Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "Take me back," he told her. "We won't have breakfast after all."

  On the drive back he was as preoccupied as he'd been when Vic Serotonin left his office the previous afternoon. At the bungalow he stood with his sodden raincoat over his arm and watched her K-turn the Cadillac so she could head back up Maricachel towards the centre of Saudade.

  "You got this from my shadow operators," he accused, "that was clever. I hope it was what you wanted."

  "I will never understand you."

  "No one ever understands anyone," he said. "We should both get a little rest."

  All her ambush had achieved was to drive him further back inside himself, a place the assistant now understood as a maze which made the one his wife had lived in look simple. Instead of going home, she made her way across town to C-Street and the tank farm. Against reason, she had begun to enjoy the flabby, rather slow-witted version of herself the tank had proposed. She cleaned 1950s house; chose 1950s clothes, especially silk knickers; and waited for 1950s man to come home, wondering what he'd say to her if he ever did. Mostly, she imagined his blunt, nicotine-stained fingers on her. The tank's flexible programming enabled her to do the shopping in Aschemann's Cadillac, though she refitted it with a rolled, peaked and vented hood, reshaped rear-quarter scoops and lowered skirts; and-after considering paint chips both authentic and inauthentic-resprayed it the pearlescent blue of a boiled sweet. She had the steering wheel chromed, but otherwise kept the chrome down to the fenders and grille. The front bench seat was long enough to lie full-length on in the fairground parking lot, so she could watch the Meteorite spin violently above her while she masturbated, and after ten minutes or so come with a deep sigh. It was as good as a sleep.

  While she was telling herself that, Aschemann sat listening to the sea and trying to fit what he knew about himself and his wife into what he knew about the event site. As part of giving up Vic, Edith Bonaventure had rickshawed her father's site journals over to him. It was something, she said, she needed to do. Leafing through them (a little puzzledly, because, despite all his experience on the other side, Emil had so clearly lacked the one understanding Aschemann now came to), he fell asleep almost as if by accident, and for the first time in fifteen years found himself dreaming of something other than the dead woman: water flowing as cool as early daylight over his feet and around his ankles; voices laughing in excitement. It was, he assumed, some memory of childhood.

  8

  Boundary Waves

  By the time the cats began to pour back into the event site, up Straint Street and past the yellow window of Liv Hula's Black Cat White Cat bar, it was raining again. Five in the morning. A few people would be out once the street had cleared, workers who used Straint as a short cut through to the ion works. A few shop assistants and clerks with rooms nearby, making their way down into the city proper; a few fighters making their way back from Preter Coeur. But generally Straint was unfrequented, and every morning at that time, the light seemed less to be coming back into things than leaving them for good. Liv Hula's window was the only lively thing in that part of Saudade. It illuminated the sidewalk. Seen from outside, two or three all-night drinkers, isolated by its rectangularity so that they seemed to have nothing to do with one another, could look like a warm crowd. They looked like people you might enjoy to know.

  Liv, watching the cats go past and wondering why her life seemed like a lot of separate pieces of reasonable worth which hadn't yet added up to anything, would include herself in that picture: she was someone you thought you might like to know when you were walking up Straint, when the colour was bleached out of everything else, the kerbstones, the cats, the two-storey buildings with their chipped, greying storefronts. That was the sum of her.

  "The cats never get wet," she said. "You notice that? Whatever the weather is, they never get wet."

  Vic Serotonin, who had come in about ten minutes previously, now stood with his elbows on the zinc bar, staring hard at his hands as if it was an effort for him to remain alive. His client had walked in five minutes before him, and was sitting at a table on her own. Vic had a small bag with him, and he was wearing a dark-coloured watch cap. Mrs Kielar had on a short belted leatherette jacket over fitted black slacks; she looked tired. They were drinking coffee with rum and pretending, for the nanocameras, not to know each other. It wouldn't have fooled a dog.

  When Vic didn't answer, Liv poured him more coffee, adding milk from the covered jug, and said, "You're in early, Vic. It a jump-off day? You're always in early on a jump-off day."

