Empty Space

investigator must always take account of that.’

She stood companionably next to him for a moment, hands on hips, looking around the mostly empty space as if oil-stained floors and fluorescent warning stripes held an innate interest for her. Epstein didn’t like the way she relaxed. He found her as disturbing at close quarters as the operator had been. She was too hard to avoid. Her tailoring occupied the warehouse like another personality: everything interested it, from a momentary change in Epstein’s breathing to the sound of footsteps half a mile away. Every time its attention shifted, he caught the rank, exciting smell of hormonal gradients. She would smile at you behind that as if remembering something sexual you had enjoyed together, while pictographs ran chaos patterns down the inside of her forearm, from elbow to wrist like print from the historical times. She was some cheap cutter’s idea of the future.

‘I want to know when Enka disappears,’ she told him.

For the same reason, she explained, she would recommend they keep an eye on Toni Reno. In her judgement, she said, they were at a weird place with this. ‘But we won’t know how weird until the next thing happens.’ There wasn’t much else they could do unless The Sea had discovered something. She enquired of her office if Reno had any kind of Port Authority paperwork in process at the time of his death, and, learning that he did, went off to investigate. Epstein watched her leave, asking himself all the same questions her colleagues asked about her in the building at Uniment & Poe. The difference? Epstein’s perspective on it was not SiteCrime perspective. It was cop perspective, and to him she resembled nothing more than some toxic one-shot personality the kids download in Carmody on a Saturday night.

Unaware of these harsh judgements, the assistant made her way across the rainy cement of the noncorporate port.

Toni Reno’s paper trail — chiefly bills of lading, along with some transcripts of FTL uplinker calls — led to a ship called the Nova Swing, a crew-owned HS-SE shorthauler well known to the Port Authority as what they called in those days a ‘petty mule’. Like all those mules, Nova Swing was seen in every port on the Beach; today, the assistant found her parked on the southern edge of Carver Field waiting on freight from some point of origin two or three lights along. The crew of this brassy old three-finner were familiar to her from the Straint Street bars. More significantly perhaps, as far as the assistant went, they were the small change of Lens Aschemann’s last case: a port whore named Irene, who had adopted the mona package early and done well on it; an ex-smuggler everyone still called Fat Antoyne, though he was slim and fit-looking now, tan from all those distant suns he visited; and Liv Hula, a retired rocket jockey. It was this third crew-member the assistant met with, up in the control room alone and just that moment plugging into the ship’s mathematics.

A thin, grey-haired woman about fifty years old, she lay in the pilot couch stripped to a white cotton singlet and simple boy-leg underpants slightly too large for her, while a two-inch bundle of colour-coded wires forced its way into her mouth. Her head was turned to one side as if to facilitate this. Her eyes looked passively away. The wires pulsed and wriggled, inserting themselves deftly through the soft palate and into the lower architecture of the brain. As they connected, a cascade of busy, shivery movements went up and down her body like the beginning of an orgasm. In response there was a chaotic run of lights across the bakelite and grey-paint control consoles; a smell of hot insulation filled the room. Then, in a startlingly accurate imitation of Liv Hula’s voice, the ship’s speakers said:

‘Really, everyone should try this. The sex never fails.’

‘You could not pay me enough money,’ the assistant said. ‘First it violates your mouth, then it crawls in your ear at night? And you die?’

The pilot laughed. In some phenomenological sense she was now the self of the Nova Swing, its identity. She was housekeeping its motors and systems, watching distant events with its senses. Being the boat, she sometimes said, relieved her of the burden of having a self of her own. To the assistant she boasted, ‘These are the pussiest mathematics. You should see what the grown-up stuff does.’ As she spoke, ki-gas primers fired off in one of the outboard fusion pods; servos ran up to a clingy high-pitch whine then shut down abruptly. ‘Fuck it,’ Liv Hula complained. ‘Boundary layer turbulence. Antoyne?’ she called. ‘Are you down there? Your fucking old machinery is on the fritz again.’ When no answer came she asked the assistant, ‘I wonder if you met Antoyne anywhere on your way up through the ship? Because as you see I am busy, and he could help you better than I can at this time.’ When she talked, a clotted buzz emerged from around the pilot wires, as if she was still trying to form the words with her mouth like an ordinary human being; her hands made small unrelated movements. Her body looked tired, fallen in on itself. ‘Could you find something to put over me? I’m cold.’

