Empty Space

lamplight.

‘I never saw anything like this,’ he told himself.

The dogs were subdued  on the way home. They weren’t sure what they’d caught. A hare more blue than  grey, unmarked  by death: though  empty, its eyes seemed to focus on him when he took it from them. ‘Get up,’ he said to the bitch to cheer her up. ‘Get on with you.’ But she stuck so close he felt her head touch his leg. It was cold in the bothy where he lived with the dogs, up there the far side of Ampney. When he got in he thought for a minute he saw a kind of grey mould on everything. Then, later that night, he woke up out of a dream of the woman he had talked to the afternoon  before. He didn’t remember  anything  about  her and now she was leaning over him in his bed, undressed, whispering something  he couldn’t catch. Her grey hair was hanging down, her tits thin  and  white, her eyes the blue of his dog’s eyes. He didn’t like the way she tried to catch his attention.  It woke him. He was as hard  as wood, and it wouldn’t go away. He yearned to fuck someone, anyone. ‘I’d fuck anything,’ he said to himself. By then, wraiths and dips of mist lay across the fields. He could see all the way to the Arbor barn at Winsthrow, up to its door in mist. Further away, it looked as if something tall had caught fire in that direction, but it was just something in the corner of his eye and when he turned his head it was gone. ‘She wanted to know all about you,’ he teased the dogs.

They pressed up close to him then, and all the next day followed him about, quiet and unresourceful. ‘Get on with you,’ he said to them. ‘Get on with the both of you.’

Anna Waterman, meanwhile, had passed the rest of the afternoon at the de Spencer Arms, arriving home about five o’ clock. By six she had twice rung Marnie, to leave confused messages. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she began, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. In a sense, she wasn’t sorry, she was only in a panic. ‘Well, anyway, give me a call.’ Poor Marnie! After that she went round with the vacuum cleaner, and opened all the windows to get rid of the smell of paint. Later, James the cat stalked up and down the arm of the sofa butting his head into her face while she sat in front of the television. ‘James,’ she told him, picking uninterestedly at tuna and baked potato, ‘you’re a nuisance.’ The cat responded  with a breathy grinding noise.

Anna retired early; experienced busy dreams, in which her new bathroom,  relocated to the station concourse at Waterloo where it drew the late afternoon commute like a football crowd, became filled with water in the azure depths of which flickered real fish; and woke tangled in her damp nightdress in the deep night, convinced that a strange light and heat, coming and going Chinese red and sunflower yellow outside her window, had winked out the instant she opened her eyes. Feeling as if someone might be staring in at her, she struggled up out of bed and went down to look out of the back door. Only the lawn and flowerbeds, suspended in the cool, milky late-summer dark: but in the distance, somewhere the other side of the river, she could hear the long, belling cries of dogs. Cool air flowed around her ankles. Everything out there was very still. James sat in the middle of the lawn like an illustration; turned his head to look at her, then, as she left the house, stretched amiably and walked off. The sound of the dogs became clearer. Musical but inexplicable, detached from anything you might expect to happen on an ordinary night, it was a sound distant and very close at the same time. It wasn’t coming from across the river. It was coming from Anna’s summerhouse.

Originally stained a colour Tim Waterman  had called ‘Serbian yellow’, which faded over the years to the faintest lemon tint in the fibres of the wood, the summerhouse  stood as leached and grey as a beach hut, the earth at its base rioting with exotic flowers again — huge foxglove-like bells in pale transparent  pastel browns and pinks, round which fluttered hundreds of dusty-white moths. ‘How beautiful!’ Anna thought,  though  now the sound  of dogs was loud and  close. Suspended between delight and  dread,  she approached the summerhouse and pulled at its door, which stuck then gave. She had time to hallucinate a rolling endless landscape of tall grass, under  a lighting effect from the cover of a science fiction novel, and hear a voice say, ‘Leave here. Leave here, Anna!’ Then the dogs were on her. It was hard to count  them, jostling and snapping, white teeth and lolling tongues, long hot muscular bodies brindled fawn and violet. It was hard to see what kinds of dogs they were. Before she knew it, the sheer weight and strong smell of them had knocked her off balance, she had stumbled back from the door, she was down on her back on the lawn in the dark, laughing and gasping as they licked her all over. ‘No!’ she said. She laughed. ‘No, wait!’ Too late. The nightdress was up around her waist.