  No answer to that either. She shrugged and went behind the counter, which she wiped carelessly with a rag. She looked over at Mrs Kielar and raised her voice. "Don't say anything, then, Vic," she said. "I don't want to hear what you say about yourself. I heard enough about that." She switched the lights off, then on again, then off. Without them, the air in the bar reverted to a sepia colour-although the objects it picked out often seemed without colour themselves and as if they were lighted in some way from inside. "Is that bright enough for you, Vic? Can you see well enough in this light?"

  When Vic refused to take the bait, Liv moved away and stood in the shadows at the back of the bar.

  The travel agent and his client continued to ignore one another in their obvious way. They were there about fifteen minutes more, then Mrs Kielar pushed her chair back, turned up the grey fur collar of her jacket and left, and Vic threw some money on the zinc counter and he left too. As soon as he'd gone, Liv Hula stepped out of the shadows and counted the money. Her hand went to her mouth. She rushed to the door and called, "Vic, it's your whole tab. There's no need to pay your whole tab!" But they were already too far up Straint to hear her, following the black and white cats into the aureole of the event site.

  "Good luck, Vic!" Liv Hula called. "Good luck!" But neither of them looked back.

  If it was cats on Straint, it was dogs across the city at Suicide Point: Lens Aschemann woke just before dawn, with the confused impression that he had heard them barking as they lollopped through the surf. A trip down the hall and into the kitchen, which had the best seaward view, showed him the tide was on the turn under fast grey clouds, while rain blew suddenly this way and that across an empty beach. He stood for a minute or two listening for the loose sound of the swash; he could still hear the dogs, but they were moving away. It occurred to him that he wasn't entirely sure he was awake. This idea made him smile faintly and dial up his assistant.

  "Do you hear dogs?" he asked her.

  "What?"

  Sand, blown in under the kitchen door during the night, had stuck to the soles of Aschemann's bare feet. He brushed at them ineffectually, first one then the other, with the palm of his hand. "Every part of the year," he told her, "is filled with unacknowledged acts of memory, cued by the smell of the air, the seasonal fall of the light. Do you follow?" Silence in the pipe. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn't. "There are dogs in everything. They aren't real, but neither are they only a metaphor. We're dogged by the things we've forgotten."

  "I'm not sure I-"

  "Do you see what I'm saying? The investigator must always allow for this. The older we grow, the louder their voices, the more inarticulate they are." She made no further attempt to reply, so he said, "At least I don't hear them in this datapipe, that's a blessing," and then asked her to run the nanosurveillance from Straint Street, which she seemed relieved to do. After a few minutes following the life of the bar, he shook his head.

  "Is this all that happened overnight?"

  "Three or four a.m., the system went down again. There's some footage but it's not informative."

  "I can believe that," Aschemann said.

  "We should have put people in."

  "Who would we use? This woman knows everyone who drinks at her bar. She's no fool, even if Vic is." Liv Hula stood motionless at the zinc counter; she leaned her elbows on the zinc counter. The footage jumped, and she leaned on the zinc counter again. She stared emptily ahead. She looked tired.
"Switch this off, for God's sake."

  Aschemann brushed at the sandy soles of his feet as if this action might clarify his life, or at least connect him to it. Two hours' sleep in an armchair had given him kidney pain, but it couldn't explain the feeling that something was approaching him, racing towards him from what part of his past he couldn't even guess. It couldn't explain why his hands were so stiff, as if he'd been clenching them tightly in his sleep. Only the dogs could explain that. "At least we know where they're going," he said. "We have an embarrassment of confirmation on that." Just before he closed the dial-up, so that the assistant would have no time to reply, he said, "By the way, did you enjoy that sleep of yours you had in the twink-tank?"

  "Watch out for the dogs you hear."

  Aschemann took his kidneys to the toilet, chuckling. "One day I'll give that tank a try," he promised himself.

  ***

  "How will we know we're in there?"

