He opened his dial-up and said, ‘Hi!’ but all he could hear in the pipe was a sound like very distant canaries.
‘Renoko?’
Halfway through the afternoon, he gave up and went out into the avenues between the buildings. Everything seemed to hang suspended in the late afternoon light, static and fried. Even Antoyne’s movements were reluctant. They were the movements of a fatter man. The Mambo Rey Postindustrial State, stripping away his pretensions, had resolved him as an earlier version of himself. It was the story of his life. All the buildings were neglected. In addition some of them were curiously damaged. Splintered wood, deformed aluminium siding. Cracked asbestos panels flung about. In each case it was as if something had burst into the structure from one avenue and out of it into the next. Antoyne could smell the broken wood in the air. He wandered about until he found himself on the edge of the estate where, the other side of a weed-grown strip of cement, the skeletal sheds and rusting hoppers of abandoned lanthanide workings stretched away between empty evaporation ponds and wrecking yards so silted up that the ancient ships seemed to lean at angles out of a milky grey sea. The light was a resin coating on all of it.
Antoyne trudged up one slope of dust, down the next, craned his neck at the stripped hull of an early Creda Starliner, leaned in through a second floor factory window to find somewhere he could shit. Some people go to the tailor early in life and have themselves cut so they don’t need to do that. Antoyne wasn’t one of those. A shit was a shit for Antoyne, that’s what he always said: it was a sensation he enjoyed. Although sometimes, given the product, you wondered what was going on inside you. He squatted between some items of abandoned machinery for a couple of minutes, groaning, then became aware that something was in there with him. It was very close. Perhaps it was even kneeling right next to him, almost brushing his shoulder, and smelling ranker, whatever it was, than Antoyne’s bowel movement. It was amused by him. Full of passive terror, he stared hard away from where he thought it was until it had gone, then pulled up his chinos and fastened his belt. He went into a corner and threw up. Then he left the factory and stared out across the sea of dust, above which, at the horizon, floated mesa after rotting mesa the colour of pigeon’s wings. Sex, he thought. It reeked of sex. There were no tracks in the dust but his own. He had neither seen nor heard anything. On his way back through the Mambo Rey Postindustrial Estate he spotted the item they were supposed to pick up, floating motionlessly at a street intersection in the distance.
It was a bone colour, on the yellow side of white. Closer inspection revealed it to be twelve feet long, longitudinally ribbed for about two thirds of its length, with a blunt sloping point at one end. It seemed to be made of porcelain with the hair-fine brown craqueleur of an ageing urinal. It was very warm to the touch, like anything left standing in the afternoon sun. Antoyne shoved it along, up and down the avenues, looking for the landing field. It wasn’t hard work but it wasn’t easy either. Soon he came upon Liv Hula, standing in the middle of the street staring up at a corpse which hung in the air about four feet above her head. When Fat Antoyne arrived all she said was, ‘What do you think of this?’
Antoyne stopped pushing the mortsafe. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
‘I never saw anything like it,’ he said.
‘You get dead people,’ Liv Hula agreed, ‘but they don’t float.’
The corpse was of an old guy, snappily dressed in a loose shirt worn outside bronze pleat-front plus fours, with tan loafers, no socks and a white golf cap. He had a quiet smile on his face as if to say, ‘Being dead means less to me than than you’d think,’ and he was swimming in the air, like an instructor in some new kind of meditational discipline, tracing a slow, graceful butterfly symbol. Two or three dice drifted in loose orbits round his head, and a worn-out advertisement from one of the fuck-resorts further into the twilight zone was trying to draw him into a conversation about photography. A hot wind blew up and down the street. Otherwise things were completely silent. Antoyne said:
‘I’m sorry I threw up in your pilot chair.’
He offered Liv the heart-shaped stone Irene had given him, which she took absently, still staring up at the corpse.
‘Do you want some help with that thing?’ she said.
They got round the back of the mortsafe and leaned into it. Pushing was much easier with two. Halfway across the landing field, Liv handed him back the stone.
‘This won’t work, Antoyne,’ she said, giving him a very direct look.
FIFTEEN
Random Acts of Downward Causation
Saudade: Autumn when you could tell. Rain, anyway.
At SiteCrime, all the talk was war. The Nastic – allies for a day or two some time in the middle 2400s, but now in possession of new physics and a hybrid cosmology that trumped the rest – were moving out of bases in Delta Carinae. Rumour said that EMC had a new best buy in its arsenal, even now being R&D’d from alien blueprints on a secret research asteroid in the very shadow of the Tract. No one knew what it was. They called it the ‘field weapon’ or the ‘non-Abelian’ weapon. Meanwhile, Lens Aschemann’s ghost hung in a corner on the fifth floor. I don’t pity the dead, the assistant thought, not when they persist like this. Two floors down it was common knowledge: she would be helpless without him. One floor up they said she had no personality. What the assistant thought of these opinions, if she knew, went unrecorded. She did her work. She watched Toni Reno and his loader fade to zero. As Epstein the thin cop put it, there was never a point at which you could safely say, ‘They’re gone’, but after ten days only a sketch remained.
