Empty Space (7 page)

He laughed. ‘And now it wants to see you,’ he said.

He was one of those men you don’t know if they’re older than they look or younger than they look. He had good skin and a smile which seemed satisfied with all the deficiencies of
the world as they had revealed themselves to him. He possessed a deep, withering bitterness he thought he was hiding. Longish grey hair curling into the nape of his neck, maybe a little gelled to
stay in place. Chinos and a polo shirt, light canvas shoes whitened with pipeclay – an outfit that meant something, she could see; an outfit that made references the assistant
couldn’t follow. He had a carefully trimmed grey beard which thrust the lower part of his face forward into the room. He had a good nose, too. But in the gloom and fading inflorescence of
the launch, that was the important part of him, his jaw and his quiet blue eyes.

‘You’re from EMC,’ she guessed.

‘Think that if you like.’

‘I wonder if you’re here at all.’

At that, he smiled again. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ his voice said, from the empty air.

After he’d gone, she went to the window and looked into the street and tried to see what he had seen. Earlier that day there had been an escape of mathematics from the
ram-head control loops of one of the visiting cruise ships, a big Creda Starliner. Daughter code, running on a substrate of nanotech and human proteins, had swum into some unlucky
rocket-jockey’s vestibular lymph during the night. He had made it through port gate security before it began to change him, then rolled around Saudade sneezing and buying drinks in
bars. There would be outbreaks of new behaviour by dawn. The port was shut, and the uniform branch was touring its northern peripheries with sound equipment, advising people to stay in the
house.

‘You are all right if you have only touched yourself. You are OK if you have only touched yourself.’

They were giving out a help centre number to call if you thought you were infected: no one would dream of going there, because in the middle term it meant only the quarantine orbit.

Meanwhile, Gaines was reporting to his colleagues at the Aleph Project. As an EMC fixer with a satisfyingly broad remit, Gaines occupied various different kinds of space,
most of them electronic; although, as he said, some things he did went a little too fast for normal channels. There were actions he could do, assets he had access to, which didn’t seem very
physics. But when he reported to the project, it was in the ordinary way, as a holographic fetch, via a system of private FTL routers.

‘She’s not in touch with it,’ he concluded his report. ‘And if it’s in touch with her, it’s using some part of its personality we haven’t explored
yet.’

He listened for a moment, staring into the air, then laughed. ‘She lives in this room,’ he said. ‘You should see it. No, she has no idea what she is – come to think of
it, nor do I. She has ten-year-old datableed technology running probability estimates down the inside of her arm. What? Yes, some kind of cheap local police thing. What do you say?
Welcome to the Halo, man.’ He laughed again and then his voice went flat.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s too early to bring them together.’

But the next morning he appeared in the assistant’s room again, carrying two plastic cups of coffee – one mocha, one Americano – and some pastries. This time he was wearing a
light shortie raincoat, spotted with rain, over twill cargo pants. His bare chest was grizzled, and the skin had slackened around the nipples, over stringy but powerful-looking pectoral
muscles. If he was younger than he appeared, some odd things had happened to him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we sit on the bed here?’

That was hard for her to understand. She slept on the bed, she sat in the chair. She didn’t sit on the bed.

When he had got her to understand, he gave her some quite complicated co-ordinates, which even to the assistant implied an object travelling towards the Kefahuchi Tract. ‘If anything
strange happens to you,’ he said, while they were eating the pastries. ‘If anything at all odd happens, why don’t you dial me up? Better still,’ he said, ‘why not
use this?’ From his raincoat pocket he took out a thing like a cheap pressed-tin box with a skull in it. The box had a glass front. The skull was small, like a child’s. Sometimes
it seemed to have a body, like a baby’s, a partial homunculus hanging part way through the back wall of the box; sometimes it didn’t. ‘Skull radio,’ he said to the
assistant. ‘It brings down most of the major vibes. Like sucking on the universe through a wide-bore straw. If anything at all odd happens, you give me a call on this.’

‘What for?’ she asked.

Gaines smiled at her. ‘Because you don’t understand yourself,’ he said. ‘Because you’re bored. I’m leaving you the mocha, OK?’ When he was happy, he
had a passive, easy look.

