Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  6

  Tanked on C-Street

  An hour later, when Alice Nylon and her punks delivered Vic to the back office of the Semiramide Club, Paulie DeRaad was sprawled in the same chair Vic had last seen him in, as if during the intervening period he hadn't moved at all, only got sick. Alice believed he had sat there for at least a day. She brought him drinks from the bar, she said, but he didn't seem as interested as usual; in fact he didn't seem interested at all. "He's not himself, you know?" she said to Vic. "Generally, you fetch him a Night Train, he'll put it down in one and crush the can that way he has against the side of his head, it's all one fluid move? Well, today he don't drink nothing. Then he wakes up suddenly and asks for you."

  "How did he put that?"

  "Well, he says, you know, bring that fucking fucker Vic to me," Alice recalled. "Then he's like this again. I mean," she offered, "take a look."

  Paulie's legs were straight out in front of him, his head thrown back as if the chair had a headrest, which it did not but was just an ordinary uncomfortable moulded chair. His whole body was in a rigid condition. Where it wasn't the bluish colour of milk, his skin had a heavy-metal tinge particularly evident where it was ablated around his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were closed, though somehow you gained the impression they might flicker open any moment. It was hard to tell how sick Paulie was, and Paulie himself didn't help with this. He was smiling as happily as a girl. Some of those smiles were surprising, they were surprisingly sexy. It was as if Paulie wanted to share something. Sometimes he wanted to share it so much that he was practically winking. Vic Serotonin didn't care to know what it was. These weren't real smiles, he could tell: they were what you got when there was nothing left to smile for.

  "Fuck it, Paulie," Vic said.

  "He wakes up sometimes, we don't understand what he says."

  Vic went to the office door, which he opened a crack. When he looked out into the Semiramide Club it was smoke, music and alcohol fumes, business as usual; no one was looking back in. He shut the door again. "Does anyone else know about this? Any of his EMC connexions?" Alice didn't think they did. "Let's keep it that way, then," Vic recommended. "Those assholes don't need to know, we can agree on that?" As far as she was concerned, Alice said, they could. "Good," said Vic. When he turned back to Paulie, he found Paulie had woken up and got out of the chair and was standing right in Vic's personal space, his face-pumped up with blood under the skin so it was bright red-thrust forward, his blue eyes open as wide as they would go.

  "What have you done to me, you fuck?" he screamed.

  Vic felt the hair go up on the back of his neck. "Jesus, Paulie," he said, "I don't know." Before he could add anything to that, Paulie had pushed him aside and was kneeling down in front of Alice Nylon.

  "Are you my pretty little girl?" he said.

  "I am," said Alice.

  "Then give me your best smile!" Paulie cajoled her. "There! You see? You feel better already!"

  He stood up again and began to lurch restlessly about the room, walking from the hips with his knees stiff. He seemed to get interested in things, then he would stop and stare at the wall and do nothing. After he had been walking around like this for a while, examining the bits and pieces he kept in the office as if trying to understand who he was, he stopped in front of a hologram of himself with the other guys who came out alive from the wreck of the old El Rayo X. They looked a little sunburned but they were all grinning broadly, still in the bottom half of their vacuum suits, giving the thumbs-up with one hand and brandishing various kinds of guns and tools with the other. "Who are these people?" Paulie asked Vic, but when Vic told him, he didn't answer. The blood had leached out of his face again. Vic looked at Alice, who shrugged.

  "He ain't the Paulie we know."

  Faintly, from the Semiramide Club outside, came the sound of laughter and applause. The entertainment had started in on their second set with the moderne classic Jordan V-10. Vic Serotonin thought a moment.

  "Is there another way out?" he said.

  "Door at the back there exits in an alley."

  "Fetch his rickshaw girl," Vic told her. "Don't talk to anyone else."

  When Alice had gone he went through Paulie's clothes until he found the key to the room where Paulie kept the artefact Vic had sold him. This would be an unsettling process for anyone, but Paulie stood compliantly throughout, his head tilted up slightly so he could face the hologram of himself. His eyes were closed again. A few minutes later the rickshaw girl ducked in through the back door.

