Empty Space Read Free Page A

if he was thinking. Then he shrugged – because what did he know? – secured it, and left. After the arcs went off in
    the hold, and Fat Antoyne had closed the hatch, and his footsteps had gone away inside the ship, the tube seemed to settle a little in its restraints. A few minutes went by, then a few more. A
    couple of lights flickered suddenly on the panel up by the porthole.
    When Reno got back to the warehouse to have one more look for his loader, he found her hanging some feet in the air above the place where the artefact had been. She was
    turned towards him as he entered, her face presenting upside down, her back arched as if he had caught her in the middle of a suspended moment of jouissance, a sort of unpremeditated
    back-flip. She was naked.
    ‘Christ, Enka,’ Reno said. He wondered if she had been there all along.
    The patch of air around her was dark and bluish, despite the lights being on, and in it the shadows fell at wrong angles both to one another and to the shadows in the rest of the shed. This
    gave Enka an effect of being snatched from the world inhabited by people like Reno to another, colder, more complex regime, as if in seeking release she had exchanged one set of predictabilities
    for another. Her arms and legs were still moving slowly. Although that action caused her to rotate a little, it seemed to make no difference to her position in the air; or to her essential
    plight. Her expression was one of understanding, the slow understanding that will lead to panic in another moment. At an undetermined point before this understanding set in, something had
    inserted itself powerfully at a diagonal from her left armpit to the lower part of her ribcage on the opposite side. A long triangular flap of tissue was hanging down, but it was a white and
    fishy colour unsuited to a human being. If he stood on his toes and extended his reach, Toni could catch the end of it, but it had a rubbery touch that made it hard to hold, and when he got
    sufficient grip to pull on it nothing seemed to happen. If her new state shared enough of the boundary conditions of the normal to anchor her there, it was also different enough for Enka to be
    unreachable by Toni Reno.
    Toni couldn’t think how it happened.
    ‘Fuck you, Enka,’ he said aloud. ‘For getting yourself into this.’
    As if in answer a voice said: ‘My name is Pearlent and I come from the future.’
    The shed was empty under the arcs. Enka swam backwards towards him through her new reality, like someone suspended in a low-grade hologram.
    Toni ran out the shed, past the Nova Swing – now closed and dark – and across the noncorporate port in the wind. He would have run all the way home to his refurb in the
    Magellan Ladder if a woman – or what he thought of as a woman – hadn’t come at him in a side street off Tupolev. She came at him very fast and at an odd angle out of the shadows
    – as if before Toni arrived she had been lying down in the shadows at the base of a building – and took hold of him round the upper body. Toni’s tailoring was state of the art,
    but a millisecond or two after it cut in, her tailoring somehow switched it off again. Toni was ramped – nerve propagation speeds were up all over his body, his haemoglobin structures were
    retuning themselves in the picosecond range – but he never landed a punch. He felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He was behind the action. He was still seeing her come up from the
    pavement when she wrapped her left arm almost lovingly round his head and pushed the barrel of a weapon up into his armpit.
    ‘So what do you want to do next?’ she asked him, in a voice which seemed really interested to know.
    When Toni moved his head fractionally to be able to speak, she pressed the trigger and that was that. A couple of b-girls on their way back from a night at the Ivory Coast found him very
    early the next morning. Apparently he was surrounded by black and white cats. ‘We’re knee deep in