Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  Her connection was slow. Its wheels broadcast a mournful ringing noise to the woods and empty pasture. Home at last, thirty-five minutes after midnight, she listened to a message from Marnie, ‘Mum, please don’t just go off like that without telling me. Anyway, how did it go this morning?’ Anna sat on the loo with her knickers down; she took off her shoes and scratched the sole of one foot. At school in the late 2000s, Marnie had been so dismayed by the mobile phone that, though it was already the great load-bearing pillar of juvenile culture, she had refused to own one. What had gone wrong since then? ‘Anyway, I want to hear how it all went!’

  Anna could not guess the meaning of the scenes she had witnessed in Carshalton; equally, there seemed to be no way of interpreting her own history. In the end, if you have a certain sort of mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended – only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. ‘I did my best,’ she thought, ‘and now I can’t be bothered any more.’ After making such an indifferent job of it for so long, what she wanted to do was live. As a starter she opened the downstairs doors and windows, then a bottle of red wine. She threw the pocket drive in the recycling bin.

  If she called Marnie they would only shout at one another. Preferring to avoid that, she took the bottle to the sofa—

  —then almost immediately dragged herself through layers of silent chaos to consciousness, to find James the cat staring into her face, purring coarsely with something between pleasure and possessiveness. She was naked. At some point she had woken without remembering it, closed the house up, taken herself to bed. ‘Get off, James—’ rolling away from him and off the queen size box-spring, desperate for something to drink— ‘We aren’t even the same species.’ Though she was not directly aware of it, her dream continued.

  She lay on her side on a black glass floor in her Versace gown and long black gloves, upper body raised on one elbow. She was not turning from a woman into an animal or from an animal into a woman. If she was not in transit, neither was she in any sense ‘caught’ between those two states: she was busily occupying them both at once. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else: she felt smeary and blurred at significant sites of paradox or conflict, in the manner of a Francis Bacon. Waking up never interrupted this hard, thankless work of superposition (‘Someone has to do it, darling,’ she imagined saying to Marnie) or much diminished her sense of it. It was all the worse for being unconscious, implicit, ongoing. It was all the worse because it felt like a commentary on her life, welling up from some internal source she preferred not to acknowledge. Halfway out of the room, she went back and hugged the cat. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to him. ‘James, if you want my advice, never be a failed suicide. You won’t hear the bloody last of it, even from yourself.’

  James allowed her to carry him downstairs. He dashed into the night the moment she opened the kitchen door, only to return excitedly a few minutes later with a neon kidney in his mouth. Perhaps two inches by one and a half, with plump, eye-catching curves, it had a saturated pale blue colour and a transparent rind that seemed both resistant and pliable. James crouched on the worktop and sheared into it with his back teeth, breathing heavily through the same side of his mouth. ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Anna said, turning away in case she saw it burst. ‘I’m closing the door.’ But a long soft flash of lightning caught her in the doorway, throwing her into silhouette and projecting her shadow against the opposite wall. There was no thunder. A wave of moist heat rolled into the kitchen. It was transformational weather, weather suited to another country: a thick low cloudbase, smells of static water pocked with rain. The cat looked up, then down again.

  ‘Hello?’ Anna whispered. ‘Hello?’ She peeped out into the garden. It stretched away, elongated, too narrow, rippling with heat. Quiet yet catastrophic changes of light revealed, a long way off, the summerhouse.

  ‘On fire again,’ thought Anna. ‘How tiresome.’

  This time it presented as a whole series of buildings: it was a sixteenth-century windmill on the Downs, a Dickensian lapboard cottage as tarry as an upturned boat on a beach, a Palladian folly collapsing into the Pagan site on which it stood. These structures slowly replaced one another in a shifting field of view. They loomed and shrank, as if they were approaching or receding. Each arrived not simply with its own architectural style but with its own style of mediation, from hard-edge photographic to St Ives impressionist, from construction-paper silhouette to matchstick hobbyist Gothic. One minute it was a woodcut of a summerhouse, with static flames; the next, impasto rubbed on with someone’s thumb.

