Empty Space

hand then let her go. ‘You’ve got a Kv12.2 expression problem,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ She stared down at her own hand, then up into Gaines’s face — as if, he thought, she was trying to understand the exchange as emotional rather than diagnostic — and after a moment asked:

‘Do you want to sit on the bed and talk?’

‘You really are someone’s project,’ he said.

Which of them was the cypher? They sat on the bed, with George the tailor behind them, and both of them stared at the wall. Gaines felt tired after Panamax IV, suddenly the only scene he could remember from his whole life was him and Emil Bonaventure in the PEARLANT labyrinth, dragging along some dead entradista whose suit visor was caked an inch thick with the remains of his own lungs. After a moment or two, he put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I’m going to need you to do something for me,’ he said.

TWENTY FIVE Lowboy Orbits

They put Irene out into space, so she could drift forever through the incredible refuse of the Beach she loved.

Without her they were soon depressed and rudderless. Life swilled about in the bottom of the trough. Communication failed. Lies returned home. The FTL media brought only war news, and every shift of the light reminded them of some better time in their lives. Neither of them could fly the ship. Liv went to Antoyne and said, ‘My mouth is damaged, but my mind is worse.’ Antoyne shrugged: there was no way he could do it. They fucked for comfort, what a mistake that turned out to be. The Nova Swing hung there in the middle of nothing. When she fired up her Dynaflows and set a course of her own, back towards Saudade where it had all begun, they were almost relieved to have things taken out of their hands.

They continued to avoid the main hold. Instead, they slept and slept, living separate lives inside their own guilt about Irene. But once the ship got under way, levels of unconscious activity could only rise: Antoyne dreamed he was fat again, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. He dreamed he was dead. Liv dreamed of ghosts. Sometimes a torn coat seemed to float along the ship’s ill-lit companionways and stairwells (in that dream, she admitted wryly, the coat had secured the ontological high ground: it was Liv who felt like the haunting); other times, as if they sought clarity and kindness, her dreams were all of her glory days at the Venice Hotel on France Chance —

Situated between the sea and the city, a stone’s throw from the rocket-sport port, the Venice — with its tall, uncurtained windows, tranquil shabby rooms and uncarpeted pale oak floors which always captured the waking light — was, for five years the destination of rocket-jockeys all over the Halo. A twenty-four hour carnival unfolded outside the old hotel: bad paint-jobs, bad haircuts, bad planning. People were building their own starships in sheds at the edge of the field. Inside, you could find the most beautiful pilot, nineteen years old, sleeping in an empty bar at four in the afternoon, and soon go up to his room on the fourth floor back corridor. Next morning you woke alone and smiling, wrapped yourself in a pink cellular blanket, which you later stole and kept it with you your whole life, and went to the window, listening to the illegal sonic booms rolling in from seaward as the returning hyperdips performed low level aerobrake re-entries.

A few hours before, these cockleshells with alien engines had been toppling through the France Chance chromosphere (filmed in perfect rights-reserved imagery by virtual hydrogen-alpha filter). Now the boys who flew them were determined to be the first human beings to scrub off more than twenty thousand kilometres an hour at less than five hundred feet above sea level. And the frail, utter certainty of it was: you had done that too, and you still couldn’t get enough of it, and you would do it again and again until you couldn’t do it any more. Later, you found your lovely pilot was the legendary Ed Chianese, and that the two of you were in competition for the Stupidest Achievement of That Year award.

It was from the perspective of this dream that Liv, waking transfixed, understood where she had seen the occupant of the K-tank before. She dialled up Antoyne, who, refusing to leave the crew quarters for three days, played Ya Skaju Tebe on infinite repeat and ate raspberry ice cream with his hands.

‘Fat Antoyne, listen. We have to go into the hold.’

But Antoyne wouldn’t budge.

Walls blacked with graffiti flower shapes; armoured bulkheads deformed not by blast, or even melting, but by enforced transition through unnatural physical states; autorepair media busy over everything: someone, Liv thought, had pressed the wrong switch down there.

A section of the hull remained transparent. It was a wall of nothing. Eerie light from a corner of the Tract lengthened out the main hold so that it seemed more like an exterior than an interior. This illusion was increased by the disarray of the mortsafes. They were hard to count now. They lay tumbled on one another into a kind of distance, like corroded boilers in a scrapyard. Repair work was going on among them, but you couldn’t quite see where. A sputtering sound filled the air. Sparks flew up and rained back down, cutting gold curves on the watching eye, bouncing off the deck as they cooled to dark cherry. Big shadows danced over the bulkheads.

Everything smelled of mould on bread, and of MP Renoko, who slumped like a traditional wood puppet in the unremitting yet unreliable glare of the welding arc, his clothes blackened, his left arm resting at an odd angle in his lap. One side of his face had dripped into the hollow of his clavicle, where it produced a finish resembling melted plastic; the other side boasted a sceptical grin, an appreciative glint in the eye, as if Renoko had only just died — or as if he was still alive, choosing for some reason to remain incommunicado. In this environment even a dead human being was a comfort. Liv stood next to him and peered into the fountain of sparks.

‘You can come out now, Ed,’ she called.

‘Liv? Liv Hula?’

For weeks she had watched him drift aimlessly around the ship when he thought everyone was asleep; now he floated towards her with a big smile, his arms wide. Over the years the memory of him had worn down inside her. It was smooth from use and bore little resemblance to the figure he cut at this end of his life. But the Halo is a wall-to-wall freak show: why should Ed Chianese be any different? The ragged flaps and ribbons of his braised organs trailed out behind him.

‘Is that you, Liv? Jesus!’

When she didn’t respond, Ed looked unhappy; as if, though he had got her name right, he had mistaken her for someone else. For instance a more recent admirer. Focusing slightly to the left of her, he said:

‘I’m sorry.’

‘About what?’ she said. ‘What happened to you, Ed?’

‘Just the usual wear and tear.’

‘I can see.’ And, when he didn’t follow that up: ‘I called, but you never got in touch.’ She left a silence but he didn’t want to fill that either. ‘Hey!’ she tried. ‘Someone told me you hijacked a K-ship and flew it into the Tract!’

‘That was years ago,’ Ed said, as though apologising for having once been in the past. ‘Anyone could do it.’

‘Fuck off, Ed. No one comes back from there.’

‘I did,’ he said, with such a tone of regret that she believed him instantly. ‘I didn’t want to — once you’ve been in there you’ll do anything to stay — but here I am.’ After some thought he added, as if determined to produce a fair and balanced account: ‘Actually, the K-ship hijacked me.’

‘So now you’re hijacking the Nova Swing.’

‘Is that what they call her these days?’ He looked around vaguely. ‘Nice name,’ he said.

‘It’s cheap, Ed,’ Liv said. ‘That’s why you like it.’

She said: ‘What do you mean, “these days”? Are you Ed Chianese?’

‘Who else could be this fucked up?’

‘Fair point, Ed.’

Somewhere among the piled mortsafes, the MIG welder was working again. Or perhaps it wasn’t that. Sparks, anyway, were fountaining up, so bright the Tract paled into invisibility behind them. There was a sound like