  Vic Serotonin stopped to allow his client to catch up. "Sometimes you don't," he said carelessly.

  The event-the fall to earth, whatever you described it as-had taken place a generation or more ago, in the city's old industrial quarter, the warren of factories, warehouses, docks and ship canals which at that time connected Saudade to the ocean. Commerce had ended instantly, but its characteristic architecture remained as a fringe about half a kilometre deep, a maze of empty buildings with collapsing corrugated roofs and broken drainpipes, their iron window frames bashed in and emptied of glass. A mile or two past Liv Hula's bar, Straint narrowed to a lane; the cobbled cross-streets became little more than industrial alleys, pitted and rutted, littered with lengths of discarded cable and balks of timber. Everything smelled of rust and precursor chemicals. The blue enamelled signs on the street corners had long since corroded into unintelligibility. Elizabeth Kielar studied them and shivered.

  "I'll know," she said.

  "Then why ask me?"

  "I'll feel it."

  "All that happened last time," he reminded her patiently, "is you lost your nerve." The only reply she offered was an angry look; as if he were the unpredictable one, the one both of them had to be careful not to trust.

  Over the years, Vic had given the question more thought than his tone implied. You knew you had entered the aureole when the weather changed, that was his view. Turn a corner between two factory yards in winter: sunlight would be falling into the well of the street while insects described fast, wavering trajectories from the brassy light into the darkness of the buildings. If it was sunny in Saudade, patches of fog drifted through the aureole. Or the wind would, as now, pile up a few cold, soft short-lived flakes of snow in the gutters. Whatever else happened, the shadows struck at absurd angles for the time of year, as if geography was remembering something else. "The lines of distinction aren't sharp," Vic concluded. You had to use your intuition as to when something like that became important.

  "When the Kefahuchi Tract first fell to earth, they tried to build permanent controls. Walls, ditches, concrete blocks. But that stuff would be absorbed overnight." Something went wrong with the air, and next morning your border post had gone and you were looking across a fifty-yard waste lot covered in cheat weed and cracked concrete, at what appeared to be a huge, motionless, empty fairground in the rain. "Now they have a more relaxed attitude. Take the wire up every so often, put it down somewhere else: they call it 'soft containment.' " Still trying to explain himself, and thinking of the complexities of his relationship with Emil Bonaventure too, Vic added, "Even in the aureole you need luck. I'm not one of those people who believe they'll have street light in there by next Wednesday."

  "Do any of you understand anything at all?" she said angrily. "Why do you all act as if you know something when you don't?"

  "This area's thick with police. So try to keep up."

  Twenty minutes later it was full dawn, and the first patrol of the day had caught up with them. Vic hurried Elizabeth through the nearest door and into a derelict warehouse-puddles, ripped-up concrete and foul earth, holes that gaped down into cellars and sewers, everything of worth stripped out long ago-where he pushed her to the floor and put his hand across her mouth. Elizabeth stared up at him in a kind of puzzled supplication, as if she didn't understand why humiliation should be part of this search for her own nature, while matt-grey Site Crime vehicles forced themselves down the narrow accessway outside, repeatedly occluding the light then allowing it to splash in again rich with steam cooked out of the standing water by the waste heat of the nuclear engines. The air shuddered with the din of it; above that, you could hear the faint realtime shouts of the foot police coordinating their sweep through the buildings.

  "They're not looking for us!" Vic shouted into Elizabeth Kielar's ear. Nevertheless he made her lie there, listening, until long after the engines and the shouts had passed. Then they left, Elizabeth brushing irritably at her clothes. After that it was more of the same, rusting tracks, flooded rocket-docks with vast discarded machinery visible just beneath the surface of water stinking of the sea but so glamorised by exotic radiochemicals it would glow faintly in the dark. They made good time, and Vic Serotonin was pleased by the professional way things were falling out for once. But as they passed, everything-each alley and abandoned wharf, each collapsed or melted gantry, even the Site Crime patrols-seemed to settle, shift and morph indiscernibly into something else. The aureole was all around, like a wave propagated through everything. Everything was up for grabs. Half an hour later, when rain caught them at the edge of the site itself-a shower which slanted in, mercurial against the direction of the light, to pass within minutes-you couldn't, as Vic said, be sure where it came from, or how. Though on the face of it things looked simple enough.

