‘The fuck,’ Imps asked himself, ‘is happening here?’
On they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, flowing out of the dark and parting around the research vessel, of which they took little more notice than the void itself. SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, its hull shuddering with the approach of some catastrophic event — the phase change, the leap to the next stable state — aimed itself at the heart of the singularity, which seemed to shift and boil in response with realtime bursts of high-energy photons. The alien engines shuttled faster and faster, producing curious slick pulses that presented to the observer not as light but as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth, a vibration in the walls, a perpetual but perpetually decaying echo effect in the context of things. The fleet paused a second, hung in silhouette, then hurled itself in.
For a moment after they had vanished, the vacuum still seemed inhabited. Then it was nothing again. Imps van Sant stared into the eyepieces of his obsolete instruments. Deep in explicatory failure, he had no way of placing himself with regard to what he had witnessed. Man, he thought. Who were those guys? They seemed full of madness and a direct rejection of anything he might have called humanity. It made him lonelier than ever. He was considering this when empty space whispered at him.
‘Hello?’ it said.
She hung out there, a kilometre long and clean as a herring gull over a windy beach. You looked at her and you could taste salt, ice cream, iodine. Feel for a second fully inside yourself.
‘I can be anything I want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want that. I want to be the one thing I am.’
And when van Sant couldn’t think of an answer:
‘What do you remember best?’
‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t a regular kid.’ He rummaged through the litter of empty beer cans, broken table tennis balls and repro 1970s wank mags around his pilot chair until he found some real estate brochures. ‘I don’t remember anything, but I want to live somewhere like this.’ Holding up a picture so she could see, a Sandra Shen tableau entitled,
‘It’s the real McCoy,’ Imps said.
‘I don’t recall anything like that,’ she said. Then, almost immediately: ‘What would you be if you could be one other thing?’
‘One other thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d be gone from here.’
‘I want to go home too,’ she said. ‘Let’s start soon.’
Just then, off in a corner of the Tub’s main display, as in some hallucination accompanying neurological disorder, there bloomed a soft white explosion like a puff of fibres or a cloud of spores. It was low yield, less than a light-day away in the direction of Radio Bay. Not quite as far out as Imps van Sant, but far enough. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ For a moment he thought the war had caught up with them. On examination, though, it proved to be just some abandoned old research tool which had gone mad after a million years staring into nothing and blown itself up. This close to the Tract, it was always happening. What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories?
TWENTY EIGHT
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
The volunteers of the Wyndlesham & District Fire Service, called to a house on Coldmorton Lane when smoke was seen rising just after dawn, attended with a turn-of-the-century pumping unit on a Man chassis and their even older Mercedes turntable (some local enthusiast’s ‘big society’ donation, salvaged from the corner of a field in southern France and lovingly restored), to find the occupier, a fifty- or sixty-year-old woman naked and with an inexplicable smile, half in and half out of a small wooden structure at the end of her garden. She was dead. Preparing to damp down, they also discovered that though it had collapsed in on itself in a curiously chaotic way — as if blown about by brief, whirling, highly localised gusts of wind — the structure, a lapboard shed about the same age as their Mercedes, had clearly never been on fire. There was no heat. There was no charring. There was no smell. The banks of glowing embers that had appeared to surround it when they arrived turned out to be only its contents, piles of colourful household stuff which had burst from the damp cardboard boxes inside when the roof fell in.
Police, paramedics and the dead woman’s GP all turned up at once. By then, the turntable had returned to its garage in the derelict agricultural college buildings at Plumpton; and the team leader — a raw-looking Yorkshireman called Weatherburn with hacked-off grey hair, thirty years’ experience and his own sense of humour — was rocking the Man pump about in front of the house, trying to get it back out into Coldmorton Lane without cutting up the lawn. Weatherburn stuck his head out of the cab’s side window and told the doctor: ‘Whatever the caller spotted, it wasn’t a fire.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘We can usually recognise one when we see it.’
The doctor grinned whitely and, already sick of shouting to be heard over the roar of the diesel, failed to reply.
Not long later he rolled off his powdered nitrile gloves and informed the attending police officers: ‘A stroke. Massive.’ Everyone at his practice knew Anna Waterman.
‘What’s that in her hand?’
When they pried the object loose, it turned out to be an outboard computer drive with a polished titanium shell and a style of connection port no one had seen except in museums. They passed it about, rubbing their fingers over some deep, etched-looking marks at one corner. The paramedics, meanwhile, got the body on to a trolley and pushed it effortfully up the lawn, leaving tracks in the dew. The doctor watched them go. ‘She was a nice old woman,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘A bit mad, like most of that generation.’ Suddenly depressed, he leant on the orchard fence and looked out across the meadow at some wisps of mist dissipating above the river. He was thirty years old. Anna’s age weighed on him. She had seen the world when it was still proud of its future, blown, like its economy, as a stream of bubbles. Behind him, the remains of the summerhouse settled suddenly. Dust puffed up, and from inside came faint scraping noises.
‘I think there’s an animal in there,’ one of the police said.
‘Hurry and rescue it then,’ the doctor advised without turning to look. He laughed. ‘I can’t see a health and safety issue.’ He left them to it and went up to the house to make out the formal notice of death and call the daughter.
