The assistant advised him not to bother, and had him wait while she examined the transit manifest. Cargo was given as: mixed cargo. Port of loading, Saudade. Port of discharge: New Miass, on some rock named Kunene, a hundred lights nearer the Tract. ‘Here’s something odd,’ she noted. Shipper, consignee and the ‘notify party’ were all the same: one MP Renoko, trading as FUGA-Orthogen, a limited liability operation with all the quantum uncertainty you expected in the Halo — if you knew who ran it, you didn’t know what it did, and vice versa. She asked Epstein what he thought of that, and Epstein said he had no opinion. FUGA-Orthogen, it turned out, dealt mainly paper — rights to the images of dead minor celebrities, brands no one bought into any more — but also owned the remaining assets of a once-popular travelling entertainment, Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant aka The Circus of Pathet Lao. ‘Fifty years after he picked them up,’ the assistant told Epstein, ‘this man Renoko is moving the assets of a circus around the Halo under the guise of commerce.’ She read on. One of those assets, it seemed, was an HS-HE cargo hauler, sold as-seen five years ago through a third party to Saudade Bulk Haulage: who renamed it
‘Fat Antoyne,’ the assistant said to herself, ‘you are a dark horse.’ She asked Epstein if he had ever been to Kunene. Epstein said he hadn’t, but he thought it wasn’t far up the Beach.
Unaware of their desultory exchange, Rig Gaines was on a visit to one of his less demanding projects. This corroded cylinder — about fifty feet long by twenty in diameter, cold enough to chill ham, smelling inside of hydrazine and unwashed feet and known to Gaines as ‘the Tub’ — was heading towards the K-Tract at just over walking pace, piloted by his old friend and ally, Impasse van Sant. Though it rarely produced anything marketable, Gaines liked the Tub. He liked to spend a morning there, drinking Giraffe beer while the pilot brought him up to date.
Keeping in mind EMC’s culture of hip self-presentation — not to say its preference for conservatively leveraged joint venture structures with local partners — Gaines kept silent his collaboration with Imps von Sant. Last of the genuinely human beings, Imps passed his day in shower sandals and cargo shorts, often matched with a slogan T-shirt, which might read SHE’S UP YOU, MAN or YbAlB4 (pronounce that ‘yibble before’). In addition he cultivated a range of mid-20th century conditions from gingivitis to dry skin and had, over the years, grown fat. This old school viewpoint was what Gaines enjoyed about Imps most: his work being more difficult to fathom. Half the experiment — designed off the shelf a hundred years before to identify strange materials in the big dust clouds and expansion fronts at the edges of the Tract — was broken, while the rest produced data not from outside but from in, giving van Sant a running commentary on its own processes he had begun to describe in his reports as ‘a cry for help’. Needles swung across their dials, redlining jerkily until the Tub’s shadow operators woke up murmuring:
‘It’s not right, dear,’ and, ‘It’s too much to ask.’
When Gaines arrived that morning for the weekly performance objectives review, he found van Sant hammering with the heel of his fist on a zinc box about a foot on a side and enamelled green, from which a pair of independent eyepieces dangled on cloth-covered flex.
‘I used to be able to see something in here.’
‘Forget that stuff,’ Gaines advised him, ‘and give me a beer.’
‘It was a view of mountains,’ van Sant said.
He scratched up a quart of Giraffe, then banged the box again. ‘Mountains in one eye, and something else in the other, I forget what. No, wait. A lake! That’s what it looked like to me.’
‘Really?’
Gaines had his doubts about the quality of these images — neither did he believe them to be informative in themselves. The instrument, acquired knock-down at the usual Motel Splendido fire sale, was operator-tuned: there would be some way of seeing, something you did with your head, which performed that trick of cross- correlation. Squint though he might, Imps van Sant had never got the knack. He wasn’t tailored the right way, though a certain natural shrewdness enabled him to observe:
‘It was what they added up to that made the difference.’
‘You don’t want to worry about that,’ Gaines told him vaguely. ‘Have we discovered anything this week?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
They drank beer, then played table tennis in the crew quarters using a new ball Gaines had brought along. The game being a version of his own devising, its rule-like structures and boundary conditions changing visit by visit, Gaines won. Shortly after that, carbon dioxide levels were raised sharply all the way across the Tub environment. Alarms went off. Van Sant had to suit up and go outside — where the ongoing tantrums of probability self-cancel to vacuum — and hit something twice with a wrench; then they had to dump the greenhouse and start again. By then it began to be time for Gaines to leave.
‘Biology,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Don’t you just wish you could do without it?’
‘Very funny.’
After his friend had gone, Impasse van Sant sat tiredly in the bottom half of the eva suit and told himself: ‘I hate going out there. I can feel that thing looking at me.’ He meant the K-Tract. Gaines felt differently about it, he knew. Like everyone else, Imps had very little idea how he fitted into his friend’s schemes: but he sometimes thought that Rig visited the Tub because it was the only place he could relax. Rig loved it out in the dark, away from everything human. Van Sant felt less than comfortable with that. Some time ago — too long ago, perhaps — he had become aware of the Tract hanging up there in front of him, year on year like a huge boiling face — stripped, raw, raddled with Bok globules and dust lanes, flattened and stretched laterally by poorly-understood relativistic effects, heaving with emotions you couldn’t recognise.
It made him feel routinely anxious. It made him feel alone. So as soon as he was sure Rig Gaines had gone he opened a spread of communications channels and whispered into empty space:
‘Hey, babe. Are you out there?’
No answer today.
The assistant booked a ticket to Kunene. Tide-locked with its local sun so that one side froze and the other cooked, this medium-sized venue a few lights into the Bay offered a single habitable time-zone known as ‘the Magic Hour’. Rare earth oxides had kick-started Kunene’s first phase of commerce, but it was the Magic Hour’s fixed and subtly graded bands of sunset action that brought in the investment partners: badlands, ghost towns and wreck-littered coastal benches seduced tourist and corporate image-maker alike, confirming Kunene as the Halo’s primo location for everything from amateur wedding holography through ‘existence porn’ to the edgiest of brand initiatives.
Everyone who enjoys a sunset wishes it would never end; on Kunene, the brochures promised, you could have that wish.
For half a day the assistant stared out the portholes of the shorthauler
Administration was an eight-acre lot, thick with low-rise accommodation. Blue and white striped awnings creaked in the wind. Heavily blistered signs advertised commodities long past. All seemed deserted: but at reception in a single storey structure reprising the moderne suburban carport of 1959, the assistant found a short, skinny old man wearing golf cap, box-cut shirt and bronze polyester pleat-front trousers, idly throwing Entreflex dice on the polished wooden counter. A thousand faded bills of lading were pinned upon the wall. A switched-off sign read:
PERDIDOS E ACHADOS
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘we’re closed.’
