M. Harrison - Empty Space

5am, Saudade: not late enough to be morning, too late to be night. Fat Antoyne stood out on the loading platform and stared across the noncorporate port at the dawn, just then arriving in streaks of pale green and salmon over the distinctive silhouette of the Rock Church. He wiped his hands. The rag, which had originally been a white cotton singlet of Irene’s, cropped short and bearing the slogan HIGGS, made him feel both horny and full of an almost nostalgic guilt. A little later, as if to further demonstrate his condition, Irene herself appeared, walking brassily across the windswept cement arm in arm with Liv Hula. They leaned into one another for balance — also a little forward as if compensating for a strong headwind — and sang. Irene was wearing a Vinci Nintendino bolero jacket featuring foot-long alien pinfeathers dyed pink. In one hand she clutched her signature see-thru cosmetics bag; in the other a pair of five-inch heels, red patent leather and with an otherworld glow all their own.

‘Hey,’ called Fat Antoyne.

They waved and called, ‘Hey! Fat Antoyne! Fat Antoyne!’ as if it were a big surprise to see him there, 5 am, on the rocketship they all three owned. Back on board the women tuned to Radio Retro and filled the air with old time hits, including Ya Skaju Tebe and Frenchie Haye’s understated but durable version of Lizard Men from Deep Time . They were sleepy, though prone to sudden inexplicable bursts of energy, during which they had brand new ideas about things in general. Soon, owlish but tending to giggle, they too were examining the payload.

‘Fat Antoyne, it’s big,’ was Irene’s conclusion.

‘Do you think?’ said Liv Hula. ‘It’s not as big as I expected.’

Fat Antoyne stared at them. ‘I could make you eggs,’ he said. It was a puzzle, the women often thought, how Antoyne maintained his new thin looks, when all he ever did was eat. ‘We could get eggs in the control room. Coffee and raisin bread too.’

Irene hung from her arms around his neck.

She said, ‘Or — Fat Antoyne, listen! Listen, Liv! — we could take a rickshaw to Retiro Street and dance! Eat cake!’

Liv, meanwhile, bent down and peered into the porthole.

‘Don’t encourage him,’ she said.

‘My turn,’ said Irene, pushing her away. ‘What’s a mortsafe anyway?’

‘I don’t see anything much in there,’ Liv Hula said. ‘Can we have the lights on?’ She sought out the bills of lading. ‘“MP Renoko”,’ she read. ‘“Hard goods. D.i.f. Documents on site.” Where are we taking this?’

‘Da Luz Field,’ Antoyne said. ‘Somewhere called World X. It’s fifty lights down.’

‘Everywhere’s fifty lights down, Fat Antoyne.’

The assistant rented her room from someone she knew, a woman called Bonaventure who ran a bar on Straint Street near the event site. At night the rocket launches lit the room’s warm air like a bad tank experience, psychic blowback from the engines reinscribing the thoughts and feelings of the people who had lived there before her. They sweated out on to the walls in layers of swirled colours like graffiti written on top of one another. Maps, artefacts, butterflies from another world, all of that kind of thing. For some reason, the assistant didn’t mind. She was used to it. She enjoyed it — although ‘enjoyment’ was a word she had never used much about her own experiences. Sometimes she wondered whose dreams she was having.

The evening after she first heard the word ‘Pearlant’, a man called Gaines walked in through the wall of the room. She understood instantly he was not one of the past’s stories. His appearance made her afraid. In response, her tailoring switched itself on; but something he could do — or didn’t even need to do — switched it off again, so that she came up off the bed hard and fast, then had to stand there in the middle of her own room, feeling naked and displaced, like a child who has made a bad judgement and sees it too late, while he walked around her to the window as if she was a fixed object, something almost interesting in a shop, something that wasn’t in his way.

‘This is a quaint place to live,’ he said, looking down into the street, which had once been gentrified but which was going downhill again. It was late. The bars and nuevo tango joints were opening slowly, their neon-cluttered facades pulsing and sucking. Ads patrolled the pavement with the soft voices of children. Rocket dub basslines thumped in the walls. The street was opening like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night. ‘But all this cultural babble out here, don’t you sometimes want a rest from it?’

‘It’s only what people want,’ the assistant said. She wasn’t sure what people wanted.

‘They mistake it for substance.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

It meant that there was something down underneath all this, Gaines informed her. ‘It means that the world isn’t all signs and surfaces.’

She indicated the walls of the room, still imbricated and flickering with hallucinations, hard sweats, failed or partial communications from other planets. ‘How could there be?’ she said. ‘Anything fixed? In this physics universe?’

He came away from the window then and stood close in to her, calculating and looking her up and down with a new interest. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I know there is because I’ve seen it.’

He laughed. ‘And now it wants to see you,’ he said.

He was one of those men you don’t know if they’re older than they look or younger than they look. He had good skin and a smile which seemed satisfied with all the deficiencies of the world as they had revealed themselves to him. He possessed a deep, withering bitterness he thought he was hiding. Longish grey hair curling into the nape of his neck, maybe a little gelled to stay in place. Chinos and a polo shirt, light canvas shoes whitened with pipeclay — an outfit that meant something, she could see; an outfit that made references the assistant couldn’t follow. He had a carefully trimmed grey beard which thrust the lower part of his face forward into the room. He had a good nose, too. But in the gloom and fading inflorescence of the launch, that was the important part of him, his jaw and his quiet blue eyes.

‘You’re from EMC,’ she guessed.

‘Think that if you like.’

‘I wonder if you’re here at all.’

At that, he smiled again. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ his voice said, from the empty air.

After he’d gone, she went to the window and looked into the street and tried to see what he had seen. Earlier that day there had been an escape of mathematics from the ram-head control loops of one of the visiting cruise ships, a big Creda Starliner. Daughter code, running on a substrate of nanotech and human proteins, had swum into some unlucky rocket-jockey’s vestibular lymph during the night. He had made it through port gate security before it began to change him, then rolled around Saudade sneezing and buying drinks in bars. There would be outbreaks of new behaviour by dawn. The port was shut, and the uniform branch was touring its northern peripheries with sound equipment, advising people to stay in the house.

‘You are all right if you have only touched yourself. You are OK if you have only touched yourself.’

They were giving out a help centre number to call if you thought you were infected: no one would dream of going there, because in the middle term it meant only the quarantine orbit.

Meanwhile, Gaines was reporting to his colleagues at the Aleph Project. As an EMC fixer with a satisfyingly broad remit, Gaines occupied various different kinds of space, most of them electronic; although, as he said, some things he did went a little too fast for normal channels. There were actions he could do, assets he had access to, which didn’t seem very physics. But when he reported to the project, it was in the ordinary way, as a holographic fetch, via a system of private FTL routers.