M. Harrison - Empty Space

Just then the void behind him opened like a huge door. It was filled with ships. There were hundreds of millions of them, a fleet of lights assembling itself from all over the Beach. They streamed in from as far away as Sector 47, da Silva’s Cloud and The Mokite Bench, pooled briefly among the chaotic attractors and gravity-rips of Radio Bay, then poured towards the Kefahuchi Tract. Under magnification they proved to be all sizes and ages, from massy spacetime warpers to last year’s one-man escape pod. All they had in common was their condition. They were hulks. They were banged-up, rusty and half-disassembled yet seamed with brand-new welds. They came trailing clouds of smart autorepair media. Out in the lead raced a single three-fin Dynaflow HS-HE cargo hauler, tubby, brass-looking, brought to a dull polish in some places by particle ablation, streaked with bird shit in others as if it had waited out the last forty years in the second-hand lot of some noncorporate field. On its nose someone had stencilled in letters five feet high the legend SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, then under that, smaller: Nova Swing . The space around its stern was fogged with ironising radiation a relentlessly violet colour, through which could be seen — shuttling in tight, complex and only partially visible orbits, orbits comprising the propulsion topology itself — an unknown number of outboard engines.

‘The fuck,’ Imps asked himself, ‘is happening here?’

On they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, flowing out of the dark and parting around the research vessel, of which they took little more notice than the void itself. SAUDADE BULK HAULAGE, its hull shuddering with the approach of some catastrophic event — the phase change, the leap to the next stable state — aimed itself at the heart of the singularity, which seemed to shift and boil in response with realtime bursts of high-energy photons. The alien engines shuttled faster and faster, producing curious slick pulses that presented to the observer not as light but as a sound, a smell, a taste in the mouth, a vibration in the walls, a perpetual but perpetually decaying echo effect in the context of things. The fleet paused a second, hung in silhouette, then hurled itself in.

For a moment after they had vanished, the vacuum still seemed inhabited. Then it was nothing again. Imps van Sant stared into the eyepieces of his obsolete instruments. Deep in explicatory failure, he had no way of placing himself with regard to what he had witnessed. Man, he thought. Who were those guys? They seemed full of madness and a direct rejection of anything he might have called humanity. It made him lonelier than ever. He was considering this when empty space whispered at him.

‘Hello?’ it said.

She hung out there, a kilometre long and clean as a herring gull over a windy beach. You looked at her and you could taste salt, ice cream, iodine. Feel for a second fully inside yourself.

‘I can be anything I want,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want that. I want to be the one thing I am.’

And when van Sant couldn’t think of an answer:

‘What do you remember best?’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t a regular kid.’ He rummaged through the litter of empty beer cans, broken table tennis balls and repro 1970s wank mags around his pilot chair until he found some real estate brochures. ‘I don’t remember anything, but I want to live somewhere like this.’ Holding up a picture so she could see, a Sandra Shen tableau entitled, Airstream trailers beside the Salton Sea, 2001 . ‘Or this,’ he said: picture of two Japanese-looking people fucking in surf. She’s wearing a wedding dress. In the background, mountains. ‘Or I quite like this.’ A wooden house with a pier going out into a lake: three brown pelicans diving for fish. Then his favourite, the ice-cream parlour at Roswell, New Mexico, Old Earth. Pastel neon mints and pinks against lightly etched aluminium columns: a holy twilight in the parking lot.

‘It’s the real McCoy,’ Imps said.

‘I don’t recall anything like that,’ she said. Then, almost immediately: ‘What would you be if you could be one other thing?’

‘One other thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be gone from here.’

‘I want to go home too,’ she said. ‘Let’s start soon.’

Just then, off in a corner of the Tub’s main display, as in some hallucination accompanying neurological disorder, there bloomed a soft white explosion like a puff of fibres or a cloud of spores. It was low yield, less than a light-day away in the direction of Radio Bay. Not quite as far out as Imps van Sant, but far enough. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ For a moment he thought the war had caught up with them. On examination, though, it proved to be just some abandoned old research tool which had gone mad after a million years staring into nothing and blown itself up. This close to the Tract, it was always happening. What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories?

. . . I said, you made your life a description of the present moment, the warm neon of pizza huts and pubs, blurred by a slight rain and repeating in every shallow puddle; she said she could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, no one believed that. She says: what is time anyway? Don’t give me that, I know what time is. Don’t, whatever you do, you bitch, give me that. Night’s here. It’s about being a meme. I light up in RF, radar and batshit 27-40 kHz, immediately get a response from the dunes, come in on the sonar ping & there she is: it’s love patch, baby, love patch. In this world we’re the remains of our own humanity. Don’t jump! I’m calling. I’m calling out to her, The summerhouse! I’m calling, Don’t start all this! Don’t become part of this! She doesn’t hear. Anyway all we can do is kill. Elise, Ellis and Elissa, the Blister Sisters. Elissa Mae. Ruby Mae. Lula Mae. Ruby Tuesday. Mae West and May Day. She’s the One, Two Dollar Radio, Flamingo Layne. KM, LM, KLF. A Member of the Wedding. Spanky. Misty. The best little engine in the world. Hanna Reitsch, Jaqueline Auriol, Zhang Yumei, Olga Tovyevski. M3 in Orion. ‘Sabiha Gokce’. Pauline Gower and Celia Renfrew-Marx. Irma X. Colette. Mama Doc. Sfascamenta. My name is Pearlant! My name is Pearlant and I come from the future! Never mind darling she tells the other one. Please try to be a bit calmer. At least we’re alive. It’s not much but it’s better than being dea

The volunteers of the Wyndlesham & District Fire Service, called to a house on Coldmorton Lane when smoke was seen rising just after dawn, attended with a turn-of-the-century pumping unit on a Man chassis and their even older Mercedes turntable (some local enthusiast’s ‘big society’ donation, salvaged from the corner of a field in southern France and lovingly restored), to find the occupier, a fifty- or sixty-year-old woman naked and with an inexplicable smile, half in and half out of a small wooden structure at the end of her garden. She was dead. Preparing to damp down, they also discovered that though it had collapsed in on itself in a curiously chaotic way — as if blown about by brief, whirling, highly localised gusts of wind — the structure, a lapboard shed about the same age as their Mercedes, had clearly never been on fire. There was no heat. There was no charring. There was no smell. The banks of glowing embers that had appeared to surround it when they arrived turned out to be only its contents, piles of colourful household stuff which had burst from the damp cardboard boxes inside when the roof fell in.

Police, paramedics and the dead woman’s GP all turned up at once. By then, the turntable had returned to its garage in the derelict agricultural college buildings at Plumpton; and the team leader — a raw-looking Yorkshireman called Weatherburn with hacked-off grey hair, thirty years’ experience and his own sense of humour — was rocking the Man pump about in front of the house, trying to get it back out into Coldmorton Lane without cutting up the lawn. Weatherburn stuck his head out of the cab’s side window and told the doctor: ‘Whatever the caller spotted, it wasn’t a fire.’