Empty Space

lately.’

‘Fifty years is a long time, man.’

‘You could say that. I look forward to a holiday.’

‘Kick back a little,’ the newcomer agreed. ‘Sink into the data.’

During this dialogue he had been busy opening a panel in the hull of one of the mortsafes.  Over this he now bent,  his head and shoulders inside, his elbows still visible as he worked at the exposed engine. Field effects rippled across the hold like luminescence in surf. All three mortsafes blurred, fogging the warm air with physics. Various kinds of musical sounds could be heard as they exchanged data. MP Renoko observed alien states of matter crawling across the walls as symbols, hallucinatory lights, scenes from his own past. Much of what was going on made him even tireder than usual. He massaged his left hand with his right. Stood up slowly, suddenly remembering the circus at dawn, some landing field on  a forgotten  planet.  Every morning  different, every morning  the same. The harsh light on cement, the air full of salt and fried food smells. A tiny Chinese-looking woman with piled up red hair and a tight emerald cheongsam, swaying like a mirage through the heat haze between the carnie booths, every eye’s focus, human or alien. ‘Can code enjoy sex?’ the media always ask. MP Renoko remembered something less easy to describe.

‘Do you ever see her?’ he said softly, one ghost to another.

The newcomer  grunted  in surprise  and  shook his head. This simple motion transferred itself to the dangling strips of flesh that comprised his lower half, causing them to whirl like a skirt.

‘No one sees her now, man. She’s got so much stuff to do. She’s working on behalf of others.’

‘I just wondered.’

‘We’ve all got stuff to do now.’

Shortly afterwards he left, saying only: ‘I’ll be back for you, Jack,’ which he seemed to find funny. MP Renoko, whose name had never been Jack or anything like it, laughed dutifully. He waited until the mortsafes had calmed down then he too left the hold, walking out the same wall he had entered by. Unaware of these kinds of events except as a localised cluster of internal surveillance blackouts, the crew of the Nova Swing slept, ate, screwed, stared out  the portholes  at the wonders  of space, and  drew closer to their next destination:  a G-type star, known to the navigational mathematics  as an 11-dimensional mosaic of co- ordinates,  but to the generations who lived and died by its light as ‘Scinde Dawk’.

By that time, everyone was in a bad temper  with everything: Liv and Antoyne argued over who should clean up the mess in the control room; Irene, bored and with a far-off look in her blue eyes, crafted for herself outfits in increasingly radical expressions of pink,  which, to  the  consternation  of the  shadow  operators, she wore fifteen minutes  each before weeping inexplicably and throwing  them about. Forty-eight hours  later these three found themselves in the parking orbit of the Scinde Dawk system’s only inhabitable  planet  — the  tidally-locked  Funene  — searching  the twilight zone for an abandoned  factory town dubbed  by Irene, ‘some dump called Mambo Rey’. Liv Hula hit the retros, ran three cursory aerobrake cycles to save fuel, and was bringing them down on the customary tail of green flame when the ship’s instruments picked up surface activity around the Mambo Rey rocket field.

‘Fat Antoyne,’ she said, ‘Something is going on down there.’

Why tell him, Antoyne wanted to know.

‘Don’t sulk! Don’t sulk, Antoyne! I fucking have to work in here! My workplace should not smell of someone else’s puke!’

Antoyne was of the opinion that nothing could smell as bad as the blanket she kept in there.

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

‘The truth often hurts.’

‘Antoyne, sometimes you are as big a cunt as Toni Reno.’

A dry laugh came from the crew quarters.

‘No one is as big a cunt as Toni Reno,’ was Irene’s opinion.

‘We all can  feel the  truth  of  that,’ Liv Hula  admitted.  ‘So Antoyne,’ she said, in as placatory a voice as she could manage, ‘help me out here. I don’t know what I’m seeing.’

Antoyne  didn’t know either. A rooster-tail  of disturbed  dust billowed its way between the low hills surrounding  the port. At its head could be made out a fierce mote of energy. Nova Swing’s arrays were detecting short range RF, broad spectrum  FTL transmissions,  and  some  kind  of radar:  nothing  anyone  could understand.  Neither  was there  any logic to the object’s course. It resembled a spark racing along a carelessly-laid fuse, or some weird science particle tangled and looping through invisible fields. Thirty miles into the badlands, it abruptly disappeared. The dust settled slowly. No matter how many times he re- ran the footage, Antoyne couldn’t make out what was going on. The object was too small to be a vehicle. It was too fast to be a human being.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

By then they were on the ground. Irene, who had knowledge of fifty planets before she was fourteen, recognised a dump when she saw one. Mambo Rey was a place no one wanted, except to hologram themselves getting sex against a collapsing industrial shed in clever light. It was less a world than a lifestyle accessory. ‘Having a great fuck, wish you were here!’ 35 degrees Celsius, humidity nil. A metal taste filled the mouth: rare earth dust, rotting even as it separated out of the ancient strata, blew across the concrete on the wind, silting up the corners of the wooden terminal buildings. As the surrounding  mesas eroded, they had exposed the remains of early life in that part of the Halo — huge, bare, cryptic, radioactive forms that looked less like bones than pieces of architecture. Elsewhere in the subtle gradations of Funene’s twilight zone, hallucinatory giant insects strode the horizon on long, fragile legs.

‘Jesus,’ Irene said: ‘Roach planet.’ And then, bending down suddenly, ‘Hey! I found a heart-shaped stone!’

After a brief argument  with Liv, who claimed it was no more than  a tooth  washed out  of some ancient  alluvial deposit,  she presented  it to Fat Antoyne, and the women set out to find the Snakebite bar. Antoyne watched them trudge off across the hot cement — laughing and arguing arm in arm, an image sharpened and  rendered  almost  unbearable  by the  glare of the  perpetual afternoon — then went back inside the Nova Swing and examined the stone. It was pink, translucent, full of small bubbles suspended in a web of hazy fracture planes. It wasn’t a tooth. He rubbed it with his thumb, then dialled up MP Renoko.

‘We’re here,’ he said.

‘Hello?’ a voice replied. ‘Hello?’

The pipe was bad. If it was Renoko, he sounded  as if he was already talking to someone else.

‘Are you there?’ Antoyne said.

‘Hello!’ the voice shouted. ‘For a moment I thought you’d gone!’

‘Is this Renoko?’

‘Who’s that? Is that you, Antoyne?’

‘We can take delivery of those goods of yours,’ Antoyne said. At this, he thought he felt Renoko’s attention focus suddenly. ‘Hello?’

‘You’ll find us in the old lost property office.’

‘Are you here, then?’

‘Well,’ said Renoko. ‘That depends  what you mean.  Do you need me to be there?’

‘I’m at Mambo Rey,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Antoyne?’ Renoko interrupted.  ‘This is a bad pipe, Antoyne.

Hello?’ Another  pause. ‘Find the  lost property  office,’ he said.

‘Someone will take care of you.’

‘I’m here,’ Antoyne said. ‘Where are you?’

‘PERDIDOS Y ACHADOS!’ shouted Renoko.

Directions   followed,  then   the   dial-up   collapsed.  Antoyne looked around the control room, with its homely smells of vomit, fried  food  and  electrical  fields. Wondering  what  Renoko  had meant when he described himself as ‘here’, he got up abruptly and searched the ship from top to bottom.  It took an hour to check every companionway. Sometimes Antoyne felt the need go back and check the ductwork  too. Only when he was sure the Nova Swing was empty did he feel safe enough to leave.