-funded radio frequency observatories mothballed, its lower management dormitories and holiday resorts closed down. Da Luz Field continued to operate,
but at reduced traffic volumes. The Port Authority maintained an oversight staff. The single small bar and pâtisserie, L’Ange du Foyer, was little more than a handful of stamped
aluminium tables set out in the blazing sun, at one or another of which Irene the mona could be found every morning after breakfast, wearing huge black sunglasses and drinking chilled
marzipan-flavour latte. Toni Reno’s paperwork, weighted down by an empty cup, fluttered in the warm wind. By the third day it was grubby from being handled, covered with brown rings; by
the fourth it seemed like an obsolete connection to another world.

Irene drank. Antoyne fixed the fusion engines. Everyone was bored. Liv Hula walked restlessly around the da Luz hinterland, a few acres of heat-bleached scrub and building projects fallen
into disuse before completion. Thin black and white cats hunted across it, concentrating minutely among the rubbish and broken glass. Liv felt unusually centred, unusually herself; yet at the
same time unable to shake her sense of being haunted. North, in the port suburbs, a few New Men still lived, treating the single storey white houses like nodes in a warren. They bred happily, but
– quiet and subdued, uncertain what to do next – kept to the old suburban boundaries. The population remained at replacement rate. The males lay on the patios all day, masturbating in
the unrelenting sunlight, and at night scoured the well-planned streets, ranging ten or fifteen miles at a time at a steady loping pace. What they were looking for they were unsure. On
Nova Swing
’s fifth day in da Luz, a group of women appeared at the port itself, to stand patiently outside the terminal buildings as if waiting, Liv thought, for tourists who no
longer came.

When she said this aloud, Irene smiled.‘We’re the tourists, hon,’ she said. She removed her sunglasses, looked around in satisfaction, then slid them back on to her nose
again.

The women brought with them a boy, Liv thought six or seven years old, thin and white, with a large round head on which the features seemed too small and delicate. He had wide eyes and an
expression somehow both inturned and outgoing. He pottered about in the landing field dust, then, picking up what seemed to be a dead bird, came and stood as close as he dared to L’Ange du
Foyer.

‘Hello,’ Liv said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Careful, hon,’ said Irene.

The boy sat down in front of them and played with the bird, looking up occasionally as if for approval. The bird was grey and desiccated, its beak fixed open in a pained little gape. Its head
lolled eyeless. Extended, its wings revealed iridescent bars of colour, green and dark blue, over which could be seen crawling hundreds of minute parasites. ‘Jesus,’ said Irene. The
women stood twenty yards from L’Ange du Foyer, listlessly watching this performance through the heat of the afternoon; then one of them came over suddenly, picked up the boy by his armpits
and swung him away, saying something Liv didn’t understand. She seemed to be trying to take the bird from him. The boy struggled grimly to keep it and, being set down, ran off.

Later, they all left. ‘It’s cooler now,’ said Irene. ‘Why don’t we have an ice cream?’

Later still, with the sunset lodged in the sky above the central massif, the boy slipped out from where he had been hiding. Before Liv could say anything, he had dropped the bird at her feet
and run off. Without quite understanding herself, she followed. Irene the mona stared after them, shaking her head.

The boy made his way quickly through the suburbs. Every so often he stopped and beckoned. His feet were bare. A mile or two south of da Luz lay a line of steep undercut
cliffs, the buff-coloured guardians of some ancient fossil beach. He ran to and fro along the base for a minute looking for the way up; finding it, he turned and waved his arms. ‘Not so
quickly!’ Liv called. He vanished. The cliffs swallowed the last of the light. The boy stared down at her as she climbed steps in a gully. All she could see was his head against the sky.
‘Infierno,’ he said quietly at one point. ‘Infierno.’ Above the cliffs long ridges of yellow earth rose to the dry central massif, where at noon the heat would ring in the
dusty aromatic gullies and across the rocky pavements. Now it was faint night winds in the lava tunnels that threaded the country like collapsed veins. She stood at the lip of a
jameo
,
listened to water thirty feet down, threading its way through the tumble of fallen rocks. Paths glowed in the starlight, so clever in their use of the contours that after a while she seemed to be
finding her way without the boy. He was leading her, but he was less obviously there. She came upon him from time to time, squatting on a rock, or made him out half a mile away, a pale flicker
against a hillside. If the route became difficult, he fell back; otherwise, she was on her own under the blaze of stars. In this way he brought her to a plateau strewn with rocks, the only
feature of which was a low, ramshackle structure – bits of bleached, unshaped wood, stones piled on one another, a door banging in the wind – built over a
jameo
.