Empty Space by M. John Harrison

said Irene, pushing her away. ‘What’s a mortsafe anyway?’
    ‘I don’t see anything much in there,’ Liv Hula said. ‘Can we have the lights on?’ She sought out the bills of lading. ‘“MP Renoko”,’ she
    read. ‘“Hard goods. D.i.f. Documents on site.” Where are we taking this?’
    ‘Da Luz Field,’ Antoyne said. ‘Somewhere called World X. It’s fifty lights down.’
    ‘Everywhere’s fifty lights down, Fat Antoyne.’

SIX

    Skull Radio
    The assistant rented her room from someone she knew, a woman called Bonaventure who ran a bar on Straint Street near the event site. At night the rocket launches lit the
    room’s warm air like a bad tank experience, psychic blowback from the engines reinscribing the thoughts and feelings of the people who had lived there before her. They sweated out on to the
    walls in layers of swirled colours like graffiti written on top of one another. Maps, artefacts, butterflies from another world, all of that kind of thing. For some reason, the assistant
    didn’t mind. She was used to it. She enjoyed it – although ‘enjoyment’ was a word she had never used much about her own experiences. Sometimes she wondered whose dreams
    she was having.
    The evening after she first heard the word ‘Pearlant’, a man called Gaines walked in through the wall of the room. She understood instantly he was not one of the past’s
    stories. His appearance made her afraid. In response, her tailoring switched itself on; but something he could do – or didn’t even need to do – switched it off again, so that
    she came up off the bed hard and fast, then had to stand there in the middle of her own room, feeling naked and displaced, like a child who has made a bad judgement and sees it too late, while he
    walked around her to the window as if she was a fixed object, something almost interesting in a shop, something that wasn’t in his way.
    ‘This is a quaint place to live,’ he said, looking down into the street, which had once been gentrified but which was going downhill again. It was late. The bars and nuevo tango
    joints were opening slowly, their neon-cluttered facades pulsing and sucking. Ads patrolled the pavement with the soft voices of children. Rocket dub basslines thumped in the walls. The
    street was opening like a glass anemone against the steepening food gradient of the night. ‘But all this cultural babble out here, don’t you sometimes want a rest from it?’
    ‘It’s only what people want,’ the assistant said. She wasn’t sure what people wanted.
    ‘They mistake it for substance.’
    ‘I don’t know what that means.’
    It meant that there was something down underneath all this, Gaines informed her. ‘It means that the world isn’t all signs and surfaces.’
    She indicated the walls of the room, still imbricated and flickering with hallucinations, hard sweats, failed or partial communications from other planets. ‘How could there be?’
    she said. ‘Anything fixed? In this physics universe?’
    He came away from the window then and stood close in to her, calculating and looking her up and down with a new interest. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I know there is because I’ve
    seen it.’
    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