‘Who does?’ said Irene. ‘I suppose  you had a good time last night?’

When Liv smiled and looked down at her yoghurt it was already full of flies. Later, the three of them stood in the Nova Swing main hold examining what Renoko had left them: another  mortsafe, a metre or two longer than the first and floating a few inches higher off the floor, tapered to both ends and much more knocked about.

‘There should be a viewing plate,’ Antoyne said, ‘but I don’t find it.’

You saw these things in all the old travelling shows, MP Renoko had explained. They were pressure vessels. The carnie narrative was they contained an alien being: people paid to stare in, maybe their  kids would bang on the tank  with a stick, everyone went away happy. This one, riveted like an old zinc bucket, had streaks of corrosion, sublimated sulphur and char along its sides, as if it had been through a recent low temperature fire or failed industrial process: some event, Fat Antoyne said, with barely enough energy to boil a kettle. After that it had been stored in damp conditions. It was more work to move about than the first one. And if you put your hand underneath it – which he didn’t recommend  anyone did that – it would be microwaved.

Liv Hula shivered.

‘Sometimes I hate it in here,’ she said.

Irene laughed darkly. ‘“As-yet-undetermined”,’ she said. ‘That cunt Toni Reno has let us in for it again.’

9 Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears

NINE

Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears

Last practitioner  of a vanishing  technique,  with  specialisms in diplomacy, military archaeology and project development, R.I. Gaines – known  to younger  colleagues as Rig – had  made  his name as a partly affiliated information  professional during one of EMC’s many small wars. He believed that while the organisation was fuelled by science, its motor ran in the regime of the imagination. ‘Wrapped up in that metaphor,’ he often told his team – a consciously mongrelised  group  of policy interns,  ex-entradistas and science academics comfortable along a broad spectrum of disciplines – ‘you’ll always find politics. Action is political, whether it intends to be or not.’

Some  projects  require  only  an  electronic  presence.  Others plead  for  some  more  passionate  input.  Today  Gaines  was in-country on Panamax IV, where the local rep Alyssia Fignall had uncovered  dozens of what at first sight seemed like abandoned cities. Microchemical analysis of selected hotspots, however, had convinced her they were less conurbations  than what she loosely termed ‘spiritual engines’: factories of sacrifice which, a hundred thousand  years before the  arrival of the  boys from  Earth,  had hummed  and roared day and night for a millennium or more, to bring about change or, more likely, hold it off.

‘Close to the Tract,’ she said, ‘you find sites like these on every tenth planet. You can map the trauma front direct on to the astrophysics.’