  "This is Annie," Alice said, coming in behind her.

  "Oh boy, you don't look good," the Annie told Paulie. Between the three of them they manhandled DeRaad out of there; it took further effort to get him into the rickshaw. Alice Nylon sat on Vic's knee. Vic sat crushed in next to Paulie and tried to work out what sort of situation he was in. He wished he had handled Edith Bonaventure a little better, because perhaps her father's book would have told him more about Paulie's condition. He wondered if he was about to make another mistake.

  "I can't believe this is Paulie DeRaad," the rickshaw girl said after a mile or two. "I mean, is he dead?"

  "Turn left into Voigt," Vic told her.

  "Hey, forget I asked."

  "Are we there yet?" said Alice.

  Nothing much had changed in the room off Voigt Street. The smell was still bad. Paulie, who had woken up again as soon as they got close, caught it from twenty yards away. His head went up and his nostrils dilated. He stood passively enough on the steps outside, while Vic struggled with the door and the rickshaw girl clopped away into the night of the noncorporate hinterland, but you could tell he was interested.

  If Paulie was interested, so was the boy inside. When they got in the room, he had dragged himself off the bed and pressed himself into a corner. He was naked. He watched them with a soft smile while his hands made shy, pushing motions in Paulie's direction. Paulie smiled too. The boy's whole body shivered once, from head to foot: under the filth it had a clear, waxy look, and it had contracted in on itself a little as if something had been used up inside. "I don't want you," he said in that three-toned voice which sounded more like electronica chords than anything human. A few bright motes trickled out of one eye. Suddenly he made a break for the door, but Paulie reached out and caught his upper arm. The force of the boy's lunge swung them both around. "Hey," Paulie said, as if to himself, "naughty, naughty." They tottered for a moment, clutching at one another, then fell on the bed, where they lay winded and face-to-face. Paulie got a wide gentle smile on his lips and laid his cheek close to the boy's; he whispered something. The boy looked up at the ceiling emptily at first, then he started smiling too.

  Vic had no idea what was happening.

  "We've got to stop this!" he said.

  Alice didn't think there was any need. "Paulie won't hurt him now," she said. "Look. They're friends."

  "That's what I'm afraid of," Vic said.

  The situation remained like that for perhaps two minutes, then the boy's face got a light in it exactly as if someone had switched on a lamp inside his skull. His mouth opened slowly and light poured out over the room and all over Paulie DeRaad, as bright and fierce as the radiation that took his skin off all those years ago. It was a light you could hear. It had organ values. It issued from the boy's mouth but reflected so instantly off the walls that it seemed to come from everywhere else too. Vic and Alice covered their eyes but they could still see the light unabated, and they thought they could feel heat though no heat was there. Then it had passed, and the room was quiet and dark again, and the boy on the bed was just a Point kid lying confused and naked in his own filth and tangled clothes. Paulie DeRaad lay next to him with his eyes staring open, screaming at his old friend Vic:

  "You fuck! You fuck!"

  "Paulie, I-"

  "It's daughter-code, Vic. You fucking unprofessional fuck, you brought me a daughter and I'm walking around dead!"

  He wasn't walking around at all.
Paulie was lying there on his back immobile except for some of his face, mostly the eyes and mouth. His eyes were popped out with the effort of holding something at bay. His jaw was clenched so hard his voice sounded as if it came down a bad datapipe from some location in the parking orbit. You could hear his teeth crack. His hands plucked at his clothes. "This isn't me," he said. "Am I me?" He laughed suddenly. It was the distinctive DeRaad laugh, they heard it from CorCaroli to Motel Splendido, wherever there were difficult times to be had. "Hey! Vic! Like the old days!" This thought seemed to relax him. He sighed and turned to face the boy; code began to pour t out the boy's mouth like cold tapioca. Vic and Alice pulled them apart. The boy convulsed, rolled away, curled up in a foetal position, held a murmured conversation with himself in three different voices. By then Paulie DeRaad was unconscious again. He had managed to get some of his clothes off and his bare arms had the same waxy pliable look as the boy's.

