Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "Do you think they originate in the site?"

  Aschemann believed this to be obvious. But he wanted to encourage her, so he only said in a mild way, "I've wondered about that myself." He wasn't comfortable with the possibility. It would mark, he believed, some kind of sea-change. It could only be a marker for change when, without any other help than the music, people came out of the Saudade site who had never gone in.

  "Whatever they are," he said, "we don't want them out here."

  "I'll call down a team," his assistant said.

  Code flickered along her forearm. Her strange eyes, the same colour as the surf, went out of focus as she dialled up. Her lips moved a little even though she wasn't actually speaking. Aschemann put his hand gently on her arm. "Not yet," he cautioned her. His voice collapsed the dial-up. She looked at him vaguely, like someone who has just woken up from a realistic dream.

  "I always like to watch a little," he explained, "before I do anything."

  There was a note of apology in his voice. Aschemann had a high turnover in assistants because he was fond of advising them, "The true detective starts in the centre of the maze: the crimes make their way through to him. Never forget, you uncover your own heart at the heart of it." Another of his favourites, even more puzzling to young men and women conditioned to seek answers, was, "Uncertainty is all we have. It's our advantage. It's the virtue of the day."

  ***

  So now he sat in the Long Bar, in what had become his favourite corner, wondering if he had watched enough.

  Just as he decided that he had, something changed his feeling about the place and what might be happening there. The door opened and let in a man he recognised, Antoyne Messner, called by everyone who knew him Fat Antoyne. No one cared about Fat Antoyne. He had a history of low-per centage contraband operations a few lights away in Radio Bay. He had stayed ahead by moving only the lightest stuff-exotic isotopes, cultivars of embargoed local species, tailor packages for the kiddy trade-in a hullshot Dynaflow HS-SE or -SE2, its cheap navigation tools leaking the illegal daughter-code used to negotiatate the complex gravitational attractors and junk-matter flows of the Bay. His rule: make two trips maximum then throw the ship away. The code itself was the risk in that trade. Relax, and it would come down out of the mathematical space and into your head at night. As long as your hygiene was good, the code kept you one step ahead of EMC, but you still had to be a pilot. In consequence the stresses were high. Antoyne didn't do anything at all since he fetched up in Saudade except run errands for Vic Serotonin, and he was therefore widely assumed to be a burn-out.

  He pushed his way between the tables and sat awkwardly on one of the chromium stools at the Long Bar. He seemed dispirited. He spent some time trying to order a drink which, when it came, the bartender placed in front of him with exaggerated care, and which settled out quickly into distinct layers of pink and yellow. It was popular, he told the people near him, on Perkins' Rent. No one seemed convinced. Aschemann watched him swallow half of it then went over and said, "You're a long way from Straint Street." Then when the fat man stared at him uncertainly:

  "Antoyne? Maybe you don't recognise me. Maybe in this light you don't see me as well as you could."

  "I know who you are," Antoyne said.

  Aschemann smiled. "I would usually find you at Liv Hula's this time of night, caning it with Vic Serotonin."

  "Only I got work now. It's temporary."

  "That's good news, Antoyne!"

  The fat man didn't seem to know how to encounter the enthusiasm of this. "It's temporary work," he said.

  "So how is Vic?"

  Fat Antoyne swallowed the other half of his drink and stood up. "You know," he said, "I like the light in here. I always liked a low light to drink by. It's the music I don't like." He wiped his mouth and gave the band a look which he transferred somehow to Aschemann.

  "I was leaving anyway," he said.

  "There's no need for that," the detective insisted. "Look, I'll just sit here and have another drink. You should have one too." He would be hurt, he implied, if Antoyne went off like that. He pulled up the bar stool next to Antoyne's and took a moment to get comfortable on it. "You don't mind if I sit," he said. "We're both out of place here, surely we can sit together?" He took a matchbook off the barman-it had a tiny hologram of the Live Music Nightly sign, which he turned appreciatively this way and that-and then another glass of rum. "Do you mind if I just fold my coat," he asked, "and put it here on the bar?" He held up his drink to the light. He had a habit of smiling around at people to show that he was enjoying the evening the way it had turned out. He tapped his fingers to the music for a minute or two, then concluded, "Myself, I don't mind this. But what I like is that old New Nuevo Tango."

  The fat man received the news without interest.

  "A lot do," he acknowledged.

  Aschemann nodded. "I heard Vic is taking more risks than he needs to," he said, as if that was part of the same discussion.

  "Vic's OK," Antoyne said defensively.

  "Still, people will get hurt."

  "There's nothing wrong with Vic. Vic Serotonin to my mind never hurt anyone."

  "And yet, you know, he's in and out of the site, like all those people. We can't stop them finding new entrances-" here, Aschemann gave a small chuckle "-sometimes we have our reasons we don't even want to try. But then the next day he's at the Semiramide Club. He's in bed with Paulie DeRaad. Are those kinds of connexions without risk, do you think? For someone in Vic's trade?" After a moment of reflection he added, "All those travel agents have a reckless streak, Antoyne. The trouble in Vic's life proceeds from that."

  Something new seemed to occur to him. He touched the fat man's forearm suddenly to get his attention.

  "Antoyne, has Vic upset you in some way?"

  Antoyne shrugged.

  "I won't give up Vic," he said, and walked off.

  "Vic's giving himself up," the detective called after him mildly. "Not just to me. To whatever's in there."

  Antoyne did not reply, but instead pushed his way more energetically between the crowded tables to the door. In the end there was a kind of fat dignity to Antoyne, which remained intact despite his habit of always putting himself at a disadvantage, of appearing to disentitle himself in a society where anyone could be what they wanted. No one understood why Serotonin tolerated him, but maybe that was why. For a moment or two Aschemann considered this. Then he retreated to his favourite corner, where he tried to recoup the rhythm of the Cafe Surf, taking his time over another glass, drinking in little sips which coated his mouth with the warm rum taste of burnt sugar. He thought about Vic Serotonin, also Paulie DeRaad, who, of the two, he liked the least. He thought about the tourist trade, or at least the sector of it which was his professional concern.

  While he was thinking, the band squeezed out two or three thin boys in white singlets, earrings and studded leather belts. Aschemann watched closely their struggle through the toilet door and into the sticky prismatic light. They looked, he decided, surprised. They looked incomplete, and surprised to find themselves here. Then the music squeezed out an old woman in a hat and a blue print dress and for a moment all four of them swayed clumsily together as if in time to the music. There was a lacuna, a moment of awry-a moment like falling, which happened between them but spread itself out to everyone else in the bar; and then the Cafe Surf was itself again. The new customers bought drinks and headed out into the night.

  Aschemann stood at the door and watched them go. The next night he had some of them arrested.

  The way this came about was unforeseen. Three women and one man were picked up two miles from the Cafe Surf, in the back lot of another bar, where they were apparently trying to have sex with one another. There was some sense they didn't know how to progress with this but were willing to learn. Aschemann, who got notice of the event from the uniform branch, contacted his assistant and had her go down there. "Take them to a holding cell," he told her. "I can't go myself." He had
other things to do-he was out on the edge of the noncorporate port investigating a long-running series of crimes against women-but it seemed pointless to waste the opportunity. "Don't interrogate them," he ordered. "Strictly, there is nothing wrong with trying to have sex in the back lot of a bar, otherwise we would all be in prison. Just settle them in and then you can go home. Oh, and one other thing."

  "What's that?"

  "Make sure no one hurts them."

  She was back on to him perhaps an hour later. Things were fine, she said. It was like handling refugees. Though they were curiously pliable, they were slow to give names. They smelled a little. They didn't seem to be from an alien species. They didn't seem to be hungry. They were not chipped, she said, by any method the holding cell diagnostics understood, neither were any of the usual markers encoded into their DNA; she could therefore assign them no point of origin in the Halo.

  "What do they look like to you?" Aschemann asked her.

  "They look like idiots," she said.

  When she last saw them, that was how they looked. It was perhaps two after midnight. They stood all night like that, puzzledly, in the centre of the cell, talking to one another infrequently in their slow, gluey voices; and in the morning they were gone.

  "There's no explanation for it," she said.

  Her skin ran with data. It was like a pore-bleed. Nervousness or anger was causing her to clench and unclench one fist, as if by pumping the forearm muscles she could pump the mathematics too. He wondered if she had been taught that, or if it was just a mannerism. "Look at the nanocamera record! We had saturating coverage. There was never a moment those people were specifically and exactly not there. In some lights there still seems to be a trace of them, even now. And even after the holding cell was empty, it turned out they had been seen in other parts of the station." She stared at her arm as if it had let her down. "What can have happened? There was never a moment they weren't there. They just seemed to evaporate.

  "There's no explanation," she concluded again.

  Aschemann scratched his head. "Higher up they might want one," he decided. "But we don't have to provide it right now." And then, trying to help her, "This isn't anything anyone could have predicted."

  Next, she wanted them to raid the Cafe Surf.

  "Not yet," he said. "But it's a nice day. Let's visit by all means."

  She stared at him. "What?"

  "It would make a change for you to drive," he told her, and gave his usual driver the day off. Twenty minutes later she was stuck with him. He sat in the front passenger seat with his arms folded, smiling around comfortably as the pink Cadillac convertible slipped down from his office, between the Moneytown palms and white designer duplexes of Maricachel Hill, to the Corniche. It had rained early, but midmorning sun was etching the last traces of humidity off the surface of the air. He loved to be driven, and he was proud of the car. After a few minutes he told her, "You see? You feel better already. Take your time."

  She gave him a look from the side of her eye.

  "Oh ho," Aschemann said. "Now I'm irritating you."

  "I can't believe you're so undisturbed. I can't believe you're not angry."

  "I'm angry," he said, "but not with you."

  He allowed her to absorb that; then, to change the subject, began telling her about the killings at the noncorporate port. Called to the scene of the original crime some years before, he had discovered two lines of a poem tattooed in the armpit of the victim: Send me a neon heart/Unarmed with a walk like a girl. "She was a Mona from five lights down the Beach. The usual juvenile in box-fresh urethane shoes. This tattoo was unique," he said, "in that it was not smart. It was just ink, driven into the skin by some antique process. Forensic investigation later proved it to have been made after the heart stopped beating, in the style of an artist now dead but popular a year or two before."

  "Is that possible?" his assistant wanted to know.

  Aschemann, who had been trying to light his pipe, threw another spent match out of the Cadillac. "Look around you," he advised her. "In the middle of the city we're less than two miles from the event aureole. No one is certain what happened in there.

  Anything is possible. What if crimes are motiveless now, whipped off the crest of events like spray, with no more cause than that?"

  "A surprisingly poetic idea," she said. "But the murders?"

  The man who looked like Einstein smiled to himself. "Maybe I'll tell you more later, when you learn to ask better questions."

  "I think we're here."

  The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf was full of fractured sunlight and bright air. Sand blew across the floor from the open door; the staff were sleepy and vague. Someone's toddler crawled about between the cane tables wearing only a T-shirt bearing the legend SURF NOIR. Meanings-all incongruous-splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a "world" implied in two words, dispelled in an instant; which is foam on the appalling multi-textual sea we drift on. "Which is probably," Aschemann noted, "the name of an aftershave."

  He beamed down at the toddler, which burst into tears. "Show us the toilets," he heard his assistant demanding at the bar.

  They skirted the dais and went through the doorway. Thereafter the floors were checkerboard black and white linoleum, the walls papered red and enlivened at intervals with reproductions of the poster art of Ancient Earth. There was a smell of urine, but that was artificial. Smart grafitti made the usual promises and demands- size, weight, preferred metabolic disorder. "A toilet is a toilet," Aschemann concluded shortly, "though these could be less contemporary. Nothing is here."

  She looked at him in surprise.

  "You're wrong."

  "Suddenly I'm the assistant," he complained.

  "I can feel something." She tilted her head as if listening. "No. The code can feel something. We should get an operator in here."

  "I don't work with an operator."

  "But-"

  "That's all now," he insisted. "We go outside."

  She shrugged. "Apparently this door is never closed."

  A condemned pier awaited them out back. Rusty cast-iron pillars, forty feet high, marched out towards the distant water, the wet sand dimpled and weedy around their bases. Reflected sea-light flickered and wheeled across the rotten boards above. Somewhere between the pillars, the event aureole began. There would be no firm distinction. One moment you would be here, the next you would be on the other side. No warning, only a tangle of rusty wire which fell to powder at your touch. The Cafe Surf, you saw immediately, backed straight into the darkening greenish volume of it. You could hear the water lapping tentatively far out. You could hear other sounds less easy to describe, which to Aschemann sounded like children reciting something in a playground. The air was cold and soft. He bent down and squeezed some of the wet sand into a lump which he brought near his face.

  "What do you think?" he heard his assistant say.

  "I wonder they were allowed to build here," he answered. "I wonder there isn't more wire. I wonder if I ought to close them down now and not proceed any further with this farce." It was his responsibility after all. He dropped the handful of sand at her feet, where it fell apart easily and without a sound. "How far would you go in?" he asked her in return.

  "Into the site?"

  "I'm interested to know."

  Even as they stood looking at one another, a wave passed through them. It went through Aschemann like a drop in temperature, and he saw for an instant the beach behind the Cafe Surf tipped ten degrees off the horizontal; and, falling softly through the air into the water, snow. A metal taste in his mouth-very quick, it was a memory of something-then snow, or something like it, whirled between the pillars, and through it he saw a row of houses fallen into disuse stretching away beneath the pier. Then a room, with more snow falling into it on some live thing
he couldn't make out, he was close in and trying to back away, its head tilted to one side in the coy manner of a child asking a question. Human, or perhaps not.

  At the height of the wave anyway, that was what he saw. An upper room papered with faded roses, open to the air. Something that might have been a child. But it was soon gone, and just as suddenly he found himself sitting down in the damp sand, listening, for what he didn't know, while his assistant bent over him to ask:

  "Are you all right? What did you see?"

  "Snow!" he said, looking up at her in a kind of desperation. He gripped her arm, but, imagining he could feel the data running through it under the skin, let go again immediately. "You saw something too? Can you confirm that? Snow on houses? I-"

  But she had seen something else altogether.

  "I was in the bottom of a narrow valley, very warm. Mosses grew on everything." She found herself standing in front of a building full of disused turbines. "It was a turbine hall, very old," she said, "by a river. It went back into darkness with arched windows either side. Great annular shapes. Spindles absolutely crimson with rust, laminated like choux pastry. Chalk marks. 6II/600rpm." This made her shiver. "They had put chalk marks on many surfaces," she said. The building was open to the sky. That was the only particular she would agree, a building open to the sky. "You looked up through the roof and saw the valley side going up and away to limestone knolls thick with vegetation. Light fell through at sharp angles onto the machinery. But it was very damp. Very humid-"