into the curves of the old freighter’s hull that they could feel waste heat radiating from the internal processes it made no attempt to mask. Its signals traffic alone could have cooked a city. It wanted them to know it was there. It wanted them to know that they were a question it could answer if it wanted to; anything it wanted, it could have. It matched them through one and a half cycles of their aerobrake program, then became interested in something else and spun away. Liv, who had felt the K-captain crawling in and out of her brain through the wires in her mouth, shuddered.
‘I hate those things,’ she said.
There was a silence. Then a faint voice, already four lights down the Beach, whispered:
‘Well I’ve never said an unkind word about
New Venusport South Hemisphere, 3am: Madame Shen’s old premises, a three-acre strip of cement between the sea and the rocket yards. For a minute or two after the
‘Look!’ Liv Hula said. ‘No, there!’
A figure was making its way along the line of buildings, silhouetted against the faint luminescence of the waves: female, tall, full of the unresolved tensions of the heavily-tailored. Faceless and quiet, she leaned for a moment on the siding of the Deleuze Motel, one arm straight out from the shoulder, palm flat against the wall. The wind smelled of chemicals. She raised her head to it like a dog, looking out to sea, then sat down at the edge of the concrete apron and began pouring sand from one cupped hand to the other: someone who, arriving too late for a meeting, regrets having come at all.
‘I know that woman,’ Liv whispered, ‘but I can’t think where from.’
Antoyne was unable to help. He had seen so many people like that, in bars from here to the Core. After you had yourself rebuilt to such a degree, body language was enough to tell whatever two-dimensional story you had left. You were so wired to yourself you no longer knew what you were. Every response ramped up, every surface tuned to receive rays from space: designed for looks, speed, confidence and security at point of use.
‘But who can say what back door access the tailor left?’ he concluded.
Liv found this critique unhelpful. ‘I know her from somewhere,’ she said. Then: ‘Look! Antoyne! In the breaks!’
Two hundred yards away, a long cylindrical object was beating up out of the sea, dipping and rolling in the salt spray. In three or four minutes it had found its way on to the beach. It looked like a mine from a forgotten war, rusty, steaming and throwing off curious dark rainbows while it decided where to go next. The woman by the Deleuze Motel was watching it too. She stood up and dusted off her hands. When the mortsafe showed signs of moving away into the dunes, she called out and began running after it at a rate no human being could sustain, becoming in three or four paces a mucoid blur. Almost immediately, she was in collision with an identical blur, which had lunged up at her from a shallow hiding place down in the sand and marram grass. Both of them shrieked loudly. It was as if she had run full tilt into a mirror. Every movement she made, her double matched. Sand flew up around them so it became impossible to tell which was which. Then one of them slowed down suddenly and strode around looking puzzled with her hands to her head. She sat down hard. Fell forward slowly from the waist. Leaving her there motionless, the survivor went fizzing away among the dunes, tearing up the marram grass, startling the shoreline birds.
‘They’ve killed her!’ said Liv.
Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘This isn’t to do with us.’
A third figure, some shadowy little old guy in a shortie raincoat, had watched the encounter from the dunes, clapping his hands, looking round as if appealing to the rest of the audience on a lively evening at the Preter Coeur fights. His face was a white oval. He had the look of an enthusiast. If there had been a way to bet, you thought, he would have set his money down. After a minute or two he approached the dead woman, knelt down near her head and busied himself about there, chuckling. Then he retreated into the dunes a little way and waited, his stillness such that he became difficult to see, until the woman woke up. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ they heard her complain distinctly. She rolled over, too late to avoid puking an evil pink fluid copiously on herself. She got to her feet and staggered to the side door of the Deleuze Motel, above which blinked a flamingo-coloured neon reading STARLIGHT ROOM with, above that, two stylised palm trees intertwined. Leaning against her own shadow on the blistered wall, she threw up again, more carefully this time, and went inside. The man in the raincoat, meanwhile, had walked off towards the sea without looking back once.
‘Fat Antoyne, this is so wrong!’
By now Antoyne had something else to think about. Down at the base of the
He went down to fetch it and found the usual corroded tin can, leaking its unknown past like a physical substance. This time someone had daubed it with nondrying anti-radar paint, into which a meaningless line of letters and numbers had then been impressed using some kind of stencil. It was warmer than the others. When he had got it stowed away, he found that Irene had left the ship. Liv didn’t know where. The two of them went out into the dunes and called around, but Irene didn’t answer. ‘You’d better go and find her,’ Liv told Antoyne. Then shouted after him, ‘She’s not happy, Antoyne.’ The wind blew harder and the moon was up. Squalls were headed in across the bay.
Raised on an agricultural planet, Irene had questions from the start, mainly about her ability to empathise. But when you sign for the package they offer you a heart of gold, because it makes you happier in the work. It’s free. Really, it’s a cheap tweak. No one loses, not you, not your customer. Irene opted in and never regretted it, though maybe her heart was over-tuned now for the quarantine orbit, because here on South Hemisphere NV, made more upset than she could allow herself to understand by the story of the little boy in the sarcophagus, she needed a bar, a bottle of Black Heart, and the company of people she didn’t know.
But the other side of the fence things only deteriorated. Seaward in the fog, you could feel distance growing in everything. From Lizard Sex to The Metropole, the shutters were up all along the strip. The old-fashioned signs banged in the wind; rust ran down from blisters in the paintwork. Outside the joint they called 90-Proof & Boys, the air tasted of salt. Ivy Mike’s lay silent and unoccupied. The circus wasn’t in town, and it was coming on to rain.
Eventually she heard voices. The front doors of the Deleuze Motel, flanked by frosted glass windows and scoured wood panels with tinpot ads, were padlocked shut. She shook them. A wan yellow light could be seen inside. ‘Hello!’ No one answered. They didn’t even stop what they were doing. There were distinct rattling sounds and, every so often, outbreaks of a kind of subdued shouting. The yellow light came and went, as if someone was walking jerkily to and fro in front of it. Irene could hear ordinary sounds too: a chair scraped back, ice clattering in a glass. She patted the door as if it was someone’s arm. ‘So hey,’ she said, ‘you’re having a good time in there.’ She went round the side and found, under the pink and mint neon STARLIGHT ROOM, another pair of doors, loosely latched and shifting in the wind. Without a thought she put her eye to the gap, where the paint was slick with rain. Whatever she saw in there made her take one startled pace backwards then run away as fast as a b-girl can.
EIGHTEEN
It Takes Place in a Vacuum
Some days the shadow operators vanished the moment daylight fell on them. Others, they fluttered up to meet it, swimming about delightedly in the air above her desk. Their behaviour was as opaque to the assistant as hers was to them. They predated the human. They were a form of life you found everywhere: but what they did before human beings arrived in the Galaxy to make use of them, no one knew, not even the shadow operators themselves. If you asked them they grew shy and thoughtful.
