Empty Space

begun its day by leaning away from a fifty megaton airburst about two hundred kilometres inland and twelve kilometres high. A hot blue light went across the sky. The heat was so fierce people assumed their hair had caught fire. During this period, fences, trees, houses, low density warehousing, utility poles and pylons all took on an ordered slant. Half an hour later, a huge ocean surge boiled inland, floated the wreckage and aggregated it in the shallow valleys on the edge of town, piling everything on top of everything else. By the time Nova Swing arrived, Thing Fifty was less a place than a list of building materials.

Liv Hula put down in the suburbs, and they wandered about while Irene tried to find her old home. The wreckage resembled a heap of opened-out cardboard boxes. Everything had equal value — dead animals knotted in branches, water gurgling back to the sea along hidden sloughs and creeks, plastic chairs. At your feet a thousand pieces of broken tile; middle distances of uprooted garden shrubs and shattered wooden spars: behind that, in a curious reversal of perspective, the houses tilted and slumped into each other as if they were still floating. Above the high water mark the streets were full of soft toys. Every so often you saw a single figure in the distance; or a dog made its way along the street sniffing everything with enthusiasm, as if any moment it expected to be reunited with what it knew. Everything was entangled. Everything stank of sewage and the sea. There was no ground plan. You didn’t know where to assign value. The tarry light didn’t seem to come from the sun, diffused by haze, but to leak out of the wreckage itself. Irene sat at the kerb. She looked around at it all. Then she drew up her knees, wrapped her arms about them and wept.

‘Come on now, love,’ Liv said: ‘I can see everything you’ve got.’

Irene wiped her eyes. She tried to laugh. ‘Everyone in the Halo’s seen it anyway,’ she whispered.

She took Fat Antoyne’s hand and put the back of it next to her cheek, then pushed it away again suddenly. Her skin was wan, her expression indistinct, as if she’d been rinsed out of her own face. The things she missed about this town were gone. They had never been here anyway. They had vanished not into the current disaster, but years ago, into her own. The past wasn’t real but it was all she had: that’s how you feel when your life has faltered. She stood up and tugged her skirt straight. ‘I’ll just go into this house here,’ she said.

‘Irene!’

It was a building caught in the complex process of kneeling into its own yard. Windows full of broken glass gave on to rooms where the light fell in new and unexpected directions. Irene brightened up after she found an unopened bottle of cocktail mix. She began dragging things into the centre of rooms where she could examine them. ‘Oh look!’ she said, as if Liv and Antoyne were in there with her. ‘Oh look!’ They made faces at one another and shrugged, Don’t ask me. They heard her feet scraping about. They heard her murmuring to herself as she used the broken toilet. ‘You guys could help if you liked,’ she called. ‘Or don’t you want a —’ She checked the label of the bottle ‘ — Kyshtym Cream? They’re good!’ When she emerged at last, her arms were full of clothes, kiddie’s toys and household items.

‘And look!’ she said. ‘After all these years!’

It was a toddler’s My First Experience skirt, in traditional neotony pink.

‘I had one just like this.’

Liv stared in disbelief then shook her head. ‘Irene,’ she wanted to know, ‘is this actually your old house?’

‘It could be,’ Irene said. ‘Yes, it easily could be.’

‘Because if it isn’t —’

‘They don’t want the stuff, Liv,’ Irene said. ‘You should see the condition they’re in. Really.’

Her mood, which had remained elevated on the way back to the ship, dipped as soon as the Kyshtym Cream wore off. Disposed about her quarters, the repro radio, false-colour hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract and collection of cast iron casserole-ware looked less fun than they had in situ. ‘Disaster chic,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’ Antoyne didn’t think anything. She sighed. ‘Antoyne, are we bored of each other at last?’ Unable to answer that either, he became alert but very still. Irene used her thumb to enlarge a split in the seams of a soft toy shaped like a cockroach, then asked him so suddenly and abjectly if he thought life was worth it that he could only hug her roughly and insist:

‘Your life is what you make it in this world.’

‘I think that’s what I mean, Antoyne.’

History, the boys from Earth believed, is bunk.

The Angel of History may look backwards, but that pose will make no difference to the storm that blows it into the future. No wonder it has such a surprised expression!

This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what ‘where’ meant.

It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archaeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them — AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine.

But though, as a whole, the human race soon knew how to find its way around, it still had no idea where it was: so that, in Irene the mona’s day, the paradigm for individual motion remained a blind if not quite random jump. Before she took the mona package and did so well with it, Irene touched down on fifty worlds.

Thirteen years old, she was already tall and bony. She loved fucking but she had an awkward walk and big feet. She did her hair the way they all did then, in lacquered copper waves so complex they could receive the test tone of Radio Universe. When she smiled her gums showed; when she boarded that rocket she never looked back. Worked her way down through the Swan and out to Stevenson’s Reach. Then on to Lila y Flag, L’Avventura, McKie, LaFuma RSX, where she hit the wall a little and was forced to rest a year with a sweet alien boy from You’re Worth It. There she took the package, opting — from the hundreds of Monroes on offer — for the soft-look Marilyn photographed in black and white by Cecil Beaton at the Ambassador Hotel, 1956. Suddenly she was five foot three, with a kind of receptive liveliness and flossy blond easycare hair that always smelled of peppermint shampoo. After that the journey got easier for her: its inner and outer trajectories seemed to match. She was so happy! Magellan to O’Dowd, Pixlet to Oxley; The Discoveries, The Fourth Part, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista; Massive 49 to Meniere’s World; Tregetour, Charo, Entantiodroma, Max Party, Gay Lung and Ambo Danse. American Polaroid, American Diner, American Nosebleed. Oxi, Krokodil, Waitrose Two and Santa Muerte. By then, her suitcase contained: tampons, fourteen pairs of high heel shoes, the dress she left home in, yellow rayon with a faux-Deco feel, which she never wore again. That girl had a sweet way of laughing. Drunk, she’d explain, ‘I love shoes.’ She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else, until she’d scattered herself like small change across the Halo and down into Radio Bay. There, where the Beach stars fell away like a cliff over nothing, she fell away too, with a laugh on her face and her arms spread wide to everything.

If you asked Irene to describe her favourite memory, she would bring out a little hologram cube about an inch on a side —

Four am, under a weird grey-blue neon. Raucous laughter. Three and a half minutes of the B-girl life. It had been a long night for whoever captured the pictures. Shadows flickered, the camera looked here and there without purpose. The angles were inventive. Irene began with her back to the camera and her feet planted in the gutter. You could hear her say, ‘Kinny, take that away! Oh, Kinny, you bugger!’ She got her dress part way up and her thong part way down before she started to piss, but after twenty seconds slowly tipped forward into the road and began to throw up, smoothly and loosely, from the other end. Steam rose in the cold air. After a minute or so of that, she seemed to pass out. Her body tipped forward a little further, arching the lower back and pushing her face into the road, then after a moment or two of equilibrium, subsided sideways and curled up into the foetal position. Her hat fell off and rolled cheerily back and forth. The camera tried to follow it, then there was more laughter and everything went black.

‘It’s very sentimental I know,’ she told Fat Antoyne now. ‘But I loved that hat. And the bolero, with its little satin bows.’ Clothes like that weren’t really clothes at all, she tried to explain: they were semiotics in action. ‘Party semiotics in action.’ She sighed and put her hand over his. ‘It was a lovely world, and sometimes — like now, with you and me in our comfortable little ship, with all these new ornaments — it still is.’ She had been having such a good time in those pictures that she remembered nothing of it. ‘Sometimes I’m not even sure it’s me!’