Empty Space ktt-3

by M. John Harrison

  ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said.

  For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse, new universes awaited, furled up like tiny dimensions inside each abandoned technology. Back-engineering became the order of the day. Everyone could find something to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found, you could find something bigger. At the other end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins, nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.

  Ten per cent of it was still functioning. Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the outset: to them, the Beach was an interregnum, a holiday from common sense, an exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, extraordinary, panoramic instant they congratulated themselves on living in: the instant in which everything that went before somehow met and became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.

  It was, in short, a chance to make some money.

  2410AD: two Motel Splendido entradistas ran across an alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf, wobbling its way like a dirty balloon along some gravitational instability at the hot edge of the Tract. Their names were Galt & Cole. They made a single pass, looked things over and decided it could be done. Two days later their ride broke up in a Kelvin-Helmholtz eddy a bit further in. Cole, who couldn’t think for alarms going off, went down with the ship; Galt, temporarily stripped of ambition by a plume of gas elevated to eleven million degrees Kelvin and observable only in the extreme ultraviolet, made it back to the research tool by escape pod. Five years later, his FTL beacon drew the attention of a Macon 25 long-hauler inbound for Beta Hydrae with ten thousand tonnes of catatonic New Men stacked in the holds like the sacks of harvestable organs they were.

  By then Galt was calcium under a weird light. A few shreds of fabric and a polished skull. Who knew where his partner could be said to be? Galt left an autobiography, or maybe a final statement, or maybe only the name they had decided to give the real estate, scrawled on a stone — PEARLANT. They died near their fortune, those two, like all losers: but the name stuck. Beneath the pocked and gouged surface, choked with God knew how many million years of dust, lay what came to be called the Pearlant Labyrinth.

  Two generations of entradistas hacked their way in. That was a story in itself. Lost expeditions, weird fevers, death. Every side-tunnel full of ancient machinery incubating an acute sense of injustice. They contended with fungus spores, cave-ins, passages flooded by non-Abelian fluids at room temperature. They were driven mad by the feeling of being observed. Worse, the labyrinth, clearly some kind of experiment in itself, had been constructed with such exquisite fractality that the term ‘centre’ could only ever be a distraction. The experimental space, through which temporal anomalies ticked and flared in direct response to events deep inside the Tract (‘As if,’ someone said, ‘it was built to tell the time in there’), would always contain more distance than its outer surface permitted. Eventually a team of maze-runners from FUGA-Orthogen — an EMC subsidiary specialising in nuclear explosives, capitalised out of New Venusport on the sale of mining machinery somewhat older than the labyrinth itself — hacked its way into the vast, ill-defined chamber which would come to be known as The Old Control Room. Their shadows scattered, jittery and spooked, across its perfectly flat allotropic carbon deck. They gathered at a respectable distance. They cracked their helmets and let fall their thermobaric power tools. They admired the fluttering opalescence of the Aleph where it lay suspended in its cradle of magnetic fields. They knew they had struck it rich.

  Fifteen years later, 3D images of this treasure trove filled Gaines’ dial-up: they were a little scratchy from distance, not to say the passage through three competing kinds of physics.

  Around the time he was in the cloister with Alyssia Fignall, the Aleph had burst — boiling up from the nanoscale like a pocket nova, only to writhe, flicker, and, at the last moment, become something else. Where the containment machinery had been there was only the deck. On it lay an artefact of unknown provenance with the appearance of a woman, just over life-size and wearing a gown of grey metallic fabrics. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. A white paste oozed from the corner of her mouth. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. Gaines stared at her; the woman, her limbs and torso shifting in and out of focus as if viewed through moving water, stared blankly back, her eyes drained of emotion, her face immobile. Whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t in the chamber. Whatever effort she was making, it had nothing to do with him, but went on in silence, bitter, determined, undefinable, as if she would never understand what was happening to her yet never give up.She looked, Gaines thought, like someone trying not to die.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption,’ his site controller, a man called Case, told him. ‘It assigns values where you might not want them.’ Case had started out as a serious physicist, then, after a temporal convulsion in the maze aged him sixty years in a day, switched to management. He lived for his work, had written a fictional account of Galt & Cole called ‘These Dirty Stars’, and though unimaginative did well with multidisciplinary teams. ‘To me she’s less like a person than a problem.’

