Empty Space

‘That,’ Antoyne said, pointing above his head; but the baby was gone. He looked up, around, behind him: nothing.

Gravuley Street offered no aid. To the left lay darkness and the empty planet; to the right, the savagely lighted window of the Faint Dime. He could see every item of interior decoration, pressed-out and perfect in candy colours. Someone was drinking Ovaltine with rum. Someone else was getting a big-size ham on rye sandwich with fries. Antoyne wiped his mouth. The hair went up on his neck. One o’ clock in the morning, and a light wind blew dust in ribbons down the middle of the street.

‘Something was here,’ he asserted. ‘Why don’t we get a drink?’

‘I’m buying,’ said MP Renoko. ‘It seems to me you’ve had some sort of shock.’

Renoko looked like a photograph of Anton  Chekhov, if Chekhov had aged more and come to favour a little white chin-beard. Otherwise his look sucessfully teamed used raincoats with grey worsted trousers five inches too short. His hair — white, swept back to a grubby collar — always seemed full of light. He was small-boned, and intense in manner. His clothes came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘soup’. On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went unwashed. As soon as he and Fat Antoyne had settled themselves in the comparative safety of The East Ural Nature Reserve, he returned to his original subject as if he had never left it:

‘“Everyone their own evolutionary project,” we tell each other here in the Halo. Excuse me, this can only be an element of cultural self-dramatisation, even in times like ours.’ His smile meant he was prepared to forgive that. ‘But if there is a new species,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s up there in those quarantine hulks.’

Fat Antoyne said he didn’t get it.

Renoko smiled. ‘You get it,’ he said.

Leaked navigational nanoware or eleven-dimensional imaging code slips up someone’s anus at night and discovers it can run on a protein substrate. In a similar way, ads, memes, diseases and algorithms escape into the wild. They can run on your neurones, they can run inside your cells. They perform a default conversion. Suddenly the cops are out with the loudhailers, ‘Stay inside! Stay indoors!’ but it’s too late: on your street, in your house, everything collapses suddenly into an unplanned slurry of nanotech, half-tailored viruses and human fats — your husband, your two little girls in their identical dresses, you. ‘Entire planetary populations,’ Renoko said, ‘are converting to this stuff. Is it an end-state?’ He threw up his little hands. ‘No one knows! Is it a new medium? No one is willing to say! It’s as beautiful as water in strong sunlight, yet it stinks like rendered fat, and can absorb an adult human being in forty seconds. The hulks are full of it, the quarantine orbit is full of hulks. Men like you keep it safe.’ Obsolete pipeliners that worked the Carling Line, decommissioned Alcubierre warps the size of planetisimals, anything with a thick hull, especially if it’s easy to reinforce further: Fat Antoyne had a sudden clear image of those pocked relics in the interplanetary darkness — used-up ships mysterious with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs, pinwheeling around on near-chaotic operator-controlled trajectories.

He shook his drink and watched it settle. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I got a six month contract to move some of it around, that’s all.’

‘And how are you enjoying that?’

Antoyne made the universal gesture for money. ‘This way,’ he boasted. ‘Mostly though my pilot does the work, you’ve seen her in here. She goes by Ruby Dip.’ Suddenly it occurred to him to ask: ‘Why are we talking about this?’

‘Because once all the other questions are asked, the last one left is: what does this new species want?’

Renoko leaned forward intently. He looked in Fat Antoyne’s eyes.

‘Would your pilot ever take a passenger up to the orbit? Would that seem possible?’ Immediately he suggested it, he began to laugh. They both knew he’d gone too far. Up there, the Quarantine Bureau was all over you with every kind of licence and paperwork. In addition they had oversight by EMC assets, the fragmentary orbits of which looped round Vera Rubin’s World as tight as the lines of a paranoid magnetic field. ‘Before you answer that,’ said Renoko, to release the tension, ‘let me get you another of those weird drinks you like.’

But Antoyne now shook his head no thanks and got to his feet. Some said MP Renoko was a twink addict and orbital miner, real name ‘Remy Kandahar’, wanted for crimes on all those worn-out planets of the Core. Others believed him to be all that remained of the notorious Circus of Pathet Lao — aka Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant — the assets of which he had been in the process of stripping since Sandra Shen’s disappearance fifty years before. Fat Antoyne, who subscribed to neither of these options, took out a hologram business card for Dynadrive-DF. This he placed on the table next to Renoko’s empty glass, saying: ‘“We haul anything,” is our pledge. Find us at Carver Field, Saudade if you ever want to do business of that kind. Just get in touch.

‘Thanks for the drink, I needed that after what I saw.’

Later that night, having found his way without further incident down the unreliable perspectives of Gravuley Street to Ruby Dip’s room, he said:

‘It makes you think.’

‘I know what it makes me think,’ said Ruby.

Ruby Dip was a short, broad, muscular woman fifty years old, whose skin not only told the whole story of life in the Halo through tattoos reading ‘Tienes mi corazon’ and ‘They Came from Planet E!’, but also featured treasure maps; fragments of secret code which, interpreted freely, could show any man the way home; and smart red worms of light that propagated across her substantial tits and into her armpits like the embers at the edge of a piece of burnt paper. Though she had her passions, Ruby liked the continual entertainment that was the rocket jockey’s life, and saw no reason to want much else. Her hair was cadmium yellow stubble. She favoured cropped and faded denim, smelled of the Pocket Rocket, and collected antique Spanish tambourines stuck all over with deep red roses and bits of sheet music and lighted from the inside, several examples of which now lay scattered across the cheap furniture or hung from the walls.

‘But have you ever seen inside a hulk?’ said Fat Antoyne, who if nothing else knew how to persist at the wrong moment.

Ruby confessed herself puzzled.

‘Honey,’ she said. ‘I just push them around.’ She looked up at him. ‘Now come on and push me around, Fat Antoyne, don’t wait!’ Besides which, she said, after they finished gasping and grunting at one another and Ruby rolled away to look at the ceiling, where did he get these ideas? She climbed up on the sink in the corner, sat there for a while, then got off again impatiently. She wouldn’t piss now for half an hour, she said, as if that was Antoyne’s fault.

‘Ruby, at least run the water.’

‘I never saw anyone less like a human being than MP Renoko.’

If you wanted Ruby’s opinion, he was a Shadow Boy. He was one of those mysterious, almost metaphysical entities whose reign in the Halo predated that of the Earth people, and whose motives remained, even now, opaque. ‘If indeed they have motives the way we do.’

‘Or if they even existed,’ Antoyne reminded her.

Ruby Dip waved this away.

‘Wait ’til you owe those boys money,’ she said, ‘you’ll find they exist! You’ll owe them half your brain as well! One day they pull you in and collect,’ she promised him. ‘They’re the gangsters, they’re the cops: fact is, you don’t know who they are. Don’t you get it? They look just like you and me!’

Antoyne shrugged. ‘Hey, no problems.’

If that was the way Ruby Dip wanted it, he said, that was OK with him. By then they were back on the bed again.

‘No this is the way I want it,’ Ruby Dip said.

Ruby’s unreasonable anger at Renoko, it turned out, stemmed from an argument she had with him one lunchtime in the Faint Dime diner. It concerned the nature of kitsch. Renoko felt that kitsch was a product of an event he named ‘the postmodern ironisation’, prior to which it could not exist: before that, the objects you could now describe as kitsch were actually trash objects. ‘Without the operation of irony on trash,’ he maintained, ‘there would be no kitsch.’ To him, the postmodern ironisation was like the Death of History or the coming Singularity. ‘Everything was changed by it. Nothing could be the same again. It had the irreversibly transformational qualities of