  "This was such a fucking mistake," Vic said. "We should take him back to the club."

  Alice shook her head.

  "Leave it with me," she said. "He needs to be in his own place now. I don't want the Semiramide crowd to know about this."

  "I can't tell what you're thinking, Alice."

  Alice smiled vaguely. "I'll take care of him for now," she said. Her eyes were inturned and he realised that she had dialled someone up. Just because Alice was eight didn't mean she was bad help: the contrary was true, or she wouldn't be Paulie DeRaad's best little girl. She was already on it. She was making arrangements. "Yeah," she said, "ten minutes, Map Boy. Back of Voigt. By the way, a rickshaw won't do it. Hey, don't try to fuck me with that. And don't come in," here she gave a flat little chuckle, "unless you ain't got enough problems of your own. Yeah, yeah, fuck off, I heard it all before." She joked a little more with Map Boy, then her eyes refocused and she said, "You still here, Vic? To be honest I don't need you around now." Serotonin shrugged and went to the door. He was halfway out when she called:

  "You'd better know how to sort this out, Vic."

  It was two a.m. by then, and he felt peripheral to everything, especially Paulie. DeRaad always thought of Vic as one of his contemporaries. Though nothing could be further from the case, there being twenty years in it as far as Vic knew, Vic had always understood this as a compliment he might one day deserve-as though in Paulie's book you could be elected to a generation particularly favoured by craziness and poor judgment. At the beginning of their relationship Vic had been flattered, but for some years now he had no intention of ending up like Paulie or any of Paulie's friends. It complicated his position that he found himself responsible for a bad turn in Paulie's life.

  The streets were deserted, and a thin salty mist in the air would be rain by morning. Vic stood undecided for a minute at the corner of Voigt and Altavista; then, rather than go back to the Semiramide Club, turned up his coat collar and took himself off to Straint Street and Liv Hula's bar, where he found Liv herself yawning on one side of the zinc counter, while, from the other, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar made halting conversation.

  At about the same time, in his office across the city, Lens Aschemann, a man who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the aged Einstein, was informing his assistant:

  "Just from its surface you know when water is deep. As a child you learn to interpret the colour, the movement, the way the light plays on it." Hard orange street light played on Aschemann's surfaces; while his shadow operators, unused and unloved, moved uncomfortably in the corners of the room. "We have a species need," he went on, "to make estimates like that. By implying everything that isn't there-not just in the case itself but in the world the case seems to have some relation to-crime awakes in the detective a similar need.

  "Do you understand? No. Well then, think about it, while I go see my friend Emil Bonaventure."

  "I'll drive you," the assistant offered.

  "A man can't visit his old friend without bringing the police along?" Aschemann asked. He waved his hand dismissively. "Take the night off," he instructed. "Go home, wash your hair."

  She studied him as if she had never seen him before.

  "Oh, now I offended you again. So go to a bar, whatever: I can give you a list of nice ones, only don't get caught trying to have sex in the back lot."

  "Thanks for that advice of yours," she said.

  This amused him. "We're getting to know one another now," he acknowledged. He offered her the keys to the Cadillac. After the Semiramide Club raid, he had forbidden her to return there, or to the Cafe Surf, alone.

  As soon as he left, she had the shadow operators open a pipe to his records. Unnerved by the inappropriateness of this, they fussed around, whispering, "Is there anything else we can bring you, dear?" while she sprawled in Aschemann's leather chair and stared into space like someone in the early stages of arousal, her lips moving gently as the raw data cascaded down the inside of her arm. There was an item about the death of his wife. She kept returning to it because although it seemed to hold the key to him, she had no idea how to turn it in the lock. "Are you sure you're comfortable?" the shadow operators asked. "It looks such an awkward way to sit."

