when test-accelerations broke it in two. ‘I don’t know how they found it in the first place. Modern cosmology tells us that if there’s an arse-end of the universe it’s probably here.’ There was a click. ‘I’m approaching the fracture now.’ After that, communications would remain poor for the duration. Back on the Nova Swing, displays showed the feed from her headpiece cameras failing briefly before offering a series of uninterpretable still pictures of hull plates, detached structural members, and sudden voids which seemed to imply a completely different spatial relationship with the asteroid. Miles of cable had unreeled into space. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s interference in the pipe.’ Then: ‘I’m in now.’ A cross section of the wreck would have revealed brittle, organic-looking structures of tubules and fibres in faded blues, purples, pinks and browns. Inside, however, it was dark. Curiously leaning speleothems divided the passageways, which eventually gave way to more recognisable architecture. ‘Whatever this started out as, it wasn’t a ship. I think it might have been an animal. The ductwork and cabling was laid in by hand. Even the hull is a retrofit. It’s an afterthought. I’m getting near the reactor now.’ There was a long pause, then: ‘Jesus. Holes.’ Fifty million candlepower jittered around an undefinable space, throwing the shadows of pillars at odd angles on to the walls. ‘Are you getting this?’ She was in some sort of chamber. Wherever she looked, perfectly straight, perfectly circular tunnels, half a metre in diameter, had been bored through the ancient organic mass. They displayed the surface glaze of high-temperature events. ‘This is new. About the time of the salvage attempt, or perhaps just before. Fuck. What’s that? What’s that?’
The light flew about the walls, then went out.
A further silence.
‘Antoyne? Antoyne? Are you getting this? Antoyne, something’s in here with me.’
Up in the pilot room of the Nova Swing, shadow operators whirled around, their hands to their faces, whispering:
‘What has she done now? Oh, what has she done now?’
Fat Antoyne got out of the crew quarters and into the pilot chair without thinking. ‘Accept,’ he told the systems, and then, as the connexion burrowed its way up through his soft palate, causing him to sneeze then vomit without warning, remembered he was a man who had sworn never to fly again. The systems were all over him as soon as they sensed that. For a moment, struggling to shut down the navigational software, he felt as if he was seeing in too many directions at once. His identity was gone. He seemed to be throwing up endlessly. Everything stank of rubber, then — as the ship tried to calm him down — of gag-reflex dampers and some kind of lowgrade norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor it was pumping into him.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he told it thickly. ‘Just get me alongside.’
pSi engines fired in the dark. At the same time, the vacuum took on an ionised look. Phase-changes rippled through a smart gas of nanodevices, billions of tiny cameras poured between the two vessels like milt. Despite that, Fat Antoyne, his connexion still partial and unstabilised, remained blind.
‘Hey, Liv,’ he said. ‘Liv?’
Nothing. Then static in the pipe, and a distant noise like gak gak gak, the sound of the galaxy talking to itself in FTL bursts.
‘Hello? Antoyne?’
‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘Antoyne, I’m sorry. There’s nothing here. I got disoriented.’
Wearily, Antoyne began to close down the pilot connexion.
‘Welcome to the club,’ he told Liv Hula.
‘Antoyne! Bodies! Bodies!’
