Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "Well, then, you would begin to feel bad. But you look fine to me, Paulie."

  "I ain't fine," Paulie said. "I got a temperature ever since this started. I don't care about my food. You bring a Mona in, I even forget she's there for a moment or two. I get vague. What sort of life is that?"

  "One thing," Vic advised, "you should shoot it."

  Paulie stared.

  "I tried that right away. But it reassembles itself, Vic. White lights rolling together from all over the floor. Eeriest fucking thing you ever saw, crying and whining the whole time." He added, as Vic got up to leave, "By the way, I got your boy Antoyne working for me now, that's OK with you."

  Eleven p.m., too late to go anywhere, too early to go home. Vic was puzzled by everything he had seen and heard. He thought about going to visit Emil and Edith Bonaventure. He thought about going home to bed. In the end he didn't do either of those things. On his way out he stopped at the table where Fat Antoyne Messner sat. Antoyne, who was wearing a brand new royal blue drape suit over a yellow shirt, had been joined by one of the club Monas. At close quarters this vision turned out to be Joe Leone's ex-squeeze, Irene. Irene was leaning in close so Antoyne could see deep into the promise of her hot-ochre Mexican-style blouse. She had her fingers on his wrist as if she was taking his pulse, and they were both drinking those pink and yellow drinks he liked. "Hi, Irene," Vic said, "Fat Antoyne! Nice suit!" He had to shout to be heard over the crowd. "Why don't I sit down with you?" he suggested. When they looked at each other then back at Vic and didn't answer, Vic made a What can you do? gesture, as if the general noise levels were causing him to mishear what everyone said, and sat down anyway. He ordered drinks.

  "So: everyone works for Paulie now?"

  "It's temporary, Vic," Fat Antoyne replied quickly, as if he had been expecting that question.

  "It's work," Irene corrected him, at the same time giving Vic a look. "Everyone has to work," she said. "I don't care how direct I am when I say that."

  Naturally, a person with Antoyne's skills sought port work, shipyard work, Irene went on to explain; but the civilian yards weren't doing as well as anyone thought. "He looked everywhere, and evidently I found him this opportunity instead." Things were tough all over, she reminded Vic, and in a shortening labour market you couldn't always have your first choice: luckily Paulie DeRaad was there to fill the gap. She had always found Paulie to be a fair employer, also he was known for good pay. Vic could see how well it was working out, she said, by the new sharp way Antoyne could afford to dress.

  Vic agreed he probably could.

  "I didn't have no real place there," Antoyne said suddenly, meaning Liv Hula's bar. As he saw it, that was the problem. "All I wanted was a chance to fit in, Vic."

  "Still," Vic said, "don't you miss those nights we caned it with Liv?"

  "Another benefit is, here they just call me by my name. Which I prefer that. Not 'Fat Antoyne' like in some other joints."

  "It's great you lost weight," Vic said.

  To Irene, with her honed Mona instincts for the feeling nature of life, Vic Serotonin had the face of someone who walked around the town a lot on his own. When he finished his drink and said goodbye to them both, and added courteously to Irene, "Be sure and have a nice night," she felt all the things Vic didn't know about himself quiver in her own nerves. She watched him make his way through the Semiramide crowd, passing a moment with Alice Nylon on the door, and told herself sadly, "I knew a million men like him." With his black hair and sad hard eyes, he looked like the New Nuevo Tango itself, she had to allow. But he had no idea about other people, and less than no idea about himself. She couldn't express it any other way. A man who walked around a lot on his own and despite that knew himself less well than others knew him. She put her hand over Fat Antoyne's.

  "Vic Serotonin," she said, "will learn too late about the realness of the world, and how none of us is put here in it long."

  Fat Antoyne shrugged. "We don't need to think about him."

  This was his signal they should return to the conversation they were having before Vic interrupted them. It was the same conversation they had every night since Joe Leone died, the mythodology of which was: they would soon leave Saudade and travel the Halo again, but this time together. Which was surely, as Irene pointed out, the simplest and most direct of gestures, since travel had by definition brought them both here and together in the first place. "I've washed so many planets out of my hair, why not this one?" she said. "Joe would want it for me," she said. "I know he would!" Her eyes were reckless and bright. "Oh Antoyne, wouldn't it be so nice?" Antoyne, less certain, was anyway pleased she said it. Each time they had this talk, he felt bound to warn Irene she could find more rewarding travel companions than himself-and better men, though he had had his day, that was certain. In response, he would always hear her say:

  "Never talk yourself down, Antoyne!"

  If he talked himself down, she warned him, a man wasn't for her. She counted herself fortunate, she said, to meet Antoyne the awful night Joe died. She was known for her belief that life was follow your heart and never talk yourself down. The future was bright for both of them now, and sad men like Vic would never find that out.

  Unaware of these harsh judgments, Vic Serotonin made his way down through Moneytown to the Corniche. Half an hour's walk brought him to the shadows underneath an abandoned pier, where he stood looking out across the sand. The tide was neither in nor out. The sea had a light in it, as if something was happening just over the horizon. Where it fizzed and fumed at the perimeter of the event site, the surf was a violet colour, and gave off faint odours of oxidants and aftershave like an empty dance hall.

