Empty Space

watched the dynaflow medium streaming past. ‘I wish I could talk to Fat Anthony?’ he said suddenly. ‘But he avoids me.’

‘His name’s Antoyne and he’s a decent man. Back in the glory days he loved you and admired you, the way we all did. I was just the same. You were crazy and beautiful and that’s what we wanted. If you asked us to be heroes, we would have followed you anywhere. But it’s France Chance, Ed, win or lose every time you open the throttle. Remember that?’ Then, as soon as he began to answer: ‘And now what? You’re the only one who ever came back from the Tract, big achievement. But what have you brought out of there? You might be into something good, you might be deeper in shit than ever.’ She smiled; her smile said she couldn’t help him with that. ‘You can have the ship. I don’t think either of us wants it after what happened, and we can easily get another.’

She looked out the porthole one day not long after that, and saw they were back in the Saudade Quarantine orbit.

The planet turned beneath them like some immense flywheel. Deadlights flickered off the bow. All around, it was offworld warehousing of the unnameable: a million tonnes of a substance half protein, half code, the waste of human interaction with mathematics.

She got on the internal comms and said, ‘Ed, this is the wrong orbit. Park & Ride is further in. Do you want any help?’ Silence from the main hold. ‘Ed?’ When she arrived down there, she found the hull back in place and the mortsafes lined up in a neat row.

They didn’t look any less disused than usual. ‘What are you fuckers looking at?’ she asked them. As if in response they separated suddenly, to reveal Ed Chianese lying prone on the deckplates while a very small Chinese woman crouched, knees apart, where the small of his back had once been. Ed’s face was pressed into the floor, her emerald green cheongsam was hiked up round her waist. Her skin was very white. You couldn’t be sure what was happening between them, but white motes the size of clothes moths seemed to be pouring out of her polished little ivory-colored vulva.

‘Ed?’

Ed seemed too preoccupied to answer. The woman, if that’s what she was, chuckled and looked over at Liv. Liv turned and ran before she could be made to look closer, before she could be made to understand more. From that moment, she felt, everything in her life would depend on not interpreting what she had seen there. It would depend on remembering no more than a wink, a cigarette, a smile on very red lips. Ed caught up with her in the companionway outside.

‘Jesus, Liv. You could at least knock.’

‘Get us down to Saudade City,’ Liv said. ‘And then piss off.’

An hour later, the three of them stood on the loading platform, looking out across the damp cement of Carver Field towards the Port Authority buildings and over them to the city itself. It was raining. The new day had a used light all over it; a light which might be described as pre-enjoyed on its passage from Retiro Street to the Church on the Rock. In the crime tourism quarter, the hotel neons weren’t quite done, but they’d faded to pastels of themselves. Ed Chianese leant on the loading platform rail, his ragged lower half rattling faintly in the wind.

‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’

Liv found him a smile. ‘You’ve walked through one too many walls, Ed. Look at the state of you.’

‘I’ve got used to a life,’ was all Antoyne could think of to say.

When Ed had gone the two of them were left on the cement, craning their necks as the Nova Swing groaned her way back to the Quarantine orbit on her tail of smoke. They watched until she was a fading green glow in the cloudbase. ‘Those fucking old engines!’

Liv Hula said.

‘But she was a boat.’

‘She was a dog, Antoyne.’

They laughed, then they turned towards Saudade City. The streets had a new excitement, they were packed with refugees and military police. Lightning flashed — a K-ship, splitting the sky, trailing thunder! She took his arm, folded it under her own, hugged it against her side, the way she used to walk with Irene.

‘Where to next?’ she said.

‘Some place where Crab Nebula is a main course not a destination.’

TWENTY SIX Lizard People from Deep Time

Uptown Six took the dynaflow highway halfway across the Halo. It was a fast uncluttered trip. Viewed from inside, the dyne fields are just like a human being — a kind of bad-natured origami, accordion-folded to contain more than seems possible or advisable. Is this how the universe dreams of itself? Eels flickering in shoals through some velvet medium? Splashes of coloured light drawn sideways suddenly by the unimaginable stresses of not really being there? The assistant, who felt similar stresses herself, sat uncomfortably by the porthole in the human quarters trying to comprehend these phenomena.

‘I don’t like to travel like this,’ she told the shadow operators, ‘with those fish outside the window.’ She didn’t like the food on the Uptown Six. She didn’t like the Vicente Fernandez lowrider music Carlo played, with its heavy reliance on traditional ranchera stylings. When he turned it off, she didn’t like a noise she thought the air-conditioning made which no one else could hear. Every time the ship changed course she said, ‘Is it supposed to sound like that?’ Her problem wasn’t travel itself. It was that she couldn’t feel comfortable away from Saudade. The shadow operators — obsessed by anything new and dysfunctional, and thus already deeply invested — took on the grey, slightly translucent appearance of mourning women, rubbed their bony, work- roughened hands together, and begged her:

‘Would you prefer something different to eat, dear?’

The cabin was filled briefly with their smell of violets and Vinolia Soap.

‘Can we fetch you a blanket?’

An hour or two into the journey R.I. Gaines opened the FTL routers and tried to refamiliarise himself with Galactic events. He fell asleep instead and dreamed he was in a rocket port surrounded by refugees. They resembled people, but they also resembled something like a swarm of bats or locusts too — or even a swarm of shadow operators, with a similar kind of sadness to their voracity and yearning. They were an ongoing process yet they never seemed to change. Gaines sat at a table with his hands in his lap. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind him, laughing and shrieking. He didn’t know what to do or think next. Adverts fluttered overhead like moths: his eyes followed them. People went in and out of the travel terminal doors: his head turned that way. Listening to the chimes of the public address system, he realised that, quite literally, he was not himself. He was someone he knew, but he couldn’t remember who. Eventually his number was called and he got to his feet and walked towards the gate.

While Gaines was dealing with these issues, whatever they were, Carlo — whose meds had flattened him off nicely for the day — tried to lure the assistant into the pilot tank with him. Though she seemed interested, even after she had lifted the lid, she would only do sex inside an immersive art experience called Joan in 1956, which apparently featured an old car and something she described as ‘waisted cotton briefs’. Carlo wasn’t disheartened.

‘I’m so fucking in love,’ he told Gaines when Gaines woke up.

By then they were under the shoulder of the Tract itself, tumbling down a thirty-light-year well between high temperature gas clouds. Soon, Galt & Cole’s big score filled the screens, not quite a planet, not quite a machine: a geological madhouse with aspects of both, having the gravitational signature of a low density rubble pile but eye-watering Mohr-Coloumb figures. It was as porous as sponge yet nothing could pull it apart. The highly cratered surface sported a uniform orange colour, slightly too pale for rust. Across it roiled deep cobalt shadows and strange-looking rivers of dust.

‘Home again,’ Gaines said.

‘Keep watching the skies, Carlo,’ he called as they left the ship.

‘These days there’s no need to run the maze,’ he told the assistant. But he took her in anyway. Some part of him still needed to show it off.