Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  The detective sat on a wooden chair in her room, smiling round at the holograms and trophies, the costumes pinned on the wall with their pretty skirts fanned out as if she was still in them. Accordions like old dogs, wind broken, teeth bared in rippling tango smiles, eyed him savagely from the shelves and glass-front cabinets. "Still," she said, offering the Black Heart, "have a drink before you go up. Vic Serotonin brought us this, just the other day." Aschemann, who had seen nanocam footage of Edith and Vic's ringside disagreement at Preter Coeur, didn't believe her; but it wasn't displeasing to have Vic's name come up so soon in the conversation.

  "That Vic," he said with a smile. He shook his head, as if the travel agent's character was a burden they could share.

  Edith regarded him equably.

  "Vic's generous to his old friend, just like you."

  "Everyone loves Emil," Aschemann said. "That's what you get for being famous in your day." He took a drink. "This is good rum of Vic's," he congratulated her.

  "Have some more."

  "I'm fine."

  "After another glass perhaps you'll be brave enough to cuff Emil. He's upstairs like always. A little weaker today, he'll be no trouble."

  Aschemann would not be distracted.

  "A pity Vic is caught up in something bad," he offered.

  "We're all caught up in something bad."

  "Vic opened a door, I don't even know if he meant to. New sorts of artefacts are coming out of it."

  Edith made a spoiled face. "What's new about new?"

  "They walk about," Aschemann was surprised to hear himself say, "as if they own the place."

  Edith was still thinking about new. Everything presented as new in those days; as a result, the argument went, nothing was. She had seen that written on a wall. Her philosophy: you had your time at being new.

  "Maybe they do," she said.

  "Another thing: Paulie DeRaad gets involved, suddenly we can't find Paulie. Our equipment doesn't see him. It's good equipment, perhaps a little old, but someone has talked to it in a language we can't afford. Perhaps this is a military language. Perhaps his friends from EMC will soon be asking questions we don't know how to answer." After all, Aschemann decided, he'd have another drink. While he was pouring it for himself, he said, "I daren't let Vic go into the site again until I know what's happening. Edith, what you know you should tell me, because this isn't just a little tourism. It isn't just a little thrill for the offworld girl with time on her hands."

  Several expressions passed across Edith's face, complex, but with contempt as their keynote feature.

  "You would know all about that," she accused.

  She took Aschemann's glass out of his hand, emptied it back into the bottle and put the bottle away. "My father is upstairs," she said. "Remember him?"

  "I was hoping he would help me."

  "How can he? He gave up long ago. You and Vic are all he has, but when he sees you, you make it worse-" Edith stopped suddenly. She stared up at the musical instruments in their presentation cases, like someone confronting all over again the boundary conditions of her life. Then she said tiredly, "I won't give Vic up, forget it."

  Aschemann had expected nothing else.

  "Let's go and see Emil," he suggested, as if it was a new idea.

  Bonaventure slept half upright against the head of the bed. The pillows had slipped out from behind him so that his emaciated trunk made a slumped S shape against the whitewashed wall. He was staring vaguely into the furthest corner of the room. At the left side of his mouth the upper lip had drawn back off his teeth, but this expression seemed to have little to do with anything he might be thinking. When he saw Aschemann, his eyes lit up.

  "Hi, Vic!" he said.

  "I'm not Vic," Aschemann said.

  The animation faded from Emil's face. "So arrest me," he said faintly. After that he appeared to fall asleep.

  "Is this something new?" Aschemann asked Edith,

  "No," she said shortly. "It's just the same old thing, Lens: your friend's dying." He had cancers they couldn't describe, let alone cure. Everything ran wild inside of him, as if his body was trying to be something else but had no plan: his organs switched on and off at random, his bones didn't make platelets anymore. The latest thing, Edith told Aschemann, was some hybrid virus which self-assembled in his cells from three or four kinds of RNA and a manufactured gene no one could identify. "That's nothing in itself," she said. "The worst thing is he still can't dream. I'm going to leave you with him. I get enough of him all day, it's a relief someone comes to visit."