  Independent of the patrols, Lens Aschemann's pink Cadillac nosed its way down the pot-holed alleys, waited at each junction, then, accelerating briefly but wildly, left the road and bumped its way through the tall weeds of a concrete lot as if its driver had lost control of the clutch. With the detective himself at the wheel, the car's character changed. It became like a big, blunt animal, some species adapted neither for stealth nor pursuit but which, despite Darwinian constraints, had decided to learn them both.

  Aschemann drove as if he couldn't see well, gripping the wheel tightly and thrusting his face close to the windshield, while his assistant suffered in the passenger seat, steadying herself with both hands and offering him an expression of open hostility.

  "I don't understand why you're insisting on this," she said.

  "Now you think you're the only driver in the world?"

  "No!"

  "Everyone drives. We all like to drive."

  "This is because of yesterday."

  "I won't dignify that with an answer. Sometimes we have to drive, sometimes we have to ride. Don't spoil a beautiful day."

  Aschemann's face looked more than ever like the older Einstein's, the eyelids even more drawn-down, the cheeks pouchier, with a greyish tinge from lack of sleep. His eyes were veined and watery. They gave him a look of confused enthusiasm. The Cadillac's front wheels left the ground briefly, then banged back down so hard the suspension bottomed out. She clutched the windshield edge reflex-ively: this stimulated a response from her forearm dataflow. "Are you familiar with the term 'lost'?" she said. Satellite navigation signals were still available, but her software could no longer distinguish between several possible sources, ghost emissions, particle dogs, accidents of atmospheric lensing. They might be real, they might not. At least one of them seemed to be in the site itself. "As of now we don't know where we are."

  Aschemann smiled.

  "Welcome to the aureole," he said.

  "This is about yesterday," she accused him.

  He leaned over and patted her shoulder. "After all, can we ever say we know where we are?"

  There was more orbital traffic than usual that morning: military traffic, alien traffic, surveillance traffic. If you just knew how to look, you found EMC up there in numbers. High-
end assets in hair-trigger orbits, calculated to keep an eye on some dubious investment of middle management's. She had her own investment in play. She followed the data as it bled endlessly down her arm, pausing only to say:

  "Please keep both hands on the wheel."

  Along with the agency, its goodwill, and his South End walk-up, Vic Serotonin had inherited from Emil Bonaventure the use of a bolt-hole on the top floor of the old Baltic Exchange building, which faced the event site across a bare expanse of concrete called "the Lots." This comprised a room twelve feet by fifteen, once an office with frosted glass dividers. Over time Vic had been obliged to defend it against other travel agents: in reprisal, two or three of them, led by a woman born Jenni Lemonade but known in Saudade as Memphis Mist, had used a hand-held thermobaric device to rip a hole in the middle of the floor, through which you could, if you felt like it, contemplate a thirty-foot drop into standing water. Despite this it remained a serious professional location, offering views of the Lots where they rose gently towards the faint thickening of rain-wet air which marked the interface. It offered a place to wait while you assessed the situation. Vic had slept there once; the dreams he experienced convinced him not to do it again. Now he stood at the window, which possessed neither frame nor glass, and was puzzled to hear Elizabeth Kielar say:

  "Did you ever want children?"

  The view frightened her. She had averted her head as soon as he brought her in and, careful to keep facing the hole in the floor, inched her way round the walls to the corner in which she now squatted, her arms wrapped round her knees. When Vic spoke, she smiled at him confidingly, as if he'd caught her in some even less dignified position. What little oblique, dirty light fell on the side of her face served to occlude rather than disclose. Close to the site something was always wrong with the light anyway; it struck as if refracted through heavy but volatile liquids, aromatics on the edge of evaporation.