  Vic had a familiarity with venues of this kind. He had instincts of his own about any place caught halfway between the event site and the city. But this one told him nothing, except he would not try to run anything across the line here. It didn't strike Vic as a good way in. It didn't strike him as a good way out. He smoked a cigarette. He looked and listened. Behind him, rickshaw girls stamped and panted in the crushed oystershell parking lot of the Cafe Surf, wasting their breath on the cool night air. Customers hurried towards the bar, laughing and batting out at the ads which fluttered in their hair. Every time someone opened the door, music spilled out. It wasn't Vic's kind of music, but he went inside anyway.

  When he left an hour later, he was none the wiser. Fake Sandra Shen decor. Standing room only. Overflowing ashtrays, tables littered with screwed-up napkins, half-empty plates and Giraffe beer bottles. The smell of steam from the kitchen. And under the red neon sign, Live Music Nightly, a cheap two-piece to grind out endless bebop remixes of last year's sentimental tunes. You couldn't even get near the toilet for the stream of people coming out. Vic leaned on the bar, listening to the band and shaking his head; then he turned on his heel suddenly and pushed his way to the door. If something was happening there, he didn't know what it was.

  He took a rickshaw back into the city and made the girl stop outside the uptown police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe, where Lens Aschemann maintained an office. Past midnight, and damp winds chased wastepaper across the deserted pavement. A single second-floor window remained illuminated. Broken silhouettes came and went against the blind. It wasn't hard to picture Aschemann up there, drinking rum while he methodically pasted Vic into the frame for some scheme Vic didn't even know about. What had Site Crime stumbled over at the Cafe Surf? Paulie DeRaad's EMC connexions, maybe, running an artefact-related operation of their own. But then why put Vic Serotonin in the frame for Paulie's lack of discrimination?

  "Hey," the rickshaw girl reminded him, "you pay a horse to run."

  "So run," Vic told her.

  "You know I got to towel down if I stand around too long. People just don't get that."

  "I'm sorry," said Vic.

  "Life's too short to be sorry, hon."

  Vic paid her off on the edge of a weed-grown lot a few streets away from his rooms in South End, then to
ok the roundabout route home. No one followed him, yet when he got into the hall of his building he couldn't convince himself he was alone. A package had been left for him. When he opened it, he found a small leather-bound book, on the cover of which was a line-drawing of a hand holding some flowers. Though the flowers were all on the same stem, and the same shape, they were of different colours. For a moment, he thought that Edith Bonaventure had found her father's diary and brought it to him. But the handwriting wasn't Emil's, and the first sentence Vic read began, "Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before my childhood?" Serotonin stared at this in exasperation, then ran upstairs to his room, where, instead of putting on the light, he stood by the window in the dark and looked down into the street. Ten or twenty yards away on the opposite side, someone looked back at him. It was the woman from Liv Hula's bar, her face blanched by the vapour lamps, framed by the collar of her fur coat. By the time he had forced the window up and shouted, she was gone.

  Some hours later, across the city, the man who resembled Einstein let himself into his dead wife's bungalow by the sea.

  The front door, swollen with salt moisture, must be lifted as you opened it; sometimes it stuck anyway. Sand feathered across the linoleum in the hall. Rather than switch on the lights, Aschemann paused and allowed his eyes to adjust to the faint sea-glimmer limning every surface. He made his way carefully to the kitchen, where he wiped the window and regarded the ocean. "How are you?" his wife's voice said to him. "You see that ship out there?" It was the kitchen of an empty house, empty cupboards, empty shelves, dust and sand in a thin gritty layer on everything. Aschemann ran warm water from the faucet, catching it in his cupped hands to splash his face. Then he went back down the hall and took off his raincoat.

  While he was doing that his wife's voice said, "Can you see the same ship as me, those lights to the right of the Point?"

  In life she had constantly asked him similar questions, whether he was standing next to her or lying in bed with some other woman halfway across the city. She had, somehow, never trusted her own eyes.

  "I see the ship," he reassured her. "It's only a ship. Go to bed now."

  Comforted by this fragment of an exchange the rest of which lay at some inaccessible level of memory, he sat down in the lounge, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and dialled up his assistant, to whom he said, "I hope you have something good for me. Because we aren't doing so well since the other day." He knew this was ambiguous. Let it stand, he thought.

  After the raid on the Semiramide Club, they had argued in the car. "I don't like to have shots fired," he had informed her. "Now I'll have to apologise to Paulie."

  "Paulie is a violent creep."

  "Still. Shots fired is not my way. Find nothing and set light to a wall, is that a day's work? Threaten some children! The problem with DeRaad will always be the same. He's never quite intelligent enough for his own good, and never quite stupid enough for ours. That's Paulie." He touched her arm. "And drive slower," he said. "I don't want to lose this nice car. I don't want to hurt someone." She stared ahead, and, if anything, accelerated a little. Moneytown was all round them with rickshaws and pedestrians, the Cadillac embedded in early evening traffic one minute, prised free the next. Stop, start, stop, start: it made Aschemann feel ill.

