Empty Space Read Free

lights along the Beach – it was logged as ‘hard goods’; but the object itself, though unlabelled, had illegal
    artefact written all over it.
    No point of origin was on record.
    ‘Enka!’ he called. ‘Where the fuck are you?’
    He thought he heard a shout from somewhere out on the windy hard standings in the dark, too far away to be an answer, or to be anything to do with him.
    Toni Reno’s percentage always generated itself in a financial space far removed from the physical transaction itself. It was a given for everyone in this kind of arrangement that they
    never knew how their part of it related to any other. In this case, the paperwork advised him, his responsibility ended when the goods were stowed in the hold of a freighter named the Nova
    Swing . So when he discovered he could move the object just by pushing it, he decided to load it himself.
    It was hard work, like manhandling something in water. Once he manoeuvred it out of the shed, there were six or seven hundred yards to cover. The arcs were off in the whole south sector of the
    port, the rain coming on again. One moment clouds filled the sky, the next they had passed over and the Tract cast down a bluish light. Reno would push a while; stop and call out,
    ‘Enka!’ or try to dial her up; then bend down to get his hands and forearms underneath one end of the tube, almost embracing it. That was the position to push from, the embrace. Each
    time he pushed, the tube dipped and rocked a little on its long axis before moving forward in a slow, oily way. One moment it had more inertia than you expected, the next a breath of wind was
    enough to send it off course.
    The boat they called the Nova Swing stood up against the night sky among all the other short-haulers – tubby, three-finned, brass-looking. Her cargo cradle was out. A
    man known around the port as Fat Antoyne sat on the cradle rail drinking from a pint of Black Heart, his unzipped leather pilot jacket and oiled pompadour flapping in the wind up there. When he
    saw Reno he waved. The lift descended its eighty feet slowly, with whining servo noises, and jolted to a halt; at which Reno put in one last embrace and shoved the goods aboard.
    ‘Hey, Fat Antoyne,’ he said.
    Fat Antoyne said hey. He said, ‘What’s this?’
    Reno brushed down his Sadie Barnham coat. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
    He felt rain cooling the back of his neck and his scalp. It darkened the surface of the tube, the way rain soaks a little into any porous surface; which he somehow didn’t expect. You
    didn’t think about this object – which he now saw had faint remains of moulded features, worn down to bulges and vague crockets long ago – as being subject to weather. The two
    of them contemplated it for a moment, then compared paperwork in case that helped. Fat Antoyne had ‘mortsafe’. ‘You know what a “mortsafe” is?’ he asked Toni
    Reno.
    Reno admitted he had never heard that word. His lading bills had ‘hard goods’, that was all.
    Antoyne chuckled. ‘Hard goods is right,’ he said. ‘I’ll sign off on that.’ Close up, you saw his chinos, tailored for comfort in some kind of twill, had grease
    stains down the front. He was on his own tonight, he said. His crew were getting rest and relaxation in a bar they liked, he wasn’t so keen himself. He offered Reno a drink, but Reno
    regretfully declined.
    ‘You take care,’ Reno told him.
    When Reno had gone, Fat Antoyne put the cap back on the bottle and put the bottle in his jacket.
    ‘Asshole,’ he said.
    He hoisted the tube up into his number one hold. ‘Mortsafe,’ he said, and chuckled. That was a word he could get used to. When he touched the tube, it was cold. He knelt down and
    carefully passed his hands underneath, feeling the faint resistance you feel when you try to press two magnets together. He studied its surface with the help of a loupe designed to operate in
    three different regimes, making a clicking noise with his tongue as