Empty Space

Antoyne moved the inspection lamp around. It was like a wreck under water in there. Fine silt fell through the beam.

‘Is it dead yet?’ Irene the mona called from the crew quarters.

They were thirty lights from anywhere, in the voids by the Tract itself. The big argument they had, which went back and forth while Antoyne screwed the porthole cover back on, was if they had come upon the tank by accident, or whether it was another item on MP Renoko’s cargo manifest. It was a measure of how weird their sense of reality had got, Liv Hula insisted, that they couldn’t decide. They stood there for a time, arguing back and forth, then left the hold.As soon as the bulkhead door closed behind them, bursts of high-speed code issued from the K-tank — chirps and stutters, odd runs of simple calculus, fragments of ordinary language mysterious yet emphatic — as if the occupant was trying to make contact but couldn’t remember how. The other items in the hold were inappropriately excited by this, flashing and winking in return, humming with subsonics, emitting brief flashes of ionising radiation. After perhaps an hour — its baroque ribs and lumps of melted inlet pipe making it look like a child’s coffin decorated with mouldings of elves, unicorns and dragons — the newcomer seemed to calm down.

‘We should dump it in the nearest sun,’ said Liv.

The day you enlist for the K-ships, you haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours. They give you the injections, and within twenty-four hours your blood is teeming with pathogens, artificial parasites, tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down. Over the next three days the shadow operators, running on nanomech, take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces, flushing the waste out continually through the colon. They pump you with a paste of ten-micrometre-range factories, protein farms and metabolic monitors. They core your spine. You remain awake throughout, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits don’t make it past that point. If you do, they bolt you into the tank at the front of the ship. By then most of your organs are gone. You’re blind and deaf. A kind of nauseous surf is rolling through you. They’ve cut into your brain so that it will accept the hardware bridge known as ‘the Einstein Cross’. You connect with the ship math. You will soon be able to consciously process 15 petabytes of data per second: but you will never walk again. You will never touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself.

You sign up in a private room at a pleasant temperature: nevertheless, you can’t get warm. You say goodbye to your parents. They give you the emetics whether you’ve eaten or not. Then it’s an hour or two to wait before the injections start. Forty years ago — shivering on the edge of a bed, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a hospital gown that fell open constantly at the back — it had come to Liv Hula that she would be able to choose the Einstein Cross, but that she would never, ever be able to unchoose it. So she had put the bowl down carefully, and, speaking to no one, got dressed again and gone back to her life.

Everywhere they stopped after that, the talk was war. Provocation was heaped on provocation. Every rhetoric had its counter-rhetoric, every history was self-revised. Riots erupted across Halo cities. Out near Panamax IV, two unidentified cruisers ambushed a helpless K-ship. It was a major flashpoint: the boys from Earth had dropped the ball. Nastic assets roared into known space. Their manoeuvres out near Coahoma and the Red Revenues hadn’t been the bumbling, half-hearted adventures presented by EMC: rather they revealed pattern, a cold, technical mind, deft new kinds of hit-and-run, workouts for a major offensive. It was, in a sense, the perfect psychodrama of betrayal. Whole star systems were gas in half a day. Refugees were already on the move. Irene stared at the news and found herself martyred to empathy and nonrecreational mood swings. One moment she would be saying: ‘I will never get tired of this, all our adventures with these cosmic winds, and tides roaring through space!’, the next it was, ‘We all got a black heart to our personality, Antoyne.’

What had upset her so on New Venusport, she refused to say.

Fat Antoyne had found her a mile from the Deleuze Motel, teetering at the end of a line of footprints on the hard wet sand. It was the hour before dawn. She’d lost her bag, also one of her best shoes. Her face and hands were cold and salt. Overcome in ways he couldn’t explain, he tried to put his arms around her. But though Irene had the expression of someone ready to seek help anywhere it could be found, she only stepped away.

‘Antoyne, no,’ she said.

Aboard the Nova Swing once more, she kept to herself. Even safe in empty space, she couldn’t sleep. On the beach before Antoyne arrived, she had been trying to imagine Madame Shen’s Circus in its glory days: music, alien shows, marzipan, white frocks, fresh sunshine on the midway. People laughing and fucking on the very sand where Irene stood! But she couldn’t forget that she had wet herself looking into the mysteries of the STARLIGHT ROOM, where the three ghastly white-capped figures of Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint cast their dice; and when her wonderful, warm man found her, her neck was stiff from staring as hard as she could in the opposite direction to that dispiriting place. ‘Change your game you change your luck,’ she told Liv Hula, ‘that’s everything I used to believe in life.’ The past was gone. Only the present could affect the future, and the future was always open for business: that was how she had always seen it. ‘But Liv, now I recognise each change of heart is just another scam performed upon yourself!’

Now she could only conclude that the long haul, with its concomitant emptiness and anxiety, had proved as debilitating as the short, which wears you down by insisting you forget everything you knew last week. She was tired, she said. She wanted to go home. Perhaps she would feel better if she saw her old home.

Liv Hula said she could help with that.

Perkins Rent IV, known to its inhabitants as New Midland, supported an agriculture of beet, potatoes and a local variety of squash grown year round under plastic. New Midlanders worked for offworld money. A handful of FTZs in closed compounds — precision assembly plants working from bulk metal glass components — clustered on the major continent, each served by a town of fifty to seventy-five thousand souls where bi-yearly surveys revealed a reassuringly high incidence of obsessive-compulsive traits and, ideologically, a kind of Janteloven prevailed. The only other way of earning a living on New Midland was to work the ghost train.

This line of abandoned alien vehicles, all sizes between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, hung nose to tail in a cometary orbit that reached halfway to the nearest star. Their rindlike hulls presented dusty, lustreless grey. Whoever they belonged to had parked them and walked away before proteins appeared on Planet Earth. They boasted the shapes of asteroids — potato shapes, dumbell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them. By contrast their nautiloid internal spaces were pearly and disorienting, as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often a short segment of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the system gas giant. New Midlanders mined them like any other resource. Nobody knew what the ships did, or how they got here, or how to work them: so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them through sub-contractors to a corporate in the Core. It made an economy. It was the simple, straight line thing to do. They were broken up from inside out. The used-up ones attracted unpredictably-shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. Above the rest bustled the industrial arcologies and futuristic bubble-worlds — factories, refineries, sorting facilities, starship docks busy round the clock.

Liv Hula slipped in from high above the plane of the ecliptic, intending to hide in the debris-belt of her choice. What she found changed her mind.

‘Antoyne, look at this.’

‘What?’

‘Someone fought here. Perhaps half a day ago?’

The ghost train had been derailed. Its industries now took the form of a complex metallic vapour through which toppled everything from nuggets of melted aluminium to entire ore-crushers. Shockfronts were still swinging through this medium, here and there compressing it to wispy arcs the colour of mercury. The routers had gone down under the weight of distress traffic — transponder signals from eva suits and escape pods, trickles of RF leaking like the air from punctured living quarters, the papery voices of the already-dead filling the pipes with intimate, matter-of-fact panic. They were saying what the dead always say: ‘No one’s left but me.’ One moment they were trying to reason with the problem, the next they were begging the guys to pull them out of there. The ghost ships had fared no better: they toppled about, laid open like water-stained illustrations of the Fibonacci spiral. Some of the larger ones, accelerated by hits from high-end ordnance, were wobbling into the distance on interesting new trajectories. Several fragments fifty metres diameter and above had found their way down to the surface of New Midland.

As a result the FTZs were matchwood. Thing Fifty, the little coastal town Irene remembered so well, had