  Pausing only to remove Kearney’s computer drive from the recycling bin, Anna went out and stood in the orchard, barefoot, naked, quiet, no longer sure what age she might be.

  ‘Whoever you are,’ she said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  As if in response, the summerhouse cycled through a few more versions of itself, becoming in succession a Tarot card (the Tower, always falling, always in flames, index and harbinger of a life in transit); a canonical firework from someone’s vanished childhood, a ‘volcano’ wrapped in red and blue paper, pouring out pink-dyed light, smoke, showers of sparks, thick dribbles of lava; and a sagging fairground marquee, with scalloped eaves and pennants in many different colours. Cartoon bottle-rockets fizzed into the air behind it, bursting in showers of objects which toppled back to earth with inappropriate noises – plastic crockery that rang like a bell, an Edwardian railway train pumping out the sinewy sound of pigeon wings in an empty industrial space – folding themselves up and vanishing even as they fell. These objects smelled of leather, frost, lemon meringue pie; they smelled of precursor chemicals. They smelled of Pears Soap.

  Anna approached until the heat began to tighten the skin above her eyes. At that distance, the summerhouse steadied itself. It reverted to the familar. Then a dense spew of smaller items fountained up from the flowerbeds, poured out of the door, blew off the roof, resolving itself into a display of a thousand fireflies, sleet falling through car headlights, showers of jewels and boiled sweets, enamelled lapel badges, shards of stained glass. Strings of coloured fairy lights and fake pearls, glittering Christmas baubles. Little mechanical toys – beetles, novelty swimmers, jumping kangaroos, all powered by rusted-up clockwork from the first great phase of Chinese industrialisation. Parti-coloured juggling balls. A thousand giveaway pens. A thousand cheap GPS systems that no longer ran. Bells and belts. Birds that really whistled; birds that sang. A million tiny electrical components and bits of ancient circuit boards as if every transistor radio ever made had been buried in the earth, and with them – like a kind of grave-goods! – the faint music and voices of Workers’ Playtime, Woman’s Hour or Journey Into Space, everything they once had played. A fog of small consumer goods. All the rubbish of a life, or someone else’s life.

  Anna Waterman née Selve stopped a pace or two before the summerhouse door. She tilted her head and listened.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  She said: ‘Oh, what is it now?’

  Everything was very calm and quiet and smelling of the hotel bathroom when she stepped inside and began to fall. She let go of the computer drive in surprise. At the last moment, James the black and white cat darted between her legs. All three of them, the woman, the animal and the data, fell out of this world together. Glare and dark, strobing into sudden silence and things switching off busily, up and down the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

  TWENTY THREE

  Heart Sounds & Bruits

  MP Renoko – that mysterious software entity which, people said, was all that remain
ed of Sandra Shen’s Circus – had returned lately from an inspection of major Quarantine orbits all over the Halo.

  He was tired but happy. With these visits, interesting but necessarily clandestine, his contribution was complete. The cargo in place, the client settled in the hold of the ship they called the Nova Swing, his part in things coming to an end, he took a last walk down by the sea, a mile along from the circus ground on South Hemisphere, New Venusport. Away from motel and beach-bar it was all spray and sunshine, the water booming in on a steep shore strewn with rocks the size of white goods, where sunbathing men and women lay like lizards staring blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them. The huge waves, MP Renoko said, might have been in a hologram for all the notice they took of them.

  ‘You wonder,’ he added, to the ghost by his side, ‘why they have so little common sense.’

  ‘But look!’ the ghost said. ‘Look!’

  She hacked with her heel at the shingle then bent down quickly and prised something loose. After the removal of a bit of seaweed it turned out to be an old round coin with a small square hole in the middle, still somehow bright and untarnished. ‘Down between the rocks,’ she said, ‘spiders make their webs. A foot or two from all that surf! They tremble every time a wave comes in, and we can’t express the sense of anxiety with which this fills us.’ A shrug. ‘Yet every year there are webs and spiders.’