The assistant smiled and nodded. It was forty degrees in the control room; humid. She said:

‘I’m interested in your relationship of commerce with Toni Reno.’

Liv Hula claimed she did not deal with that side of things. She added, in an aside, that Toni Reno was a well- known cunt, and a bad dresser besides. ‘You would have to ask Fat Antoyne about him. If you didn’t see Antoyne on your way up here, he is probably having sex with Irene in their cabin. It’s their habit this time of day.’

‘Captain, I’m interested to know if you loaded anything of Toni’s recently.’ The ki-gas primers fired again. This time the fusion engine came to life, its deep groans of self-pity resonating in the vessel’s gamma-ablated hull. Liv Hula laughed. ‘I’m not the captain!’ She cut the engine and when it was quiet again, added: ‘My father gave me the soundest advice, “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” For the Nova Swing we decided not to have a captain that way. It was a decision we all made.’

‘This is the paper on Toni Reno’s cargo. Maybe you recognise it.’

‘Could you find something to cover me?’ Liv Hula asked again.

The assistant went to the control room door, looked up and down the passageway outside, as if she might find what was needed out there. When you touched things in a rocket like this, your fingers came away slick with the generic talc of other worlds. ‘I see the three of you in the Straint Street bars,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get on so well together. Two or three nights a week you’ll find me down there. Since Aschemann vanished, those bars are my responsibility.’ She had depended on Aschemann. His ghost, which lived among the shadow operators clustered in the ceiling corners of her office, was less use. Most of the time it was just a face. It often seemed to be warning her against something. ‘He taught me to look inward, at places like the Tango du Chat; then, in places like this, outward at the stars. I can never make my mind up what it is I see.’ In the end she found a pink cellular blanket at the foot of the command couch. It smelled as if someone had wrapped an animal in it. ‘Be sure and ask Fat Antoyne to dial me up over this Toni Reno problem. I’m always available, always interested in the things you do.’

She drew the blanket tenderly up over Liv Hula’s body. ‘Warmer now?’ she said; and, pausing at the door before she left, ‘A space captain like you can afford nicer pants than those, honey.’

The assistant thought of herself as someone unafraid to meet her own eyes. She looked into them every day but did not necessarily see anything there. She had her predictable circuit, at work or leisure. Mid-day, she could be found walking between the booths at Preter Coeur, where she knew by heart the fighters, the cutters, the chops; they were like an old-time collection of ‘stamps’ or ‘cigarette cards’ to her. Early mornings she parked her big pink repro car on the Saudade Lots, where the event site bled into its own aureole and something large but not quite visible could often be sensed repositioning itself in the rags of mist. In the evening it was the bars on Straint or the tank farm on C-Street — or she sat in her GlobeTown room, looking in the mirror, watching rocket-port physics crawl over the walls and trying out names for herself.

She tried ‘Sekhet’, she tried ‘Sweet Thing’. She tried ‘Roses’, ‘Radtke’, ‘Emily-Misere’. She tried ‘Girl Heartbreak!’ and ‘Imogen’.

She tried ‘L1 Dominette’.

She looked in the mirror and said: ‘She is too pretty not to get married.’

SEVEN England Calling

In London, the weather had turned. Anna Waterman changed trains at Clapham Junction, and, taking the twelve-ten to Epsom, alighted at Carshalton Beeches. From there she walked east then south under a sky that looked like both sunshine and rain, through long suburban perspectives off which the dense ranks of detached and