Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  Liv Hula said, "You didn't go after her, Vic."

  He stared.

  "You stayed where it was safe, and shouted a couple times, and then you came home."

  "Vic would never do that," the fat man said in a blustering way. No one was going to say Vic would do that. "Hey, Vic. Tell her. You would never do that!" He got up out of his chair. "I'm going in the street and keep an eye open now, just the way you wanted. You got a wrong idea about Vic Serotonin," he said to Liv Hula, "if you think he'd do that." As soon as he had gone, she went to the bar and poured Vic another Black Heart rum, while Vic rubbed his face with his hands like someone who was very tired and couldn't see his way through life anymore. His face had an older look than it had when he left. It was sullen and heavy, and his blue eyes took on a temporary pleading quality which one day would be permanent.

  "You don't know what it's like in there," he told her.

  "Of course I don't," she said. "Only Vic Serotonin knows that."

  "Streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync one minute to the next. Geography that doesn't work. There isn't a single piece of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you're done. Lost dogs barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat."

  She wasn't disposed to let him get away with that.

  "You're the professional, Vic," she reminded him. "They're the customers. Here's your other drink if you want it." She leaned her elbows on the bar. "You're the one has to hold himself together."

  This seemed to amuse him. He took the rum down in one swallow, the colour came back into his face and they looked at one another in a more friendly way. He wasn't finished with her, though. "Hey, Liv," he said softly after a moment or two, "what's the difference between what you've seen and what you are? You want to know what it's like in there? The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

  He got up and went to the door.

  "What are you fucking about at, Antoyne?" he called. "I said 'look.' I said 'take a look.' "

  The fat man, who had trotted up Straint a little into the predawn wind to clear his head, also to see if he could get a glimpse of Irene the Mona through a chink in the boarded windows of the chopshop, came in grinning and shivering with the cold. "Antoyne here can tell us all about it," Vic Serotonin said. "Everything he knows."

  "Leave Antoyne alone."

  "You ever been in there when everything fell apart, Antoyne?"

  "I was never in there, Vic," Antoyne said hastily. "I never claimed I was."

  "Everything was just taken away, and you had no idea what established itself in exchange? The air's like uncooked pastry. It's not a smell in there, it's a substrate. In every corner there's a broken telephone nailed to the wall. They're all labelled Speak but there's no line out. They ring but no one's ever there."

  Liv Hula gave him a look, then shrugged. To the fat man she explained, "Vic just so hates to lose a client."

  "Fuck you," Vic Serotonin said. "Fuck the two of you."

  He pushed his glass across the counter and walked out.

  After Vic Serotonin left, silence returned to the bar. It crowded in on itself, so that Liv Hula and the fat man, though they wanted to speak, were hemmed in with their own thoughts. The onshore wind decreased; while the light increased until they could no longer deny it was dawn. The woman washed and dried the glass Vic Serotonin had used, then put it carefully in its place behind the bar. Then she went upstairs to the room above, where she thought about changing her clothes but in the end only stared in a kind of mounting panic at the disordered bed, the blanket chest and the bare white walls.

  I ought to move on, she thought. I ought to leave here now.

  When she came down again, Antoyne had resumed his place by the window and with his hands on the sill stood watching the pay-loads lift one after another from the corporate port. He half-turned as if to speak but, receiving no encouragement, turned back again.

  Across the street someone opened the chopshop door.

  After a brief quiet struggle, Irene the Mona stumbled out. She took an uncertain step or two forward, peering blindly up and down Straint like a drunk assessing heavy traffic, then sat down suddenly on the edge of the sidewalk. The door slammed shut behind her. Her skirt rode up. Antoyne pressed his face closer to the glass. "Hey," he whispered to himself. Irene, meanwhile, set her little shiny red urethane vanity case down beside her and began to claw through its contents with one hand. She was still sitting there two or three minutes later, showing all she had, sniffing and wiping her eyes, when the cats came out of the Saudade event site in an alert silent rush.