  ‘How did this happen?’ Gaines said. ‘How can this have happened?’

  No one was willing to make a guess.

  ‘Never mind the Aleph,’ Case said. ‘The labyrinth itself is a million years old. We never knew what it was supposed to do; we never even knew which of them we were talking to.’

  Nanoscale footage presented the field-collapse as a kind of topological suicide. Picoseconds in, the Aleph resembled less a teardrop than a perished rubber ball, first folding to make a comic mouth, then rushing away towards a point beyond representation. ‘You aren’t looking at the event itself,’ Case warned Gaines. ‘Only the stuff we could pick up.’ In the aftermath of the deflation, a full nanosecond later, the containment apparatus itself could be seen softening, flowing — this was visible on cameras run realtime outside the containment facility — and then evaporating into light. Out of the light the artefact emerged, but could not be observed emerging: Case thought this important. ‘No matter what timescale we look at these recordings — no matter how slow we run them — no smooth process can be detected.’ First the Aleph was there, then the woman was there instead. Her struggle had already begun. ‘For all we know, she could be an artefact in the other sense,’ Case said: ‘An illusion of our data-gathering methods.’

  ‘She looks so alive.’

  ‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl,’ Case said, to show he could understand that.

  ‘What does this mean for the field weapon?’

  ‘The field weapon?’ Case looked at Gaines as if he was mad. ‘It’s fucked. That whole line of research is fucked. I don’t think there ever was a field weapon, Rig.’ He stared around him, into the dark of the old control room. ‘I think the labyrinth had its own agenda all along.’

  ‘Don’t let upper management know about this.’

  SIXTEEN

  Carshalton Shangri-La

  ‘I’m having some strange dreams,’ Anna Waterman said, a few days after her brush with dogs. She had arrived late for Dr Alpert due to a missed connection, but seemed pleased with herself. She sat down immediately and without any indication that she was changing the subject, went on: ‘Do you know where I’d live, if I had the chance?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where?’

  ‘I’d live in
the covered bridge that goes over the platforms at Clapham station.’

  ‘Mightn’t it be a bit draughty?’

  ‘I’d keep it as one big space. Every so often you’d come upon a bit of carpet, some chairs, a bed. My furniture! I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she decided, the way you might say: ‘I’d encourage birds to visit the garden.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Just for the company. But Clapham would no longer be a stop. People would have to understand that.’ She smiled and sat back expansively in her chair, her body language that of someone who, having made a very fair offer, expects a positive response.

  Helen Alpert smiled too. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were happy with your own house now?’

  Anna nodded. ‘Less unhappy,’ she agreed.

  The doctor made a note. ‘And Marnie?’ she enquired. ‘How are you getting on with Marnie?’

  Around the bathroom issue, and the deeper issues represented by it, Marnie and Anna had developed a kind of considerate wariness. Marnie had phoned the next day, anxious to apologise. In return, Anna sent a card, a kingfisher bursting out of the water with a small silver fish in its beak. Next time she arrived, Marnie brought flowers, a thick bunch of white stocks, blue delphiniums and sunflowers which they made into an arrangement together. One of the sunflowers was left over so Anna put it in a jug in the new bathroom. Every time she went to the loo she felt light and warmth pouring from it, and found herself full of the slow, lazy happiness she had been used to as a child, before things went wrong. The problem with Marnie, Anna had begun to suspect, was that for her nothing had ever really gone wrong.

  ‘I’m not sure Marnie is as grown up as she thinks she is.’

  The doctor left a pause in case Anna wanted to develop this insight, then when nothing further emerged, enquired:

  ‘And the dreams?’

  ‘The dreams are a nightmare.’

