Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "Arrest me or let me go," he said. "I'm not comfortable with any of this."

  "No one is comfortable," Aschemann reminded him, "out here in the Halo." He watched Vic walk away down the corridor. "You should take care from now on," he called, "in case I can't protect you from yourself." He dialled up his assistant. "Put every camera we have on him," he ordered. But the orbital component of the surveillance system, a smart fog of microsatellites sold on from some small war ten or twelve lights along the line, was down for service. "Those pSi engines burn too hot for their own ceramics," the assistant informed him. They would be out that day, she apologised, and all the next; consequently there would be a reduced service. There would be some loss of coverage. Even as he flagged down a rickshaw in broad daylight at the junction of Uniment and Poe, Vic Serotonin was becoming as invisible as his friend DeRaad.

  "I thought we were arresting him," the assistant said.

  "We changed our minds."

  Police work, the man who looked like Einstein always tried to teach his subordinates, is an activity drained of romance yet suffused with every possible kind of mystery. It was the opposite life, he believed, to the one his wife had lived: although he knew that his ability to see himself clearly-to encounter himself as a continuity-had, quite early on in their relationship, been corrupted by his attempts to bring her into focus. Did that matter, now that he had begun to understand what was happening in the teeming epistemological gap between Saudade and the event site?

  Vic Serotonin went straight from the detective bureau to the Semiramide Club, the nearest place he could think of to get a drink. It was like a warehouse at that time of the morning, with much the same ambience if you discounted the smell of high-end pheromone patches and low-end liquor. The cleaning service was in. A few people of Paulie's, disconcerted by his absence, sat around tables at the back, among them Fat Antoyne Messner and Antoyne's squeeze, Irene, who were discussing the hottest subject in the Halo at that or any other time-what they would do with their lives if they ever got off-planet. Irene could envisage herself owning a little business. She had as many ideas what that might be, she confessed, as she had smiles; but she knew just what she'd call it, however her good fortune turned out: Nova Swing. That was a name the fat man could appreciate, indeed he received it as he received all Irene's plans, with the look of someone already convinced. On his part, the suggestion was they buy a ship. Nova Swing would be as good a name for a rocket, he believed, as for a boutique; and a rocket was, whatever angle you looked at it from, a business. Antoyne would always know how to make money out of a rocket. At which Irene gripped his hand across the table and smiled with every part of her body.

  "We only could get our start, Antoyne, there'd be no limit to the things we did!"

  That was how Vic found them.

  "Hey, Fat Antoyne!" he said, pulling up one of the many empty chairs so he could sit down. "I was just thinking of you on the way over."

  This approached the truth, although what had engrossed Vic most, as the rickshaw girl plodded through her midmorning low, was his promise to Elizabeth Kielar. Now wasn't a good time to take a client into the site. On the other hand, he had no doubt that circumstances would soon make it impossible for him to go in at all. He wasn't sure which he was most afraid of: being caught in whatever operation Paulie DeRaad was running through the Cafe Surf (because now he was certain it must be Paulie's op, financed for their own purposes, perhaps, by his shadowy backers in EMC); or allowing himself to be sucked into the meltdown of psychic confusion and professional misjudgment Paulie had triggered at Site Crime. Thinking too much about this had caused Vic a crisis of confidence. That was why he was glad to see Fat Antoyne, though a moment's consideration might have changed his mind about the offer he now made.

  "I was thinking of how you always wanted to go into the site," he said. "Well, now you can." He beamed at Antoyne, who did not reply, and then at Irene, who gave him an unfriendly look and said:

  "Excuse me, I got the urge for the powder room."

  "It's work, Antoyne, if you want it."

  "I work for Paulie," Antoyne pointed out. "Also, I don't see you for days, maybe weeks, suddenly you want me to go in the site with you. You never wanted my help when I offered."

  "That was perhaps insensitive of me," Vic allowed.

  Antoyne only repeated, "You never wanted my help when I offered."

  "I see that," Vic said. He knew it wasn't enough, but he didn't know what else Antoyne wanted him to say. After a pause he went on, "Paulie's not feeling well. I expect you heard." He shuddered. "I got it from Paulie himself, you don't want that experience. He doesn't look good, Antoyne. It will be a while before there's work for anyone in that direction. Look around you." He indicated the gun-kiddies, desultorily threatening to shoot one another over a dice game called Three Dick Hughie. Every time someone came in the front door they all looked up at once, their little six- and seven-year-old faces full of light, in case it was Alice Nylon with news. "These guys know that. Hey, what about a drink?"

  Vic sat back. Antoyne stared at him as if he was in the middle of planning what to say. They remained in that position until Irene returned from the powder room in an improved mood and accepted a cocktail, as she put it, on both her and Antoyne's behalves. "You two men can still be friends," she judged, after the drinks arrived, "if you just but trust each other. You know I'm right." She tried to catch Vic's eye.

  "That's nice, Irene," Vic said, looking away. "That's as true as anything I heard. I was thinking of going in tomorrow," he told Antoyne.

  Some discussion followed-on how they would meet, exactly where and when the jump-off would take place, what Fat Antoyne might expect in the way of remuneration-and then Vic went home. "That is a very lonely man," Irene concluded as she and Antoyne watched him leave the Semiramide, "whose journey is always the long way round. Antoyne, there's something I have to ask you, and I want you to think hard before you answer because it could mean so much for our hopes and dreams."

  In one corner of Vic Serotonin's South End walk-up, on a small wooden chest of drawers hand-painted dark green, were arranged some items he had brought out of the site. There was nothing fatal about them. Look away from an artefact and you always feel for a moment that it lives another life-that in fact it takes the opportunity to live another life. But these were not artefacts, or at any rate they did not announce themselves as such; they were ordinary objects he had picked up in there-a brass lizard three inches long; a bowl full of beads in hot colours; one or two dusty ceramic tiles featuring pictures of fruit.

  Vic examined them for a moment or two, thinking how they stood out in some reassuring way from the cheap repro which otherwise filled the room. Then he sighed, pulled open one of the drawers and unwrapped his Chambers pistol from the soft cloth he kept it in.

  He swept the top of the chest clear, unfolded a second cloth and laid the gun out on that in pieces; these he inspected, cleaning the mechanical parts carefully before reassembling them. Throughout the process, the weapon itself reminded him in a gentle, persistent voice that its non-mechanical parts weren't user-serviceable. A chip was supposed to keep the physics under control, but the Chambers pistol was known as a particle jockey's nightmare, feared by humans and aliens alike. Vic had his at a discount from Paulie DeRaad, who had it gratis with a crate of other stuff from an EMC armoury sergeant up the line; they'd been in some war together. Every time he cleaned it, Vic heard Paulie's voice advising: "Treat that fucker with respect, maybe it'll kill someone else instead of you."

  Once the job was finished, Vic didn't seem to know what to do next. The light moved round the room to afternoon. The air cooled and there was a mist over the far edge of the noncorporate port. Occasionally he would get up and look out the window down into the street, but mostly he sat on the bed, wrapping and unwrapping the pistol until Mrs Elizabeth Kielar knocked at his door and he let her in.

  "I felt so afraid," she said.

  She stood awkwardly just i
nside the room, as if she was expecting a further invitation. "I walked, I don't know why. I went to the bar but then I remembered you wouldn't be there." Before Vic could speak she said quickly, "Are you all right with this?" She turned up the collar of her coat, then turned it down again so that the light from the window accentuated the sharp line of her jaw. "You did tell me to come."

  "Don't you ever say what you mean?" Vic asked.

  He touched her where the light fell. Both of them went very still, and she looked up at him with a bemused expression.