  Who knew how many of those cats there were? Another thing, you never found so much as a tabby among them, every one was either black or white. When they poured out the zone it was like a model of some chaotic mixing flow in which, though every condition is determined, you can never predict the outcome. Soon they filled Straint in both directions, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell. Irene struggled upright, but the cats took no more notice than if she had been one of the street lamps.

  Irene was born on a planet called Perkins' Rent. She left there tall and bony, with an awkward walk and big feet. When she smiled her gums showed, and she did her hair in lacquered copper waves so tight and complex they could receive the mains hum, the basic radio transmissions of the universe. She had a sweet way of laughing. When she boarded the rocket to leave, she was seventeen. Her suitcase contained a yellow cotton dress with a kind of faux-Deco feel, tampons and four pairs of high heel shoes. "I love shoes," she would explain to you when she was drunk. "I love shoes." You got the best of her in those days. She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else. She loved a rocket jockey.

  Now she stood with tears streaming down her face, watching the Saudade cats flow around her, until Liv Hula waded fastidiously into the stream and fetched her back to the bar, where she sat her down and said:

  "What can I get you, honey?"

  "He's dead this time," Irene said in a rush.

  "I can't believe that," Liv Hula said. Immediately she was tidying up inside, planning to stay back inside herself away from the fact of it. But Irene kept repeating in her disorganised way, "He's dead this time, that's all," which made it hard to dissociate. Irene took Liv Hula's hand and pressed it to her cheek. It was her opinion, she said, that something makes men unfit for most of life; to which Liv Hula replied, "I always thought so too." Then Irene broke into snuffling again and had to fetch out her vanity mirror. "Especially the best parts," she said indistinctly.

  Later, when Antoyne came and tried to make conversation with her, she gave him the full benefit of her looks. He bought her a drink which settled out the same colours as her skirt, pink and yellow, and which he said they drank on some dumb planet he knew fifty lights down the line.

  "I been there, Fat Antoyne," she told him with a sad smile.

  That original Irene, she thought, wasn't good at being on her own. She would sit on the bed one place or another, listening to the rain and trying to hold herself together. On the other hand, she never lacked ambition. The stars of the Halo were like one big neon sign to her. The sign said: All the shoes you can eat. When she bought the Mona package, the tailor promised her hair would always smell of peppermint shampoo. She had gone through the catalogues, and that was what she wanted, and the tailor designed it in. On the Saudade streets it was her big selling point.

  "I been there," she told Antoyne, letting him get the peppermint smell, "and just now I'm glad to meet someone else who's been there too."

  Antoyne was as encouraged by this as any man. He sat on after she finished the drink, trying to engage her with stories of the places he had seen back when he rode the rockets. But Irene had been to all those places too-and more, Liv Hula thought-and Fat Antoyne had all he was going to get for one cheap cocktail d
rink. Liv watched them from a distance, her own thoughts so churned she didn't care how it ended. Eventually even Antoyne could see the way things were. He scraped his chair back and retreated to his place by the window. What time was it? How had the things happened that ended him up here? He looked out on to Straint. "It's day," he said. "Hey," he grumbled, "I actually respected the guy. You know?" Meanwhile the stream of cats flowed on like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, until suddenly it turned itself off and Straint was empty again. Across the road at the tailor's they were flushing Joe Leone's proteins down the drain.

  At the civilian port, the cruise ships, half-hidden in the mist, towered above the buildings; while along the tall narrow streets a traffic of rickshaw girls and tattoo boys had begun, ferrying the tourists from the New Cafe Al Aktar to Moneytown, from the Church on the Rock to the Rock Church, while around them their shreds and veils of shadow operators whispered, "A sight everyone will be sure to see, a discourse of oppositions." Fur coats were all over Saudade by eight, the colour of honey or horse-chestnut, cut to flow like some much lighter fabric. What sort of money was this? Where did it come from? It was off-planet money. It was corporate money. However cruel the trade that produced them, you could hardly deny the beauty of those coats and their luxurious surfaces.

  Shortly after the last cat had vanished into the city, Vic's client returned to the bar.

