Empty Space

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 patisserie, 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.

‘I’m not going in there,’ Liv Hula said.

The boy smiled at her then, turning away and pulling down his pants, pissed loudly against the stones, sighing every so often, straddling his legs and tightening his buttocks, staring over his shoulder at her with a grin. It seemed to take a long time. When he turned back he had left his little white penis hanging out.

‘Put that away,’ Liv said.

He laughed. ‘Here,’ he said, beckoning and holding open the door.

‘I’m not going in there,’ she repeated. Then — as if she had arrived on World X for this purpose alone; as if the logic of every journey she’d made, including the brief pointless dive into the photosphere of France Chance IV, led here — she pushed past him. Inside, steps led down from the lip of the jameo to the floor of a lava tube perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Looking up at her with his arms stretched wide was a New Man, tall and thin, with a shock of red hair standing up from a wedge-shaped head. His limbs had the characteristic articulation, wooden in one joint, pliable in another. He looked anxious, like someone trying to act, in all good faith, an emotion they have experienced only as a set of instructions.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Come down!’ the New Man said. ‘Come in!’ The wind closed the door behind her, opened it again. ‘If you have come for cock,’ he said, ‘you have come to the right place!’

He had it there, in his hand. Liv stared at it, then back up at his face, then around his house, the uneven walls of which, niched, limewashed and in places caulked with bundles of vegetable fibre, seemed clean and dry. He had used the old flow-ledges as shelves. There was a bare table with a white bowl and a ewer; some items of the sort the New Men collected, believing them to be from their lost home planet — perhaps art, perhaps just toys or ornaments. At one end a curtain, at the other a mattress, next to which he had laid out clean towels, candles, aromatic oils in handmade pots.

‘You’re the last of tourist trade,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They come for our cock. Look, look. Our cocks are a little different than yours.’

‘They are,’ Liv Hula said.

‘But they work nicely. They work well for you.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘We can fuck you,’ he said, as if quoting from an advert.

He had the resinous, warm New Man smell, a little like creosote, but not entirely unpleasant. His cock was, after you had got used to it, just a cock. What Liv enjoyed was the surprising calm he made her feel despite his own anxieties, a kind of temporary erasing of her own life that had nothing to do with sex. It was an easing of the memory of herself. In the end, she thought, perhaps I came here for that. When she woke in the morning, the lava tube was empty. There was a trickle of water behind the curtain, which she used to wash in. She wandered along the flow shelves as if she was in a shop, picking up his things and putting them down. She left money on the table. The child reappeared and led her back down to the rocket port at da Luz, which she saw with proprietary amazement a long way off through cool air and soft, floury light. There was the Nova Swing, standing up on its fins like the flying buttresses of a brassy little cathedral! Under daylight the landscape wasn’t so barren as she had imagined. The gullies and lava tunnels were often full of cool green vegetation: shafts of sunlight fell on constant little rills and trickles of water. She soon outdistanced the boy, who seemed preoccupied.

Just  before  noon, crossing the cement field through the heat ripples, she saw Fat Antoyne and Irene outside