M. Harrison - Empty Space

In his glory days Fat Antoyne Messner had run a number of petty mules like the Nova Swing . All featured illegal propulsion systems, capacious holds and occult service histories: they were registered out of planets with made-up names. He had operated them, so he claimed, on behalf of numerous Halo celebrities: Emmie-Lou Parang, Impasse van Sant, Margot Furstenburg, Ed Chianese. Why rocket-sport stars and entradistas like that would need the services of a rusty cargo vessel, when they were up to their eyes in smart carbon and BMG-composite hulls with salvaged alien machinery bolted the other side of the pilot bulkhead, he never made clear. Maybe it was to haul spare parts. Maybe it made them feel good to have a fat man around.

Whether you believed these claims or not, one thing was certain: Antoyne was no longer the loser you used to see beached-up in Saudade City, narratising his bad luck, drinking Black Heart rum, reduced to making small points at the very edge of the game as errand boy for cheap crooks like Vic Serotonin or Pauli DeRaad. He owned his own ship. He had an eye for a transaction. He wasn’t even fat anymore.

At 4am the morning after he met with Toni Reno, Antoyne made some FTL calls, as a result of which he found himself down in the Nova Swing number one hold, re-examining the payload Toni left behind. On the bills of lading it was described, ‘Delivery, insurance, freight, documents on sight’, which is not to say much. Because of his previous career, Antoyne experienced a natural anxiety when it came to Port Authority paper. About the payload itself, technology had told him all it could. He concentrated instead on its viewport, situated at the front end and constructed of three inch quartz glass, opal in colour, elliptical in shape. To obviate reflections, Antoyne had switched off the halogen lights. Every so often he was forced to wipe condensation from the glass with a piece of rag.

If he cupped his hands round his face, he could make out a greenish object, like something alive viewed under low-power photomultiplication. This object moved about, or maybe not. Antoyne didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like being in the dark with it, or the way the Nova Swing main hold seemed warmer than usual, or the carmine LEDs that occasionally flickered into life up and down the mortsafe’s lateral line.

Two years before, Antoyne’s company — Bulk Haulage, aka Dynadrive-DF — had won a six month contract to tow hulks in the Vera Rubin’s World quarantine orbit. Antoyne left the Nova Swing at home, hired an 18/42 series Weber tug — the Pocket Rocket , old but serviceable — and ran the job out of a landing-field bar known to its habitués as ‘The East Ural Nature Reserve’. He took a room for the duration, not far down Gravuley Street from the field, and ate with all the other quarantine dogs at the Faint Dime diner, where he liked the way the light reflected off the chromed faux-Deco panels behind the counter. Early evening would find him at the window of his room, eyeballing the Neapolitan layers of a late sunset while he waited for the neon to come on. It was a two-storey town on a one-issue planet. Their idea of style was yellow Argylls and black loafers. Gravuley Street seemed to go on forever, especially at night.

A week after he arrived, Antoyne watched something strange emerge from a boarded-up building not far from the Faint Dime: the naked body of a baby, magnified to adult size and the same olive-drab colour as the frontage. At first, looking up from the sidewalk to the second floor, he had it as some kind of novelty sign. What would you advertise with a giant baby? He didn’t know. Any kind of baby was a mystery to Antoyne. He didn’t like them much. This one, which appeared perhaps three months old, protruded at an odd angle, so that its pudgy legs lolled apart. It was a girl. Antoyne averted his gaze, as if he had seen some kind of porn not to his taste. He thought he heard a faint, squeezing rustle: when he made himself look again the baby had forced itself out a millimetre or two more. It was working its way into Antoyne’s world. A voice from beside him said without preamble:

‘Have you ever been inside a quarantine hulk?’

This voice belonged to MP Renoko, a man you often met at The East Ural Nature Reserve, where he would begin a conversation by saying: ‘You agree there’s no neccessity to confuse a practical tool with a theory of the world?’ Renoko came and went, but always bought rounds of drinks.

‘I’m relieved to see you,’ Antoyne said. ‘Considering this.’

‘Considering what?’

‘That,’ Antoyne said, pointing above his head; but the baby was gone. He looked up, around, behind him: nothing.

Gravuley Street offered no aid. To the left lay darkness and the empty planet; to the right, the savagely lighted window of the Faint Dime. He could see every item of interior decoration, pressed-out and perfect in candy colours. Someone was drinking Ovaltine with rum. Someone else was getting a big-size ham on rye sandwich with fries. Antoyne wiped his mouth. The hair went up on his neck. One o’ clock in the morning, and a light wind blew dust in ribbons down the middle of the street.

‘Something was here,’ he asserted. ‘Why don’t we get a drink?’

‘I’m buying,’ said MP Renoko. ‘It seems to me you’ve had some sort of shock.’

Renoko looked like a photograph of Anton Chekhov, if Chekhov had aged more and come to favour a little white chin-beard. Otherwise his look sucessfully teamed used raincoats with grey worsted trousers five inches too short. His hair — white, swept back to a grubby collar — always seemed full of light. He was small-boned, and intense in manner. His clothes came spattered with outmoded foods such as tapioca and ‘soup’. On his feet he wore cracked tan wingtips without socks, and it was a feature of this careful image that his ankles went unwashed. As soon as he and Fat Antoyne had settled themselves in the comparative safety of The East Ural Nature Reserve, he returned to his original subject as if he had never left it:

‘“Everyone their own evolutionary project,” we tell each other here in the Halo. Excuse me, this can only be an element of cultural self-dramatisation, even in times like ours.’ His smile meant he was prepared to forgive that. ‘But if there is a new species,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s up there in those quarantine hulks.’

Fat Antoyne said he didn’t get it.

Renoko smiled. ‘You get it,’ he said.

Leaked navigational nanoware or eleven-dimensional imaging code slips up someone’s anus at night and discovers it can run on a protein substrate. In a similar way, ads, memes, diseases and algorithms escape into the wild. They can run on your neurones, they can run inside your cells. They perform a default conversion. Suddenly the cops are out with the loudhailers, ‘Stay inside! Stay indoors!’ but it’s too late: on your street, in your house, everything collapses suddenly into an unplanned slurry of nanotech, half-tailored viruses and human fats — your husband, your two little girls in their identical dresses, you. ‘Entire planetary populations,’ Renoko said, ‘are converting to this stuff. Is it an end-state?’ He threw up his little hands. ‘No one knows! Is it a new medium? No one is willing to say! It’s as beautiful as water in strong sunlight, yet it stinks like rendered fat, and can absorb an adult human being in forty seconds. The hulks are full of it, the quarantine orbit is full of hulks. Men like you keep it safe.’ Obsolete pipeliners that worked the Carling Line, decommissioned Alcubierre warps the size of planetisimals, anything with a thick hull, especially if it’s easy to reinforce further: Fat Antoyne had a sudden clear image of those pocked relics in the interplanetary darkness — used-up ships mysterious with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs, pinwheeling around on near-chaotic operator-controlled trajectories.