  Where Vic had come back filthy, she came back clean. You wouldn't notice anything new about her, except her shoulders were a little hunched and her face was still. Her hands she thrust into the pockets of her coat. Nothing had been taken away from her: but she held her head more carefully than before, always looking forward as if her neck hurt, or as if she was trying not to notice something happening in the side of her eye. It was hard to read body language like that. She placed herself with care at a table near the window, crossed one leg over the other and asked in a low voice for a drink. After a little while she said, "I wonder if someone could give that other man the rest of his fee."

  Antoyne sat forward eagerly.

  "I can do that," he offered.

  "No you can't," Liv Hula warned him. To the woman in the fur coat she said, "Vic's cheap, he left you for dead. You owe him nothing."

  "Still," the woman said, "I feel he should have the rest of his money. It's here. And I was fine, really." She stared ahead of herself. "A little puzzled, I suppose, at how unpleasant it is."

  Liv Hula threw up her hands.

  "Why do they come here?" she asked Fat Antoyne in a loud voice. Before he could say anything, she added, "They leave the nice safe corporate tour and they end up in this bar here. They always find our Vic."

  "Hey, Vic's OK," the fat man said.

  "Vic's a joke, Antoyne, and so are you."

  Antoyne struggled to his feet and looked as if he was going to challenge that, but in the end he only shrugged. Vic's client gave him a faint, encouraging smile, but then seemed to look past him. Silence drew out a moment or two; then a chair scraped back and Irene the Mona came over to the table where these events were happening. Her little urethane shoes clattered on the wooden floor. She had wiped her tears and done her lipstick. She was over Joe the Lion now. What had she been on, to invest her considerable life-energy that way? Irene had a future in front of her, everyone agreed, and it was a good, light-hearted one. She had her plans, and they were good ones too. Though it was true she would keep Joe in her heart-pocket many years because that was the kind of girl she knew herself to be.

  "That sure is a beautiful coat," she said. She held out her hand.

  For a moment, the woman looked nonplussed. Then she shook Irene's hand and said, "Thank you. It is, isn't it?"

  "Very beautiful, and I admire it so," Irene agreed. She gave a little bob, seemed about to add something, then suddenly went and sat down again and toyed with her glass. "Don't be hard on him, honey," she called across to Liv Hula. "He's nothing but a man after all." It was hard to tell which man she meant.

  "I feel he should have his money," appealed the woman in the fur coat. When no one answered she set the cash on the table in front of her, in high-denomination notes. "Anyway, it's here for him," she said. She got to her feet in that careful way she had developed. "If he comes back…" she began. She made her way to the door and stood there for a moment peering up Straint Street towards the event zone, wreathed-silent, heaving and questionable-in its daytime chemical fogs, as if trying to decide what to do. Eventually, she smiled at the other two women; said, "Thank you anyway" and walked off back towards the city. They heard her heels go away for what seemed a long time.

  "Jesus," was Liv Hula's comment. "Hey, Antoyne," she said, "you want another drink?"

  But the fat man had gone too. He had lost patience with the way they treated him in there. He was just a man trying to fit in, someone who had seen as much as anyone else, more than some. It made him angry they didn't listen.

  What the hell, he thought. Nothing keeps.

  At least he was out of that bar now, into the morning somewhere he could breathe, heading for Moneytown and the strip mall wonderland running south of Straint, down past the spaceports to the sea. He was narrowing his eyes in the strong light glittering up off the distant water, as if he could discern something which didn't belong there, something he hadn't lost after all. Something, perhaps, you couldn't lose. He was going to look for work. There was always work in the ports.

  2

  The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf

  A couple of evenings after these events a man who resembled Albert Einstein walked into a different kind of bar, off at the money end of Saudade where the aureole, curving across the city like a shaded area on a map, met the sea.