  "We never know what we mean," she said. "We act it out, moment to moment. We never know what we mean until it's too late." Then, when Vic let his fingertips slip until they found the pulse in her neck:

  "Why don't you fuck me? It's what we both want."

  Vic woke up later in the dark from a thick and disturbing sleep, half-convinced that someone had that moment dialled him up with the kind of message no one wanted to hear-a change of plan, a debt called in, a dead parent, the kind of message that in 2444AD could only divert your attention from the feelings that made you real to yourself. Elizabeth Kielar's satin underclothes were on the bed, pooled slippery as water. Elizabeth herself was kneeling close by, turned away a little from the waist, feet tucked under, iodine shadows delineating each muscle and rib. There was a harsh, dry smell about her, which Vic, excited, took to be her sex. She had opened up her diary and was holding it towards the window so that the street light caught the pages. When she saw he was awake, she smiled.

  "Why do I do this?" she asked.

  "Only you can answer that."

  "I looked out of your windows while you were asleep," she said. "And I looked through all your things. Was that wrong of me?" She shivered, staring ahead as if she could see a long way off. "I write because I don't remember anything about myself. Do you remember your childhood, Mr Serotonin?"

  "I'm Vic," Vic said.

  He put out his hand and touched her arm above the elbow. "You don't have to panic," he said. "Read me something."

  "I'm afraid of what will happen tomorrow," Elizabeth said.

  "Are you reading that or is it what you feel?"

  "I'm reading it and it's what I feel," she said.

  "You don't have to go in there," Vic suggested, though he knew she did. She shut the diary and dropped it on the bed, began to put on her clothes. Vic picked up the diary, smelled its pages, leafed through them. He could feel her watching him, trying to anticipate what he would do. When he found an entry he could almost understand, he read it aloud. " 'Some sea-travellers,' " she had written, " 'never regain their land legs. They come ashore but from now on, for them, walking will always be as difficult as walking on a mattress. But it's worse to sit still, or try to sleep. At least when they move about the symptoms are minimised.' "

  "Don't," she said. "Don't!"

  " 'They call this mat de debar quement? "

  She put her hand over his mouth to stop him. "What do my fingers smell of?"

  Vic laughed. "The sea," he said.

  "Well then, make me wet."

  He turned her hand over, licked the inside of the fingers and placed them against her sex. "You do that," he was beginning to say, when his dial-up cut in and Alice Nylon's voice filled his head without warning. "If this is Vic Serotonin," Alice said, "Paulie wants to talk to you," and after that, Paulie himself came on. Vic pushed Mrs Kielar away.

  "Hey, Paulie," he said.

  Among Paulie DeRaad's bolt-holes he kept an apartment on the top floor of Beddington Gardens, a system-built beachside tower in retro-Socialist chic circa 1965AD, its cracked curtain walls accurate down to the wads of newspaper the original contractors had used as separators in place of cement. A bald rectilinear space with inset lighting, its window a single sweep of glass taking in the full curve of the bay to Suicide Point, the apartment was furnished and styled moderne, with the wet bar at one end and at the other racks of what resembled faux-wooden TV consoles from the historical times, connected to the FTL routers by which Paulie kept abreast of his interests up and down Radio Bay.

  White carpet was fitted throughout.

  Alice had brought her boss there two days before, and she had been looking after him ever since. She made what food she knew how, mainly ordered-in falafel and brownies, but Paulie wasn't interested in eating. She mixed him drinks from the wet bar, but, inexplicably, Paulie wasn't drinking. When he was asleep she wiped his forehead with a cloth, or stood up on tiptoe to admire his possessions. She liked best the white singlets and underpants he kept nice and clean in a drawer, which she buried her face in when she first found them, but only looked at thereafter in case she spoiled them. The rest of the time she spent talking to the Semiramide people, intercepting problems, cleaning house across the city, trying to gauge how panicked everyone was. "He's all right," she told her friend Map Boy, who, because he wasn't one of that crowd, she could open up to a little. "On the other hand you don't want to get close to him. I'm cautious about it. You know?"

