M. Harrison - Empty Space

‘Would you prefer something different to eat, dear?’

The cabin was filled briefly with their smell of violets and Vinolia Soap.

‘Can we fetch you a blanket?’

An hour or two into the journey R.I. Gaines opened the FTL routers and tried to refamiliarise himself with Galactic events. He fell asleep instead and dreamed he was in a rocket port surrounded by refugees. They resembled people, but they also resembled something like a swarm of bats or locusts too — or even a swarm of shadow operators, with a similar kind of sadness to their voracity and yearning. They were an ongoing process yet they never seemed to change. Gaines sat at a table with his hands in his lap. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind him, laughing and shrieking. He didn’t know what to do or think next. Adverts fluttered overhead like moths: his eyes followed them. People went in and out of the travel terminal doors: his head turned that way. Listening to the chimes of the public address system, he realised that, quite literally, he was not himself. He was someone he knew, but he couldn’t remember who. Eventually his number was called and he got to his feet and walked towards the gate.

While Gaines was dealing with these issues, whatever they were, Carlo — whose meds had flattened him off nicely for the day — tried to lure the assistant into the pilot tank with him. Though she seemed interested, even after she had lifted the lid, she would only do sex inside an immersive art experience called Joan in 1956 , which apparently featured an old car and something she described as ‘waisted cotton briefs’. Carlo wasn’t disheartened.

‘I’m so fucking in love,’ he told Gaines when Gaines woke up.

By then they were under the shoulder of the Tract itself, tumbling down a thirty-light-year well between high temperature gas clouds. Soon, Galt & Cole’s big score filled the screens, not quite a planet, not quite a machine: a geological madhouse with aspects of both, having the gravitational signature of a low density rubble pile but eye-watering Mohr-Coloumb figures. It was as porous as sponge yet nothing could pull it apart. The highly cratered surface sported a uniform orange colour, slightly too pale for rust. Across it roiled deep cobalt shadows and strange-looking rivers of dust.

‘Home again,’ Gaines said.

‘Keep watching the skies, Carlo,’ he called as they left the ship.

‘These days there’s no need to run the maze,’ he told the assistant. But he took her in anyway. Some part of him still needed to show it off.

Back at the beginning it had been a fracturing, disconnective experience, a space flickering with bad light and worse topology. The tunnels, small-bore and intricately turned one moment, would become huge and simple the next; as full of generated sounds as they were echoes, with no way of telling which was which. ‘Worse,’ Gaines told the assistant as he led her along, ‘they changed their nature.’ One moment they were tiled with shiny ceramics, next some sort of organic-looking fibre was matted over everything. You could be in a blood vessel or waiting for a train, or feel yourself running like a fluid between glass plates: it was an archaeology from which anything could be intuited and of which nothing was true. ‘It wasn’t so much what you might find round the next corner,’ Gaines said, ‘as that you were round the next corner before you knew it was there.’ As a result — at the start, anyway — the maze had seemed more like a condition than a system. Its objects had seemed abstract.

‘What’s this I’m walking in?’ the assistant said.

Gaines stopped. ‘It’s water. It’s just water.’

He looked down uncertainly.

‘These are the safe parts,’ he said. ‘Back in the day, entire sections would go missing. They’d be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what’s fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone’s stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in.’ All expeditions, he told her, failed in some way, but they each had a character of their own: and if, for a while, that character seemed like the reality of the explored space, it was the best you could expect. ‘You learn to work with it. We were total colonialists. Always on the back foot. Always in the thin slice of the present.

‘Who built it?’ he said, as if she had asked him. He shrugged. ‘How would I know? Lizard People from deep time. They were all over the Halo for a while, you find traces of them even on a dump like Panamax IV.’

The assistant shivered.

As soon as they left the surface she had felt her tailoring come up. Now she looked back along the passage, which just there was full of brown light and had an old monorail running along it.

‘Something’s in here with us,’ she said.

‘People often think that.’ The labyrinth, Gaines said, was a perfect venue for standing acoustic waves: at around nineteen Hertz these would commonly generate feelings of dread, bouts of panic, visual defects and hallucinations. ‘Down at twelve you just vomit endlessly.’

Half a mile along, the architecture changed suddenly and they were in primitive, squared-off passageways driven through basalt. When the boys from Earth arrived, there had been no light here worth speaking of for a hundred millennia. ‘We call it the PCM,’ Gaines said. ‘Pearlant Cultural Minimum. Suddenly you can see the tool marks. These sections may be the oldest of all, tunnelled into the rocky material before it aggregated, when it was part of something else. Or maybe their civilisation just lost traction on things for a while. Or these areas might have had a religious purpose. There’s no physics worth speaking of down here, but we get panel art. Look.’ He stopped in front of what appeared to be a section of bas reliefs, which showed three modified diapsids wearing complex ritual clothing. One of them was strangling a fourth, who lay passively on what looked like a stone bier.

‘These people were a million years ahead of us, but they were still trying to work out how to be rational. I don’t think they ever quite made it. The Aleph was only one of their projects.’

He took her arm again.‘Are you ready? It’s through that next door.’

On Saudade, Epstein the thin cop got a call to go to one of the bonded warehouses at the noncorporate rocket port. It was 4.20 am. Exactly two minutes earlier, the corpse of Enka Mercury had vanished. Edits of the nanocam coverage showed a translucent, fish-coloured image of Enka — through which you could make out the ribbed alloy walls of the warehouse — suddenly replaced by nothing. No matter how many cuts the operator made, there was no transition phase. One minute Enka was clinging on — her expression, when you could see it, as determined as it had been from the start, the expression of someone who had died but had never given up — the next, she was gone.

Epstein stared into the empty air of the warehouse as if his own deep common sense might do better than the technology, then took himself down to the alley off Tupolev, where he arrived in time to see Toni Reno follow his loader into oblivion. It was a cold wet morning, with traffic sparse on Tupolev and light creeping in from the side. As the war re-engaged everyone’s libido, Toni’s following had dropped off. But a couple of thirteen-year-olds — their calculatedly asymmetric caps of black hair and Fantin & Moretti hand-crafted moccasins soaked with rain — still occupied the sidewalk.

‘Toni never hurt anyone,’ one of them complained to Epstein. ‘Why does this have to happen to him?’