Cover

Title page

EMPTY SPACE

A HAUNTING

M. John Harrison

GOLLANCZ

LONDON

Dedication

To Forced Ent

Epigraph

‘No point is more central than this, that empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics’

JOHN A. WHEELER

‘Our instruments have limits. Since knowledge of physical reality depends on what we can measure, we will never know all there is to know . . . Much better to accept that our knowledge of physical reality is necessarily incomplete . . .’

MARCELO GLEISER

‘In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times’

A.E. VAN VOGT

1 Organs

ONE

Organs

Anna Waterman heard two cats fighting all evening. At ten o’clock she went out into the garden and called in the family tom. A decade or so ago, her daughter Marnie, age thirteen and already unfathomable, had named this animal ‘James’. Late summer displayed a greenish afterglow at the bottom of a sky full of stars. Anna’s was a long garden, perhaps fifty yards by twenty, with lichenous apple trees in unmown grass and a leaning summerhouse which looked like something from a 1970s Russian film – falling apart, surrounded by overgrown flowerbeds, filled with those things you discard but don’t throw away. The flowerbeds had an unhealthy vitality. Every year, tended or not, they produced dense mixtures of indigenous weeds, wild flowers and – since the warming of the mid-2000s – exotics with large petals and fleshy leaves, blown in as seeds from who knew where.

‘James!’ Anna called.

James didn’t respond, but neither were there sounds of him killing or being killed. Anna was encouraged.

She found him in the base of the hedge at the end of the garden, where he had something cornered among the roots and dry earth. He was nosing it about, tapping at it with a front paw, purring to himself. She stroked him and he ignored her.

‘You old fool,’ she said. ‘What have you found now?’

Some gelid bits and pieces loosely scattered with soil. Except for the size and colour, they looked like internal organs. They had the swelling curve of pig’s kidney. There was a faint glow to them. Anna picked one up and dropped it immediately – it was warm to the touch. The cat, delighted, sprang upon it and knocked it about.

‘How disgusting you are, James,’ Anna told him.