M. Harrison - Empty Space

Jump off the cutting table (once); crouch on the floor and move her head rapidly side to side, emitting active sonar between 200 and 1000 kHz (three times); perform other target-seeking behaviours (twice); become aware of the Pearl in front of her (twice); vomit a white liquid (once); throw up her hands and shout something indistinct (four times); turn left and run three paces (four times); turn left and run four paces (three times); decelerate abruptly (every time); and scream (every time).

Somebody laughed.

‘Stop that,’ said Case.

Overdriven movement registered as the usual mucoid blur. Waste heat systems undervented, raising the subject’s body temperature slightly above operating norms at 110 degrees fahrenheit; cortisol, androstenedione and estradiol levels rose sharply. After the fourth iteration, a suite of unplanned arm-movements began to be present. No one was able to explain this.

Throughout, the Pearl remained stable. Viewed as a false-colour display, the folds of its metallic gown fluttered in undetectable drafts. A faint zone of refraction surrounded it, causing the image — now perhaps twice life size — to ripple as if underwater. Its face looked human, then more like a cat’s face. After some minutes there came a shift in the index of refraction, like a little step-change in energy states. At the same time the main research tool came to life: elements of the labyrinth began to realign themselves; a grinding vibration could be felt in the floor. Hologram schematics flickered. Seismic arrays were picking up action at the scale of plate tectonics. ‘VF14/2b is warming up,’ someone announced, and began to reel off phase-space data. Case’s operator said in a calm voice, ‘There’s something massive in the tunnels.’ The overhead lights dimmed and shifted towards the red. ‘You may have to extract me,’ the operator said.

Then it shouted, ‘Look, look! In the maze! Deep time!’ Nothing was heard from it after that.

Meanwhile the Pearl opened and closed its mouth, waving its arms above its head in a kind of boneless, astonished panic. It seemed to be falling faster. Thousands of small objects tumbled along with it, as if the air itself were unloading them, glowing embers or stained-glass fragments, bouncing and rattling as energetically as Entreflex dice where they fell. Waves of perfume — cheap, old fashioned and bizarrely sexual, something you might smell on Pierpoint Street at four in the morning — billowed through The Old Control Room. As if disheartened by this display, the policewoman tired visibly. She made a last effort to break Gaines’ behavioural constraints, then raised her left fist to her mouth and bit at the knuckles. She stared over her shoulder at him.

‘Help!’ she called (once).

Then she jumped into the Pearl and vanished. After that, the Pearl vanished too, and everything went dark.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Gaines into the silence.

He was working out how to distance himself from the project and move on when he saw the tall white flower of light slowly beginning to bloom, and heard the voices and sounds which, to him at least, sounded like the voices and sounds of something, as he put it to himself, arriving , and began to run like everyone else for the back door of the facility and the debatable safety of the labyrinth beyond, trampling as they did so the ageing Case, who had lost both his sticks.

Aspodoto, Tienes mi Corazon, Backstep Cindy: a name, in the Halo, is everything. You are no one without a name. Fortunata, Ceres, Berenice. Queenie Key, Calder & Arp, Washburn Guitar. Mani Pedi, Wellness Lux, Fedy Pantera, REX-ISOLDE, Ogou Feray, Restylane and Anicet . . .

When Anna Waterman fell through the summerhouse floor and into the Aleph, it was just before dawn on a damp September morning in London. What time it was for the Aleph would be less easy to record.

The space she fell through was a confusing colour, like darkness on a windy night. It was too wide to be a tunnel, too confined to be anything else. Its boundary conditions allowed her to topple; they didn’t allow her to touch the sides. The sky quickly contracted to an almost invisible point above her. For a time, the cat was some company. It fell with a comical expression on its face, then seemed to drift in towards her, kneading the air with its front paws and purring loudly, after which they lost sight of one another. ‘James, you nuisance,’ Anna said.

Up above, something settled, as if the summerhouse, properly on fire this time, had begun to collapse. Rattling down towards her came a shower of objects coloured deep wine and amber or fanned by their speed to the fierce yellow of Barbie hair. These hot dolls, burning coals and melted pill-bottles seemed to be falling much faster than Anna; as they passed they matched her velocity for a moment, so that she felt she could have reached out and touched them; then they accelerated away and were quickly lost to sight.

In life, she knew, you might: Fall ill. Fall pregnant. Fall from grace.

God knows she had done all three of those. ‘Mine was a prolonged fall,’ she imagined herself explaining, ‘accompanied by much of the detritus I thought I’d left behind.’ She addressed the cat: ‘Name your jouissance .’

As she fell, she was aware of her arms waving slowly and bonelessly. Her legs pedalled. The sensation of falling was, she thought, much the same as that of treading water: the more you struggled the less control you maintained. Your heart rate increased, all the effort went to waste. You felt closer to drowning. It was a mistake to allow that idea in. The most important distinction of childhood is the one between falling asleep and falling as death. Long before she had fallen into anorexia, or read Milton on the fall from dawn to dewy eve, or fallen victim to Michael Kearney, Anna had been afraid to fall asleep. As soon as she recognised that, she began to struggle. There followed predictable moments of panic, flickering and buzzing on all sides, anguished flashes of light, after which she found herself in an echoing space, the nature of which she would have been hard put to describe.

It was very tall; it was dark and light at the same time. It reminded her of a restaurant she and Marnie used to visit for lunch, built into the shell of an abandoned power station in Wapping. She had a sense of dread. She could see a little, but she didn’t know what any of it was. There were people all round her. They gestured and goggled, trying to push their faces close into hers. Their mouths opened and closed, yet it was Anna who felt like the fish in the tank. They were studying her.

‘How close can I get?’ they asked one another, and: ‘Do we have any idea where she came from?’

‘We don’t have an idea about anything.’

Laughter.

‘She looks as if she’s falling. Caught falling.’

‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption, Gaines.’

In fact, Anna felt like someone caught going to the lavatory in the middle of Waterloo station in the rush hour. She had a slightly nauseous sense of James the cat, so close she couldn’t quite bring him into focus. It was embarrassing. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else. There was something the matter with her cheekbones. She felt smeary and unstable at significant sites, in the manner of a Francis Bacon painting. At the same time she felt as if she had been penetrated by something huge in an inappropriate part of her body; or, worse, that she had penetrated it. What made her condition so impossible was the nature of this object.

It was her own life.

. . . Sekhet, Sweet Thing. Minnie. Matty. Mutti. Roses, Radtke, Emily-Misere. Girl Heartbreak! & Imogen. L1 Dominette. I pull one way she pulls the other. That woman will never be part of me. I say fall on your own. Fall on your own you bitch. Not near me. There is a third thing in here with us she says & a fourth and a fifth. It stinks of cat in here, some filthy animal. We’ll never get where we’re going this way. My name is. (Ysabeau, Mirabelle, Rosy Glo. Sweet Thing & Pak 43. Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire. Stormo!, Te Faaturuma.) I fall into the summerhouse & shout the wrong thing. No one listens . . .