‘Jesus, Antoyne,’ she said. ‘What are you fucking around with now?’
No one heard her.
Antoyne was enjoying a shit. Irene, who trusted Renoko as far as she could throw him, had zipped herself into a lightweight white eva suit, grabbed her favourite Fukushima Hi-Lite Autoloader from the weapons bar and, with a transparent bubble helmet under one arm, was making her way from the crew quarters to the main hold. Latticed stairways leaned at expressionist angles against the moody emergency light; in the rear companionways the ship’s gravity had become undependable. Communications were nonexistent. It was hard to tell which way was up. Irene, though, looked good with her close-fit suit, her determined expression and her flossy blond hair. ‘It’s hot as hell down here,’ she said. ‘Hello?’
She put her ear to the main hold doors.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Liv? Antoyne? I hear something!’ Setting helmet and Hi-Lite on the floor, she opened the door and stepped through.
Just as Liv heard Irene’s strange cries, the missing sections of the ship returned. Antoyne never knew any part of it had been gone. He appeared in the control room pulling up his trousers and together he and Liv ran through the
‘Antoyne,’ she whispered, with a kind of puzzled matter-of-factness, ‘the universe isn’t what we think.’ She reached out a soft hand to Liv Hula, insisted, ‘Nothing here was made for us!’ Then, writhing about in Antoyne’s arms so she could see into his eyes: ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’
‘He didn’t look,’ Liv reassured her.
She wasn’t sure if he did or not. The backs of her gums were bleeding where she had ripped the pilot connexion out. She could feel a lot of loose tissue up there. Sometimes Liv felt she had died a hundred lights back, on the mystery asteroid. Ever since, her nightmares were of being discovered by retrieval teams, lapped in faint ionising radiation at the junction of two corridors, an unreadable name stencilled above the faceplate of her eva suit. Day after day, plugged straight into the inner life of the hardware, she lay in the acceleration chair, always too cold, reviewing the internal surveillance data. Something had been wrong down there from the very first day of the Renoko contract, but with every new artefact they picked up, ship life had been less easy to observe. She had no idea if the
‘The mortsafes!’ Irene screamed. ‘The mortsafes!’
Liv Hula slammed the main hold door and backed away from it carefully, holding out Irene’s Autoloader in both hands.
They dragged Irene back to the crew quarters. She was hanging by a thread the whole way, hallucinating and crying out. When they got there she made Fat Antoyne dress her in her newest clothes and carry her to a porthole. They couldn’t find a single mark on her, but she was slipping away so fast you could feel her go past you and out into empty space.
‘Those stars! So beautiful!’ she said, and closed her eyes. Her skin had a lead-coloured glaze. Antoyne, whose arm had felt weird since he thrust it into the hold, looked down at her and concluded she was already dead. But after a while she smiled and said: ‘Antoyne, promise me you won’t get a cultivar of me. If I have to die I want to die forever, here and now in this utterly for-real place.’ She seemed to think about it for a moment. Then she clutched his arm and said, ‘Hey, and I want you to find someone else! Of course I do! We should never be alone in this life, Antoyne, because that is what human beings are for, and you will have many experiences of love yet. But honey, I want you to lose me. Can you understand that?’
Antoyne, dumb with it already, said he could.
‘Good,’ she said.
She sighed and smiled as if that weight was off her mind. ‘Look out at those stars,’ she urged Antoyne again. And then, in a change of subject he could not follow: ‘All the shoes you can eat!’ She pulled herself up with her hands on his shoulders to get a look around the crew quarters.
‘Oh, Liv,’ she said. ‘And our lovely, lovely rocket!’
Antoyne felt himself begin to cry. All three of them were crying after that.
TWENTY FOUR
Spike Train
Three fifty am, the assistant visited Ou Lou Lu’s on Retiro Street, a venue added only recently to her night’s round. There she drank a cup of espresso, holding it in both hands and dancing thoughtfully to the sidewalk music the way R.I. Gaines had taught her, watching out for the flash of pre-dawn light above the city. When it came, she drove back over to Straint Street to talk to her friend and confidant, George the gene tailor. It was fine rain like fog. The Cadillac rolled down Straint, its 1000hp engine already turned off, and came quietly to a halt outside Sharp Cuts. The assistant — let’s call her the Pantopon Rose — tall, white-blond hair cropped to not much of anything — possessing the kind of height and fuck-off good looks which come naturally from the most radical tailoring — stepped out on to the sidewalk.
‘Hey, George!’ she called.
No answer. Her expression grew puzzled. The door hung wide open and the rain was blowing in from the street.
She could smell the dockyards. From the factories she could hear the sound of women clocking on for the early shift. The light had a yellow colour: it picked out the ceramic receiver of the reaction gun she now took out quietly, holding it down alongside her thigh. One instant she was outside, the next she was in, silent and motionless, smiling around. The chopshop seemed empty. Nevertheless she didn’t feel alone. Something was masking itself in the IR, RF, acoustic and active sonar regimes. It was near. She could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, but it wasn’t that. Something was in the room with her. It was impure in the sense it didn’t fit. It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit in and if you failed to grasp that you had already made a mistake. She couldn’t smell it, but she knew it had a smell. She couldn’t locate it, but she knew it had a location. Then came the whisper she almost expected, the amused voice from an empty corner:
‘My name is Pearlent —’
The assistant put a Chambers round exactly where her systems placed the voice. A soft, coughing thud and the corner of the shop burst into rose and grey flames. Heat splashed back. In the shifting lick of that — the warm flicker of geometry followed by dark — she identified an object moving. It was a decoy. It was all over the room. It was all around her with —
— and the low, charismatic laugh of a rebuilt thing.
If it shot back she was dead. It was there, not there: there, not there. Then it was right in her face. Tall, with white-blond hair cropped to nothing much. The fuck-off body language of someone who can run fifty miles an hour and see in sonar. Someone whose very piss is inhuman.
It was herself.
It was gone. It was next to her yet out of range. For an instant everything hung suspended, then fell.
‘Christ!’ the assistant screamed. She redlined her equipment. She was quick enough to get a round off at the blur in the doorway. The round fizzed away like an angry cat and burst in the street. When the assistant arrived out there she found she had shot her own car. Flames were already reflecting in the window of the Tango du Chat, appearing curiously still, like cut-out flames, or flames in an old book. Spooked drinkers stared out. They hadn’t even begun to duck. She could hear running footsteps, but they were unhurried and already three streets away. That was something you might puzzle over later in your room, when you recalled a face just like your own glaring madly into yours from ten inches distance — permitting itself to be seen in five false-colour overlays, teeth bared and laughing with your own perfected fuck-off arrogance — and admitted just how far things had slipped away from you. You
