Empty Space

door, only to return excitedly a few minutes later with a neon kidney in his mouth. Perhaps two inches by one and a half, with plump, eye-catching curves, it had a saturated pale blue colour and a transparent rind that seemed both resistant and pliable. James crouched on the worktop and sheared into it with his back teeth, breathing heavily through the same side of his mouth. ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Anna said, turning away in case she saw it burst. ‘I’m closing the door.’ But a long soft flash of lightning caught her in the doorway, throwing her into silhouette and projecting her shadow against the opposite wall. There was no thunder. A wave of moist heat rolled into the kitchen. It was transformational weather, weather suited to another country: a thick low cloudbase, smells of static water pocked with rain. The cat looked up, then down again.

‘Hello?’ Anna whispered. ‘Hello?’ She peeped out into the garden. It stretched away, elongated, too narrow, rippling with heat. Quiet yet catastrophic changes of light revealed, a long way off, the summerhouse.

‘On fire again,’ thought Anna. ‘How tiresome.’

This time it presented as a whole series of buildings: it was a sixteenth-century windmill on the Downs, a Dickensian lapboard cottage as tarry as an upturned boat on a beach, a Palladian folly collapsing into the Pagan site on which it stood. These structures slowly replaced one another in a shifting field of view. They loomed and shrank, as if they were approaching or receding. Each arrived not simply with its own architectural style but with its own style of mediation, from hard-edge photographic to St Ives impressionist, from construction-paper silhouette to matchstick hobbyist Gothic. One minute it was a woodcut of a summerhouse, with static flames; the next, impasto rubbed on with someone’s thumb.

Pausing only to remove Kearney’s computer drive from the recycling bin, Anna went out and stood in the orchard, barefoot, naked, quiet, no longer sure what age she might be.

‘Whoever you are,’ she said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

As if in response, the summerhouse cycled through a few more versions of itself, becoming in succession a Tarot card (the Tower, always falling, always in flames, index and harbinger of a life in transit); a canonical firework from someone’s vanished childhood, a ‘volcano’ wrapped in red and blue paper, pouring out pink-dyed light, smoke, showers of sparks, thick dribbles of lava; and a sagging fairground marquee, with scalloped eaves and pennants in many different colours. Cartoon bottle-rockets fizzed into the air behind it, bursting in showers of objects which toppled back to earth with inappropriate noises — plastic crockery that rang like a bell, an Edwardian railway train pumping out the sinewy sound of pigeon wings in an empty industrial space — folding themselves up and vanishing even as they fell. These objects smelled of leather, frost, lemon meringue pie; they smelled of precursor chemicals. They smelled of Pears Soap.

Anna approached until the heat began to tighten the skin above her eyes. At that distance, the summerhouse steadied itself. It reverted to the familar. Then a dense spew of smaller items fountained up from the flowerbeds, poured out of the door, blew off the roof, resolving itself into a display of a thousand fireflies, sleet falling through car headlights, showers of jewels and boiled sweets, enamelled lapel badges, shards of stained glass. Strings of coloured fairy lights and fake pearls, glittering Christmas baubles. Little mechanical toys — beetles, novelty swimmers, jumping kangaroos, all powered by rusted-up clockwork from the first great phase of Chinese industrialisation. Parti-coloured juggling balls. A thousand giveaway pens. A thousand cheap GPS systems that no longer ran. Bells and belts. Birds that really whistled; birds that sang. A million tiny electrical components and bits of ancient circuit boards as if every transistor radio ever made had been buried in the earth, and with them — like a kind of grave-goods! — the faint music and voices of Workers’ Playtime, Woman’s Hour or Journey Into Space, everything they once had played. A fog of small consumer goods. All the rubbish of a life, or someone else’s life.

Anna Waterman nee Selve stopped a pace or two before the summerhouse door. She tilted her head and listened.

‘Hello?’ she said.

She said: ‘Oh, what is it now?’

Everything was very calm and quiet and smelling of the hotel bathroom when she stepped inside and began to fall. She let go of the computer drive in surprise. At the last moment, James the black and white cat darted between her legs. All three of them, the woman, the animal and the data, fell out of this world together. Glare and dark, strobing into sudden silence and things switching off busily, up and down the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

TWENTY THREE Heart Sounds & Bruits

MP Renoko — that mysterious software entity which, people said, was all that remained of Sandra Shen’s Circus — had returned lately from an inspection of major Quarantine orbits all over the Halo.

He was tired but happy. With these visits, interesting but necessarily clandestine, his contribution was complete. The cargo in place, the client settled in the hold of the ship they called the Nova Swing, his part in things coming to an end, he took a last walk down by the sea, a mile along from the circus ground on South Hemisphere, New Venusport. Away from motel and beach-bar it was all spray and sunshine, the water booming in on a steep shore strewn with rocks the size of white goods, where sunbathing men and women lay like lizards staring blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them. The huge waves, MP Renoko said, might have been in a hologram for all the notice they took of them.

‘You wonder,’ he added, to the ghost by his side, ‘why they have so little common sense.’

‘But look!’ the ghost said. ‘Look!’

She hacked with her heel at the shingle then bent down quickly and prised something loose. After the removal of a bit of seaweed it turned out to be an old round coin with a small square hole in the middle, still somehow bright and untarnished. ‘Down between the rocks,’ she said, ‘spiders make their webs. A foot or two from all that surf! They tremble every time a wave comes in, and we can’t express the sense of anxiety with which this fills us.’ A shrug. ‘Yet every year there are webs and spiders.’

The coin, flipped into the air, glittered briefly.

‘Heads or tails?’ enquired the ghost.

‘You were always the best arguer,’ Renoko acknowledged. ‘I know it’s wrong to say, “I think”. I should say, “I am thought”.’

She took his arm, and gave him her faint little oriental smile.

‘You should,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay long. Back to the circus? Or on to the diner?’

‘I’m ready to go anywhere.’

Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn’t a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet’s housekeeping, stood a sixty by sixteen foot O’Mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine but known to its habitues — edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast — simply as ‘the Tambourine’. By day, the gulls dived and gyred above its deco stainless steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o’ clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass, where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe.

‘On your own here,’ Renoko said, ‘you can hear voices in the tide.’

His weariness amazed him.

Shortly after these events, a strange scene took place on board the Nova Swing. The cabin lights flickered. The Dynaflow drivers ran rough, failed briefly, then came back up, inserting a blank space in the crew’s experience of their lives roughly equal to the effects of a transient ischemic attack.

Down in the main hold, a wave went through the deck plates, as if matter could experience a stroke too. Light and dark became muddled. The mortsafes bumped together like moored boats. The lid of the K-tank blew off violently and clattered away, revealing the proteome inside, which slopped about like dirty salt water at night.