  "I'll be fine," she said. Later, she drove Aschemann's Cadillac down to the Corniche and parked facing out to sea.

  It was a quiet night, with low cloud and a crack of greenish light just above the horizon. Onshore breezes whipped up the sand around the ragmop palms, hissed over the bodywork of the car. She walked down the access road to the bungalow where Aschemann's wife had lived. It was damper down there. Inside, the bungalow had a stale smell, not quite food or people. She stood in the kitchen, in the passageway, in the single reception room, in the cobalt dark and the shush of the sea, with her eyes closed, waiting for Aschemann and his wife to assemble themselves in front of her. Nothing like that happened. They were absent and dead respectively: they would never self-disclose. She would have to find them, in the old furniture, the stale carpets. She decided to begin with the bundles of letters piled in the fake bureau.

  "To be as happy as this," the detective had written to his wife just after they met, "to be this open to someone else, is something I never expected." It was a prophetic failure of nerve. He never settled. He was unfaithful from the moment they married, in tourist hotels during the afternoon and the back lots of bars at night. She forgave him over the years but he could never forgive himself; suddenly you found him telling her, "Part of me has lost patience with both of us. It wants to fall back into life. In the end, one person always gives more than the other and is disappointed." He had left her because she couldn't defend herself against him, but this only made him, as miserable as she was. "Late afternoon it rained," he wrote, from an apartment on Third Street. "I felt completely lonely and upset without you. For a second all I wanted was to be at home, among the things I knew, as if this life I have here was just some visit I had made without you." Her name was Prima, but for reasons the assistant couldn't make out, he often called her Utz or Utzie. Dear Utz. Hello Utzie. After they separated, he stopped writing about himself and wrote to her about the city instead. He wrote to her about ordinary things. He wrote to her about his job. To catch the criminal, he said, you had to go down inside: that's where you would find him.

  Throughout the correspondence, if that was what it could be called, he had favoured a flimsy, almost transparent paper, light blue, prefolded so that it could be made into its own envelope. The earliest letters, full of endearments and graphic descriptions of the sex they had (as if by reliving it, perhaps, he could prove to himself he was there), were brittle but intact; while the later ones, though cruel, fell apart at the folds, as if they had been handled every day since.

  Why had he chosen to write letters to her, when they lived in the same city, the same house? Had Prima ever answered them? It was impossible to know. "I'm increasingly shortsighted," he had written, three days before her death, "yet my dreams are as compactly constructed as advertisements."

  Aschemann's assistant reread all the lett
ers, then stood at the window. Outside the bungalow it was the sound of waves on the beach, the smells of salt and marram, a blowing mist, all condensing into one substance like a block of smoky plastic. Nevertheless, she seemed to hear something out there: a cry or a laugh. As she trudged back to the car, a group of kids emerged from the darkness, hunched up in their shiny gun-punk rainwear, exchanging casual murmurs, jostling one another, eyeing her frankly. "Try me out," she invited them, her smile so accommodating that they slipped away into the mist shaking their heads. "You see?" she whispered. On the way home, she looked in the driving mirror, she looked in the wing mirrors, she shifted gears with care: a policewoman, practical and calm but never still. She wondered why she understood neither Aschemann nor his wife, who, aware of their disaster from the outset, had encouraged it to roll over them anyway. She wondered if only half of her was there.

  Aschemann always described as equivocal his relationship with Edith Bonaventure. "What he means," Edith would say, "I don't like him." Aschemann and her father were friends and sparring partners from the very first days of artefact policing in Saudade. Almost as soon as Emil arrived on-planet, touching down at the noncorporate port with a Halo tan and a would-be accordion-star daughter, Aschemann was arresting him. "Those were the good old days," Bonaventure always reminded Edith, as if at thirteen years old she hadn't been mature enough to appreciate them for herself. "Things weren't so serious."

  Even at thirteen Edith had had her doubts about that; but was never less than loyal. "I don't like a man who arrests my father," she told Aschemann now. "On any grounds."