FOURTEEN Enantiodromic Zones

The Halo is rich with hauntings  of one sort or another. They occupy many different kinds of space.

Two of them  held a short  meeting  in the Nova Swing main hold.  First  to  arrive  was the  entity  calling itself MP  Renoko. Though presently operating  himself by FTL transmission  from a Faint Dime cashout terminal on the south hemisphere  of New Venusport, Renoko self-identified as human; and when he walked through the wall of the hold, he certainly resembled — down to his white stubble, grubby short raincoat and bare ankles — the same individual who had commissioned  Fat Antoyne, insulted Irene’s sense of business, and argued so fiercely with Ruby Dip about the nature of kitsch. His first act was to inspect the mortsafes, which greeted him with a kind of biddable skittishness.

Renoko patted them like the thoroughbreds they were, whistling in the tuneless but familiar carnie manner.  Occasionally he gave a nod of approval. To the smallest of them, he said with a laugh, ‘I see you’ve been back at the old game!’ Then, opening his arms as if he could embrace all three at once, ‘It’s a real treat to see you together again!’

He busied himself about, using his breath and the sleeve of his raincoat to wipe down a viewport here or buff up a brass detail there. But after a while he sat down suddenly in a corner of the hold. Both his facial expression and his body language collapsed into vacancy. He seemed to be prepared  to wait. The mortsafes settled down again. It would be difficult to reproduce  Renoko’s state of consciousness during this period. He identified as a human being, but he could not be said to be one. Based on a few lines of code last separately aware of itself in the glory days of Sandra Shen’s circus, he was now in all senses an emergent property: not of a single cash register, or indeed a single diner, but of the whole Halo-wide  Faint  Dime  chain  (in  itself a subsidiary  of FUGA-Orthogen),  including its wholesaling and accountancy  software, its transport  and construction  departments,  its human  resources and, especially, their day to day viral loading. The progress of a modified herpes infection through  the staff of a given diner did as much  to generate, maintain  and  express MP Renoko as the progress of a restocking order for ketchup or the decision to press forward with a new outlet. These different kinds of events implied, added up to or gave rise to him. In a sense he was nothing more than  a list of instructions  left behind  by Madame  Shen herself when she abandoned  the Circus. But you can’t accrete fifty years of history without  becoming some sort of identity in your own right. That was a guarantee of sorts, Renoko sometimes believed: though of what he wasn’t sure.

After perhaps  an  hour,  some activity began  in  the  opposite corner of the hold. A few pale green motes of light floated about near the floor, then  vanished. When  they reappeared,  it was to drift  lazily towards  one  another,  whirl  together  like flies on  a hot afternoon,  separate, then whirl together again — until over a period of minutes  they had assembled themselves into a rough, recognisable  shape. This figure hung,  slightly over life-size, its shoulders six feet from the deckplates, like a compromise between a man, some strips of meat and a charred coat. It had arms, but was without legs. ‘Hey,’ it said softly. At this the mortsafes woke up. They jostled and nudged at one another. LEDs of every colour flashed urgently down their sides. If Renoko had charmed  their alien hearts, the newcomer charged them with a strange, immediate, nervous energy. The hold filled up with such a mixture of electromagnetic styles and motives that MP Renoko’s hair stood on end. He stirred and sat up. His mind came back from wherever it had been. A private-looking smile passed across his features, so that for a moment he seemed quite human.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

‘I remember you, man. You look like shit.’

‘We both look like shit,’ said MP Renoko, ‘but you look dead.’

A laugh. ‘How we doing otherwise?’

Renoko gestured around  the hold. ‘Well enough. As you can see, a little behind schedule.’

‘You know, I don’t think there’s a schedule as such.’

Renoko seemed to settle in his corner. ‘I’d like to get it over with anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a little tired