Empty Space

‘I was something but I didn’t know what, even then.’

She thought about it. ‘Even then I was on a journey back to something. It was a long time ago,’ she said eventually. ‘If I knew what I was then, that’s what I’d choose to be.’

‘You’ve already been something else?’

‘I can’t explain.’

‘I was never anything but myself. I was always locked in.’

But she wouldn’t help him with that, not this time. In the end she whispered bleakly: ‘We all make bad decisions.’

Just then a random pulse of energy shuddered across the face of the K-Tract. A tenuous shell of something — less than gas, more than nothing, dark matter like a kind of ghost velvet — expanded into the local universe. ‘Oh look!’ she called. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ She manoeuvred herself to face it, her hundred-metre tip feathers curling and separating. Meanwhile the wavefront penetrated the hull of van Sant’s tub, giving rise to events of such subtlety they couldn’t be detected. It touched his face light as lovers’ fingers, and left the wiring confused.

‘Someone went in there,’ he heard her whisper.

‘So they say.’

‘It wasn’t so long ago. I wondered if I should go too.’

Exotic radiation bathed them both, to different ends, for twenty minutes. By the time van Sant emerged from its trailing edge, she had resumed her restless patrol of empty space, and he was alone again.

Don’t go! Imps wanted to shout.

He always failed to ask her so many things.

Who are you? What are you? Why are we out here, the two of us? What’s the nature of your dialogue with the universe? What happens next? Is it possible for species as different as us to fuck?

All of these questions but one were in fact asked of himself, and might have been rephrased: Will I ever go home?

None of them mattered if you were involved with R.I. Gaines. Everything Rig ever did implied that the real action was happening elsewhere. Some other domain of possibilities was being actively explored alongside this one. Gaines’ motives were so obscure — his projects went so unreported, even in the hierarchy of EMC — that in the end only your own part in an op could be described (for the same reason, it could hardly be called a ‘contribution’, since you had no idea what it contributed to). Every time Imps’ alien visitor appeared, she forced him to query not why Rig Gaines wanted him out here in the middle of nowhere, but what facet of his so-called personality had prompted him to agree to come there in the first place.

Days like that, when she had departed, leaving the lights turned off in van Sant’s head, his instruments showed him nothing but his own cast-off past: Levy flight after Levy flight into empty space. He had no consolation but the long slow struggle to understand his own course. That and the Tract. Because the Tract is gaining on us, Imps thought: it’s slowly catching up with the real universe. The first place it would wash over was the Beach. Meanwhile, Imps van Sant was closer to it, he believed, than any other living beachcomber: which meant the first one it would wash over was him.

A long way off, in the ballroom of the Deleuze Motel, the assistant sat recovering herself. She drank barrel proof rum from the bottle and watched the old men work the overend on one another at the Ship Game — adjusting their white caps, shooting the cuffs of their formal shirts with sharp economical gestures, whispering, ‘Well now,’ or ‘Now you fucked.’ In their opinion, the night was moving along: every so often one of them would cock his head at the sound of the ocean, lean across, and, black eyes as empty as raisins, assure the assistant that the night was moving right along. Dice rattled and scattered, shedding alien luck as friction brought them to a standstill. The faint smell of vomit coming and going in the cold air, the assistant realised, originated with her. Three am, the tide was fully out. R.I. Gaines walked in through the sea-facing wall.

‘Wow!’ he said. ‘The Ship Game! Make room!’

The old men blinked up at him like lizards. They made room. Something he could do with the bone interested them, they were disposed to admit. Soon, they were taking his money, he was taking theirs. ‘It’s a redistributive system,’ he proposed. Redistribution, they agreed, was the name of that particular game. The assistant watched these events from a distance, then walked over to the door. The breeze was onshore. Dawn wasn’t far off. Seeming to notice her for the first time, Gaines jumped to his feet and led her back into the room. He made a gesture that took in the salt-stained walls, the chandelier with its two dim bulbs, the dusty signs behind the bar.

‘Sometimes you’re quite hard to find,’ he said.

The assistant shrugged. She offered him the rum. ‘So,’ she said, ‘do you want to go and sit on my bed together?’

He gave her a thoughtful look.

‘The Aleph stopped asking for you. We wondered if you knew anything about that.’

‘I never know what you’re talking about.’

Gaines grinned. He held up the bottle, studied the label. ‘“Black Heart”,’ he quoted. ‘“All the sweet lacunae of the Caribbean Sea”.’

The assistant looked down at her arm. Nothing was happening there.

‘I wonder if it’s time you two met?’ Gaines asked himself.

The fact was, he couldn’t decide. He had recently come from the Aleph site, where there had been more activity than he expected, reflections of smart displays fluttering across the shiny carbon floor, smells of ionisation and construction. Case’s people were devising new containment principles. It was a high risk period for them all. They had no idea what they were dealing with. When Gaines arrived they were arguing if they wanted a bunch of fat cables in here just for the look of it, or do the whole thing tight beam, which, hey, would be the quick and dirty solution. It was a professionally toxic but busy atmosphere. The reason being, Case told Gaines, that early the same morning Pearl had begun to emit pulsed bursts of RF.

‘It’s not organised, as far as we can tell.’

‘So what is it?’

Case shrugged. ‘It’s not exactly random noise either,’ he said.

‘I’m impressed. Is there anything you guys don’t know?’

‘Rig, we’re doing what we can here,’ Case said tiredly.

His imaging team produced a hologram display that rotated the woman smoothly around every axis so that she looked like virtual false-colour shots of a sculpture, spoiled by some sort of faint, in situ interference. Attempts to clean the interference out had only given her the lines of a Deco portrait, freezing the folds of her gown to create strong contentless curves suggestive of power and energy. Her eyes were rendered the same colour as her face, without pupil or lids. ‘After we took these I had them build a field tomography unit round her,’ Case said. ‘Forget it. It was like looking into nacre.’ As far as X-rays were concerned, she was solid all through. ‘Positron emission feels the same about her. We decided not to try neutrons, in case she bore some slight resemblance to a human being.’

‘She looks as if she’s falling,’ Gaines said. ‘Caught falling.’

Her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left of the ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee; they were as far apart as the skirt of the gown permitted. The feet were bare. The arms, outstretched either side of the head, curved towards the ceiling of the chamber; the hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. The gown fluttered stiffly, as if caught in strong air currents venting through the floor of the control room. The effect was of someone falling sideways from a great height.

‘How close can I get?’ Gaines asked.

‘Close as you like,’ Case said.

To Gaines she had that inner focus possessed by the very sick. When he whispered, ‘Hey, who are you? What is it you don’t like about yourself?’ she only looked through him, contorting herself slowly, trying to alter her position around the fall-line, her expression full of fear and rage. He stepped in and knelt down until eighteen inches of air separated their faces, but he couldn’t force himself any closer — he experienced the sensation of inappropriately invading someone’s personal space, but worse. And where he had expected to feel the air moving around her, fluttering her gown, it was just the opposite, very still.

‘I can feel heat radiating off her,’ he told Case.