According to the names stencilled above their faceplates, she had found one third of the original salvage crew. Arranged as an element in a tableau installation or primitive waxwork, the title of which might be Death Site XIV or The Final Exploration, MENGER sat, legs splayed wide and shoulders slumped, at the base of the wall, the headpiece of her eva suit nodding forward, hands resting lightly between her thighs. SIERPINSKI, posed awkwardly on one knee as if proposing, proved in fact to be writing on his suit forearm the word ‘curvature’. Was it less an observation, Liv Hula wondered, than a warning? ‘There isn’t a mark on either of them,’ she informed the Nova Swing. Which of them had died first? The woman, certainly, seemed caught in the very act of giving up. Was there an element of solicitude, even tenderness, in the way SIERPINSKI leaned towards her? The tunnel, narrowing here and split into three by curiously marbled and streamlined pillars, curled over their heads like a frozen wave. Unwilling to look into the dulled faceplates, an act which would turn discovery into voyeurism, and frightened less that she would see MENGER & SIERPINSKI than that she wouldn’t, that the suits would prove to be abandoned and empty, Liv skirted them and went on. The dial-up remained open but silent, until she remarked suddenly, ‘The whole wreck’s been penetrated again and again from the outside. Hard to guess when.’ The closer she approached the reactor, the more openings she found. Here and there, yellow Tract light fell from one of them in a slanting beam on to ductwork or a sheaf of cable; low level ionising radiation lent everything else a bluish glow. She heard her own breath: behind that, Fat Antoyne coughing and choking into the dial-up pipe as he tried to extricate himself from the ship systems. Behind Antoyne, the familiar FTL interference everyone describes differently, but which Liv always heard as distant shouts of alarm. ‘I’ve got the reactor in front of me.’ It was in a containment vessel the size of a house, around which the original material of the wreck had tried to grow. Pipes led in and out of this fibrous crystalline mass. ‘They pumped water into a slurry of 235U, it vented itself as superheated steam on a five-hour cycle.’ She consulted her head-ups. ‘Decay levels indicate it was last operating in the Devonian period of Old Earth. It’s not attached to an output device. God knows what it was for. All it ever did was raise its own temperature a couple of hundred degrees. I think it might have been an environment for whatever lived here orginally.’ On the Nova Swing they experienced a long pause. Then: ‘Antoyne, I heard the same noise as before.’ A dull buzz, at sufficiently low frequencies to feel as if it had not so much invaded her nervous system as replaced it, this was accompanied by sensations of vertigo and a metallic taste in the mouth. Later, the chaotic pans recorded by her helmet cameras would reveal only a bluish, mucoid blur. ‘I’m heading back.’ As she turned to leave, it was obvious that something was in there with her after all. ‘Antoyne? Are you getting any of this?’ Her visual feed went down, and for a minute or two only broken phrases could be heard from her, ‘shiny lacquerwork’, ‘domed head’ and repeatedly — ‘Antoyne?’ Liv dragged herself and her equipment through the fibrous corridors. It was like being lost inside a major organ. Behind her, she could sense the artefact tunneling its way impassively towards her across the pumice-like structural grain of the wreck, bursting out of one wall only to disappear instantly through another. She imagined it waiting there for four hundred million years. Had it hunted the salvage crew the way it was hunting her?
Irene the Mona, though she loved space, would often wonder what caused people to want to be out in it. If you asked her, it was almost entirely a visual experience anyway. Sometimes those billowing towers of gas, infused with hyacinthine light, ripped by shockfronts from, whatever, exploding quasars and like that, were beautiful; sometimes they only seemed monstrous. Irene preferred warm, solid-earth cities, where on a rainy day the windows of each retro-shop and tailor parlour glowed with personal options. She preferred the lights, the saxophone music, the pink and purple ads like moths, the souls which sprang so readily to meet your own. All phony, all gorgeous. But it was also a fact that she could not be entirely a stay-home girl. Because someone had to handle the fiscal and aspirational sides of the enterprise that was Saudade Bulk Haulage, not to mention human resources!
‘So here I am,’ she told herself aloud, ‘out among the stars and galaxies, which I have to say look almost as remarkable as a new pair of Minnie Sittelman fuck-me pumps.’ Around that time her name was called on the ship speakers: ‘Irene, Irene,’ followed by a noise of gak gak gak.
She found Antoyne lying on the control room couch in a puddle of sick, both hands clutching the bundle of coloured pilot wires as if he had been trying to rip a snake out of his mouth. His knees were drawn up to his chest and he was shaking. If Antoyne had a secret, Irene believed, it was that he didn’t do well alone; but there were days, too, when he didn’t seem to do well even when he had people to look after him. ‘Honey,’ she said, lifting his head and tenderly detaching the wires, on the gold tips of which she was able to discern tiny specks of brain matter, ‘this is not your job, and you really need a shave too.’ Antoyne threw up again and rolled off the acceleration couch.
‘Am I here?’ he said.
‘Yes Antoyne, you are here all right.’