Meanwhile, though she had alerted Port Authorities all over the Halo, the Nova Swing slipped away, and went curiously unreported.
Forced to await developments on both these cases, and unhindered for once by the mystery that was R.I. Gaines, she investigated the massacre in the basement, working in her office with holograms made at the scene. The vics, viewable from any angle, lay about in louche poses. Even their smell was replicated. Forty-eight hours after the attack, a faint aerosol of lymph had still hung in the air. The evidence team’s conclusion: someone had done a job on them. After that, causation itself dribbled away in predictable chains of confusion, each ultimate cause itself shown to be proximate in some other context until everything danced off into metaphysics. Evidently it was a Preter Coeur kill. The room was full of clues to that, the fading signature of hormonal switchgear, the wounds traceable to biomineral weapons – self-sharpening polycrystal mosaics derived from nacre, perhaps expressing as fingernails?
Nanocamera coverage having tanked so completely during the actual crime, it was expected the assistant would go down there in person, if only – as the sixth floor put it – to familiarise herself with the venue. But she never did. She remembered the event on the back stairs. The thought of the basement made her uneasy, and remained with her even in the Cedar Mountain immersion tank on C-Street, where, as Joan the 1950s wife, she dreamed a baby came through the wall in her bright, new, airy, shades-of-primrose kitchen.
First something went wrong with the paintwork. It turned matt olive in the top corners; then in patches on the walls themselves, which spread quickly until everything was covered. Then she noticed that on the kitchen shelves her carefully arranged tins of anchovies and Parma ham had been replaced with stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit. These items caused her both disgust and anxiety. Her husband Alan might come in at any moment and see them! But now the kitchen doorway had no door; the kitchen window opened on to a weed-filled lot where it was always raining. Damp had penetrated the cheap formica cabinets, covering them with fibrous ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall, Joan saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow-brown tones, and the rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact. Joan felt that it might t
ake years to squeeze through. And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult – she was so embarrassed! – the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a baby. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were foreshortened and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work.
At all points it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling.
Saturday morning, Joan had always made cakes. Often her husband found her in the kitchen, still up to her elbows in flour or perhaps setting the ‘regulator’ on her brand new Creda oven. The radio played a little light classical music. Alan loved her cakes. He would put his arms around her, rub a little, bunch up her skirt, then shoot helplessly while he was still trying to slip into her clean underwear from behind. ‘Oh!’ Joan would tell him, ‘I do love our times together.’ It was their mid-morning Saturday ritual. He could always surprise her. She was always ready for him, yet never somehow prepared. Today, though, she was only thinking how awful it would be if he came in and saw the vulva in the kitchen wall. And just as she thought that, he did. Once Alan arrived, the walls returned slowly to their original colour. It took all morning but everything was real again. After they held hands the way they did, staring up at the wall together, Joan and Alan felt for a week or two that they had changed. They knew a secret others didn’t. Though it was horrible, it made them feel that they had found their way through to some more knowing way of life. Joan said vile things. Alan pulled her skirt up and fucked ’til they were both red and sore. Then they found that all their friends knew the secret too, so it was just a kind of loss everyone went through.
The assistant began to bang her head on the side of the immersion tank and make a sound full of grief. She could hear herself but not stop; the technicians could hear her, but it was too soon to get the lid up. Later, she cancelled her subscription to Cedar Mountain and received a refund; this time no one could explain what had gone wrong.
Panamax IV:
‘Don’t you get sick of the cultural noise?’ R.I. Gaines asked Alyssia Fignall. They were sheltering from the noon light in a bony cloister, perhaps a mile from the sea and some miles down the valley from her hilltop site. Its arches were in shade, but full sun fell across the dry central fountain, the pale rhiolite columns, the dry brown vegetation between the cobbles. She had been trying to explain to him how richly-decorated the cloister would have been before time stripped off the paint. This had upset his idea of it as bare, quiet, uncommunicative: possessing an almost geological calm. ‘All I want is the stone, wiped clean.’ He shrugged. ‘And perhaps this sense of an unending afternoon.’
She smiled. Touched his hand. ‘You’re tired, Rig.’
‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he told her. ‘The ship won’t come until dark. You can tell me all about these sacrificial engines of yours.’
‘Not mine,’ she said.
Later, as the air cooled and the sky filled up from the east, local children processed through the town square, dressed as lions, tigers, bears, fairies with wings, the mythical inhabitants of Old Earth.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘They’re enacting one of the folk-tales of the local river. It’s tidal for several miles past here. At each tide, the water leaves a few black lumps of wood on the shore. These, sodden as much with age as water, are the river’s gift to the land.’ None of the children were older than four, but they bore their wands and tinsel garlands – along with a banner reading something like Los Ninos de Camapasitas – with considerable gravity, watched by Halo tourists of a certain age, mainly women dressed in a puffy shorts-and-blouse combination which made them resemble, by contrast, someone’s baby. ‘“I brought you these,” the river says to the land. The land declines without having to say anything at all. The river shrugs and tries again later.’
‘A complex story.’
‘It loses in translation,’ Alyssia admitted.
