Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  Now she could only conclude that the long haul, with its concomitant emptiness and anxiety, had proved as debilitating as the short, which wears you down by insisting you forget everything you knew last week. She was tired, she said. She wanted to go home. Perhaps she would feel better if she saw her old home.

  Liv Hula said she could help with that.

  Perkins Rent IV, known to its inhabitants as New Midland, supported an agriculture of beet, potatoes and a local variety of squash grown year round under plastic. New Midlanders worked for offworld money. A handful of FTZs in closed compounds – precision assembly plants working from bulk metal glass components – clustered on the major continent, each served by a town of fifty to seventy-five thousand souls where bi-yearly surveys revealed a reassuringly high incidence of obsessive-compulsive traits and, ideologically, a kind of Janteloven prevailed. The only other way of earning a living on New Midland was to work the ghost train.

  This line of abandoned alien vehicles, all sizes between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, hung nose to tail in a cometary orbit that reached halfway to the nearest star. Their rindlike hulls presented dusty, lustreless grey. Whoever they belonged to had parked them and walked away before proteins appeared on Planet Earth. They boasted the shapes of asteroids – potato shapes, dumbell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them. By contrast their nautiloid internal spaces were pearly and disorienting, as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often a short segment of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the system gas giant. New Midlanders mined them like any other resource. Nobody knew what the ships did, or how they got here, or how to work them: so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them through sub-contractors to a corporate in the Core. It made an economy. It was the simple, straight line thing to do. They were broken up from inside out. The used-up ones attracted unpredictably-shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. Above the rest bustled the industrial arcologies and futuristic bubble-worlds – factories, refineries, sorting facilities, starship docks busy round the clock.

  Liv Hula slipped in from high above the plane of the ecliptic, intending to hide in the debris-belt of her choice. What she found changed her mind.

  ‘Antoyne, look at this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone fought here. Perhaps half a day ago?’

  The ghost train had been derailed. Its industries now took the form of a complex metallic vapour through which toppled everything from nuggets of melted aluminium to entire ore-crushers. Shockfronts were still swinging through this medium, here and there compressing it to wispy arcs the colour of mercury. The routers had gone down under the weight of distress traffic – transponder signals from eva suits and escape pods, trickles of RF leaking like the air from punctured living quarters, the papery voices of the already-dead filling the pipes with intimate, matter-of-fact panic. They were saying what the dead always say: ‘No one’s left but me.’ One moment they were trying to reason with the problem, the next they were begging the guys to pull them out of there. The ghost ships had fared no better: they toppled about, laid open like water-stained illustrations of the Fibonacci spiral. Some of the larger ones, accelerated by hits from high-end ordnance, were wobbling into the distance on interesting new trajectories. Several fragments fifty metres diameter and above had found their way down to the surface of New Midland.

  As a result the FTZs were matchwood. Thing Fifty, the little coastal town Irene remembered so well, had begun its day by leaning away from a fifty megaton airburst about two hundred kilometres inland and twelve kilometres high. A hot blue light went across the sky. The heat was so fierce people assumed their hair had caught fire. During this period, fences, trees, houses, low density warehousing, utility poles and pylons all took on an ordered slant. Half an hour later, a huge ocean surge boiled inland, floated the wreckage and aggregated it in the shallow valleys on the edge of town, piling everything on top of everything else. By the time Nova Swing arrived, Thing Fifty was less a place than a list of building materials.

  Liv Hula put down in the suburbs, and they wandered about while Irene tried to find her old home. The wreckage resembled a heap of opened-out cardboard boxes. Everything had equal value – dead animals knotted in branches, water gurgling back to the sea along hidden sloughs and creeks, plastic chairs. At your feet a thousand pieces of broken tile; middle distances of uprooted garden shrubs and shattered wooden spars: behind that, in a curious reversal of perspective, the houses tilted and slumped into each other as if they were still floating. Above the high water mark the streets were full of soft toys. Every so often you saw a single figure in the distance; or a dog made its way along the street sniffing everything with enthusiasm, as if any moment it expected to be reunited with what it knew. Everything was entangled. Everything stank of sewage and the sea. There was no ground plan. You didn’t know where to assign value. The tarry light didn’t seem to come from the sun, diffused by haze, but to leak out of the wreckage itself. Irene sat at the kerb. She looked around at it all. Then she drew up her knees, wrapped her arms about them and wept.

