Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "Mrs Kielar?" No response. It was the body language of someone waiting for the worst to happen. "I ache," she had said to him, "I ache."

  "I'll take you in there," he offered. "Soon."

  Across the city, the man who looked like Einstein sucked with satisfaction on his empty pipe and nodded to himself. "For once this technology worked," he told his assistant. "We have him now."

  He nodded to himself again. "We have Vic now," he said.

  "I don't see why," his assistant said.

  It was nearly dawn, and she was hungry. They had been sitting in Aschemann's office for ten hours while a pick-up detail from surveillance mothered the obsolete nanocams Vic Serotonin had brought unwittingly into Mrs Kielar's apartment to join the house dust, the aerosols of perspiration and warm breath, the tiny drifting flakes of Elizabeth Kielar's delicate cream-coloured skin which already floated there. In the end the usual series of transmission faults had corrupted the image stream, freezing it on Mrs Kielar in her strained attitude by the window while the travel agent, naked, bent over her solicitously, his mouth open to repeat something, a curiously inappropriate point of reflected light in one eye making him look like an untrustworthy dog.

  "Drive me home," Aschemann said, "and perhaps I'll tell you."

  Once they were in the car, though, he changed his mind and started to talk about his wife instead. Why, the assistant couldn't tell. He insisted they have the top down while they drove. He looked tired, cheerful, a little frailer than usual, his white hair disarranged by the rush of cold morning air into the Cadillac. When she suggested they find a place to eat breakfast, he made an irritable gesture.

  "My wife," he said, "was an agoraphobe. You didn't know that."

  When the assistant failed to respond, instead running through her repertoire of calm practical actions-glancing into the driving mirror, changing gear, slowing to allow a group of cultivars to stagger across the road in front of the Cadillac, drunk, bagged, bleeding out happily from their injuries in the ring-he said, "This will be useful for you to know. You should listen to this if you want to understand the meaning of the Neon Heart murders."

  "I can listen and drive," she pointed out.

  "So you say."

  There was a silence. Then he went on:

  "There are kinds of agoraphobes to whom even a knock on the door is too much of the outside world. Someone else must answer it for them. Yet as soon as you step into their houses they become monsters."

  In his wife's rooms, he said, every inch of floor and furniture space had been filled up with objects, so that you didn't quite know how to get from the door to the sofa. "Once you had got there you couldn't move about, except with extreme caution. All quick movement was damped by this labyrinth-" here, he laughed "-where there was even a code, three or four quick pulls on the cord, to get the lavatory light to go on. It's less, you see, that they are uncomfortable in public than that they only feel in control on their own ground."

  He seemed to expect a response to this, but she couldn't think of one. Eventually, she said, "Poor woman. Where would you like to eat?"

  Aschemann folded his arms and stared ahead.

  "Is that all you can say? 'Poor woman'? Problems like hers are so easy to cure, no one should have them. Is that what you believe?"

  "I thought you might want to eat."

  "Agoraphobia is an aggressively territorial strategy: refusal to go out forces the outside to come in, to where it's manageable. On the agoraphobe's ground you walk through the agoraphobe's maze."

  "I don't see," she said, "what this has to do with the murders."

  "Well, you have no patience."

  Other crimes had come and gone for him, Aschemann said, but the murders continued. "They continue to this day." He said this with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Each one published new lines of the verse, with nothing to connect the victims but their shaven armpit and Carmody-style tattoo. "And, of course," as Aschemann reminded her, "the investigation itself." He had long ago forbidden the detective branch to work the case. Track record as well as seniority had allowed him to do that, sheer weight of cases solved, paperwork successfully filed. Word went out that it was Aschemann's crime. He can keep it, was most people's opinion.

  "And so?"

  "Stop here," Aschemann ordered "We can have a nice breakfast here." They swept into the kerb outside E Pellici.

  A notorious cholesterol venue halfway down Neutrino, Pellici's offered Deco walls and Cafe electrique. More important, Aschemann said, you could hear the food smoking in the animal fat. At that time of the morning Pellici's was full of rickshaw girls in pink and black lycra gorging themselves on simple carbs. They stood awkwardly up to the counter, unable to use the seating, ducking their heads needlessly, embarrassed to be among people of ordinary size. Aschemann smiled around at them, one or two smiled back. Once he was eating he seemed to forget both his wife and the murders. Grateful for this, the assistant brought up the subject of Vic Serotonin again.