  The coin, flipped into the air, glittered briefly.

  ‘Heads or tails?’ enquired the ghost.

  ‘You were always the best arguer,’ Renoko acknowledged. ‘I know it’s wrong to say, “I think”. I should say, “I am thought”.’

  She took his arm, and gave him her faint little oriental smile.

  ‘You should,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay long. Back to the circus? Or on to the diner?’

  ‘I’m ready to go anywhere.’

  Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn’t a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet’s housekeeping, stood a sixty by sixteen foot O’Mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine but known to its habitués – edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast – simply as ‘the Tambourine’. By day, the gulls dived and gyred above its deco stainless steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o’ clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass, where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe.

  ‘On your own here,’ Renoko said, ‘you can hear voices in the tide.’

  His weariness amazed him.

  Shortly after these events, a strange scene took place on board the Nova Swing. The cabin lights flickered. The Dynaflow drivers ran rough, failed briefly, then came back up, inserting a blank space in the crew’s experience of their lives roughly equal to the effects of a transient ischemic attack.

  Down in the main hold, a wave went through the deck plates, as if matter could experience a stroke too. Light and dark became muddled. The mortsafes bumped together like moored boats. The lid of the K-tank blew off violently and clattered away, revealing the proteome inside, which slopped about like dirty salt water at night. Through its surface burst the occupant of the tank, a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican haircut and a couple of snake tattoos, whose body resembled, from the diaphragm down, a charred and tattered coat. His spine was cabled at neurotypical energy sites. Half-drowned, throwing up with the vertigo of aborted interstellar flight, he stared round in panic at the main hold, the gathered mortsafes. Proteome poured off him, smelling of horse glue; rendered fat; the albumen of a bad egg. Whatever he had been dreaming was gone for good. He wasn’t used to a non-electronic presence in the universe: it was some time since he had been available in this form. He looked down at himself.

  ‘Jesus, Renoko,’ he complained to the empty air. ‘I’ve got no fucking legs. You didn’t tell me that.’

  He fell to plucking the thick rubber cables out of his spine. He tried and failed to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  The condition of the K-tank seemed to impress him. ‘Remind me to come the easy way round next time,’ he said. He addressed the mortsafes. ‘Anyone got any tissues, or like that?’

  What did they think of this performance?

  They were content with it. They were aliens. They had, by now, spent a claustrophobic fortnight in the Nova Swing main hold with its black and yellow warning stripes, loose tool-cupboard doors, injunctions to work safe with plasma. They understood where they were, and they understood why. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this. Working for Sandra Shen had required, at the least, hundreds of years of travel from distant places. They had performed vital functions at the demise of her Observatorium & Native Karma Plant. They had abandoned sane environments, left behind homes and families, to be part of the faux-Chinese woman’s engine of change. Like her, they were here to work on behalf of others. They were content with the burnt man because they were content with that.

  The Nova Swing chewed a long hole between the stars, her doomed crew staring out so that sometimes their faces appeared at the portholes together, sometimes apart. The police were after her on several worlds. The beef: artefact smuggling. Possible Quarantine infringement. Wanted in connection with the death of a Saudade factor going by ‘Toni Reno’. She sneaked from world to world across the Beach. Since she took aboard the crippled K-tank, she had dropped in quietly at Goat’s Eye and the Inverted Swan; fallen across the empty spaces between Radio Bay and the Tract itself; drifted seventy-four hours, all systems powered down, at heavily coded co-ordinates in the notorious dXVII-Channing Oort cloud. MP Renoko was a no-show at all those venues. Then, just when they had given up on him, he poked his head through the crew quarters wall and said to Fat Antoyne, as if continuing a conversation they had started in The East Ural Nature reserve on Vera Rubin’s World:

  ‘Everyone their own evolutionary project, Fat Antoyne!’

