neon seen a street or two away, as if the fields themselves were gently broadcasting it. Copper poppies nodded and swayed over the water in a warm dry wind. Bit by bit she began to see things. Long shadows from short objects, falling across the landscape like pointing fingers — stones, simple, slate, shattered, still upright, tumbled about at all angles. Then large isolated figures with a look of two dimensions, very still, placed at curiously precise distances from the river bank like some exercise in perspective. Complex in silhouette, uninterpretable except as 17th century illustrations of satyrs, they were men with the rear legs of horses. They had the cocks of horses too. Really, they were quite big. Their heads were turned away in threequarter profile, frozen in stylised attitudes of listening. They meant her no harm: it wasn’t certain they knew she was there. And beyond them so much was going on — bustling city streets, noises like a building site, powerful beams sweeping a horizon which had withdrawn and was withdrawing still, to a considerable distance. That was the place, Anna suspected, where things would change completely and suddenly; if you left the water and walked up there, you might begin to learn things you didn’t want to know. Up above, subtly pulsing stars: a great ragged arc of them pulled and pushed into chaos by the black radio winds Michael Kearney had spoken of so eloquently before he walked into the sea. Michael Kearney, afraid of everything, yet rendered almost like an ordinary person by sex, for a brief time able to have feelings. Past every surface, he had taught her, at every level, things were so wrong and inhuman: get below any surface and instantly you saw how wrong things were for us. ‘Forget all the anthropic crap,’ he used to insist. ‘None of this made itself for us.’ His own advice would frighten him and he would be ready to fuck again. Anna had always felt like the calm one in those situations. ‘I was the least damaged one,’ she told herself now, looking up at the stars and then down at the satyrs in their inexplicable landscape, each one looking out of the corner of its eye at her, a faint sidelong glitter of intelligence, self-awareness, self-regard. She was leaving them behind now. They looked quite small again.
Five minutes later, the night cooled and darkened. The fields were fields again, washed clean of mystery. The river widened and slowed, pooling into the shape of a long glass, a champagne flute perhaps. A fierce steady rushing sound filled the night. Anna pulled herself into the bank and listened: water plunging over the old four-foot broadcrest weir at Brownlow, perhaps a mile outside the village; beyond which the river, bending east to look for a way through the downs to the sea, would lose confidence and, a few miles further on, somewhere above Barcombe Mills, submerge its identity in the Ouse. Part-beached, Anna sat contentedly in the warm shallows, letting the water support her legs so that they bobbed and glimmered out in front of her, just beneath the surface. A small grey moth flickered about. She could smell guelder rose, night-scented stocks from some distant garden; and above that the replete, weighted, yeasty scent of tonne after tonne of water pouring over the weir. I don’t feel in the least tired, she thought. Seeing herself with a sort of loving amusement from the outside, she wondered what she might do next. A minute or two later she was crossing the pool step by difficult step, hugging the upstream side of the weir itself, pummelled and deafened by the roar, struggling to move her legs against the vast, steady sideways pressure of the water. Halfway over, something made her stop. She dipped one hand into the shining flow across the crest — it was like pushing at the shoulder of some big, steady animal and feeling it push back. What else was there to do? she would ask herself later. Once you saw a thing could be done, what else could you do but try to do it? Shiver with excitement, laugh aloud as the water shoved your hand about, stumble out on the other side and walk the mile home along the river bank in your sodden knickers. She had a powerful urge to pee. It was dark, and who, after all, would see? She felt very calm and satisfied, even when, trudging back across the pasture with her wet shoes in her hand, she saw that her summerhouse was on fire again. Great silent orange and yellow flames went up from the roof at the same odd angle as before. There was no smoke. There was no smell of smoke. The summer-house seemed taller, and as if it was leaning away from her. Heat shimmer gave it a squat conical shape like a windmill. Glorious showers of sparks, blown in a strong wind despite the dead calm below, lit up the crowns of the orchard trees beneath. Beneath the sound of the flames, she thought she heard a voice calling her.
‘Michael?’ she whispered. ‘Is this you? Are you here?’
There was no answer, but Anna smiled as if there had been. She dropped her shoes and opened her arms.
‘Michael,’ she begged him, ‘it’s safe to come back.’
But if it was him, he was as afraid as ever, and as Anna let herself in through the gate, her face turned up and tightening in the heat, the fire went out. She stood there in the dark, caught between one movement and the next, between one feeling and the next — until, just before dawn, she heard the birds waking up and let herself back into the house.
ELEVEN
Empty Space
‘Don’t you know, Fat Antoyne, that three old men in white caps throw dice for the fate of the universe?’
No, Fat Antoyne said, he had never heard that.
‘Their names are Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint. Another thing: these three play not just for the universe’s fate, but the individual fates of every person in it.’ They threw the dice, of which, she said, there were a different number according to the day they played on, and at every throw they would say something in a ritual way, such as ‘Heads over ends!’ or ‘Trent douce’ or ‘Down your side, baby!’, sometimes speaking singly and sometimes all together. One or all of them would clap their hands sarcastically, or blow on their fingers to indicate scorching. Or two of them would smirk at the third and say, ‘You fucked now, sonny,’ which at least could be understood by a normal person.
‘So you’ve seen these dice guys?’ Antoyne enquired.
‘In dreams I have, Fat Antoyne, yes. And when I say that, you need to stop looking at me, in your precise way you’re about to laugh at me. Because a dream is a kind of truth too.’ Antoyne laughed at that, and she pushed him off the bed. ‘They pay and they play, Fat Antoyne. And if they ever stop? Why, their faces slacken and crumple. And those old men weep.’
Why was that, Antoyne wanted to know.
‘Because,’ she said, ‘they look out into the same unmeaninged blackness as you and me.’
Fat Antoyne looked at Irene and thought that he loved her. He wished he could be truer to her, and so did she. She said: ‘What they see, it’s beautiful but it’s dark. And there’s no way to know what it is, not even for them.’
Just then, alerts rang softly through the ship, and Liv Hula’s voice came out of the speakers.
‘We’re here,’ she said.
Although, she added, she didn’t know where here was.
MP Renoko’s co-ordinates, a skein of figures and symbols compressing eleven dimensions to a single point in the dark interstellar medium, at first revealed nothing: then an orphaned asteroid drifting towards the Tract, into which it would be absorbed after an uneventful journey of less than half a million years. ‘We’ve got a structure of some sort in orbit around it,’ Liv Hula was able to confirm. And then: ‘It’s a wreck.’
Later, as she steered an eva suit into the dark, a single riding light glimmered to no purpose against the dim yellow rim of the asteroid. Data flickered in her helmet head-ups. ‘No activity,’ she said. It was as she expected. A very old nuclear powerplant could be detected inside, towards the prow of the wreck. It was lightly shielded, and had been designed with no controls or moving parts, as a single mass, like an Oklo reactor. At the stern end, chemical engines and a Dynaflow driver: first-class equipment bolted on less than fifty years before. It looked as if someone had made an attempt to salvage the wreck, machining new parts at a base on the asteroid, then giving up