  "I don't like to see him like this," Aschemann said.

  He sat on the hard chair by the bed for a while, but nothing happened. "I need to talk to you, Emil," he said. "There's a problem with the site." Then, "You could help me with this, it doesn't matter we're on opposite sides. I worked out something none of us knew." Bonaventure moved restlessly in his sleep. "Don't bring it near me," he said, and the detective leaned in close; but it was only one or other of the fevers talking. Emil's breath smelled as if he was already dead, as if all those nightmares he couldn't have were hanging round him like a gas. "I'm sorry, Emil," Aschemann said eventually. "You would have been interested in what I worked out."

  Downstairs, Edith was sitting on the floor, sorting intently through a box of notebooks in all sizes, full of deranged handwriting and diagrams in different inks, their covers faded and water-stained. They had an air of being handled harshly, folded into pockets, dropped and trodden on, bled into, lost and found, over the years. She would take one out, open it in two or three places at random, riffle through all the pages in one movement as if she was hoping something would fall out, then put it back in the box. There was a smell of real dust in the air. When Aschemann appeared, she shut the box and pushed it away. He thought she was in a better mood. "Don't get up," he said. "I have to go."

  "Do you want that other drink?"

  "No. But this is for you."

  Edith gave him a vicious look. "It's not money we need," she said. She put herself between Aschemann and the door. "Remember how I used to sit in your lap when Emil first brought me to Saudade?" she reminded him. "Those were the days! Sit on your lap in your private office with you." She laughed derisively, but it wasn't clear which of them she was laughing at. "You shouldn't have let yourself be persuaded. You should have locked him up forever, so his life would be saved now."

  Aschemann couldn't think of a reply to that.

  "I'll call a rickshaw," he said.

  She shrugged and stood out of his way.

  "Another thing," she called after him, "I don't like you going after Vic the way you do. He's a moron but he never hurt anyone." After a pause she was forced to concede, "Not deliberately anyway," but by then the detective had gone.

  Aschemann had always admired Bonaventure's generation, though his admiration diluted itself over the years. They thought of themselves as uncut diamonds, in reality they were drunks, junkies, sky-pilots and entradistas. But in their day the site had only recently fallen to earth. It was unmappable to a degree. No one knew a dependable route through the aureole-which was more active then-or, if they made it through, where they would end up inside. They weren't even sure if inside/outside concepts had meaning. Despite that they launched themselves in there daily, on foot, by air, and in every kind of cheap local petrol-driven vehicle. They came home, if they came home, three weeks later: only to find that twelve hours had passed outside. Just as often it was the other way around. No perspective, no data, no count of any kind could be depended upon.

  As for artefacts, they were scooping them up off the ground in open contravention of common sense. They were digging them out of earth as ripe as cheese, fetching them down on the run with a variety of anaesthetic darts and lite particle beams. As a result they died in numbers, of odd diseases or inexplicable accidents inside and outside the site, leaving wills too exuberant to understand and last testaments tattooed on their buttocks. These treasure maps, whose psychic nort
h pegged itself to equally unreliable features of the Kefahuchi Tract in the night sky above, always proved worthless.

  "But, hey," Emil Bonaventure would say, in the tone of voice of a survivor about to bring forth the sum of his and others' experience-then, after a longish pause, shrug perplexedly because he had forgotten what he was talking about.

  Aschemann had the rickshaw take him to his ex-wife's bungalow. "Go by the noncorporate port," he told the Annie. Traffic was light. The port seemed reassuringly inactive, its fences intact under the halogen lights. By the time he got to Suicide Point the night's offshore breezes had started up and were blowing the mist back out to sea. There was a light oiliness to the water, and from round the curve of the bay he could hear something being loaded on to a ship. A few Point kids, upped on cheap AdAcs, were running about the beach in an aimless way. Aschemann spoke to them briefly and as a result got in touch with his assistant.

  "I'm puzzled that you would come here," he said, "without asking me."

  The assistant felt ambushed. She felt slow and confused. She had spent her night off in a C-Street tank farm. There, a hundred per cent immersed in the role of housewife in the moderne world of 1956AD, she had mopped a floor; gone for a spin on a fairground ride called the Meteorite; then, in an inexplicable third episode, discovered herself posing in front of a wardrobe mirror dressed only in loose transparent satin briefs. Her breasts were heavy, with big brown aureoles; the rest of her body, by the standards of her own day, soft and running to fat. After a little while, she pushed one hand deftly down the front of the briefs and began to practise saying, "Oh Robert, it's so nice to have you in there. Are you going to fuck me, Robert? Are you fucking me?" until quite suddenly she came, with a sharp blue line of light cracking across her vision, and felt exhausted. As a night off it was different, but less fun than she expected. It was an "art" experience. In the end she had preferred the Meteorite, which consisted of a wheel like a huge flat openwork drum, mounted on a bright red steel arm which levered it seventy or eighty degrees from the horizontal. You entered, the Meteorite began to spin, faster and faster. You were pinned against the wall by simple but implacable physical forces.

  "It was a mistake I made," she apologised to Aschemann. "I thought you said you would be there." She glanced at the data flowing endlessly up and down her arm; for a moment, despite all her training, she couldn't do anything with it. I was trying to understand you, she thought of explaining: but in the end only advised him, "You should get some sleep," and cut the connection.

  ***

  After Aschemann left, Edith Bonaventure went to her father's room, stood looking down for a minute or two at the blue hollows behind his collarbones, then took him by the shoulders and shook him until he woke. "Listen to me, Emil," she said. "Listen. Look at me and help." He coughed suddenly. "I'm sorry to do this, Emil," she said. She pulled him forward so that he lolled against her, weightless and rank, his chin on her shoulder taking the weight of his head like a baby's, while she felt around, first under the pillows then under his hot skinny buttocks. "I need it and it has to be here somewhere." Suddenly she shoved him away and began to beat his chest with her fists. "I'm serious," she said, "I'm serious, Emil." Emil made vague defensive motions.

  "Hey," he said thickly. "There's no need for this."

  "Where is it?"

  There was a longish pause and she thought he had passed out again. Then he laughed.

  "It's under the bed."

  "You bastard, Emil. You fuckhead."

  "It's under the bed with the bottles. It was always there," Emil said. "You could have looked any time." His laughter grew quieter and stopped. "It won't do Vic Serotonin any good," he warned her. "There's no good giving it to Vic." Contempt came into his voice. "Why? Because he's a tourist." He leaned carefully over the side of the bed and vomited a thin line of bile on to the floor. "Sorry," he said. He hung there exhausted, his face a foot from the boards, sentient tattoos crawling for cover like lice between the sores and shadows of his ribs. His skin was rich with a smell she couldn't explain. Edith hauled him back into bed and mopped up. She wiped his face, which had once had the power to solve every problem for her, but which now seemed all bone and stubble, hurt eyes like a boy. It was a face which for sixty years admitted desire but not alleviation. He had always moved on to the next thing; he had never taken shelter, and as a result he didn't know how. She clutched him and rocked him. "You were always useless," she told him. "You were a useless father." She began to cry. "I don't know what to do," she said.

  "I'm sorry about your life," Emil whispered.

  She let him fall, and sat back in disgust. "Won't you grow up even now?" she shouted.

  The journal was there, pushed as far as he could reach into the darkness under the bed, where the only way to find it was to sweep your hands to and fro in blind disgust until one of them touched it. What else was underneath? Edith didn't want to know. "Spew up on me while I'm down here," she warned him, "I'll kill you." No answer. But as soon as she had the book and stood up to go, he grabbed her arm and drew her down towards him. She was astonished by his strength-understood, for the first time, that everybody in his life had been too.

  "Where's Vic?" he said.

  "Vic's not here, Emil."

  "I never went deeper," he said. "This is the record of it. A year inside the site, and this book is everything I saved."

  "Emil-"

  "Fifty of us set out, two came back. We travelled to the heart of it. Where's Vic Serotonin been? Nowhere."

  "Emil, you're hurting me."

  "It was worth it," he said.

  His eyes went out of focus very suddenly and he let go her arm. "A year passed in there, Billy boy," he shouted, "less than a day out here. What do you make of that?"

  After she had calmed him down she brought the journal to her own room. It looked worse in the light. Her father's adventures had aged it the same way they aged him. Its covers were bruised and greasy; like Emil's, its spine was rotten. Every page was stained, spattered, slashed; some had been torn in half longitudinally, to leave only curious groups of words-"emergent behaviour,"

  "sunset of the amygdila" and "outputs accepted as input." But these were just problems of legibility. The site being as it was, an electromagnetic nightmare, writing was the only way to get anything out: but how do you write the fakebook to a place that is constantly at wofk to change the ink you write with, let alone the things you see? Her father's script tottered into the gale of it, stumbling off the edge of one page to fall by pure luck on to the next.

  He tried to remain calm. Of a misfired attempt to go in from the sea using inflatable boats, he recorded, "Two miles from [illegible] Point, wrecks show themselves at half tide." Then, "Satnav and dead reckoning both unreliable here but keep Mutton Dagger in line with the derelict fuel refinery and you might clear the sand. Ben Moran says he went in hard and got two feet clearance at low water." Scribbled across this, in a hand so distraught it looked like someone else's, was the instruction, "Forget it." Then underneath: "Something ate Billy in the fog. We lost the [illegible] amp;c had to walk out. Four days in here, a week passed outside."

  And then: "How do we know that what we come back to is the same?"

  Edith shut the book there and then. To read any more would be to read too far into Emil. How do we know that what we come back to is the same? Less a cry of horror than of triumph. In plain fact her father was only alive when he was in there, where everything was toxic, indefinable, up for grabs. Whatever he said about it-whatever he said about himself-it was the anxiety he loved. He loved the shadows, the wrenched way the light fell, the unpredictability of it all. So what he wrote in the journal was nothing like the assured face he showed the world, or even the one he showed himself, and that was why his handwriting had this disordered, scribbled, racing look about it. As for Vic Serotonin, he was the same. Despite Emil's bad opinion, Vic was the same, so maybe the book would be a help to him. Maybe, after all, it would give him the edge
in his situation with Lens Aschemann and Paulie DeRaad. Whatever that was.

  "Vic, you moron," Edith said gently, as if he was in the room with her.

  When she looked up, the accordions glared at her from the walls; out the window she could see the street full of cats, their black and white fur untouched by the fierce gold needles of rain falling through the streetlight. Despite these omens Edith tucked the book away, put on her maroon wool street coat and found her umbrella. "I'm going out!" she called up to her father. For the longest time there was no answer; then just before she slammed the outside door, Emil, who had lain there alert and intelligent with a curious hard smile on his face since she took the journal, called down:

  "It won't do him any good. My advice, give it to Aschemann, at least he's dependable."

  "Emil, you love Vic!"

  This made her father laugh; the laugh turned quickly into a cough. "So what?" Emil Bonaventure asked the ceiling when he could speak again. You can love a disappointment.

  Earlier that evening, Vic Serotonin had walked into Liv Hula's place in time to hear Liv say to Mrs Kielar:

  "Sometimes I could do without that."

  He had no idea what they were talking about. Reduced to essentials by the strong overhead light, leaning towards one another from each side of the zinc bar, the two women made between them a shaped gap, a Rubin's vase illusion. Though none of their differences could be said to be resolved by this, it gave them something in common for once: more, at any rate, than Elizabeth Kielar's cup of chocolate cooling on the counter by her hand; more than either of them might have in common with Vic Serotonin. Vic was surprised to catch that glimpse of them. They spoke for a moment longer, then, becoming aware of him, seemed to move languidly apart and break the spell.

  "Hi, Vic," Liv Hula said. "Get you something?" Then, as if he couldn't already see, "Your client's here."