  Antoyne said, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Who’s this little old cunt?’ Irene wanted to know. She looked Renoko over, her irises dark with satire. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Antoyne, get off me.’ It was not Renoko’s chinbeard she hated; or even his 1960s paedophile look, which she admitted was chic enough. It was the sense she had that he was always keeping something of himself in reserve. Or not even something: everything. ‘Come in,’ she invited, resettling on her hips some items of dress: ‘We got your cargo of meaningless toys.’

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ Renoko said.

  ‘That won’t work here, Renoko. The only thing that will work here is this—’ making the universal sign for money ‘—then you go, taking the rusty pipework with you.’ If you were driven by unknown forces, her body language implied, best not be around Irene.

  Antoyne put his hand on her arm. ‘Why kill Toni Reno?’ he asked Renoko. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Renoko looked puzzled.

  ‘We didn’t do that,’ he said.

  Irene held out her hand again, palm up. She said, ‘Well it wasn’t us either.’

  ‘Thanks for the information,’ Renoko said. ‘I’ll make arrangements,’ he told Antoyne.

  He winked, and his face went back through the wall. He didn’t mean money, but Antoyne wasn’t to know that. Just before his face vanished it added, ‘You might have some communications problems in the next hour or so. Don’t panic.’ Down in the main hold where he next materialised, he found the charred man w
orking on one of the mortsafes with a pulsed-spray welding set four hundred years old. Sparks flew everywhere. In their heat and light, this shabby enclosed space seemed like the very forge of God. Renoko watched for a minute or two in an impressed way and then said, ‘Is that Metal Active Gas?’

  The charred man pushed back his goggles and shook his head.

  ‘MIG,’ he said. ‘You weld?’

  ‘Never,’ Renoko admitted. ‘But I love to watch.’

  The charred man nodded. He heard that all the time, his nod said, but he still appreciated the compliment. Not everyone can weld. After they had allowed a little time to pass around this shared enthusiasm, he said, ‘Hey, what a shit body you found for me!’

  ‘It’s your own,’ Renoko pointed out.

  ‘I don’t remember doing this to it.’

  ‘It will serve the purpose,’ Renoko said. ‘She says you can begin any time. They’re ready for you in the quarantine orbits.’

  The charred man scratched his Mohican. ‘If not now, when?’ he asked himself. But he looked as if he had reservations. Then he shrugged and laughed and clapped Renoko’s shoulder. ‘Hey, so she came to say goodbye to you after all, La Chinoise?’

  Renoko smiled. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘she did.’

  ‘You feel good, then?’

  ‘I feel good,’ Renoko agreed.

  ‘That’s good,’ the charred man said. He reached into Renoko’s head with one hand.

  ‘Oh!’ said Renoko. He’d seen something very special.

  ‘She tries to do her best for everyone.’

  Renoko fell back and slipped down the bulkhead with a sigh until he attained a sitting position, after which he began to lose sight of himself. It was an uncanny feeling. In my case, he reminded himself again, it’s wrong to say ‘I think’: I should always say, ‘I’m thought’. Then he wasn’t. He wasn’t thought any more. Although, as long as the boys from Earth ate lunch, a tiny part of Renoko would always live on, a fractal memory in the Faint Dime database – catch & spread light of all kind wan light thru ripple glass jagged light of pressed chrome reflection film light of pink neon diffused across ceilings formica in fantasy-pastels pressed chrome deco fluting behind the bar a curious cast to chequerboard floors shiny lime sherbert light on each pink faux leather stool all perfect pressed out in perfect sugar colour like candy every item perfect perfectly itself & perfectly the same as everything else these weird blue metallic plastic banquettes – less glitch than resonance, the remains of a stay-resident program printing itself out as a list of aesthetic possibilities once or twice a year at cash registers across the Halo, with a particular fondness for ‘the Tambourine’ on New Venusport.