Empty Space

Through its surface burst the occupant of the tank, a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican haircut and a couple of snake tattoos, whose body resembled, from the diaphragm down, a charred and tattered coat. His spine was cabled at neurotypical energy sites. Half-drowned, throwing up with the vertigo of aborted interstellar flight, he stared round in panic at the main hold, the gathered mortsafes. Proteome poured off him, smelling of horse glue; rendered fat; the albumen of a bad egg. Whatever he had been dreaming was gone for good. He wasn’t used to a non-electronic presence in the universe: it was some time since he had been available in this form. He looked down at himself.

‘Jesus, Renoko,’ he complained to the empty air. ‘I’ve got no fucking legs. You didn’t tell me that.’

He fell to plucking the thick rubber cables out of his spine. He tried and failed to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

The condition of the K-tank seemed to impress him. ‘Remind me to come the easy way round next time,’ he said. He addressed the mortsafes. ‘Anyone got any tissues, or like that?’

What did they think of this performance?

They were content with it. They were aliens. They had, by now, spent a claustrophobic fortnight in the Nova Swing main hold with its black and yellow warning stripes, loose tool-cupboard doors, injunctions to work safe with plasma. They understood where they were, and they understood why. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Working for Sandra Shen had required, at the least, hundreds of years of travel from distant places. They had performed vital functions at the demise of her Observatorium & Native Karma Plant. They had abandoned sane environments, left behind homes and families, to be part of the faux-Chinese woman’s engine of change. Like her, they were here to work on behalf of others. They were content with the burnt man because they were content with that.

The Nova Swing chewed a long hole between the stars, her doomed crew staring out so that sometimes their faces appeared at the portholes together, sometimes apart. The police were after her on several worlds. The beef: artefact smuggling. Possible Quarantine infringement. Wanted in connection with the death of a Saudade factor going by ‘Toni Reno’. She sneaked from world to world across the Beach. Since she took aboard the crippled K-tank, she had dropped in quietly at Goat’s Eye and the Inverted Swan; fallen across the empty spaces between Radio Bay and the Tract itself; drifted seventy-four hours, all systems powered down, at heavily coded co-ordinates in the notorious dXVII-Channing Oort cloud. MP Renoko was a no-show at all those venues. Then, just when they had given up on him, he poked his head through the crew quarters wall and said to Fat Antoyne, as if continuing a conversation they had started in The East Ural Nature reserve on Vera Rubin’s World:

‘Everyone their own evolutionary project, Fat Antoyne!’

Antoyne said, ‘Jesus.’

‘Who’s this little old cunt?’ Irene wanted to know. She looked Renoko over, her irises dark with satire. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Antoyne, get off me.’ It was not Renoko’s chinbeard she hated; or even his 1960s paedophile look, which she admitted was chic enough. It was the sense she had that he was always keeping something of himself in reserve. Or not even something: everything. ‘Come in,’ she invited, resettling on her hips some items of dress: ‘We got your cargo of meaningless toys.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ Renoko said.

‘That won’t work here, Renoko. The only thing that will work here is this —’ making the universal sign for money ‘ — then you go, taking the rusty pipework with you.’ If you were driven by unknown forces, her body language implied, best not be around Irene.

Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘Why kill Toni Reno?’ he asked Renoko. ‘I don’t get it.’

Renoko looked puzzled.

‘We didn’t do that,’ he said.

Irene held out her hand again, palm up. She said, ‘Well it wasn’t us either.’

‘Thanks for the information,’ Renoko said. ‘I’ll make arrangements,’ he told Antoyne.

He winked, and his face went back through the wall. He didn’t mean money, but Antoyne wasn’t to know that. Just before his face vanished it added, ‘You might have some communications problems in the next hour or so. Don’t panic.’ Down in the main hold where he next materialised, he found the charred man working on one of the mortsafes with a pulsed-spray welding set four hundred years old. Sparks flew everywhere. In their heat and light, this shabby enclosed space seemed like the very forge of God. Renoko watched for a minute or two in an impressed way and then said, ‘Is that Metal Active Gas?’

The charred man pushed back his goggles and shook his head.

‘MIG,’ he said. ‘You weld?’

‘Never,’ Renoko admitted. ‘But I love to watch.’

The charred man nodded. He heard that all the time, his nod said, but he still appreciated the compliment. Not everyone can weld. After they had allowed a little time to pass around this shared enthusiasm, he said, ‘Hey, what a shit body you found for me!’

‘It’s your own,’ Renoko pointed out.

‘I don’t remember doing this to it.’

‘It will serve the purpose,’ Renoko said. ‘She says you can begin any time. They’re ready for you in the quarantine orbits.’

The charred man scratched his Mohican. ‘If not now, when?’ he asked himself. But he looked as if he had reservations. Then he shrugged and laughed and clapped Renoko’s shoulder. ‘Hey, so she came to say goodbye to you after all, La Chinoise?’

Renoko smiled. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘she did.’

‘You feel good, then?’

‘I feel good,’ Renoko agreed.

‘That’s good,’ the charred man said. He reached into Renoko’s head with one hand.

‘Oh!’ said Renoko. He’d seen something very special.

‘She tries to do her best for everyone.’

Renoko fell back and slipped down the bulkhead with a sigh until he attained a sitting position, after which he began to lose sight of himself. It was an uncanny feeling. In my case, he reminded himself again, it’s wrong to say ‘I think’: I should always say, ‘I’m thought’. Then he wasn’t. He wasn’t thought any more. Although, as long as the boys from Earth ate lunch, a tiny part of Renoko would always live on, a fractal memory in the Faint Dime database — catch & spread light of all kind wan light thru ripple glass jagged light of pressed chrome reflection film light of pink neon diffused across ceilings formica in fantasy-pastels pressed chrome deco fluting behind the bar a curious cast to chequerboard floors shiny lime sherbert light on each pink faux leather stool all perfect pressed out in perfect sugar colour like candy every item perfect perfectly itself & perfectly the same as everything else these weird blue metallic plastic banquettes — less glitch than resonance, the remains of a stay-resident program printing itself out as a list of aesthetic possibilities once or twice a year at cash registers across the Halo, with a particular fondness for ‘the Tambourine’ on New Venusport.

Forty seconds later, the main hold filled with light.

Internal comms tanked. Up in the control room, error signals jammed the boards. ‘Accept!’ Liv Hula told the pilot connexion. Nothing. She stuffed the wires into her mouth by hand. ‘Akphept!’ Too late. They were half in, half out when the connect halted. She pushed until she bled, but the system wouldn’t receive. Instead, Liv was snatched out of herself and began some long, identityless transit.

When things returned, she was seeing them via an exterior camera-swarm. Autorepair media raced along the brass-coloured hull like dust down a hot street. The stern assembly pulsed in and out of view. Outriggers, fusion pods, the tubby avocado-shaped bulge housing the Dynaflow drive: you could see the stars through them. From a source down there, where the holds and motors had once been, intermittent, washy-looking streams of plasma curved out into the dark, already an AU long and curved like scimitars. Liv felt sick. With the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. ‘Antoyne? Hello?’ No one responded. Inside the ship, engine rooms, holds, companionways, ventilator shafts, stairwells, winked out one by one. Go through the wrong door, who knew what you’d see? Liv was aware but blind. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control room screens — a kind of luminous darkness where her spaceship had been. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order.