  Unlike Liv Hula's joint, the Cafe Surf had two rooms. These were known respectively as the Long and Short bars, the latter being notable for a strictly drink amp; run client-base. The man who looked like Einstein went straight through to the Long Bar, where he ordered a double Black Heart no ice and stared around with satisfaction at the high-end retro decor of marble pillars, designer blinds, cane tables and polished chrome bar taps. Ancient movie stars laughed out at him from brushed aluminium frames on the walls, exotic beers glittered from the shelves of the cooler: while under a red neon sign the Cafe Surf two-piece-keyboard and tenor saxophone-ambled its way through the evening's middle set.

  All of this was copied faithfully from a minor hologram work, Live Music Nightly 1989, by the celebrated tableau artiste Sandra Shen. Like the Long Bar constituency itself-a mix of self-conscious young entertainment executives on release from the corporate enclaves just down the beach in Doko Gin and Kenworthy-this seemed to puzzle and amuse him in equal parts. He had the air, cultivated in middle age, of enjoying the things other people enjoy, so long as he didn't have to take part. He smiled to himself and lit his pipe. Most nights, for perhaps a month, he had sat in the same place. He would pull out a chair, sit down, get up again to put a match carefully into an ashtray on the corner of the bar; sit down again. He did all this with a kind of meticulous politeness, as if he was in someone's front room; or as if, at home, his wife required of him a continual formal acknowledgement of her efforts. He would stare at his pipe. He would begin a conversation with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter, getting out his wallet to show her-and her friend, who wore torn black net tights and industrial shoes-something which looked in the undependable Long Bar light like a business card, which they would admire.

  In fact he was not as old as he looked; his wife was dead and whatever else he seemed to be doing, his attention never wavered from its object.

  His name was Aschemann and he was a detective.

  Halfway through his first evening there, Aschemann had uncovered a kind of discontinuity in things at the Cafe Surf. The two-piece, snug under its neon sign on the cramped dais between the Long Bar and the lavatory door, had gained its second wind. It was settling to the long haul, drawing down a kind of haun
ted bebop from the ectoplasmic night air outside-music four centuries old and off another planet. Between numbers there was laughter and shouting; the smell of food grew momentarily stronger, there was a clutter of Giraffe Beer bottles and crumpled serviettes, dark red lipstick on empty glasses, Anais-Anais scent thick in the air. Yet the tables closest to the musicians were deserted; and in the space between them and the dais, people kept appearing. These people didn't seem to belong in the Long Bar. They were shocked-looking men, white-faced, tall, wearing raincoats; thin shaven-headed boys like camp inmates; women with an eye pulled down at the corner: poor, shabby people, people crippled in small and grotesque ways. They were coming out of the lavatory, to push between the piano and the bar and then wander loose, blinking, looking for a moment both confused and agitated, perhaps by the music, perhaps by the light.

  Though they emerged from the lavatory, that was-as Aschemann saw instantly-no guarantee they had ever gone into it. Instead, for a moment, as each of these figures appeared in the orange light, it seemed as if the music itself were squeezing them into existence. As if there was some sort of unformed darkness out there at the back of the Cafe Surf, where the event site met the sea, and the band was squashing it like a fistful of wet sand into these crude forked shapes. They were lively enough. Once they had oriented themselves, they had drinks at the bar and then, laughing and shouting, wandered out into the lighted street. Thoughtfully, the man who looked like Einstein watched them go.

  The next night he brought his assistant along.

  "You see?" he asked her.

  "I see," she said. "But what will you do about it?"

  She was a neat, ambitious young woman on a one-month trial from the uniform branch, fluent in three Halo languages, wired for dial-up and with all the usual tailoring. You could tell that from her eyes, which were often unevenly focused, and from the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of one forearm like smart tattoos. Her experience turned out to be in Sport Crime (the word "sport" to be interpreted here, Aschemann told himself, as a convenient misnomer for the fights), her speciality the violation of mysostatin blocker protocols in chopshop proteomes. She had failed early on to convey to him either the intricacies or the appeal of this discipline, and it wasn't much use in Site Crime anyway. They stood outside the Cafe Surf in the warm wind on the beach, looking at the violet breakers, the curious prismatic displays, visible nightly, where the water met the event aureole, and she suggested: