Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3)

by M. John Harrison

  The Levy Flight weren’t going to miss that.

  You can originate from a freezer, Impasse van Sant believed, and still make an identity for yourself: but the thing is, you never feel sited. Day after day he hung in empty space, wondering not so much why he had no news from home as where his home had been. He knew there was a war on, but he didn’t know who to side with. That made him feel both unreal and nostalgic. How can you be nostalgic for something you never had? Wow, he caught himself thinking: a war at home! It must be something, to have all your certainties knocked over in that way. He caught fragments of media here and there. Wrecked ships slowly tumbling in hard light; long views of planets he never heard of. Children singing something against a black background. A headline that just said—

  WAR

  It gave him a warm feeling – like ‘Christmas’ or ‘growing up’ – to think that other people were having this most humanising of experiences, losing everything they cared about, everything that made them what they were. The majority of Imps’ news came from the K-Tract, as data he couldn’t decode, and was only news if you were interested in high energy magnetic fields. He was thinking about this when the shadow of his friend fell across him. One monitor wasn’t enough to display her; she hung there in high aspect ratio across three of them, allowing the K-tract to paint her tip feathers mint-blue and rose-pink.

  ‘Hey,’ Imps breathed.

  ‘What do you want,’ she said.

  ‘You look beautiful today.’

  ‘You broadcast every frequency. You call me up. You stare into the dark until you find me there. What do you want from me?’

  Imps thought.

  He felt he should tell her, ‘My day is crap when we don’t talk,’ or, ‘I think you’re lonely too,’ but both of those were too close to the truth. So he decided to say the next thing that came into his head. Sometimes he made lists of the places he might have come from. For instance he liked the sound of Acrux, Adara, Rigil Kentaurus and, particularly, Mogliche Walder. But Motel VI was his favourite. Motel life, as he understood it, wasn’t too demanding. It was a lot closer-in than empty space, but still comfortably on the edge of things. It sounded like a good compromise between what he experienced now and some sort of full humanity. He wanted to ease himself into that. He had downloaded a brochure entitled Mobile Homes of the Galaxy, which also featured dwellings based on the classic Moderne hamburger joint – all pastel neon, pressed and ribbed aluminium – set against sunsets and mountain dawns. He showed her some of these.

  ‘I want you to help me go back,’ he said.

  ‘You came here of your own accord.’

  ‘Did I?’

  She considered this. ‘Now you want to go back where you came?’

  ‘I came too far,’ he said.

  ‘You thought this was what you wanted.’

  ‘Peer pressure brought me here. It would be too much to suffer the disapprobation of my friends.’

  Rig and Emil and Fedy von Gang, hacking busily away at the mysteries in Radio Bay; Ed Chianese who, it was rumoured, had himself plugged into a K-ship and fired into the Tract itself, as dumb a thing as anyone had ever done. The entradistas, the sky-pilots like Billy Anker and Liv Hula. People who called their ship Blind by Light, or Hidden Light, or 500% Light, or anything with Light in it. People who left a note by the bed, a message in the parking orbit: Torched out, catch you later. Who were wired up wrong from the first. Whose engines cooked with hard X-rays. Who went out unassuagable and came back rich or mad, towing a derelict starship from another galaxy. Rocket jockeys the Halo knew by their first names. Imps shrugged. He excused himself and got a beer. When he came back to his seat she was still there, and he said: ‘Out here thirty years, and I find I was never like them. Whoa! What’s this? Imps, you want to go back, find your home? Stop looking in the dark for stuff no one’s ever going to understand?’

  ‘You came too far,’ she mused.

  Van Sant didn’t know if she was agreeing with him, or what. When he looked up at the monitor again, she had vanished.

