Empty Space

help?’

No answer: except that in front of her the summerhouse burst grandly and silently into flames, as black against the sky as the woodcut illustration in a book of Tarot cards.

SEVENTEEN Correlation States

When the Kefahuchi Tract expanded, in what came to be known as ‘the Event’, parts of it fell to earth on planets all along the Beach. Event sites appeared everywhere, sometimes in deserts or polar icefields or at the bottom of the sea: but often alongside the cities.

They were assembly-yards of the abnormal — zones where physics seemed to have forgotten its own rules — expanding into the real world via a perimeter of fogs, hallucinations, half-glimpsed movements. From inside could be heard confused laughter, big music, the sound of machinery. Something was being produced in there. Obsolete objects came fountaining out. They were highly energetic and abnormally scaled: rains of enamel badges, cheap rings, windup plastic toys; nuts & bolts, cups & saucers, horses & carts; feathers, doves and black- lacquered boxes, conjuror’s props the size of houses. They burst into the air above the roofline then toppled back and vanished. A blueprint unfolded itself across the sky then folded itself up again and faded away. No one minded these illusions, if illusions they were. But artefacts and inexplicable new technologies came out of the Event sites too, and sought a foothold on our side of things. Some of them were conscious and looked human. They wandered out into the cities and tried to become part of life. That was when things went wrong. EMC took an interest. Razor wire went up. The observation towers went up. SiteCrime and Quarantine (known popularly as QuaPo) became, for a time, the most powerful police forces in the Halo, second only to Earth Military Contracts itself.

Irene and Liv listened to Fat Antoyne Messner explain these recent history facts they already knew, then said as one voice:

‘Antoyne, yadda yadda. What’s in it for us?’

‘Quarantine orbit work,’ Fat Antoyne said, and he told them the story of Andy and Martha.

Andy and Martha lived on a planet called Basel Dove. Andy owned a little townhouse, worked human resources for the usual corporate; Martha collected alien ceramics. They had a son they called Bobby, eight that summer, a bright kid if a little needy. Andy found them a young woman, intelligent and ordinary-looking, to tutor Bobby in the afternoons. Her name was Bella. She dressed well but came off a little vague, as if she didn’t quite understand how a house or a family worked. Her commonest expression was of a cheerful puzzlement. Bella had her own room, near the top of the house. She worked out well. You’d find her standing in a hallway early evening, staring ahead of herself and wondering what to do next; but she soon settled in, and Bobby no longer followed Martha about all day complaining he was bored. Instead he sat quietly with Bella, listening in awe as she solved problems of classic harmonic analysis in her head. They got on so nicely! It was, as Martha said, a love affair, ‘Bella and Bobby this, Bella and Bobby that. Always Bella and Bobby.’ Those two were, really, really inseparable. But soon they were more inseparable than you would hope.

Before Bella arrived, the little boy’s mid-afternoon recreation had been to take his clothes off and look at himself in the mirror until he got hard. He rubbed but nothing came out yet. He could feel something coming up but it never arrived. All he got was a sort of shock, a painful little jolt. Bella changed all that. After mathematics she would take him upstairs to her room and style his hair for him. A passive calm came over him at such moments. He loved her smell. With each stroke of the brush, his little cock stuck out harder in his pants. When Bella touched it accidentally with the back of her hand, they looked at one another in wonder. One winter afternoon, Martha found them on the sofa. It was bitterly obvious what had been happening before she came in the room. Bella’s tits were bare. The little boy’s pants were open. Her hand was on his penis. She leaned over him, he stared up at her, growling and whimpering in his little boy voice as he struggled to come.

It was horrible enough that Martha walked in on her eight-year-old son about to ejaculate in the hand of the hired help. But worse was to be revealed. When she tried to pull them apart, they were stuck together. And when Andy came home he found his wife stuck to them too.