  ‘Come on now, love,’ Liv said: ‘I can see everything you’ve got.’

  Irene wiped her eyes. She tried to laugh. ‘Everyone in the Halo’s seen it anyway,’ she whispered.

  She took Fat Antoyne’s hand and put the back of it next to her cheek, then pushed it away again suddenly. Her skin was wan, her expression indistinct, as if she’d been rinsed out of her own face. The things she missed about this town were gone. They had never been here anyway. They had vanished not into the current disaster, but years ago, into her own. The past wasn’t real but it was all she had: that’s how you feel when your life has faltered. She stood up and tugged her skirt straight. ‘I’ll just go into this house here,’ she said.

  ‘Irene!’

  It was a building caught in the complex process of kneeling into its own yard. Windows full of broken glass gave on to rooms where the light fell in new and unexpected directions. Irene brightened up after she found an unopened bottle of cocktail mix. She began dragging things into the centre of rooms where she could examine them. ‘Oh look!’ she said, as if Liv and Antoyne were in there with her. ‘Oh look!’ They made faces at one another and shrugged, Don’t ask me. They heard her feet scraping about. They heard her murmuring to herself as she used the broken toilet. ‘You guys could help if you liked,’ she called. ‘Or don’t you want a—’ She checked the label of the bottle ‘—Kyshtym Cream? They’re good!’ When she emerged at last, her arms were full of clothes, kiddie’s toys and household items.

  ‘And look!’ she said. ‘After all these years!’

  It was a toddler’s My First Experience skirt, in traditional neotony pink.

  ‘I had one just like this.’

  Liv stared in disbelief then shook her head. ‘Irene,’ she wanted to know, ‘is this actually your old house?’

  ‘It could be,’ Irene said. ‘Yes, it easily could be.’

  ‘Because if it isn’t—’

  ‘They don’t want the stuff, Liv,’ Irene said. ‘You should see the condition they’re in. Really.’

  Her mood, which had remained elevated on the way back to the ship, dipped as soon as the Kyshtym Cream wore off. Disposed about her quarters, the repro radio, false-colour hologram of the Kefahuchi Tract and collection of cast iron casserole-ware looked less fun than they had in situ. ‘Disaster chic,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’ Antoyne didn’t think anything. She sighed. ‘Antoyne, are we bored of each other at last?’ Unable to answer that either, he became alert but very still. Irene used her thumb to enlarge a split in the seams of a soft toy shaped like a cockroach, then asked him so suddenly and abjectly if he thought life was worth it that he could only hug her roughly and insist:

  ‘Your life is what you make it in this world.’

  ‘I think
that’s what I mean, Antoyne.’

  History, the boys from Earth believed, is bunk.

  The Angel of History may look backwards, but that pose will make no difference to the storm that blows it into the future. No wonder it has such a surprised expression!

  This philosophy drove them, in the late decades of the 21st century, to launch themselves blind into dynaflow space, with no idea how to navigate it, in craft made of curiously unsophisticated materials. They had no idea where the first jump would take them. By the second jump, they had no idea where they started from. By the third they had no idea what ‘where’ meant.

  It was a hard problem, but not insoluble. Within a decade or two they had used the Tet-Kearno equations to derive an eleven-dimensional algorithm from the hunting behaviour of the shark. The Galaxy was theirs. Everywhere they went they found archaeological traces of the people who had solved the problem before them – AIs, lobster gods, lizard men from deep time. They learned new science on a steep, fulfilling curve. Everything was waiting to be handled, smelled, eaten. You threw the rind over your shoulder. The eerie beauty of it was that you could be on to the next thing before the previous thing had lost its shine.

