M. Harrison - Empty Space

Those appointments she kept with herself — South Hemisphere NV; the Mambo Rey PostIndustrial Estate, Funene; the back stairs at SiteCrime, Uniment & Poe where the light dazzled down the stairwell like the light in a religious painting of Ancient Earth: what had they achieved in the end? Nothing. It turned out she didn’t even like herself. They couldn’t relate. They were too alike, the two of them. They were too surprised by one another’s speed and perfection not to react badly. Too chafed by one another’s obduracy to talk. She got the edge over that bitch self at New Venusport. Later, poor George’s corpse made her wonder if she’d gone too far.

‘Does a person like me kill things too easily?’ she remembered asking him in nicer times.

. . . He opened my head and put in a hand. It was so gentle. I absolutely melted. After that killing yourself is easy, it’s the unthought known, toothpaste at the corner of the mouth, reflections on a false marble floor. Though as you abandon yr own viewpoint the world so rapidly loses coherence, proves so impossible to understand, that there’s nothing to be gained. Sign on a chemist shop: FA Strange. It’s FA Strange all right. I don’t get it, Michael said. Why should you? I said. Why should you get it, after all? . . .

Anna’s earlier self was drawn to the summerhouse because the heat she felt in there was her own heat. She was angry in there. She was closer to her own surface. Her attention was easier to attract. But interference proved harder than oversight —

Summer. Night. The feeling of a storm on the way. The Waterman house sits, as unweathered as an architect’s drawing, hot and airless in the river valley. It’s been a strange, lonely day. Anna Waterman looks at her own hands. She calls the cat. ‘James, you old fool!’ At nine, the phone rings. When she picks it up, expecting to hear her daughter Marnie, there’s no one at the other end. But just as she puts down the receiver she hears an electronic scraping noise and a distant voice shouts: ‘Don’t go in there! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ Within half an hour, the summerhouse has burst into flames and she sees herself — a woman hard to age, wearing a 1930s-looking floral print — running towards her from the silent conflagration. Consternation is on this woman’s face. ‘Go away!’ she calls. ‘Go away from here!’

A few days later, prone to weep suddenly after a debilitating session in Chiswick with Dr Helen Alpert, Anna wakes to moonlight and Moroccan air, with a feeling that someone has just spoken. She enters the river, and the world is suddenly unknown and unknowable. Everything is so full of mystery as she walks back that magic night, to find the summerhouse on fire again! Beneath the sound of the flames, she’s sure she hears a voice. It calls her name, but all she can say in return is:

‘Michael? Is this you?’

So it went, every time Anna tried to communicate. ‘Anna!’ she would shout. ‘Listen to me! Don’t go in the summerhouse!’ But Anna seemed so dull. She was always so obsessed with herself. You couldn’t get her attention, and that was what made you so impatient, the farce of shouting, ‘Anna! Anna!’ until you were hoarse.

In addition, physical limitations seemed to apply. The past was clear enough to see, but you felt as if you were engaging with it from too far away. Sometimes speech failed completely, and Anna could make herself known only in other ways, via the weather, for instance, or showers of emotionally-charged objects. It was as if the universe she now inhabited had suffered brain damage, and was experiencing a confusion not between different senses but between different states of energy and matter. She was reduced to a kind of practical synaesthesia. She was reduced to the use of theatre, metaphor, symbols and emotions. She tried eveything, but remained an epiphenomen of her own life, a figure distantly semaphoring tragic news from a hill. She made a nightly beacon of the summerhouse, but her earlier self didn’t get the message. She made a dozen or so copper-coloured poppies spring up on the Downs in the morning sunshine, but the language of flowers simply didn’t work as well as the language of language, and after a while Anna saw that her efforts were only making things worse.

Meanwhile, her body was strained into such a curve that only the upper left side of her ribcage touched the floor. Her right leg was raised about thirty degrees to the horizontal, the other bent slightly back from the knee. Her feet were bare. Her arms, outstretched either side of her head, curved towards the ceiling; her hands were open, palm out, fingers clutching then relaxing in slow motion. From this awkward, uncomfortable viewpoint she was forced to stare out into a dazzling nave of light, across a shiny black surface full of reflections. She was toppling into that space and at the same time through it. Everything smelled of electricity. People were pushing strange equipment around. Or they came up close and began talking about her as if she wasn’t there. ‘We’re catching it in the Planck time,’ they told one another. ‘You can’t see it for longer because it’s already in its own future, already something different.’ They said: ‘Where does the cat fit in?’

Laughter. Then:

‘The people in Xenobiology are already calling her Pearl.’

It was just like being in the bloody hospital. She hated them, and whatever ghastly world they belonged to. But worse: over a period of time that might have been seconds or years, she became aware that there was someone else trapped in there with her. Sometimes Anna could feel her bones grate together, there was so little room for them both. It wasn’t James the cat, though she knew he was inside her too, prowling about and layering his own motives over hers. A growing sense of tension and imprisonment pushed everything else out of her mind, and her attempts to communicate with her earlier self ceased. She could hear a voice, distant-sounding but quite clearly inside her own head. It raged and complained. Whoever it was — whatever it was — they fell and fell together. They were aware of one another. Everything became a dull struggle over the body, or what they thought of as the body . . .

. . . I would want to have love if I knew what that was. You can get a patch for it, it’s more like an app. It’s a mood, very economical, very full of emotion, the love patch down at Uncle Zip for Saturday night. Mary Rose, Moroccan Rose, Mexicali Rose, Rose of Tralee, Rrose Selavi. Immordino, Gianetta, Ona Lukoszaite. There’s evidence, Dr Alpert said, of a couple of tiny strokes, nothing to worry about. Did I lose my memory so I could lose my memories? Put that way it seems not just possible but ordinary . . .

Alone in the Tub, sucked towards the lee shore of the Kefahuchi Tract by long, gentle gravitational swells, Impasse van Sant lost contact with the management of his little project. Along with Rig Gaines went Imps’s last link to what might laughingly be called humanity. In the absence of supervision, he allowed the research to lapse and instead watched war pursue itself across the halo media:

Stars tricked-up as nova bombs. Minds tricked-out with logic bombs. Displaced planetary populations on the move. Duelling gamma jets at 50 million degrees Kelvin. Battleships drifting, holed and untenanted, in clouds of rosy gas. K-ships flickering in and out of it all in time-frames no one could imagine, states of consciousness no one could conceive controlled by mathematics no one understood. In the absence of Gaines’ mystery weapon, EMC couldn’t dictate the rules of the game, and had already begun to give ground to a loose alliance of aliens whose motives remained unclear and whose names for themselves all ended in x. To this feverish expenditure of energy, van Sant foresaw only the worst of ends: the boys from Earth, driven out of themselves for one perfect moment by psychodramas of blood, risk, terror, and, hey, being the real victim here, would soon be as desperate as children to be fetched back in again. Even that made them human: unlike Imps, who all his life had seen himself not just as dissociated but as protected in some unfair way by his dissociation.