  The brief spells Paulie was awake, he didn't pay her a lot of attention, uplinking instead with his offworld contacts. Nothing much came of this, so to start with she was relieved Paulie got hold of Vic. She stayed in the pipe in case either of them needed her, but with a hope that the conversation would take the weight off her. That was a short-lived hope, because when Vic said, "Hey, Paulie," all Paulie replied was:

  "Don't hey me. Who are you to hey me, you cheap fuck?"

  Vic told Paulie he should steady down.

  DeRaad gave a thick laugh. "Can you believe this?" he asked Alice Nylon. Whatever else was wrong with Paulie, he remained sharp enough to know she had stayed in the pipe with him. Security was always first things first with Paulie. She said:

  "I can't believe this, Paulie, no."

  When he heard Alice's voice, Vic sounded relieved. "How are things going?" he asked her.

  "You don't fucking talk to Alice," Paulie shouted, "while I'm still here. You fucking talk to me." No one could afford for things to develop further in that direction, so there was a silence on all sides. "Cheap fuck," Paulie said into it, not to Alice or Vic but maybe, given his present situation, to himself. Then he went on in a calmer voice, "What are you doing to help me, Vic? I'm hiding from my own people. I'm sick. I'm losing trade. It's in me, Vic. I feel it there, I hear it trying to talk to me. They say 'Shit it out,' but when I can't have a bowel movement that's great advice. Meanwhile what are you doing to help?"

  "Paulie, I don't know how to answer that."

  It was easy to appreciate the position Vic found himself in.

  Paulie had lost perspective on things, Alice could see that-she was still his best girl, but it was easy to see he had lost his perspective on things.

  "If I brought you a daughter," Vic was saying, "that's the risk you always knew you took." Alice could feel him searching around for something else to say, but in the end he only added, "I'm running a client in tomorrow from the Baltic Exchange, just after dawn. Maybe I'll find something in there to help you," and all three of them knew what that was, speaking of shit. There followed another silence, then Paulie DeRaad said, "Vic, you're fucked with me," and broke the connection.

  "Alice?" he called. "Are you still my best bet?"

  "You know I am, Paulie."

  "So set me up a pipe to Lens Aschemann. I got some information for him."

  The first night they were at Beddington Gardens, Paulie had screamed for four hours solid in his sleep while lights seemed to crawl up his own arms and into his mouth. Next day, he sent her to Voigt Street to fetch the sick kid he kept there, who had started all this and who had radioactive blood or whatever. When she got back, which took all morning with the kid stinking and throwing up and falling out the rickshaw and wandering off into shopping malls singing to itself while its face shone with an exultation Alice did not envy, Paulie had rigged up a curtain to divide the main room in half. From then on he passed his time behind that with the kid and wouldn't let her come through,
or look at him again. They had a chemical toilet in there. She had to pass things round the curtain to the two of them. She did once see that the bed was slick, and they were slick too, with something which resembled a clear resinous liquid. Maybe they spewed up this stuff and that's why Paulie wouldn't eat the food she made him. After perhaps eight hours a smell started to fill the room; also, since Paulie went behind the curtain something was wrong with his voice. It started out each sentence with thick tones, as if it was far back in his throat or he had been eating Roquefort cheese; then halfway through it jumped an octave into a music kind of sound. Alice knew that sound. She didn't like it.

  "He's here now," she told Paulie when the police detective came on. This time she stayed out of the pipe. You never knew what operators Site Crime might be running in there.

  Perhaps an hour before Paulie called Vic, certainly not more, Lens Aschemann could have been found walking briskly along the Corniche to the Cafe Surf, where, instead of entering the Long Bar and occupying his customary seat in the corner, he took shelter in the darkness under the condemned pier behind the building, tapping his foot to the faint jazz music that leaked out into the night, until he saw Antoyne Messner approaching him along the beach.