  "They aren't children," she said.

  "You're angry, I can understand that."

  The Semiramide raid had left him none the wiser. He had expected nothing less-who, after all, would store a proscribed artefact in the back room of a dance club? Not even Paulie DeRaad. Since then, without quite knowing why, Aschemann had returned repeatedly to the Cafe Surf, telling himself, Everything proceeds from there. To watch is best when you have no theory. He tracked his bebop golems into the night, observed their lateral slide and vanishment into the hustle of things in central Saudade. It was like a card trick. One in ten lasted a little longer, going as far, perhaps, as to negotiate for a room. "That must mean something," he told his assistant now. "Ten per cent of them are more than ordinarily restless. They want something. Are they even artefacts as we know them?"

  All this, she responded, served only to confirm what he already knew. Aschemann shrugged. "So it's three in the morning," he said, "and I don't understand why you waste your time talking to an old man like me."

  "Vic Serotonin walked into the Cafe Surf tonight, half an hour after you walked out. I've been trying to reach you since."

  5

  Ninety Per Cent Neon

  "Ah," Aschemann said.

  "I can't report to you when you disconnect."

  "I suppose not."

  "You disconnect and wander about on your own," she complained. When it became clear he wasn't going to answer that, she said, "We got a little coverage. Would you like to see it now?"

  Aschemann said he would.

  The house lurched, then vanished from around him. He was looking down a nanocam feed, at jumpy visuals of people in some crowded space. His assistant's voice came in across the top of that, its hollow, reverberant qualities an artefact of the transmission process. She seemed closer, but not quite in the room with him. "Is this all right?" she said. "Only they're routing it down some kind of low priority EMC pipe. Ours are all down."

  "The pipe's fine. The material itself is poor."

  "They had some technical problems with that too."

  It wasn't anything like being there. The image stream wavered, held, dropped suddenly into greyscale while slow bars of black rolled queasily down Aschemann's field of view. You could be the most experienced user, you would still throw up in the end. But there, quite visible, was Vic Serotonin, perhaps eight feet away from Aschemann, propping up the Long Bar at the Cafe Surf with his gabardine jacket open and his hat pushed to the back of his head, while the people around him conversed jerkily or ran fast-forward as if they lived in another world. "It looks as if he was waiting for someone," Aschemann said, shaking his head irritably as if to dislodge something, while his eyes focused and refocused on a spot in the empty room. People often sought to clarify an incoming image this way. You would catch them squinting or banging their temple above one eye, it was a common reaction, which never worked.

  "Do you have the same view as me?" the assistant said in an excited voice. "From about waist height? And there's a woman in a red dress to the right of the bar?"

  "That's the view I have."

  "There he is. Do you see him? He said he never heard of the Cafe Surf, but there he is! This is exactly what we need!"

  Aschemann wasn't so sure. He asked her to close the pipe, and when his vision had returned to normal said, "All I see is a man having a drink in a bar. If that was illegal we would all be in the orbital correction facility. Where did Vic go after he left?"

  "They don't know."

  "That's helpful."

  "If you watch the whole thing, the fault gets out of hand about two hundred and eighty seconds in, and they disconnect everything to fix it."

  Aschemann thanked her for the pictures. "Go home now," he recommended. "Get some sleep. We have a lot to think about here." He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room his wife had died in. He would be there until morning, sprawled in a stained yellow armchair and surrounded by her things. He would hear her voice, asking him what day it was, offering him a drink. He spent more time in that house than he would admit to his assistant; and missed his wife more than he would admit to himself.

  Something in the Cafe Surf footage had caught Aschemann's attention, but he couldn't say what it was. Then, the evening of the next day, as he sat at the Long Bar listening to the two-piece, a young woman took the stool next to his and ordered a cocktail called "Ninety Per Cent Neon." She was a Mona, so he thought at first, a Monroe look-alike in a red wrap-bodice evening dress and matching stilt-heel shoes.

  "I've seen you here," Aschemann said.

  She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back so that the dr
ess offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminium frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He'd seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Serotonin. More importantly, perhaps, he'd seen it fourteen days ago, when she stumbled out of the toilet at the Cafe Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she was new in the world. She still had an unformed, labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

  "I'm here a lot," she said. "I like the band. Do you like them?"

  He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little rum. "They're as guilty as ever," he said.

  "Guilty?"

  "Under his dexterity, this pianist hides neither intellect nor heart, only compulsion. If no one else is available he will play against himself; and then against the self thus created, and then against the self after that, until all fixed notion of self has leaked away into the slippage and he can relax for a second in the sharp light and cigarette smoke like someone caught fleetingly in an ancient black and white photograph. Do you see?"

  "It's only music, though," she said.

  "Perhaps," Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself. He offered to buy her another cocktail, but all she did was look at him vaguely as if she hadn't heard, so he went on:

  "The older man has come to a different understanding of things, one which to his friend would seem bland and self-evident. He believes that it is only because no music is possible that any music at all is possible." Here, Aschemann smiled briefly at his own cleverness. "As a result," he finished, "the universe now remakes itself for him continually, out of two or three invariable rules and an obsolete musical instrument called the saxophone."