  She was gone two days, and when she returned it was only so that they could regard one another in a kind of continuing puzzlement – honest on his side, Imps thought, angry on hers.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  Another screen came to life and began generating images of the war. Naked bodies in vacuum, rows of K-craft so long they vanished in blackness. An entire planet with a hole through it. Chaotic scenes of the displaced. Tourists who had passed this way a week ago, off to make fuck-footage in the twilight zone of Kunene, who now found themselves dirty and sleepless on the concourse of the very terminal which had promised so much. Or were pictured, still dressed in the easy to wear greige stylings of the moment, anxiously disembarking from a chartered shorthaul flight a hundred light years from their point of origin, to be bussed into temporary cities already crammed with refugees, media, aid-agency reps and dysfunctional gap-year adolescents drawn to the inferno for reasons they didn’t understand.

  ‘All over the Halo people are losing their way of life,’ van Sant whispered. He meant: ‘How lucky is that?’

  She took it some other way.

  ‘I remember all these atrocities you’re looking at,’ she said. Then: ‘I’ve done worse.’ And finally: ‘Is it right to think so much about yourself?’

  Imps got the wrong end of this; felt hurt. ‘Hey, I was careful to ask you things! You claimed you don’t remember!’ But she was already sailing away again, banking white and narrow against the absolute arc of the vacuum. ‘Are we having our first quarrel?’ Imps called after her. The reply arrived too faint to hear, as if she had slipped out of more than local space.

  After she found the dead man, the assistant stayed on at Sharp Cuts for an hour, unsure how to proceed. Once or twice she got up from George’s side to look between the window-boards into the street. Eventually she made a call to Epstein the thin cop. She didn’t want him too close to the problem, she said, but she could do with some help. Epstein said it was fine with him, but he had heard she would soon run out of favours elsewhere. The uniform branch arrived to disperse the morning drinkers and extinguish the Cadillac fire. A little later, they towed the shell.

  ‘I loved that engine,’ she said absently.

  The fourth floor at Uniment & Poe sent her a new vehicle from the motor pool. She loaded George into the front seat and drove him across the city to her room by the rocket port in GlobeTown. ‘It’s not much of a car, this one,’ she told him as they passed The Church on the Rock. ‘Look at the church, George.’ Each turn they went round, George’s upper body sagged to one side or the other. In the end she was driving with one hand and using the other to prop him up. Though moving a corpse about was nothing much for a person like her, it was at least something to do. It was something you could throw yourself into. ‘George, you’re too easy to carry,’ she laughed. ‘You should eat more, really. Do less drugs.’ She bore him up two flights of stairs and laid him on her bed. Then she took his clothes off, washed him with a damp towel, paying attention to the clots round his armpit, and got him under the covers. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see?’ George lay there collapsed-looking and stared at the ceiling.

  Down in the street, someone was playing Ya Skaju Tebe in a minor key, with pauses a fraction too drawn out. It was sentimental for the people, music for giving things up to, wartime music. Starliners, now converted to troopships, came and went at the port, rays of coloured light pouring off them to wheel across the assistant’s walls, leaving small active patches of ruby-red fluorescence which crawled about like living tattoos. Three kinds of psychic blowback lit George’s thin face, one after the other, and for a moment it looked as if he might say something despite being dead.

  That was how things rested until it got dark. George looked as if he might speak. The assistant sat on the side of the bed waiting to hear. Then R.I. Gaines walked in through the wall, combat pants rolled halfway up his thin, suntanned calves.

  Over those he ha
d his signature lightweight shortie raincoat with the sleeves similarly rolled to the elbows. He was carrying a canvas poacher bag with a feature of tan leather fastenings, from which protruded the grip and part of the receiver of a Chambers gun. His feet were bare. He looked tired. ‘Oh hi,’ he said to the assistant, as if he hadn’t expected to find her there. They stared at one another and he said: ‘Skull radio.’ They spent a few minutes searching through her possessions. When she found the radio, he couldn’t make it work. He knelt down and banged it on the floor until the glass broke and the baby’s lower jaw fell out. A few white motes drifted here and there. ‘Good enough,’ he said. He engaged in a conversation his side of which finished, ‘You know it’s almost like we’re in a real world out here. Maybe you should think of it like that too.’ He threw the radio into a corner. ‘Upper management,’ he said to the assistant: “What can you do with them?” Next he caught sight of poor dead George, staring at the ceiling with the blankets up to his neck.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘We all make mistakes.’ Gaines examined the corpse. ‘Were you trying to have sex with him?’

