Empty Space

ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall, Joan saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow-brown tones, and the rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact. Joan felt that it might take years to squeeze through.  And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult — she was so embarrassed! — the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a baby. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were foreshortened  and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work.

At all points  it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling.

Saturday  morning,  Joan  had  always made  cakes. Often  her husband found her in the kitchen, still up to her elbows in flour or perhaps setting the ‘regulator’ on her brand new Creda oven. The radio played a little light classical music. Alan loved her cakes. He would put his arms around her, rub a little, bunch up her skirt, then shoot helplessly while he was still trying to slip into her clean underwear from behind. ‘Oh!’ Joan would tell him, ‘I do love our times  together.’ It  was their  mid-morning Saturday  ritual.  He could always surprise her. She was always ready for him, yet never somehow prepared.  Today, though,  she was only thinking  how awful it would be if he came in and saw the vulva in the kitchen wall. And just as she thought that, he did. Once Alan arrived, the walls returned  slowly to their original colour. It took all morning but everything was real again. After they held hands the way they did, staring up at the wall together, Joan and Alan felt for a week or two that they had changed. They knew a secret others didn’t. Though it was horrible,  it made them  feel that  they had found their way through  to some more knowing way of life. Joan said vile things. Alan pulled her skirt up and fucked ’til they were both red and sore. Then they found that all their friends knew the secret too, so it was just a kind of loss everyone went through.

The assistant began to bang her head on the side of the immersion tank and make a sound full of grief. She could hear herself but not stop; the technicians could hear her, but it was too soon to get the lid up. Later, she cancelled her subscription  to Cedar Mountain  and received a refund; this time no one could explain what had gone wrong.

Panamax IV:

‘Don’t you get sick of the cultural  noise?’ R.I. Gaines asked Alyssia Fignall. They were sheltering from the noon light in a bony cloister, perhaps  a mile from the sea and some miles down the valley from her hilltop site. Its arches were in shade, but full sun fell across the dry central fountain, the pale rhiolite columns, the dry brown vegetation between the cobbles. She had been trying to explain to him how richly-decorated the cloister would have been before time stripped  off the paint. This had upset his idea of it as bare, quiet, uncommunicative:  possessing an almost geological calm. ‘All I want is the stone, wiped clean.’ He shrugged. ‘And perhaps this sense of an unending afternoon.’

She smiled. Touched his hand. ‘You’re tired, Rig.’

‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he told her. ‘The ship won’t come until dark. You can tell me all about these sacrificial engines of yours.’

‘Not mine,’ she said.

Later, as the air cooled and the sky filled up from the east, local children  processed  through  the  town  square,  dressed  as lions, tigers, bears, fairies with wings, the mythical inhabitants  of Old Earth.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘They’re enacting one of the folk-tales of the local river. It’s tidal for several miles past here. At each tide, the water leaves a few black lumps of wood on the shore. These, sodden as much with age as water, are the river’s gift to the land.’ None of the children were older than  four, but they bore their wands and tinsel garlands — along with a banner  reading  something  like Los Ninos de Camapasitas —  with  considerable  gravity, watched  by Halo tourists of a certain age, mainly women dressed in a puffy shorts-and-blouse combination  which made them resemble, by contrast, someone’s baby. ‘“I brought you these,” the river says to the land. The land declines without having to say anything at all. The river shrugs and tries again later.’

‘A complex story.’

‘It loses in translation,’ Alyssia admitted.

The dark came down soft and warm. They ate in one of the cafes on the edge of the square. Alyssia felt he looked too thin. He should slow down. Rig, she felt, had always seen himself caught between planets,  between  wars, between  conflicting  modes  of being:  a sardonic  eye on a world he didn’t quite  get. ‘But other  people see you differently,’ she said. ‘We see how hurt you become. We see so clearly how your personality trapped  you in EMC, in the concept of constant  war this Aleph of yours is supposed to end. Ask yourself why you called it that, Rig. The Aleph! Honestly, just ask!’