The assistant watched him fade back into the walls. The raindrops never dried on his coat, she thought. They stayed fresh. How did a holographic fetch bring coffee? When he had quite vanished,
she pushed the tin box as far away from her as she could, until it fell off the end of the bed and on to the floor. She didn’t like it. To be sure Gaines had gone, she waited until she
could feel her tailoring come back to normal; then she drank the mocha. She opened a secure pipe to SiteCrime and instructed one of her shadow operators to search the name Gaines. ‘And send
me the car,’ she said. She took calls, and as a result of one of them, drove the Cadillac across town to the noncorporate rocket port, locally dubbed Carver Field. She manouevred between
the tubby little tramp ships until she arrived at the bonded warehousing facility, where, forty hours after the crime occurred, she found herself staring up at the corpse of Toni Reno’s
loader.

Enka Mercury had risen five or six feet higher in the air since Toni Reno found her; but Epstein the thin cop, who had brought in a cherrypicker to get a closer look, thought
her rate of ascent was slowing down. Like Toni, she was still joyfully circling some invisible point. Unlike him she had begun to fade somewhat. The colour leached out of her almost as you
watched, Epstein said; at the same time she was becoming transparent. In a day or two she might disappear. He had been no more successful with Enka than with Toni. She wouldn’t be caught.
Whatever you did, she was out of reach. He stood shrugging apologetically in the chilly space of the warehouse and, indicating the flap of skin dangling from the vic’s armpit, said:

‘At least it looks like she was shot.’

The assistant stepped into the cage of the cherrypicker and manouevred it all around Enka Mercury’s corpse. Puffs of gas were emitted irregularly from its valves. After five minutes she
set herself down again.

‘What did you get from the operator I sent?’ she asked Epstein.

Epstein shrugged. Like everyone else, he had been frightened the whole period the shadow operator was in the alley off Tupolev. Even the experienced uniforms had backed off to let it do its
work. They’d rather stand in the rain all day at a traffic intersection than get near an operator. Dazzling light poured out of its mouth when it saw the corpse. ‘This is really
interesting
,’ it said, watching Toni Reno through a couple of revolutions as if he were an expert performer of some kind. It vomited some more light, then approached Epstein. It had
to stand on its toes to speak to him. Despite himself, Epstein bent down so he could hear. ‘I’ve got a little secret,’ it whispered in his ear. Nothing else. ‘I’ve
got a little secret,’ and off along the alley, turning back once to wave shyly – more at Toni Reno, perhaps, than the cops – before it disappeared into one of the buildings, the
vaporous air opalescing briefly around it as if responding to some phase transition. That morning it was running itself on a seven-year-old girl – a local mite dressed in the
customary white floor-length frock of white satin sprigged with muslin bows and draped with cream lace; also what looked like her mother’s shiny high-heeled pumps – but its
voice had three or four separate components, mostly male.

‘What does anyone get from an operator?’ Epstein said to the assistant.

‘They live by their own rules,’ the assistant agreed. ‘Was it the one that calls itself The Sea?’

‘I don’t know which one it was,’ Epstein said, meaning he didn’t care to know.

The assistant gave him an oblique smile. ‘It had on red fuck-me pumps,’ she predicted. ‘A seven-year-old kiddie in a wedding dress and red patent leather
fuck-me pumps with five-inch heels, what do you say to that, you big hero?’

She dialled up her office and had them pipe over a holographic fetch of Toni Reno’s corpse, so that she could compare Tony and his loader side by side. In those circumstances neither of
them appeared exactly real. Enka Mercury was colourless except for the faint bluish tinge to her face and hands. Toni presented as if he had been imperfectly modelled in a mixture of brown, red
and yellow tones. While she came across as coy as ever, he only looked preserved and shiny and as if he was made of wood. One of his Fantin & Moretti hand-crafted moccasins had fallen
off. The bodies circled at different rates until space seemed to adjust itself to accomodate them and they fell into a synchrony never experienced in life.

‘You see that?’ Epstein said. ‘It’s like they’re aware of one another.’

‘You’re uncomfortable with that.’

He shrugged again. ‘How does it happen?’

‘Perhaps it’s love,’ the assistant said.

Then she said: ‘Ninety per cent of what we see every day is an artefact of some other process. Of the things that are really going on.’ Epstein didn’t know how to reply to
that. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said. Then: ‘The investigator must always take account of that.’

