the central unshielded singularity — if that is what it is — are so powerful they generate in the surrounding gas clouds pressure waves that manifest themselves as sound.
This gigantic uproar, resonating through million-cubic-parsec cavities in the constituent gas, is the citizen journalism of the Tract; the loops and scribbles left by the shockfronts are its headlines. So for Imps van Sant’s instruments the news was not the destruction of Panamax IV. It was a series of discordant and complex groans 60 octaves below middle C.
‘Fuck,’ said Imps, who had never heard anything like it.
Sometimes your situation becomes too plain to you. Strange forces are at work. Imps tore off the headphones and beat them against the instrument panel until the bakelite cracked: the Tract seemed to keep on roaring at him anyway, like a huge face, its expression indescribable in human terms. Rage, elation, despair — even, he thought, some kind of vast weird parental love. It was all of those things and none of them. As for the physics: no one had ever had any idea of that. Some people said it was the physics of the early universe, still running in a leaky envelope, a cyst caught in a very long moment of bursting — the right physics but not in its right time. Imps didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. To him it was the physics of a face. He leaned back from the console and rubbed his eyes. He thought he might try and have a shower, then a beer. He was just lumbering up out of his chair when he heard a whisper from the broken headset. He grabbed it up.
‘Hello?’
George the gene tailor lay where the assistant had left him in her room in GlobeTown, the blankets pulled up lovingly to his chin. George was dead, but not alone in that. Spaceships lit the room’s warm air, psychic blowback from their weird science reinscribing on the walls — in layers of swirled colours like graffiti — the thoughts and feelings of everyone who had expired there before he arrived. Did dead George take comfort from these maps, butterflies, and other partially-depicted items from alien worlds? Was he aware of the street below, flowering like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night? Rokit Dub basslines spreading as waves across the city? The bars and nuevo tango joints opening slowly, their facades pulsing and sucking? Even if he was, these things are so much cultural babble. If they want anything, the dead want a rest from all of that.
Though she never had a name, the assistant was used to being someone. People were, for instance, frightened of her, on the fourth floor at Uniment & Poe, on Straint Street or Tupolev, on the sidewalk by the cake stall on Retiro Street. The assistant was used to having a presence in places like that. Here it wasn’t the same. Everyone was EMC. They spoke and walked as if they were thinking about something else. She was just someone who had arrived with Rig Gaines. When they came up to talk to him, they ignored her. Her chemistry didn’t work on them the way it worked on Epstein or her friend George. For instance a man called Case came up and said:
‘Is this her? Jesus.’
Case looked as if he had outlived himself. A tall man, with an air of once being heavily built, he walked bent over and bearing down awkwardly on two sticks. Both hips had gone. Like anyone else he could have had himself fixed but he had left it too long, out of carelessness or even some kind of inverted vanity, and now preferred this cooked, hairless look. His hands were ropy with veins, the skin over them shiny and slack. His brown head seemed too big for his neck; his underlip, the texture of braised liver, drooped in exhausted surprise at finding himself still alive. He stood in front of the assistant, staring greedily at her but at the same time with a curious lack of interest, as if he remembered women but his body didn’t. He whispered to himself. After a moment or two he leaned forward and tapped her forearm sharply.
‘Rig tells me you have some Kv12.2 expression issues,’ he said.
‘Is he talking to me?’ she asked Gaines.
‘We could help with that,’ Case said. ‘It’s just a small design flaw. Do you understand? Effectively, you have epilepsy.’ When she didn’t answer, he asked Gaines, ‘Does she understand anything?’
‘Honey, you could breathe through your mouth less,’ the assistant said.
Case blinked at her.
‘I never expected any sense out of you, Rig,’ he said to Gaines, ‘but this is moronic. You have no idea what will happen if we do this.’
Gaines’ response was to shrug. One way or another, he supposed, they would get some science out of it. This bland assumption turned into an argument in which Case’s team joined. They all talked at once. ‘Science?’ Case shouted at one point. He held both his sticks in one hand so he could make a contemptuous gesture with the other. ‘Science is off. It’s been off ever since you and Emil walked into this fucking place!’
Laughter all round.
‘I don’t like these people,’ the assistant said loudly.
Everyone stopped talking.
Gaines took her by the arm. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s OK, really.’ They stood looking at one another, while Case and his team stared at them. Rig gave her one of his wryest smiles and while he was still smiling at her said to someone nearby:
‘We could probably get some coffee here?’
The guy said sure. He could fetch that if they liked. They could get regular with milk or they could get regular without.
‘You don’t need to stay with us,’ Gaines told the assistant when the coffee arrived. ‘Have a look around. Have a look at everything.’ After that she was left alone with herself to an unfamiliar degree.
The room was as big as a travel terminal, dark but with islands of activity. Vehicles drove about, some quite heavy. Over near the middle of the space they had something isolated under powerful lights. It was moving in a sporadic way, like something natural, but she couldn’t see what it was. She found a place to sit, sprawled her legs wide and smiled at some of Case’s people until they looked away. She thought of names for herself: Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7 and ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. She looked down at her forearm: it was registering No Data. Meanwhile, Case’s people brought up new equipment, which they organised inside the circle of light. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to the assistant.
Outside the lighted area they had some basic chopshop fitments — a brand new proteome tank enamelled the colour of white goods in 1953, a cutting table and some surgical instruments. She was comfortable with all that. When she had finished her coffee, Gaines led her over there and said, ‘While we’re waiting, why don’t we have a look at this seizure activity of yours? Hop up on the table.’ She hopped up on the table and let him get a couple of probes into her at neurotypical sites. One of them slipped into her chest cavity, high up. She felt it rest momentarily against the collarbone as it pressed past. A sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. Soon she experienced pleasantly warm and lethargic feelings, with everything retreating to a distance as if it had nothing to do with her. ‘That’s great,’ Gaines told her, ‘just relax. Fuck,’ he said, to someone else. ‘These guys, whoever they were! Look at this. And this.’ He touched something and colours flew about in her head like small birds. She heard herself laugh. ‘Oops,’ Gaines said. ‘Wrong switch. Did you like that?’ She tasted metal, then two or three workshop spaces seemed to open inside her. Gaines began working in one of them. Later Case arrived to have a look.
‘I don’t want him here,’ she said.
‘It’s fine,’ Gaines said. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘I want you to wake me up now,’ the assistant said.
Gaines bent over her and she saw him smile.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.
‘Are you going to strangle me?’
‘You’ll be fine.’
After that she never seemed to be properly conscious again. She could tell what was happening, but it didn’t involve her. ‘Did you know you’ve got a 27 to 40 gHz radar option?’ Gaines said. His voice came from inside her now, with a clear echo, as if they were back in the tunnels. ‘Short range local surveillance medium. Not bad. Would you like it switched on?’ He switched it on and she saw everything in the control room filmy grey. Case’s people rolled the table over into the middle of the space, under the brightest light, where they left it. She lay in a comfortable haze, lighted internally by the 27 to 40 gHz radar, which Gaines had left switched on. She could detect people coming and going but not move her head. Eventually they swung the inspection table on its axis and did something to the probes so that her unforced sensory systems came back on. The assistant saw what was under the lights and why she had been brought here.
