Deep in the eight-acres of the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate, a curiously self-similar grid of buildings, he found the lost property office. Its door hung open. No one had been there for weeks. Dust had drifted across the floor and gathered as a thin film in the curls and creases of the yellowing waybills pinned to the walls. Antoyne called ‘Hello?’ and receiving no answer sat down on a chair to wait. He read some of the paper. ‘Ambo Danse VI, d.i.f. Details at site.’ Over this someone had written, ‘Fedy wants to know where this is!’ A thousand dice were scattered on the counter, some of them lighting up dimly from inside if you passed your hand above them. Antoyne sat, turning the heart-shaped stone between his fingers and listening to the wind bang about outside as if it had misplaced something. He felt uneasy just sitting there. He found another room: nothing. He poked his head out of the back door, which was off its top hinge, and looked up and down the street. Nothing.
He opened his dial-up and said, ‘Hi!’ but all he could hear in the pipe was a sound like very distant canaries.
‘Renoko?’
Halfway through the afternoon, he gave up and went out into the avenues between the buildings. Everything seemed to hang suspended in the late afternoon light, static and fried. Even Antoyne’s movements were reluctant. They were the movements of a fatter man. The Mambo Rey Postindustrial State, stripping away his pretensions, had resolved him as an earlier version of himself. It was the story of his life. All the buildings were neglected. In addition some of them were curiously damaged. Splintered wood, deformed aluminium siding. Cracked asbestos panels flung about. In each case it was as if something had burst into the structure from one avenue and out of it into the next. Antoyne could smell the broken wood in the air. He wandered about until he found himself on the edge of the estate where, the other side of a weed-grown strip of cement, the skeletal sheds and rusting hoppers of abandoned lanthanide workings stretched away between empty evaporation ponds and wrecking yards so silted up that the ancient ships seemed to lean at angles out of a milky grey sea. The light was a resin coating on all of it.
Antoyne trudged up one slope of dust, down the next, craned his neck at the stripped hull of an early Creda Starliner, leaned in through a second floor factory window to find somewhere he could shit. Some people go to the tailor early in life and have themselves cut so they don’t need to do that. Antoyne wasn’t one of those. A shit was a shit for Antoyne, that’s what he always said: it was a sensation he enjoyed. Although sometimes, given the product, you wondered what was going on inside you. He squatted between some items of abandoned machinery for a couple of minutes, groaning, then became aware that something was in there with him. It was very close. Perhaps it was even kneeling right next to him, almost brushing his shoulder, and smelling ranker, whatever it was, than Antoyne’s bowel movement. It was amused by him. Full of passive terror, he stared hard away from where he thought it was until it had gone, then pulled up his chinos and fastened his belt. He went into a corner and threw up. Then he left the factory and stared out across the sea of dust, above which, at the horizon, floated mesa after rotting mesa the colour of pigeon’s wings. Sex, he thought. It reeked of sex. There were no tracks in the dust but his own. He had neither seen nor heard anything. On his way back through the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate he spotted the item they were supposed to pick up, floating motionlessly at a street intersection in the distance.
It was a bone colour, on the yellow side of white. Closer inspection revealed it to be twelve feet long, longitudinally ribbed for about two thirds of its length, with a blunt sloping point at one end. It seemed to be made of porcelain with the hair-fine brown craqueleur of an ageing urinal. It was very warm to the touch, like anything left standing in the afternoon sun. Antoyne shoved it along, up and down the avenues, looking for the landing field. It wasn’t hard work but it wasn’t easy either. Soon he came upon Liv Hula, standing in the middle of the street staring up at a corpse which hung in the air about four feet above her head. When Fat Antoyne arrived all she said was, ‘What do you think of this?’
Antoyne stopped pushing the mortsafe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said.
‘You get dead people,’ Liv Hula agreed, ‘but they don’t float.’
The corpse was of an old guy, snappily dressed in a loose shirt worn outside bronze pleat-front plus fours, with tan loafers, no socks and a white golf cap. He had a quiet smile on his face as if to say, ‘Being dead means less to me than than you’d think,’ and he was swimming in the air, like an instructor in some new kind of meditational discipline, tracing a slow, graceful butterfly symbol. Two or three dice drifted in loose orbits round his head, and a worn-out advertisement from one of the fuck-resorts further into the twilight zone was trying to draw him into a conversation about photography. A hot wind blew up and down the street. Otherwise things were completely silent. Antoyne said:
‘I’m sorry I threw up in your pilot chair.’
He offered Liv the heart-shaped stone Irene had given him, which she took absently, still staring up at the corpse.
‘Do you want some help with that thing?’ she said.
They got round the back of the mortsafe and leaned into it. Pushing was much easier with two. Halfway across the landing field, Liv handed him back the stone.
‘This won’t work, Antoyne,’ she said, giving him a very direct look.
FIFTEEN
Random Acts of Downward Causation
Saudade: Autumn when you could tell. Rain, anyway.
At SiteCrime, all the talk was war. The Nastic — allies for a day or two some time in the middle 2400s, but now in possession of new physics and a hybrid cosmology that trumped the rest — were moving out of bases in Delta Carinae. Rumour said that EMC had a new best buy in its arsenal, even now being R&D’d from alien blueprints on a secret research asteroid in the very shadow of the Tract. No one knew what it was. They called it the ‘field weapon’ or the ‘non-Abelian’ weapon. Meanwhile, Lens Aschemann’s ghost hung in a corner on the fifth floor. I don’t pity the dead, the assistant thought, not when they persist like this. Two floors down it was common knowledge: she would be helpless without him. One floor up they said she had no personality. What the assistant thought of these opinions, if she knew, went unrecorded. She did her work. She watched Toni Reno and his loader fade to zero. As Epstein the thin cop put it, there was never a point at which you could safely say, ‘They’re gone’, but after ten days only a sketch remained.
Meanwhile, though she had alerted Port Authorities all over the Halo, the
Forced to await developments on both these cases, and unhindered for once by the mystery that was R.I. Gaines, she investigated the massacre in the basement, working in her office with holograms made at the scene. The vics, viewable from any angle, lay about in louche poses. Even their smell was replicated. Forty-eight hours after the attack, a faint aerosol of lymph had still hung in the air. The evidence team’s conclusion: someone had done a job on them. After that, causation itself dribbled away in predictable chains of confusion, each ultimate cause itself shown to be proximate in some other context until everything danced off into metaphysics. Evidently it was a Preter Coeur kill. The room was full of clues to that, the fading signature of hormonal switchgear, the wounds traceable to biomineral weapons — self-sharpening polycrystal mosaics derived from nacre, perhaps expressing as fingernails?
Nanocamera coverage having tanked so completely during the actual crime, it was expected the assistant would go down there in person, if only — as the sixth floor put it — to familiarise herself with the venue. But she never did. She remembered the event on the back stairs. The thought of the basement made her uneasy, and remained with her even in the Cedar Mountain immersion tank on C-Street, where, as Joan the 1950s wife, she dreamed a baby came through the wall in her bright, new, airy, shades-of-primrose kitchen.
First something went wrong with the paintwork. It turned matt olive in the top corners; then in patches on the walls themselves, which spread quickly until everything was covered. Then she noticed that on the kitchen shelves her carefully arranged tins of anchovies and Parma ham had been replaced with stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit. These items caused her both disgust and anxiety. Her husband Alan might come in at any moment and see them! But now the kitchen doorway had no door; the kitchen window opened on to a weed- filled lot where it was always raining. Damp had penetrated the cheap formica cabinets, covering them with fibrous
