Empty Space

a lot of drowsy flies. ‘Is there someone else in here?’ Liv said. Suddenly, Ed had her by the shoulders. His odd, not- unpleasant smell, more ozone than halal, filled the space between them. ‘Get out!’ he said.

His hands hurt. ‘Fuck, Ed!’ Liv said. But though she struggled and kicked, and though he wasn’t what you could call all there, he had no difficulty propelling her towards the door. Liv, straining to looked back over her shoulder, saw something beautiful and strange beginning to form itself out of the sparks. ‘What’s that? Ed, what’s that?’

‘Don’t look!’ he said, and pushed her out.

The door slid closed, then open again. Ed’s head protruded, lower down than you would expect.

‘Let’s talk soon,’ he said.

‘Don’t let’s bother,’ said Liv, who thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the hold behind him. ‘Just fuck you, Ed,’ she shouted.

No reply.

‘And fuck your stories. Fuck that you know more than us, and our lives are suddenly part of some weird deal of yours. Our friend is dead, also what you did to this ship is a fucking big inconvenience to us.’

The worst thing wasn’t that so much of him was missing, or that the remainder looked like a display of half- cooked meat in an outdoor market at the end of the day. It wasn’t even that he seemed to be only partly aware you were in the room with him. It was that thirty years had passed. Over distances like that, people drive themselves without much deviation towards the simplest expression of what they are. In the meantime you grow out of them. The only feature Ed retained was the weak grin he got when he knew you had found him out. At the Venice Hotel, and for a month or two afterwards, she had interpreted that expression as a measure of how nice he was. Since then, she could see, he had let it become a substitute for raising his game. Why hadn’t she expected that?

She went back to the crew quarters and explained the situation. ‘Listen Antoyne,’ she said, ‘we have to get him out of here.’

Antoyne, who smelled strongly of Black Heart, would only grunt. As Irene had often predicted, new things are bound to happen to anyone in the end; but Antoyne was bad with any kind of reversal. He had lost weight except over the upper abs, where, in a matter of days, the ice-cream diet had seated itself in a carcinomatic-looking lump. ‘Ed’s not the man we knew,’ she said. In fact the problem was the reverse of that. Ed — who walked out on Liv because she beat him into the France Chance photosphere; who left Dany LeFebre to die down on Tumblehome; who, when he got as sick of himself as everyone else had, spent fifteen years in the twink tank lapping up some mystery shit the immersion media churn out for kiddies — was exactly the man they knew. ‘Antoyne, wake up! He’s not human any more. He has some plan, it takes no account of us or anyone. Wake up!’ Antoyne opened his eyes and considered Liv for a moment with the beginnings of an interest. Then he belched, turned away and began to weep. After that, recent experience told her, no amount of shaking would get his attention.

‘Antoyne, you useless fucker,’ she told him.

From living with himself, Antoyne knew that to be true. Later, when Liv had gone back up to the control room, he rolled over, puked a little, washed up in the corner sink and stared around the cabin at Irene’s scattered underwear: party semiotics in action. The little action cube of her was playing on repeat, sounding scratchy and cheap and far away. In his head he heard her real voice say, ‘It was a lovely world,’ and then: ‘Antoyne, you got to lose me.’ After he cleaned up, he took himself down to the main hold, where he leaned in the doorway and said:

‘So.’

‘Hey,’ Ed acknowledged. He was wiping his fingers on an oily rag. ‘It’s the pizza guy! What do I owe you?’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Very funny.’

‘It’s —’ Ed clicked his fingers ‘ — Fat Anthony. Right?’

‘That was years ago. They don’t call me that any more.’ He stared at Ed. ‘What the fuck have you done to yourself this time?’ he said.

Ed grinned. ‘This? I’m not sure. Like it? I picked it up in the Tract.’

‘I heard you were there.’

‘Fat Anthony, you should go too, while you can.’ Ed said he couldn’t think of a way to describe it. It was the big achievement. In there it was eleven dimensions of everything. ‘The entities who run it, they’re all charisma.’ They were over everything, having fun. ‘Fat Anthony, it’s just so fucking different in there. You know?’

‘If it’s that good,’ Antoyne pointed out bleakly, ‘why didn’t you stay?’

‘Come back with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come back with me now. None of this is real when you’ve been in the Tract. Come back with me and see.’

Ed could sell you his own worst dream, caught with an unsteady camera, lit with a bad light. Juice or jouissance, it was always a plunge into something, with a default to the epic, from which, very often, only Ed returned. For a moment Antoyne wondered what decision he would make. Then he said:

‘Why would I do that to myself, Ed?’

The universe went on. Nova Swing ploughed across it, creaking under her own internal stresses. Antoyne cleaned up his act, weaning himself off the peppermint ice over a dog day afternoon. He folded Irene’s underwear and put it away, and in place of that desperate shrine to her constructed another, using the things she salvaged from Perkins Rent. He burned incense there but within days heard her voice telling him not to be a jerk. ‘You make your own life in this life, Antoyne.’

Ed Chianese, meanwhile, spent his time in the hold, working on the mortsafes. Entities came and went while he was down there. Some looked like angels, some looked like operators. You didn’t want to be close enough to tell the difference.

Liv Hula, a passenger in her own ship, dozed in the acceleration chair while, outside, the Halo streamed past, broken into futuristic dazzle patterns by physics and war. The news remained bad. Ed drifted in and out at unpredictable times of day, and hung there staring at the exterior screens. This exasperated her.

‘Can’t you sit down or something?’

‘The day you first came aboard this ship,’ he said, ‘you found surplus code in the navigational system. You couldn’t work out what it did.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

He shrugged.

She remembered the first time she sat in the chair. After all the years away from piloting, she felt so free, even if it was just to swallow the nanofibres and take the ship’s inventory:

Electronic infrastructure. Propulsion architecture. Communications schematics, including an ageing FTL uplinker which showed, for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected quarantine orbits from three to a thousand lights along the Beach. Otherwise it was navigation fakebooks, cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking stamps. She remembered advising Fat Antoyne, ‘You got fifty years of guano in there. Also they used the code to run something my chops don’t get.’

She looked speculatively at Ed. ‘I fenced it off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want it crawling up someone’s rectum at night. Especially mine.’

Ed brought up internal views.

‘See that junk you collected in the hold?’ he said. ‘It’s an engine. The Nova Swing’s the only ship in the Galaxy with the software to run it. That was what you found.’

She sighed impatiently.

‘Just tell me why you’re back, Ed. Maybe I can help.’

‘I came to free the people,’ Ed said, making a gesture which, perhaps hoping to take in the whole galaxy, explained nothing. ‘Things are going to get bad out here.’ This war, he said, was the big one. ‘They’ve been working up to it for a hundred and fifty years.’ It would mean a substantial collapse of EMC infrastructure. It would mean that no one had a right to expect endless progress any more. Quite the reverse. In the long term, that might in itself be good for the boys from Earth. ‘They can start from the ground up, with a more interesting take on things.’ Meanwhile it would get worse before it got better.

‘Thanks a lot for that prophecy, Ed.’

‘I was a prophet once,’ he said, ‘but I left all that behind.’ For a moment he