Empty Space

He had to laugh, Fat Antoyne said. ‘Everyone deserves a good time,’ he added. ‘Their lives are hard enough.’

He smiled and closed her hand over the little cube.

‘You keep that safe,’ he said.

TWENTY ONE Everyone’s a VIP to Someone

Between Radia Marelli and Tupolev Avenue, the crime tourism quarter lay under rain and the promise of a short life. There was perpetual graininess in the air and the neon light. Every middle manager on North Hemisphere, New Venusport knew about the donkey parlours on Saudade. The chance to do donkey parlour crime — a near death experience worth anyone’s dollar — drew them off the starliners in numbers second only to Preter Coeur on a warm summer’s evening. Their wives came for the sensorium porn. You could tell the wives by their honey-coloured fur coats and ash-blond hair. Sensorium porn was delivered as direct live feed from an alien brain as it tried to understand human sex, or the use of quotidian objects and events from Earth history like a ‘book group’ or a mirror. A mirror was one of the favourites. The EMC wives — puzzled by everything, not so much acting-out as directing the same helpless performance of themselves as they had given all their lives — got off on the cognitive and perceptual gap. The selling point of sensorium porn was that it enabled you, finally, to ‘see the world from a different point of view’. They came down the Creda Line curious and went away users. It was a toxic trade.

The assistant stood with Epstein the thin cop, in the alley off Tupolev where Toni Reno had shucked his mortal coil. They were viewing Toni’s corpse. Epstein had called her half an hour ago and said:

‘You got a problem.’

Since death, Toni Reno’s reflective index had dropped eighty-five per cent across most of the electromagnetic spectrum including visible light. As a result he was hard to make out even in good weather. Every day now, Toni drew a crowd composed partly of tourists on their way to the Llubichik Street arcades, and partly of his followers — twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys who received realtime updates on his condition piped directly into their heads. Toni was nationwide. The more he faded, the more they came to view him. They copied his dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket and bought shoes exactly like Toni Reno’s. Arguments sometimes broke out between them and the passing trade. Or the fans themselves got into arguments about what Toni meant to them, what kind of a role-model Toni really, actually, was. So committed to Toni they had committed suicide over the issue, one or two of them now drew small followings of their own. The uniform branch, Epstein told the assistant, took a back seat as far as this activity went, on the grounds that it constituted either commerce or religion, both being a right you had protected in Saudade.

‘He’s still here then,’ the assistant said.

‘Still here,’ Epstein said.

‘So what’s our problem?’

‘We don’t have a problem.’

‘Then what?’

‘It’s you who has the problem.’

The assistant adjusted some of her overlays and studied the corpse. In addition to losing visibility it had risen a further sixteen feet in the rainy air. Some thought Toni’s rate of rotation had slowed, some thought not: Epstein the thin cop placed himself, with some reservations, in the latter camp. He had money on it. The assistant thought she could detect a faint smell of decay leaking from whatever space Toni now occupied; perhaps thirty molecules in a cubic kilometre of air.

‘What problem?’ she said.

In lieu of an answer, Epstein ushered her into the building from which they had first viewed the dead broker.

‘You remember this place?’ he said.

She said she did.

‘Well, it’s a sensorium parlour, it turns out. Now in this room here — no, in here, this way — they have some bird style of alien, they’ve drilled his head for access. He’s wired the way they are, mainly to look at ordinary stuff, a coat hanger, some needles, those kinds of things. But here’s what.’

‘What?’

‘Maybe for an hour a day they got him looking into the street. So our experts play back what’s left of his head, and have an operator decode it, and find that the footage covers the period of Toni Reno’s death.’

Epstein gave the assistant an intent look, then, when she didn’t respond, went on to tell her, ‘This alien was at the window the exact moment Toni arrived in the alley.’ Reno had come from the direction of the noncorporate spaceport, the retrieved material showed: it showed him running. Then, as he drew level with the house, someone attacked him, straight out of the doorway downstairs. ‘Toni’s looking back over his shoulder. He’s so agitated he doesn’t present with his usual careful grooming. He’s scared of something we can’t see. A woman comes up off the ground so fast you can barely see her, and shoots Toni in the armpit with a Chambers gun. From some angles it looks as if she’s coming up through the ground.’

‘And?’

He smiled.

‘And she’s you,’ he said.

The assistant stared at him without replying. Her nose caught the smell of bird plumage, musty and deep. She recalled how the alien lay on the bed looking up at her helplessly, surrounded by drifts of its own feathers and whispering, ‘I am here. I am.’ They had drilled its skull. What a place, she thought, to end your weird life. As if she was considering evidence the subtlety of which would be lost on Epstein, she walked to the window and stared down into the street. If she ordered up the right combination of overlays, she could examine Toni Reno both in his present condition and as he had been when she was first called to the alley off Tupolev. She consulted her forearm, down which the ideograms flowed Chinese black and chiminy red, solid and definite in the grainy crime-tourism air. It was raining again, but now the rain took no account at all of the hanging man. It rained through him. Epstein came and stood at her shoulder so that he could look into the street too.

‘I don’t want anything to do with this,’ he said. ‘The footage goes straight to your office, my people hold off on a report.’

When she failed to reply, but only gave him that oblique smile of hers, he knew this was the most difficult part of his day. Even the fifth floor managers at Sitecrime were frightened of her. They said she had no personality, they said she had no empathy: they said she didn’t understand people. Epstein knew all these things to be true. What happened to him next would depend on how skilfully he could back away from what he had discovered.

‘I’m just a uniform,’ he emphasised. ‘This is your issue.’

The assistant did not dispute that.

All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Frand-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign — including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae — from day one. In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war crept across the Halo until it threatened Panamax IV.

Rig Gaines, suddenly uncomfortable with events, not to say his place in them, rode the Uptown Six down to Alyssia Fignall’s archeological project, hoping he might persuade her to leave the planet with him before things took their inevitable turn for the worse. He didn’t imagine she would.

The weather was hot, her house empty. In the cloister he found a note she had left: ‘Rig, when the rains