One of Martha’s forearms had penetrated Bella’s head. Martha was staring angrily at her hand emerging on the other side. Everything was soft. All three of them were covered in a thin, slippery emulsion; they were pulling away from one another, but that only seemed to make things worse. Andy threw up. He called the Quarantine Bureau. By 10 pm the same day, Bobby, Bella and Martha were a fully-fledged escape — translucent, infectious, a jelly part human, part virus, part daughter code straight from the local Event site. With Andy’s permission, Quarantine sealed this substance into a heavily welded, tapering iron container about seven feet long by three in depth, which they left on the floor of Bella’s room. Since Basel Dove was too quiet to have a quarantine orbit of its own, they explained, the sarcophagus would have to be delivered — within a week and by a licensed operator — to the one at New Venusport. They said they were sorry for Andy’s loss, and left. Andy, numb with grief and puzzlement and unable to find a local firm willing to handle such a tiny cargo, called Saudade Bulk Haulage.

‘He doesn’t want to make the trip himself,’ Antoyne explained. ‘He’s a damaged man. It’s very sad.’

Liv Hula pursed her lips. ‘So we’re undertakers now?’

‘I’m glad to get any kind of work,’ answered Fat Antoyne. ‘Besides, we’re going there anyway.’

So Nova Swing became a quarantine dog, and her crew found themselves sharing space with the remains of Martha, Bobby and Bella. They stowed the sarcophagus in a corner of the main hold. By then the contents had settled into a uniform transparent mass weighing slightly less than its original human components. It was liquid, superconductive at room temperature, and retained some memory of its former state: for instance, the little boy could sometimes be seen behind the armoured viewplate, half-formed, curled foetally with his hands between his legs. It made Irene sad. ‘Oh, his little penis,’ she said. She was not her usual self. She woke hearing dice rattle in the holds and passageways, soft laughter, voices. If a game was being played, Irene wasn’t in it. She opened doors and never found anyone there.

‘It wears you down,’ she complained to Antoyne.

Antoyne, thinner than ever, cultivated a stubble. He feared living hand to mouth. The ordered world being defined for him now by Liv and Irene, he was afraid he would fall out of it and return to his old ways. Irene thought him vague lately, especially since that afternoon at Mambo Rey, and wondered out loud if he was recalling some other lover. ‘Because that would be all right,’ she told him. ‘We all remember the other loves we had.’ Antoyne looked blank at this and didn’t seem to agree. Of course, it was quite a long list for her, Irene admitted, so each one had to work harder to stand out. She had a vision suddenly: men in an endless line, each one awaiting the opportunity to step up and impress her again. One thought he danced well. Another thought his cock was pretty big, but it would never bring tears to her eyes like the cock of that little dead boy. Of course, they weren’t really lovers.

‘Antoyne,’ she said in a rush, ‘what if this rocket was haunted?’

He touched her wrist. ‘All rockets are haunted,’ he said. ‘I assumed you knew that.’

Liv Hula could only smile at these naive exchanges. Tapped into the pilot systems while everyone else slept, she’d seen the way MP Renoko’s mortsafes clustered around the new cargo when they thought they weren’t being watched. They sniffed it like dogs, perhaps deciding it wasn’t quite their species. On the fifth day out from Basel Dove, Nova Swing had sight of New Venusport, a fully Earthlike planet in terms of biome, military presence and fiscal architecture. The Quarantine Authority hailed on all wavelengths. There were automated warnings. Vast shapes drifted in the void, blinking with dim lights. Antoyne dragged the sarcophagus to an airlock and consigned it to empty space, where it fell into the general hidden turmoil and vanished.

‘That poor little thing,’ Irene whispered.

‘Honey, there are two grown women in the casket with him,’ Liv Hula reminded her. ‘Ask yourself who put them there.’

Life in quarantine: a hundred yards away, someone in an eva suit could be seen welding steel plates over a hatch; further in, pSi engines fired up as two or three hulks worked to phase-lock with the local flow. In the brief strobing flashes, Liv made out the skeleton of a pipeliner, two centuries old, three miles long. She allowed the ship to drift further in, then out again. Renoko’s next load awaited them only a few hundred miles beneath. As they departed, a K-ship nosed out from between the hulks and followed them down, at one point fitting itself so closely