  "Our so-important Vic," Aschemann said, recovering his humour with his blood sugar. "Oh Vic," he chided, as if Serotonin were sitting across the table from him, "Vic, Vic, Vic." He made a dismissive gesture. "As well as rather ordinary sex, Vic has a conspiracy with this woman Kielar, we can prove it. So now there's a site crime. We can pick him up, have a talk with him."

  "I don't see how that helps."

  "We'll put it to him this way: why should Vic go about his business unconstrained when we don't get what we want?"

  "You could have done this any time."

  Aschemann shrugged. He gave her a smile which suggested that though she was right, she had missed an important point which he would illuminate for her out of pure generosity of heart.

  "Vic was nothing," he said, "now he's something."

  He lit his pipe and sat back. "Eat your food," he recommended, "before it gets cold." He watched her encouragingly for a moment, nodding his head and smiling at every forkful she put in her mouth, then said, "All this time, people like me have been wrong. We've been afraid of the site for the wrong reasons." The assistant wouldn't be tempted by this. She looked firmly down at her plate. "For sixty years we've tried to control what came out of there- new code, new kinds of artefacts we thought might get loose, all that alien stuff, we can't predict its behaviour, or even in many cases say what it is.

  "We never considered it might be two-way traffic."

  She stopped eating in surprise and looked at him.

  "Nothing goes in," she said.

  Aschemann smiled and nodded. "Very good answer," he said. "You're sure of that, are you?" He passed her a hot towel. "Use this to wipe your lips."

  Next evening, Vic Serotonin went to the rights.

  He wasn't keen on them himself. You can claim, and people do, that every fight is different: but it is a difference that works itself out within sameness, so that when you've seen one fight you've truly seen them all. That was Vic's view. But he felt so nervous about guiding Mrs Kielar into the site again that he thought he'd better have one more try at getting Emil Bonaventure's journal- his hope being that, against the odds, it might feature a more robust description, a more dependable map of the site than any Vic had concocted. His hope was it might give him an edge. So he dialled up Edith Bonaventure and invited her down to Preter Coeur with him.

  "Because I know you love to go," he told her.

  "I wish I could, Vic," Edith said. "But Emil, you know, he's bad. That man is so ill for all his sins! Also I was going to wash my hair. Goodbye now, and enjoy." And she closed the connection.

  Vic sighed and re-established it. "You need a night out, Edith," he tried.

  "Besides which," Edith said, as if the conversation between them had never broken off, "since Joe the Lion died I lost my previous intense interest." She laughed coarsely. "Name me a girl who didn't," she suggested in a low voice, as if she was talking to someone Vic couldn't see. Crammed into the cheap public pipe, her voice gained a sardonic echo. Behind it he could hear
accordion music, New Nuevo Tango music deconstructing its own mannered precision to the raw absurdity of the tango life: Edith herself, Vic bet, recorded in her glory days. Thirteen years old and already a hologram in her own right.

  "Hey, I'm sorry, Vic, but you know how it is."

  This time it was Vic who broke the connection. "Fair enough," he acknowledged. "I guess you know what you want."

  Edith got right back to him. "Maybe I'll come," she said.

  Fights were held all over, you could see one on any street corner after six; but the place they called Preter Coeur was Saudade's premier venue. Rank with pollutants and the native flora that throve on them, it spread, cavernous and vaulted, a waste of covered pits and roofed concrete expanses, across several acres backed up against the event aureole, at the end of a line extended from Cahuenga Boulevard. By day the rain blew between the support pillars of its many unwalled sections, through oblique bars of sunlight which fell upon bodies-the lost, the sleeping, the befuddled, the dead. It had been a military shipyard of some kind, before EMC moved to their present location. Now it sprang back to life at dusk every day, as big as a city quarter, in business for itself, self-governed, self-policed, self-made, a sprawl of food stalls, flop houses, flea markets, bookmakers, makeshift chopshops and tattoo booths around each ring, trawled by every kind of cultivar and fetch. The voices of the Radio Retro announcers, piped out the very air by sophisticated entrained-wave techniques, shouted the odds. Monas worked the rickshaw lines in giggling groups. Sexually aroused New Men staggered by, bagged on Night Train and looking for a quiet corner in which to jack off. All this under a mixed illumination of naphtha flame or blank interrogatory halogen glare, and everything in between. In Preter Coeur the shadow of a pillar fell on you with all the weight of the pillar itself; the next moment you were losing your sense of balance in the unpredictable jump and turn of smoky flickers like shoaling fish. Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being-their simple promise-catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.