  But though, as a whole, the human race soon knew how to find its way around, it still had no idea where it was: so that, in Irene the mona’s day, the paradigm for individual motion remained a blind if not quite random jump. Before she took the mona package and did so well with it, Irene touched down on fifty worlds.

  Thirteen years old, she was already tall and bony. She loved fucking but she had an awkward walk and big feet. She did her hair the way they all did then, in lacquered copper waves so complex they could receive the test tone of Radio Universe. When she smiled her gums showed; when she boarded that rocket she never looked back. Worked her way down through the Swan and out to Stevenson’s Reach. Then on to Lila y Flag, L’Avventura, McKie, LaFuma RSX, where she hit the wall a little and was forced to rest a year with a sweet alien boy from You’re Worth It. There she took the package, opting – from the hundreds of Monroes on offer – for the soft-look Marilyn photographed in black and white by Cecil Beaton at the Ambassador Hotel, 1956. Suddenly she was five foot three, with a kind of receptive liveliness and flossy blond easycare hair that always smelled of peppermint shampoo. After that the journey got easier for her: its inner and outer trajectories seemed to match. She was so happy! Magellan to O’Dowd, Pixlet to Oxley; The Discoveries, The Fourth Part, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista; Massive 49 to Meniere’s World; Tregetour, Charo, Entantiodroma, Max Party, Gay Lung and Ambo Danse. American Polaroid, American Diner, American Nosebleed. Oxi, Krokodil, Waitrose Two and Santa Muerte. By then, her suitcase contained: tampons, fourteen pairs of high heel shoes, the dress she left home in, yellow rayon with a faux-Deco feel, which she never wore again. That girl had a sweet way of laughing. Drunk, she’d explain, ‘I love shoes.’ She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else, until she’d scattered herself like small change across the Halo and down into Radio Bay. There, where the Beach stars fell away like a cliff over nothing, she fell away too, with a laugh on her face and her arms spread wide to everything.

  If you asked Irene to describe her favourite memory, she would bring out a little hologram cube about an inch on a side—

  Four am, under a weird grey-blue neon. Raucous laughter. Three and a half minutes of the B-girl life. It had been a long night for whoever captured the pictures. Shadows flickered, the camera looked here and there without purpose. The angles were inventive. Irene began with her back to the camera and her feet planted in the gutter. You could hear her say, ‘Kinny, take that away! Oh, Kinny, you bugger!’ She got her dress part way up and her thong part way down before she started to piss, but after twenty seconds slowly tipped forward into the road and began to throw up, smoothly and loosely, from the other end. Steam rose in the cold air. After a minute or so of that, she seemed to pass out. Her body tipped forward a little further, arching the lower back and pushing her face into the road, then after a moment or two of equilibrium, subsided sideways and curled up into the foetal position. Her hat fell off and rolled cheerily back and forth. The camera tried to follow it, then there was more laughter and everything went black.

  ‘It’s very sentimental I know,’ she told Fat Antoyne now. ‘But I loved that hat. And the bolero, with its little satin bows.’ Clothes like that weren’t really clothes at all, she tried to explain: they were semiotics in action. ‘Party semiotics in action.’ She sighed and put her hand over his. ‘It was a lovely world, and sometimes – like now, with you and me in our comfortable little ship, with all these new ornaments – it still is.’ She had been having such a good time in those pictures that she remembered nothing of it. ‘Sometimes I’m not even sure it’s me!’

  He had to laugh, Fat Antoyne said. ‘Everyone deserves a good time,’ he added. ‘Their lives are hard enough.’

  He smiled and closed her hand over the little cube.

  ‘You keep that safe,’ he said.