‘Other people?’ he said, smiling broadly.

She looked down at her plate. ‘Me,’ she was forced to admit. ‘I see you like that.’

In his turn, Rig talked about what he called the wanton mystery of things. He couldn’t get enough of it, he told her. But Alyssia hated phrases like that, and said:

‘In the end, maybe it will get enough of you.’

Just then something hit the upper atmosphere with a dull thud. Sprays of ionisation  flickered like heat lightning  in the clouds. Alyssia Fignall sighed. She knew this one too. Everyone did. A warm wind filled the square, and with it the K-ship Uptown Six, out of New Venusport  on grey ops for EMC’s crack Levy Flight. At that time there was no greyer op in the Halo than R.I. Gaines. A mere two hundred  feet long yet ten thousand tonnes unloaded, its matt-grey  hull profuse  with power bulges and  ram  intakes, Uptown  Six dipped  its blunt  nose  into  the  square.  Reeking of stealth coatings, strange physics and the exotically dense matter laid in wafers between the poisonous  composites  of its hull, it hung outside the cafe door in a nose-down  atttitude,  like a bad dream, full of the intelligence of its captain, a thirteen-year-old self-harmer called Carlo who would live the rest of his life in a tank of fluid somewhere near the stern.

‘Here’s your boyfriend,’ Alyssia said.

‘Behave yourself,’ he said. He put his arms round her. ‘It’s just a ride.’

‘Promise to come back soon, Rig.’

He promised.  They hugged a long time, then  Gaines let her go. Before he had taken three paces he was already part  of the darkness. The ship seemed to suck him in without  opening any part of itself: though something caused its transformation  optics to discharge briefly, distorting Alyssia’s perception of the hull into a silvery yet glutinous foetal shape, through patches of which she could see the buildings on the other side of the square.

‘You love this,’ she called after him bitterly, tilting her head to watch the sheet-lightning in the clouds.

Ten minutes into the voyage, they were bounced.

‘Incoming,’ Carlo said matter-of-factly.  It was less a warning than a courtesy; the action was over before he framed the last syllable. Two middleweight cruisers, their emissions heavily blocked, had  slipped like eels into  his ten-dimensional  parsec-on-a-side cube of awareness and despatched assets up to and including the substrate  disrupter  known  to  K-captains  as a ‘bump’. Finding their  target absent  by a millisecond  or more,  a long-gone  trail of turbulence  in the local quantum  foam, they had backtracked hastily: only to encounter  Uptown Six, its mathematics  sorting a billion or so tactical and navigational possibilities a nanosecond, already waiting for them.

‘Guys,’ Carlo said, ‘you thought  you could hide. But wherever you go, here I am.’

He released an asset of his own. ‘Be sure and have a nice day now.’

To Gaines he added: ‘We seem to be at war.’ He couldn’t say who with; by then he had lost interest anyway.

Projected  into  the  carefully deodorised  air  of Uptown  Six’s human quarters, feeds from fifteen planets showed, in quick succession, all the signs of modern  conflict: street demonstrations, agitated financial markets, rows of top-shelf EMC hardware hulking around in parking orbits up and down the Beach. Within an hour  all sides were broadcasting  atrocity-footage as fast as it could be manufactured.  Psychodrama  raged. Everyone claimed the minority position. Everyone described their grievance as longer-standing  and more asymmetric than  the enemy’s. Iconic buildings fell in towers of smoke. Sleeping genes, inserted  into entire populations three or four generations in advance, expressed themselves as plagues of ideological change. Up and  down  the Beach, innocent  CEOs, brand  managers  and  celebrities found themselves  kidnapped  then  subjected  to  sexual assault,  at  the hands of provocateurs who had no idea why they had begun to act so illiberally. By noon, exhausted attack ads fluttered up and down the streets of every Halo capital. Gaines studied these indicators