The dark came down soft and warm. They ate in one of the cafés on the edge of the square. Alyssia felt he looked too thin. He should slow down. Rig, she felt, had always seen himself caught between planets, between wars, between conflicting modes of being: a sardonic eye on a world he didn’t quite get. ‘But other people see you differently,’ she said. ‘We see how hurt you become. We see so clearly how your personality trapped you in EMC, in the concept of constant war this Aleph of yours is supposed to end. Ask yourself why you called it that, Rig. The Aleph! Honestly, just ask!’
‘Other people?’ he said, smiling broadly.
She looked down at her plate. ‘Me,’ she was forced to admit. ‘I see you like that.’
In his turn, Rig talked about what he called the wanton mystery of things. He couldn’t get enough of it, he told her. But Alyssia hated phrases like that, and said:
‘In the end, maybe it will get enough of you.’
Just then something hit the upper atmosphere with a dull thud. Sprays of ionisation flickered like heat lightning in the clouds. Alyssia Fignall sighed. She knew this one too. Everyone did. A warm wind filled the square, and with it the K-ship Uptown Six, out of New Venusport on grey ops for EMC’s crack Levy Flight. At that time there was no greyer op in the Halo than R.I. Gaines. A mere two hundred feet long yet ten thousand tonnes unloaded, its matt-grey hull profuse with power bulges and ram intakes, Uptown Six dipped its blunt nose into the square. Reeking of stealth coatings, strange physics and the exotically dense matter laid in wafers between the poisonous composites of its hull, it hung outside the café door in a nose-down atttitude, like a bad dream, full of the intelligence of its captain, a thirteen-year-old self-harmer called Carlo who would live the rest of his life in a tank of fluid somewhere near the stern.
‘Here’s your boyfriend,’ Alyssia said.
‘Behave yourself,’ he said. He put his arms round her. ‘It’s just a ride.’
‘Promise to come back soon, Rig.’
He promised. They hugged a long time, then Gaines let her go. Before he had taken three paces he was already part of the darkness. The ship seemed to suck him in without opening any part of itself: though something caused its transformation optics to discharge briefly, distorting Alyssia’s perception of the hull into a silvery yet glutinous foetal shape, through patches of which she could see the buildings on the other side of the square.
‘You love this,’ she called after him bitterly, tilting her head to watch the sheet-lightning in the clouds.
Ten minutes into the voyage, they were bounced.
‘Incoming,’ Carlo said matter-of-factly. It was less a warning than a courtesy; the action was over before he framed the last syllable. Two middleweight cruisers, their emissions heavily blocked, had slipped like eels into his ten-dimensional parsec-on-a-side cube of awareness and despatched assets up to and including the substrate disrupter known to K-captains as a ‘bump’. Finding their target absent by a millisecond or more, a long-gone trail of turbulence in the local quantum foam, they had backtracked hastily: only to encounter Uptown Six, its mathematics sorting a billion or so tactical and navigational possibilities a nanosecond, already waiting for them.
‘Guys,’ Carlo said, ‘you thought you could hide. But wherever you go, here I am.’
He released an asset of his own. ‘Be sure and have a nice day now.’
To Gaines he added: ‘We seem to be at war.’ He couldn’t say who with; by then he had lost interest anyway.
Projected into the carefully deodorised air of Uptown Six’s human quarters, feeds from fifteen planets showed, in quick succession, all the signs of modern conflict: street demonstrations, agitated financial markets, rows of top-shelf EMC hardware hulking around in parking orbits up and down the Beach. Within an hour all sides were broadcasting atrocity-footage as fast as it could be manufactured. Psychodrama raged. Everyone claimed the minority position. Everyone described their grievance as longer-standing and more asymmetric than the enemy’s. Iconic buildi
ngs fell in towers of smoke. Sleeping genes, inserted into entire populations three or four generations in advance, expressed themselves as plagues of ideological change. Up and down the Beach, innocent CEOs, brand managers and celebrities found themselves kidnapped then subjected to sexual assault, at the hands of provocateurs who had no idea why they had begun to act so illiberally. By noon, exhausted attack ads fluttered up and down the streets of every Halo capital. Gaines studied these indicators with a kind of appalled impatience. Away from the media war not a shot had been fired. Except here. After a minute he said absently:
‘Leave them alone, Carlo.’
‘Hey, I didn’t start it.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yes, OK, too late, Rig. Sorry I already killed them. Sorry I did it to keep you safe and all you do is to give me shit feelings about that. And Rig – no, listen to me, listen to me, Rig – this is something that happened two and half minutes ago? Can you hear yourself? Obsessing about something that happened two and half minutes ago? I’m sorry I killed them, because I know they were probably nice people, but excuse me they were trying to kill us first.’
Uptown Six inserted itself into a stationary eddy in the radiation signature of a trio of neutron stars, and, judging itself to be safely hidden for the next thirty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds or so, upped Carlo’s dosage of atypical antipsychotics; medicating him, in addition, for a twenty minute nap. In the ensuing silence Gaines switched off the news channels and concentrated on the images he was receiving from his major project. What he saw, he couldn’t believe. He opened an FTL pipe.
Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3) Page 14
