Empty Space

asleep.

‘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 cafe 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 Benard 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