  ‘It happened across the city.’

  Suspecting more than a malfunction, Gaines took her hand and encouraged her to stand by the window, where he could examine the data scrolling down her forearm. Still visible: but in that light the Gothic blacks and Chinese reds weakened to faint grey and orange, and her skin was the colour of old ivory. He sniffed the palm of her hand then let her go. ‘You’ve got a Kv12.2 expression problem,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ She stared down at her own hand, then up into Gaines’s face – as if, he thought, she was trying to understand the exchange as emotional rather than diagnostic – and after a moment asked:

  ‘Do you want to sit on the bed and talk?’

  ‘You really are someone’s project,’ he said.

  Which of them was the cypher? They sat on the bed, with George the tailor behind them, and both of them stared at the wall. Gaines felt tired after Panamax IV, suddenly the only scene he could remember from his whole life was him and Emil Bonaventure in the PEARLANT labyrinth, dragging along some dead entradista whose suit visor was caked an inch thick with the remains of his own lungs. After a moment or two, he put his arm round her shoulders.

  ‘I’m going to need you to do something for me,’ he said.

  TWENTY FIVE

  Lowboy Orbits

  They put Irene out into space, so she could drift forever through the incredible refuse of the Beach she loved.

  Without her they were soon depressed and rudderless. Life swilled about in the bottom of the trough. Communication failed. Lies returned home. The FTL media brought only war news, and every shift of the light reminded them of some better time in their lives. Neither of them could fly the ship. Liv went to Antoyne and said, ‘My mouth is damaged, but my mind is worse.’ Antoyne shrugged: there was no way he could do it. They fucked for comfort, what a mistake that turned out to be. The Nova Swing hung there in the middle of nothing. When she fired up her Dynaflows and set a course of her own, back towards Saudade where it had all begun, they were almost relieved to have things taken out of their hands.

  They continued to avoid the main hold. Instead, they slept and slept, living separate lives inside their own guilt about Irene. But once the ship got under way, levels of unconscious activity could only rise: Antoyne dreamed he was fat again, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. He dreamed he was dead. Liv dreamed of ghosts. Sometimes a torn coat seemed to float along the ship’s ill-lit companionways and stairwells (in that dream, she admitted wryly, the coat had secured the ontological high ground: it was Liv who felt like the haunting); other times, as if they sought clarity and kindness, her dreams were all of her glory days at the Venice Hotel on France Chance—

  Situated between the sea and the city, a stone’s throw from the rocket-sport port, the Venice – with its tall, uncurtained windows, tranquil shabby rooms and uncarpeted pale oak floors which always captured the waking light – was, for five years the destination of rocket-jockeys all over the Halo. A twenty-four hour carnival unfolded outside the old hotel: bad paint-jobs, bad haircuts, bad planning. People were building their own starships in sheds at the edge of the field. Inside, you could find the most beautiful pilot, nineteen years old, sleeping in an empty bar at four in the afternoon, and soon go up to his room on the fourth floor back corridor. Next morning you woke alone and smiling, wrapped yourself in a pink cellular blanket, which you later stole and kept it with you your whole life, and went to the window, listening to the illegal sonic booms rolling in from seaward as the returning hyperdips performed low level aerobrake re-entries.

  A few hours before, these cockleshells with alien engines had been toppling through the France Chance chromosphere (filmed in perfect rights-reserved imagery by virtual hydrogen-alpha filter). Now the boys who flew them were determined to be the first human beings to scrub off more than twenty thousand kilometres an hour at less than five hundred feet above sea level. And the frail, utter certainty of it was: you had done that too, and you still couldn’t get enough of it, and you would do it again and again until you couldn’t do it any more. Later, you found your lovely pilot was the legendary Ed Chianese, and that the two of you were in competition for the Stupidest Achievement of That Year award.

  It was from the perspective of this dream that Liv, waking transfixed, understood where she had seen the occupant of the K-tank before. She dialled up Antoyne, who, refusing to leave the crew quarters for three days, played Ya Skaju Tebe on infinite repeat and ate raspberry ice cream with his hands.