  Through this flow of light and smoke and people events, which you could describe every instant of, yet never predict its next state, the fighters moved with studied, looming, fuck-off grace, speech reduced by careful tuning of their inboard hormonal patches to the amused, confident, inarticulate growl of those who are invincible at what they do, and will never be less than what they are, and will always be more than you. The light fell on their strutting cockerel-legs, clawed and brazen-scaled. It showed you suddenly the weird articulations at knee and hip, the vast perpetually erect cock bursting from the leather britches, the second thumb a brass spur too, the spangles of live tattoo and treasure map like riding lights across the blackened torso ripe with scabs and scars. A day old, if that, and already mythological, already dead.

  Tourists loved it. If you could look down at night from five or six hundred feet in the air, you'd see every rickshaw in Saudade converging there like T-cells rushing to the site of infection, to be drawn in under the sign Uncle Zip's Prefer Coeur.

  Edith Bonaventure loved it too.

  "Oh Vic," she said, "look at it all! Look at the lights!" Her customary tough manner was softened with delight, and every passing fighter captured her heart. "Look at the monster cock on that!"

  "None of them is alive like us," Vic said. This surprised him as being true. "They're confections."

  "Oh ho," laughed Edith. "Do I hear envy? Do I hear you jealous? Vic, I believe I do!" But Vic felt less envy than a sort of generous puzzlement. How would you chop carrots, with your dick always in the way? Get in and out the bath? It was true, he thought, that despite their vitality-which streamed out into the air like the life force you would expect of a horse or other large animal-the fighters were less than real, an in-the-end pointless looping of their personal dreams into parity with some sort of public idea of what a fighter ought to resemble. "Dreams" was anyway the wrong word to use here, Vic thought. Dreams were by-numbers. They were cheap. They had been Uncle Zipped, like everything else in the Halo. No one except a Mona would be seen dead in possession of a dream these days. Edith, however, broad of hip and wearing her best grown-up clothes, a lively one herself since age thirteen, wouldn't have this. They were out for an evening's entertainment, she ruled, not a political debate. She clung to his arm, her eyes bright, which made him feel good in a distant way.

  "You're excited," he said.

  This netted him a sidelong look, both mysterious and pragmatic.

  "You can tell, can you?" said Edith. After which they were engulfed in a smell like cinnamon and adrenalin, a molecular ad-stream which, bypassing the neocortex and heading straight for the brainstem, caused her to scream in delight.

  "I want to bet! I want to bet!"

  It was a night of solid bouts, technically predictable but with plenty of live action drama. The smell of haemoglobin layered itself over the ring thick as country mist, laced with chemical signatures specific to each fighter and traditionally borrowed from the flavours of Ancient Earth alcopops-Two Dogs, JopaLume, Decoda, Yellow Fever and that great old standard made popular by Joe the Lion himself, Alcola. Edith was loving it. Her first two fighters had won, in three-and-a-half minutes and four; the third wasn't doing so well but she hadn't noticed yet. While her mood remained good, Vic said, "Have you seen any sign of that diary? Emil's old diary?"

  Edith stared distractedly at him, naphtha light flaring across her small features. Then she said:

  "Jesus, Vic, I don't know. What do you care?"

  "I'm going into the site."

  "Vic, you go into the site every week. It's your career."

  In the ring her latest favourite had slipped on a coil of his own lower bowel, which was the end of him for that evening. He seemed delighted with his injuries. The crowd gave up a good-humoured jeer as his handler dragged him into the blue shadows the other side of the ring, upon which Edith shook her head as if clearing it and gave Vic an intent look. "Did you bring me here to get Emil's book? Is that why you asked me out?" She laughed. "Jesus, Vic, you didn't need to spend your money! I could have told you no at home, a quiet night in, just you and me until Emil fell out of bed or threw up, or choked in his sleep, which he does a lot now." She shook her head slowly in disbelief. "Vic," she said, "you're a loser."