She stood companionably next to him for a moment, hands on hips, looking around the mostly empty space as if oil-stained floors and fluorescent warning stripes held an innate interest for
her. Epstein didn’t like the way she relaxed. He found her as disturbing at close quarters as the operator had been. She was too hard to avoid. Her tailoring occupied the warehouse like
another personality: everything interested it, from a momentary change in Epstein’s breathing to the sound of footsteps half a mile away. Every time its attention shifted, he caught the
rank, exciting smell of hormonal gradients. She would smile at you behind that as if remembering something sexual you had enjoyed together, while pictographs ran chaos patterns down the inside of
her forearm, from elbow to wrist like print from the historical times. She was some cheap cutter’s idea of the future.

‘I want to know when Enka disappears,’ she told him.

For the same reason, she explained, she would recommend they keep an eye on Toni Reno. In her judgement, she said, they were at a weird place with this. ‘But we won’t know how
weird until the next thing happens.’ There wasn’t much else they could do unless The Sea had discovered something. She enquired of her office if Reno had any kind of Port Authority
paperwork in process at the time of his death, and, learning that he did, went off to investigate. Epstein watched her leave, asking himself all the same questions her colleagues asked about her
in the building at Uniment & Poe. The difference? Epstein’s perspective on it was not SiteCrime perspective. It was cop perspective, and to him she resembled nothing more than some
toxic one-shot personality the kids download in Carmody on a Saturday night.

Unaware of these harsh judgements, the assistant made her way across the rainy cement of the noncorporate port.

Toni Reno’s paper trail – chiefly bills of lading, along with some transcripts of FTL uplinker calls – led to a ship called the
Nova Swing
, a crew-owned HS-SE
shorthauler well known to the Port Authority as what they called in those days a ‘petty mule’. Like all those mules,
Nova Swing
was seen in every port on the Beach; today, the
assistant found her parked on the southern edge of Carver Field waiting on freight from some point of origin two or three lights along. The crew of this brassy old three-finner were familiar
to her from the Straint Street bars. More significantly perhaps, as far as the assistant went, they were the small change of Lens Aschemann’s last case: a port whore named Irene, who had
adopted the mona package early and done well on it; an ex-smuggler everyone still called Fat Antoyne, though he was slim and fit-looking now, tan from all those distant suns he visited;
and Liv Hula, a retired rocket jockey. It was this third crew-member the assistant met with, up in the control room alone and just that moment plugging into the ship’s mathematics.

A thin, grey-haired woman about fifty years old, she lay in the pilot couch stripped to a white cotton singlet and simple boy-leg underpants slightly too large for her, while a
two-inch bundle of colour-coded wires forced its way into her mouth. Her head was turned to one side as if to facilitate this. Her eyes looked passively away. The wires pulsed and
wriggled, inserting themselves deftly through the soft palate and into the lower architecture of the brain. As they connected, a cascade of busy, shivery movements went up and down her body like
the beginning of an orgasm. In response there was a chaotic run of lights across the bakelite and grey-paint control consoles; a smell of hot insulation filled the room. Then, in a
startlingly accurate imitation of Liv Hula’s voice, the ship’s speakers said:

‘Really, everyone should try this. The sex never fails.’

‘You could not pay me enough money,’ the assistant said. ‘First it violates your mouth, then it crawls in your ear at night? And you die?’

The pilot laughed. In some phenomenological sense she was now the self of the
Nova Swing
, its identity. She was housekeeping its motors and systems, watching distant events with its
senses. Being the boat, she sometimes said, relieved her of the burden of having a self of her own. To the assistant she boasted, ‘These are the pussiest mathematics. You should see what
the grown-up stuff does.’ As she spoke, ki-gas primers fired off in one of the outboard fusion pods; servos ran up to a clingy high-pitch whine then shut down abruptly.
‘Fuck it,’ Liv Hula complained. ‘Boundary layer turbulence. Antoyne?’ she called. ‘Are you down there? Your fucking old machinery is on the fritz again.’ When
no answer came she asked the assistant, ‘I wonder if you met Antoyne anywhere on your way up through the ship? Because as you see I am busy, and he could help you better than I can at this
time.’ When she talked, a clotted buzz emerged from around the pilot wires, as if she was still trying to form the words with her mouth like an ordinary human being; her hands made small
unrelated movements. Her body looked tired, fallen in on itself. ‘Could you find something to put over me? I’m cold.’