  TWENTY ONE

  Everyone’s a VIP to Someone

  Between Radia Marelli and Tupolev Avenue, the crime tourism quarter lay under rain and the promise of a short life. There was perpetual graininess in the air and the neon light. Every middle manager on North Hemisphere, New Venusport knew about the donkey parlours on Saudade. The chance to do donkey parlour crime – a near death experience worth anyone’s dollar – drew them off the starliners in numbers second only to Preter Coeur on a warm summer’s evening. Their wives came for the sensorium porn. You could tell the wives by their honey-coloured fur coats and ash-blond hair. Sensorium porn was delivered as direct live feed from an alien brain as it tried to understand human sex, or the use of quotidian objects and events from Earth history like a ‘book group’ or a mirror. A mirror was one of the favourites. The EMC wives – puzzled by everything, not so much acting-out as directing the same helpless performance of themselves as they had given all their lives – got off on the cognitive and perceptual gap. The selling point of sensorium porn was that it enabled you, finally, to ‘see the world from a different point of view’. They came down the Creda Line curious and went away users. It was a toxic trade.

  The assistant stood with Epstein the thin cop, in the alley off Tupolev where Toni Reno had shucked his mortal coil. They were viewing Toni’s corpse. Epstein had called her half an hour ago and said:

  ‘You got a problem.’

  Since death, Toni Reno’s reflective index had dropped eighty-five per cent across most of the electromagnetic spectrum including visible light. As a result he was hard to make out even in good weather. Every day now, Toni drew a crowd composed partly of tourists on their way to the Llubichik Street arcades, and partly of his followers – twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys who received realtime updates on his condition piped directly into their heads. Toni was nationwide. The more he faded, the more they came to view him. They copied his dark blue Sadie Barnham work jacket and bought shoes exactly like Toni Reno’s. Arguments sometimes broke out between them and the passing trade. Or the fans themselves got into arguments about what Toni meant to them, what kind of a role-model Toni really, actually, was. So committed to Toni they had committed suicide over the issue, one or two of them now drew small followings of their own. The uniform branch, Epstein told the assistant, took a back seat as far as this activity went, on the grounds that it constituted either commerce or religion, both being a right you had protected in Saudade.

  ‘He’s still here then,’ the assistant said.

  ‘Still here,’ Epstein said.

  ‘So what’s our problem?’

  ‘We don’t have a problem.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It’s you who has the problem.’

  The assistant adjusted some of her overlays and studied the corpse. In addition to losing visibility it had risen a further sixteen feet in the rainy air. Some thought Toni’s rate of rotation had slowed, some thought not: Epstein the thin
cop placed himself, with some reservations, in the latter camp. He had money on it. The assistant thought she could detect a faint smell of decay leaking from whatever space Toni now occupied; perhaps thirty molecules in a cubic kilometre of air.

  ‘What problem?’ she said.

  In lieu of an answer, Epstein ushered her into the building from which they had first viewed the dead broker.

  ‘You remember this place?’ he said.

  She said she did.

  ‘Well, it’s a sensorium parlour, it turns out. Now in this room here – no, in here, this way – they have some bird style of alien, they’ve drilled his head for access. He’s wired the way they are, mainly to look at ordinary stuff, a coat hanger, some needles, those kinds of things. But here’s what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe for an hour a day they got him looking into the street. So our experts play back what’s left of his head, and have an operator decode it, and find that the footage covers the period of Toni Reno’s death.’

  Epstein gave the assistant an intent look, then, when she didn’t respond, went on to tell her, ‘This alien was at the window the exact moment Toni arrived in the alley.’ Reno had come from the direction of the noncorporate spaceport, the retrieved material showed: it showed him running. Then, as he drew level with the house, someone attacked him, straight out of the doorway downstairs. ‘Toni’s looking back over his shoulder. He’s so agitated he doesn’t present with his usual careful grooming. He’s scared of something we can’t see. A woman comes up off the ground so fast you can barely see her, and shoots Toni in the armpit with a Chambers gun. From some angles it looks as if she’s coming up through the ground.’