  In the last few days she had seen everything. Half the time she hadn’t even been sure she was asleep. In the dream she could be most certain of — the one in which she was most clearly dreaming — she was up on the Downs again, viewing herself from outside and slightly above: a woman carrying a child’s empty coat across her arms as if it were the child itself. This woman was bent forward from the waist, looking into the middle distance at the white chalk paths, then down again at the coat. Her expression was one of neither joy nor musing. Skylarks sang. Hawthorn trees clustered on the hillside below. People appeared and disappeared on long, rising horizons. There were tiny blue flowers in the turf. Quite slowly, she passed out of the picture, vanishing over one of the immense skylines of the Downs.

  Carrying a child: perhaps it was a dream about Marnie, perhaps it wasn’t. If, in the doctor’s consulting room, you acknowledged a dream like that, what might you be admitting to? You couldn’t be sure. Anna therefore kept it to herself. But it was always possible to be frank about her standard dream:

  The unknown woman lay on the black marble floor in some vast echoing space, dressed in a Givenchy gown; someone very old, unchanging but not yet herself; someone, essentially, waiting to change. Sometimes there was a kind of leaden buzzing noise, less a noise in fact than something that had seeped into you as you dreamed. Or you might hear a kind of high, distant ringing inside the floor, a kind of tinnitus at the heart of things. Sometimes there was the sense of an audience: someone — it might be you, it might be not — had started to clean her teeth then cut her wrists in a hotel bathroom, only then looking up to find tiers of fully-booked seats stretching up into darkness like a university lecture theatre. These were deranged but self-limiting images you could throw all day like sticks for Helen Alpert to chase — both doctor and patient got plenty of exercise out of that. So today Anna began refabricating a version of the dream she had once had while Michael was still alive, in which the first false-colour imagery of the Kefahuchi Tract — a new astronomical discovery for a brand new Millennium — had seemed to detach itself from the television screen and drift up into the dark air of their Boston motel room, where it hung like jewellery in a cheap illusion then slowly faded away. By that time the room was vast.

  ‘So exciting!’ exclaimed Dr Alpert. As a child — eight years old and full of joy — she had loved those pictures so much that she remembered even now the lumbering black cathode-ray TV on which she had first seen them. They were less pictures than promises about the nature of the world, the rewards of study.

  Anna — who, to the extent that she could remember the event at all, remembered it differently — could only shrug.

  To the postmodern cosmologists of Michael Kearney’s generation, entrapped by self-referential mathematical games, habitually mistaking speculation for science, the Tract had presented as the first of a new class of conundrums: the so-called Penfold Object, the singularity without an event horizon. To Kearney himself it was just another artefact of the 24-hour news cycle, data massaged into fantasies for media consumption, less science than the public relations of science. The day NASA/ESA revealed its Tract composites — great hanging towers like black smokers in an ocean trench, luminous rose-coloured fans and pockets of gas, shock- fronts with an aluminium sheen, looping through the gaseous medium as sounds 50 or 60 octaves below middle C, all layered-up from a year’s observations by half a dozen space-based instruments, not one of them operating in the wavelengths of visible light — he had stiffened like a cat which thinks it sees something through a window; then relaxed equally suddenly and murmured, ‘Never fall for your own publicity’; later adding with a grin, ‘They might as well have had it announced by a man in a cloak and a top hat.’

  A generation later in Dr Alpert’s office, Anna asked herself out loud, as if the two ideas were related, ‘What are dreams anyway?’

  What indeed? thought the doctor, after Anna had gone. Sometimes the client beggared belief. Helen Alpert studied her notes; laughed; switched the voice recorder to Play, so that she could listen for a sentence or two which had intrigued her.