  "Look," Vic said, "I-"

  "You lost a good fuck you could have had tonight."

  "Edith-"

  She walked quickly off into the crowd. He caught sight of her once more then she was gone. It was always hard to see in Preter Coeur. That change in the light at the corner of your eye, you never knew if it was a shadow or a Shadow Boy, some gangster algorithm with its sense of humour puckered in the kiss of profit. Vic Serotonin shrugged. He couldn't blame Edith. Edith was focused; she understood her own needs, perhaps to a degree no one else could. She would be back in her own time. Meanwhile he bought a fight card, from which he gathered that he knew one of the contestants in the next bout, a Straint Street boy whose chops originated a couple of doors down from Liv Hula's bar. On paper this boy was quick, and looked like a bet. Twenty minutes later, three fights behind in the attempt to salvage his dignity, Vic felt a tug on his sleeve, looked down: there was Paulie DeRaad's lieutenant, Alice Nylon, in her little plastic rainslicker and red Wellington boots.

  "Hey, Alice," Vic said. "You here to change my luck?"

  Alice had backed herself up with two or three of Paulie's soldiers, their faces contorted for Serotonin's benefit into expressions of juvenile threat. She craned her neck to see what was going on in the ring, winced. "So where's your money in this sad affair, Vic?" she wanted to know; and, when he told her, shook her head, indicating professional disbelief. "Looks like we got here too late to save you from yourself," she said. Vic, meanwhile, made a gun of his fingers and aimed it at the kiddies.

  "Don't do anything stupid,"
he warned them.

  Alice sighed. "Paulie says to come with us," she informed him not unsympathetically. "He ain't in such a good mood today."

  Not too far away in the crowd, Irene the Mona watched these events with a certain amusement. Her eyes were intent. Her intuitions were sharp. In the undependable light of Prefer Coeur her face looked older, and anyone who knew the original Irene-style-refugee from a planet few ever thought to tour-would have recognised her, installed there like a tectonic structure beneath the more obvious curves and planes of the Mona package. It was that Irene, perhaps, who noted how Edith Bonaventure flounced off into the crowd, only to be replaced immediately by Alice Nylon, as if those two were the single bald choice in Vic's world, the splitting point on a lonely man's journey. It was that Irene, perhaps, who thought to herself, It's easier to get into that stream than out of it, my girl; while to Fat Antoyne Messner she observed:

  "Things will always catch up with Vic Serotonin."

  "I got to agree with that."

  At Preter Coeur he would agree with most things Irene said. He was a man of sluggish temperament, she felt bound to admit: but the fights made him put his arm around her, and buy cheap things. The fights made him want to have sex. What she liked most about sex with Fat Antoyne was how unpractised and tentative he was- how unprofessional. She could press his head to her breast after he came and he was still sprawled there panting and saying, "I'm sorry," and reassure him, "Shush, shush, I like any kind of fucking. I'm made that way." Being with Antoyne in those circumstances caused her heart to swell up warm, so that she had dreams of being one of the alpha females of Ancient Earth.

  She watched Alice Nylon lead Vic away, and clutching Fat Antoyne's arm, said:

  "Hey, you know, maybe Vic would help us."

  "I ain't asking Vic," said Fat Antoyne.

  "Well then, we'll just have to find the money another way," she told him. "Maybe we could sell something?"

  "I haven't got anything."

  "Everyone's got something they can sell, pet. Oh Antoyne, we'll soon be so happy and successful! But real. Wherever we go we'll stay very real and good, and make all the best decisions out there in those million stars. / heart love! we'll say. / heart my life because it's so real up there on TV!" While she counselled herself quite rightly: We will have to get him Zipped first. He can buy a package makes him look razor and quick with those hands, but sensitive too; and underneath he'll still be the Antoyne I know and love. He will always be Antoyne to me, who comes too quick and doesn't understand I can forgive that because I seen it all.