  ‘Fat Antoyne, listen. We have to go into the hold.’

  But Antoyne wouldn’t budge.

  Walls blacked with graffiti flower shapes; armoured bulkheads deformed not by blast, or even melting, but by enforced transition through unnatural physical states; autorepair media busy over everything: someone, Liv thought, had pressed the wrong switch down there.

  A section of the hull remained transparent. It was a wall of nothing. Eerie light from a corner of the Tract lengthened out the main hold so that it seemed more like an exterior than an interior. This illusion was increased by the disarray of the mortsafes. They were hard to count now. They lay tumbled on one another into a kind of distance, like corroded boilers in a scrapyard. Repair work was going on among them, but you couldn’t quite see where. A sputtering sound filled the air. Sparks flew up and rained back down, cutting gold curves on the watching eye, bouncing off the deck as they cooled to dark cherry. Big shadows danced over the bulkheads.

  Everything smelled of mould on bread, and of MP Renoko, who slumped like a traditional wood puppet in the unremitting yet unreliable glare of the welding arc, his clothes blackened, his left arm resting at an odd angle in his lap. One side of his face had dripped into the hollow of his clavicle, where it produced a finish resembling melted plastic; the other side boasted a sceptical grin, an appreciative glint in the eye, as if Renoko had only just died – or as if he was still alive, choosing for some reason to remain incommunicado. In this environment even a dead human being was a comfort. Liv stood next to him and peered into the fountain of sparks.

  ‘You can come out now, Ed,’ she called.

  ‘Liv? Liv Hula?’

  For weeks she had watched him drift aimlessly around the ship when he thought everyone was asleep; now he floated towards her with a big smile, his arms wide. Over the years the memory of him had worn down inside her. It was smooth from use and bore little resemblance to the figure he cut at this end of his life. But the Halo is a wall-to-wall freak show: why should Ed Chianese be any different? The ragged flaps and ribbons of his braised organs trailed out behind him.

  ‘Is that you, Liv? Jesus!’

  When she didn’t respond, Ed looked unhappy; as if, though he had got her name right, he had mistaken her for someone else. For instance a more recent admirer. Focusing slightly to th
e left of her, he said:

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘About what?’ she said. ‘What happened to you, Ed?’

  ‘Just the usual wear and tear.’

  ‘I can see.’ And, when he didn’t follow that up: ‘I called, but you never got in touch.’ She left a silence but he didn’t want to fill that either. ‘Hey!’ she tried. ‘Someone told me you hijacked a K-ship and flew it into the Tract!’

  ‘That was years ago,’ Ed said, as though apologising for having once been in the past. ‘Anyone could do it.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ed. No one comes back from there.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, with such a tone of regret that she believed him instantly. ‘I didn’t want to – once you’ve been in there you’ll do anything to stay – but here I am.’ After some thought he added, as if determined to produce a fair and balanced account: ‘Actually, the K-ship hijacked me.’

  ‘So now you’re hijacking the Nova Swing.’

  ‘Is that what they call her these days?’ He looked around vaguely. ‘Nice name,’ he said.

  ‘It’s cheap, Ed,’ Liv said. ‘That’s why you like it.’

  She said: ‘What do you mean, “these days”? Are you Ed Chianese?’

  ‘Who else could be this fucked up?’

  ‘Fair point, Ed.’

  Somewhere among the piled mortsafes, the MIG welder was working again. Or perhaps it wasn’t that. Sparks, anyway, were fountaining up, so bright the Tract paled into invisibility behind them. There was a sound like a lot of drowsy flies. ‘Is there someone else in here?’ Liv said. Suddenly, Ed had her by the shoulders. His odd, not-unpleasant smell, more ozone than halal, filled the space between them. ‘Get out!’ he said.

  His hands hurt. ‘Fuck, Ed!’ Liv said. But though she struggled and kicked, and though he wasn’t what you could call all there, he had no difficulty propelling her towards the door. Liv, straining to looked back over her shoulder, saw something beautiful and strange beginning to form itself out of the sparks. ‘What’s that? Ed, what’s that?’