  The client, meanwhile, her mood still elevated, loitered a moment or two on the consulting-room steps, watching the tide sidle upriver like a long brown dog; then, with the whole afternoon in front of her, made her way by two buses and a train to Carshalton. September, the greenhouse month, wrapped discoloured, vaporous distances around Streatham Vale and Norbury, where silvery showers of rain — falling without warning out of a cloudless blue-brown haze — evaporated from the hot pavements as quickly as they fell. Nothing relieved the humidity. At the other end, Carshalton dreamed supine under its blanket of afternoon heat as Anna made her way cautiously back to the house on The Oaks, approaching this time from the direction of Banstead, crossing the Common on foot — past the prison compounds which lay as innocuous as gated housing in the woods — and entering the maze of long suburban streets at a point halfway between the hospital and the cemetery. 121, The Oaks remained empty, with no sign of the boy who had disturbed her on her previous visit. When she tried the back door it proved to be unfastened as well as unlocked, opening to a push. Inside, economics — as invisible as a poltergeist, a force without apparent agency — was dividing the place up into single rooms. Evidence of its recent activity was easy to come by: stairs and hallways smelling of water-based emulsion and new wood. Bare floors scabbed with spilt filler, power cables lying patiently in the broad fans of dust they had scraped across the parquet, ladders and paint cans that had changed places.

  Anna wandered around picking things up and putting them down again, until she came to rest in what had been a large back bedroom, split by means of a plaster partition carefully jigsawed at one end to follow the inner contour of the bay window. In this way, the invisible hand generously accorded its potential tenants half the view of the garden — flowerbeds overgrown with monbretia and ground-ivy, rotting old fruit nets on gooseberry bushes, a burnt lawn across which the damp, caramel-coloured pages of a paperback book had been strewn. Anna blinked in the incoming light, touched the unpainted partition, drew her fin
gers along the windowsill. Sharp granular dust; builders’ dust. Nothing can hurt in these unfinished spaces. Life suspends itself. After a minute or two, an animal — a dog, thin and whippy-looking, brindled grey, with patches of long wiry hair around its muzzle and lower legs — pushed its way through the hedge from the next garden and went sniffing intently along the edge of the lawn, pausing to scrape at the earth suddenly with its front paws. Anna rapped her knuckles on the window. Something about the dog confused her. Rain poured down suddenly through the sunshine, the discarded pages sagged visibly under the onslaught as if made of a paper so cheap it would melt on contact with water. Anna rapped on the window again. At this the dog winced, stared back vaguely over its shoulder into the empty air. It shook itself vigorously — prismatic drops flew up — and ran off. The rain thickened and then tapered away and passed.

  Out on the lawn, humidity wrapped about her face like a wet bag, Anna collected up as much of the book as she could and leafed through it. It was the novel the boy had recommended to her, Lost Horizon, ripped apart, perhaps, because it had finally failed to deliver on its promises of the world hidden inside our own. None of the pages were consecutive. Anna could assemble only the barest idea of the story. A crashed nuclear bomber pilot, perhaps American, finds himself in a secret country, only to have it — and his heart’s desire — snatched away from him at the last; paradoxically, that very loss seems to endorse the reader’s hope that such a country might exist. The front cover had been torn down the middle in a kind of careful rage. Anna read: ‘The classic tale of Shangri-La’. A telephone, its ringer set to simulate an old-fashioned electric bell, started up inside the house.

  Aluminium foil — as brown and sticky-looking as if it had been used to cook a roast — clung in ragged strips to the inside of the nearest window. Peering anxiously between them, Anna made out the dining room. No improvements were ongoing there; nor was there much furniture or ornament. Two upright chairs. A gateleg table fifty years old. Green linoleum caught the dim light in ripples. On the table stood a pressed-tin box with a glass front, about eight inches by four, someone’s small prize brought back from Mexico during the cheap air-travel decades, in which was displayed the following peculiar diorama: an object the size and shape of a child’s skull, nestled on a bed of red lace like offcuts from cheap lingerie and set against a black background (scattered with sequins and meant, perhaps, to represent Night). Otherwise nothing, except the rolled-up carpet propped in the corner opposite the door. Though the telephone seemed close, Anna couldn’t see it. It continued to ring for a minute or two. Then came a loud, amplified click succeeded by the impure electronic silence of the open connection, and a clear voice that said: