Aschemann tried to get up.
"I don't feel well. Can you help me?"
They stumbled along the beach and sat in his car.
"Do you want a drink?" he offered. He laughed shakily. "I would feel safer if I had a drink." She began to laugh too, but neither of them wanted to go back into the bar.
"It's only the aureole," she said.
Neither of them said anything else for five minutes. Then Aschemann went on to dial-up, with a request for increased surveillance on Vic Serotonin. "Well, do what you can, then," she heard him instruct whoever was at the other end. "What? No." He cut them off suddenly. "Always a problem," he complained. "The fact is," he admitted to her, "it may have been a mistake to go so easy on Fat Antoyne. He is the link between this and Vic."
"You can always pick him up again."
Instead of answering, Aschemann stared across at the Cafe Surf. "I feel braver now," he said. "How about you?"
She shrugged. She wasn't sure.
"If you're better now," he said, "go back to the office." He patted her arm. "Take this beautiful car, I'm feeling generous."
"What will you do?"
He got out of the Cadillac.
"Drink a glass of rum," he said. "Perhaps two."
She drove along the Corniche and back up the hill. The traffic was good until midtown, where the streets were packed with rickshaws. On her own she seemed less animated. If Aschemann had been able to observe her expression he would have described it as "inturned." But how useful a description was that? When she was alone, she knew, she was herself. When she was alone, she did only the things she did. She was a policewoman driving carefully. She was a policewoman glancing at her forearm datableed, then up at the street again. She was a policewoman consulting the driving mirror before she waved on a sweaty rickshaw girl in electric-blue lycra. She left Aschemann's car in the parking garage and went and sat quietly in his office and waited to feel calm. Thin from lack of appreciation, Aschemann's shadow operators crept out of the corners and took up their customary forms, whispering, "Is there any way we can help? Is there anything we can help with, dear?" They knew her. They liked her. She always tried to find them something to do. She had them adjust the slatted blinds so that the light fell across her face in precise lines of black and white. She had them bring her up to date. After a moment or two she asked them:
"Why is he the way he is?"
"All we know, dear," the shadow operators said, "is you don't make the kind of sacrifices that man has made, not without suffering."
"Oh no, dear."
"He's a saint, that man."
"Can you get me his records?"
Aschemann waited out the afternoon in the Cafe Surf. The colour was back in his face. He ate a dish of falafel. He watched pos-sesively the scraps of sunshine move across the floor, change shape, fade to a kind of eggy yellow, like a painting of sunshine, then vanish. The tide came up the sand outside, bringing a reflective violet light all its own. With that arrived the first customers of the evening, who began to talk and laugh-quietly at first, then with more animation.
By seven every table was taken and they were three deep at the bar. The place was rammed. Seven-thirty, the neon sign went on. Then the two-piece arrived, and after a gin rickey for its nerves rolled right over everyone. The keyboard guy-twenty years old, blond spiked hair and sly, mobile mouth-wore a plaid drape suit. He was a clown and a thief. He was a geek genius. Everything he played that evening, the audience understood, would be a joke at the expense of some other tune, some other musician, some other kind of music. They were delighted. They were complicit. Every so often even the saxophonist-an older man, the muscles round his mouth tightened into two deep grooves by years in the job-would stop playing and listen: it was as if he'd heard someone this good once before but now forgot who or when or where. Then, putting these speculations behind him, he would pull sharply on his cigarette, glance down at the saxophone, and pick things up a little. Rhythms flicked and ripped, tangled and separated. They tore into Parking Orbit, Entradista and New Venusport South. Things slipped a little toward the sentimental side with Moonlight in Moneytown; then came right back on track, to rising cheers and whistles, in the genuinely awesome hard bop autopsy and deconstructed chamame beats of Gravity Wave.
At the height of the wave, five men in eveningwear were squeezed from the Cafe Surf lavatory; then two dock-boys with dyed brush-cuts and steel-toed boots, arm in arm with an emaciated blonde who kept wiping her nose on her pliable white forearm.
Aschemann leaned forward tensely in his seat.
They looked half-formed, sticky, fresh from the chrysalis. Half an hour in, the music dried them out. Soon they were straggling aimlessly along the Corniche together, singing, linking arms, running suddenly for no reason. The detective followed, observing their amazement at the moth-haunted cones of light beneath the Corniche lamps. They were awed by everything. They visited another bar, called The Breakaway Station, and from there found their way down to the beach, where the blonde danced off on her own to trip and fall laughing in the thick sand while her new friends clung together in the wind at the edge of the sea. Then all eight of them turned inland and trudged solemnly up Maricachel in the warm scented darkness until they found themselves, as perhaps they had always intended, in Carmody.
Aschemann had the quarter pumped with nanodevices which, drifting like clouds of milt in the neon light, could detect two molecules of human pheromone in a kilometre cube of air, filter the DNA out of a Friday night, illuminate each casual exchange of fluids in wavebands from far infra-red to near ultraviolet. The results of this expensive, operator-rich technique were streamed to him as simultaneous separate edits of the data, which he built into composites and profiles at will. Even so he lost his quarry almost immediately among the bars and transsexual brothels, the streets that stank of perspiration, oil products and lemon grass.
Midtown they still clung together in a group. Then the men, quiet and greedy, peeled off one by one. They had a poor hold on things but they knew what they liked. Fried food, sex, hard drugs, smart tattoos, tank parlours, any kind of music from chamame to rockit dub. One minute they were still distinguishable, gawking up at buildings like black amp; gold cigarette packs against the sky: the next they had entered an alley, climbed a flight of stairs, paid cash to get processed through some pocked security door. They had merged somehow with the life around them. They were gone. Aschemann had a sense of them fading away in front of him. The hardware felt it too.
The blonde was the last to go. Where her friends had appetites, she had a sense of herself. She was puzzled by her own drives. She stood in her short white sleeveless satin dinner frock at the intersection of Montefiore and Bone, smiling at a lull in the traffic. She took off one shoe and rubbed her foot. She took off the other shoe and held them both in her hand. She looked one way, then the other, then back again, smiling expectantly each time as if she would suddenly see something new. But it had all stopped happening. The street remained empty, the neon blinked on and off. The smile faded. Aschemann looked away briefly and when he turned back she was gone.
"Can you confirm that?" he asked his team.
They could. Even so, he expected to look up and see her in the middle distance, trudging purposefully towards the next bar.
***
Something about the blonde reminded Aschemann of his wife- her sense of expectation, something, he didn't entirely know what. He remained in Carmody another hour, hoping the nanodevice operation would produce results. Things didn't work out that way; and although he could easily have returned to the Cafe Surf to collect a fresh group of suspects, in the end an impulse made him hail a rickshaw and take it down to Suicide Point, where his wife had lived.
By then it was nearly dawn. Along the concrete service road between her house and the beach, Point kids stood about in loose groups waiting for customers. One or two of them glanced up briefly at the rickshaw bowling past, trailing its coloured smoke of junk holograph
ic ads, then away again. They all had small heads and blank faces. Sand blew round Aschemann's shoes as he stood on his wife's doorstep and raised his hand to knock. Before he could complete the gesture he heard his own voice say clearly, "What are you doing?"
He didn't have to knock. He had the key. He could go in any time, nevertheless he went back and sat in the rickshaw and explained to the rickshaw girl:
"My wife's dead."
"It's a problem we'll all have."
"I forgot for a moment," he said.
He felt embarrassed. The rickshaw girl, who had clambered out of the shafts and was rubbing down her legs with a pertex towel, seemed willing to forgive him. "Hey, I'm called Annie," she said. "Just like the rest of them, I guess. I mean, I know you didn't ask." Like all those Annies, she had opted for the extreme package. She was tailored up as big as a pony-with eighteen inches on Aschemann even when she stooped-and her damp candy-coloured lycra exuded a not-dissimilar reassuring smell. Cafe electrique and a malfunction of her onboard testosterone patch caused her to stamp about restlessly in a fog of her own perspiration. "Maybe you ought to go somewhere else?" she suggested. "Your wife being dead and all? This time of night I'll take you anywhere."
Aschemann said he would like to go back to Carmody.
He made a vague gesture towards the sea, which could be heard sucking meditatively at the sand behind the house. "It's nicer in the day," he said. "Really I just come here to think."
"Most people visit the chopshop and get a cultivar," the rickshaw girl observed. "They get back the person they love that way." She reinserted herself between the shafts, turned her vehicle round and faced it up the hill. "No one has to lose anyone now," she said. "I wonder why you don't do that, the way everyone does."
Aschemann often wondered too.
"She lived here on her own," he said. "She retreated." He wasn't sure how to expand on this. "With her it was drink, fuddled political principles, old emotional entanglements. Help only confused her."
Two or three times a week she had wanted to talk about their lives together, to find out what the weather was like where he was, discuss the view from her window or his. "You see that boat out in the Bay? Do you see it too? The blue one? What sort of boat is that?" Then she would encourage him: "Come over! I'll get the Black Heart Rum you like so much." He always said yes. But in the end he rarely had the courage or energy to make the visit, because if he did she would soon sigh and say, "We had such times together, before you took up with that whore from Carmody."
"At Christmas," he told the rickshaw girl, as the rickshaw slipped along between the ragmop palms and peeling pastel-coloured beach houses either side of Suntory Boulevard, "I bought her a perfume she liked called Ashes of Roses." The rest of the time he had tried to stay away. "I was no longer in a position to m. John Harrison look after her, yet she wouldn't look after herself. Because of this I felt not only guilt but an increasing sense of irritation."
"Ashes of Roses!" the rickshaw girl said. "No shit."
Thinking he heard voices back on the access road, he turned to look out the rear window. Sand was blowing across the concrete in the purple light. No one was there, not even the Point kids.
"Go back!" he said. Then: "I'm sorry."
The rickshaw girl shrugged.
"Hey," she said. "I don't care where you go."
3
The Liquid Moderne
After what had happened with his latest client, Vic Serotonin slept a lot. He slept as if he was dead, without any dreams. You spend time on the Saudade site, you don't dream. But you wake up feeling like hell and it gets worse all your life, just something else to look forward to, as Vic always said. The exertion of not dreaming drove you to a sweat.
Vic's home was a coldwater walk-up in South End which he inherited, along with his entree into the business, from a retired en-tradista and tour guide called Bonaventure. He had two rooms and a shower. He never cooked or ate there, though there was an induction stove and the place always smelled of old food. It smelled of old clothes too, old tenancies, years of dust; but it was close enough to the event aureole, which was his professional requirement. Vic slept on a bed, he sat in a chair, he shaved in a mirror; like anyone else he bought all those things at a repro franchise at the end of the road, the day he moved in. He kept his zip-up gabardine jackets and Inga Malink artisan shirts in a wardrobe from Earth, rose veneer over boxwood circa 1932AD, that far away, that long ago. Out one window he had a good view of a bridge; out the other it was a segment of the noncorporate spaceport, primarily weeds and chainlink fence.
Late one afternoon he got up, looked in his mirror and thought:
"Jesus, Vic."
Whatever happened had made him look fifty years old. He still had the taste you get in your mouth after you've been in there recently, and he was still seeing the client run away from him in the weird elongated dawn light. There was something in her panic, there was something in the way she ran: he couldn't remember what it was, but at least he wasn't angry any more.
Among the litter in the apartment Vic kept a Bakelite telephone with cloth-covered cables and a bell that rang. Everyone had one that year; Vic's was as cheap as everything else he owned. Just after he finished shaving, the bell rang and he got a call from a broker named Paulie DeRaad, which he was expecting. The call was short, and it prompted Vic to open a drawer, from which he took out two objects wrapped in rag. One was a gun. The other was harder to describe-Vic sat by the window in the fading light, unwrapping it thoughtfully. It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across the object's surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands. It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither.
He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn't know. He didn't want to know.
"Hey," he said into the telephone, "yeah, I got it. It's still here."
He listened for a moment. "Why would I let that happen?" he asked. Then he said OK and hung up. He wrapped the item in its rag and left the building with it. "I don't do this for love," he complained on his way downstairs, as if he was still talking to Paulie DeRaad. DeRaad, one-time vacuum commando, facilitator and all-round Earth Military Contracts factotum, ran a joint he called the Semiramide Club, the visible part of extensive holdings in which EMC subsidiaries were implicated to the hilt. Wait-and-see was Paulie's working pattern, safety first his motto; and in this case, he said, he preferred Vic to meet with one of his operators, who would check things out and only make the buy if the goods were good.
Vic wasn't sure who he liked least, Paulie or his operators. Nevertheless he went down through Moneytown to the ocean, and not long after he left home found himself at the Suicide Point end of the Corniche, waiting in the half-dark of a one-room cinder-block structure which might once have been a bar, or a place where you bought cheap finance with predictable consequences, but which now anyway had peeling walls, boarded windows, a signature of disuse. Advertisements for legal services flickered softly round the heads of the Point kids in gun-punk outfits who stood talking between the ragmop palms outside.
Vic waited inside, listening carefully, for some minutes. It seemed a long while before anything happened. Then the palm trees were agitated by a cold breeze, and silvery rain poured down at an angle through the blue light on the beach. The Point kids shouted and ran about in the rain for a minute or two; then they were gone. As if he had been waiting for this, Vic took out the package an
d held it in one hand; he took out his gun and held it in the other. The room smelled of standing water, electricity, darkness.
Vic stood there watching the weather until he heard a soft voice which sounded as if it originated both inside and outside the building.
The voice said, "Hello, Vic."
"You want to come in out the rain," Vic advised.
"That's funny, Vic."
"Even so. I'm not here to talk to the climate."
The voice said, "I'll send someone."
Vic shrugged as if it had asked him for something he didn't intend to give. "The wrong thing happens here," he warned, "and I'll shoot the goods. You should be aware of that."
Another laugh.
When Paulie DeRaad's operator came in, it came as one of the Point kids, male, maybe ten years old, wearing the usual tawdry Point notion of gun-punk chic, a sun-faded gabardine coat buttoned up tight to the neck and falling away unbelted from there to just below the knee. The kid walked in under his own power, then began to shake violently and fell against the wall. "How come you do this to me?" he asked, in a puzzled voice. "I never even saw you before." He coughed, wiped the back of one wrist across his mouth and tried to make eye contact with Vic Serotonin, who turned determinedly away. After a minute or two Vic heard a sigh. The light flickered outside. The kid stopped making an effort and slid down the wall.
"Turn around now, Vic," the operator said.
Vic licked his lips.
"I promise you it's safe to turn around now."
Vic turned around. "You look like my mother," he said. He had no idea why his mother came into his mind, only that he was no longer certain what sex the Point kid was. It stood quite still and calm. Vic thought that if it ever did choose to move, to walk or run or anything understandable like that, it would be as graceful as a dancer. Its face seemed bigger. Its eyes too-they made too much contact with you. There was a kind of morning glow in that face, the unsexed unknowable personality of the Shadow Boy inside, an optimism so bare no one could look at it long.
Nova Swing Page 4
