Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "I had children," she said, "but I left them."

  She laughed at his expression. "To be honest, they were more grown up than me from the start. They were often impatient." She fidgeted. Looked down at her hands. "I left them," she said, "because I saw they'd be all right." Vic didn't know what to make of this, so he didn't reply. After a moment, she asked:

  "When do we go?"

  "Soon." A certain amount of waiting was required. The wise thing was always to remember the client and not be too hard on her in that way: but, as everyone remarked, Vic stayed well through the exercise of caution. Some adjective from the complex vocabulary of the place, a change in the light or the density of the sounds you could hear, would sooner or later reassure him. He wasn't anxious, because he wouldn't commit until he had that reassurance. It was the professional course. "It's not like waiting for a door to open," Emil Bonaventure had once advised him. More something you could interpret as permission.

  "Come and look," he invited Elizabeth Kielar.

  "I don't know," she said.

  Vic shrugged as if it didn't matter. Then he said, framing the experience for her in the voice he reserved for clients:

  "This is what you came to see. This is it."

  After a moment she stepped primly round the hole in the floor and joined him, and they stared across at the event site. You were never sure what you were looking at. Beyond the wire, beyond the remains of the original wall, with its fallen observation towers, prismatic light struck off the edges of things. There was a constant sense of upheaval. Loud tolling noises, as of enormous girders falling, or the screech of overdriven machinery, competed with the sudden hum of an ordinary wasp, amplified a million times. It was like a parody of the original function of the place. But also there were snatches of popular songs, running into one another like a radio being tuned through some simple rheostat. You smelled oil, ice cream, garbage, birchwoods in winter. You heard a baby crying, or something clatter at the end of a street-it was like a memory, but not quite. Sudden eruptions of light; dense, artificial-looking pink and purple bars and wheels of light; birds flying home against sunsets and other sweet momentary transitions between states of light. Then you saw things being tossed into the air, what looked like a hundred miles away. Scale and perspective were impossible to achieve because these objects, toppling over and over in a kind of slow motion-or so the eye assumed-were domestic items a hundred times too large and from another age, ironing boards, milk bottles, plastic cups and saucers. They were too large, and too graphic, drawn in flat pastel colours with minimal indication of shape, capable of liquid transformation while you watched. Or they were too small, and had a hyper-real photographic quality, as if they had been clipped from one of the lifestyle-porn magazines of Ancient Earth: individual buildings, bridges, white multi-hull sailing ships, then a complete city skyline toppling across as if it had been tossed up among flocks of green parrots, iron artillery wheels, tallboys, a colander and a toy train running around a toy track. Everything in a different style of mediation. Everything generating a brief norm, reframing everything else. At that time, in that instant of watching and listening, in a moment savagely and perfectly incapable of interpretation, they were all the things that fly up out of a life, maybe your own, maybe someone else's you were watching. Day to day, you might have more or less of a sense that the things you saw were describable as "real." In fact, that wasn't a distinction you needed to make until you crossed inside.

  Vic Serotonin felt nothing but relief each time he arrived at the Lots. At this point you weren't committed, you could always turn around and go home. But it was another chance to engage, and as a result a kind of peace went through you. You felt stabilised again. You felt both excited and relaxed.

  "It's quiet today," he said.

  Elizabeth smiled uncertainly. "This is awful," she whispered. "I can't bear this."

  "Will you be able to do it this time?"

  "I can't bear not to."

  "Well then," he said, "we should start."

  He went to the door calm and happy, but when he looked back she was still at the window. "This is the right time to go," Vic encouraged her. When he took her by the shoulders, though, there was that tautness so permanent, so designed-in, so far down in her it was like touching some stretched internal membrane and pausing to wonder what you would do next. Elizabeth seemed to understand this. Caught between Vic and the window, she twisted into him; pulled his face towards hers and bit him sharply. "Fuck," Vic said. He let her go and put his hand to his cheek. She knelt down, worrying inefficiently at his clothes, then her own. "Yes," she said, "fuck. Fuck. Get in me, Vic," she said. "I want something to take in with me."

  He stared at her.

  "Christ, Vic, don't you see? Fuck me while I look at it."

  That was how the man who resembled Albert Einstein found them. He arrived in the doorway-excited from driving his Cadillac, a little out of breath from the stairs-and remarked to his assistant, who was standing next to him giving Vic her flat smile:

  "They're hot, these two. I never saw two this hot."

  "We're always getting lots of Vic on Elizabeth action," she agreed. "Lots of girl on girl."

  Vic reached for his Chambers pistol: the assistant's tailoring, which had reactions down in the millisecond range, turned itself on in response: there was a blur of motion from her, during which she seemed to be in several places at once, and then an actinic flash, in the aftermath of which nothing much could be seen at all except Aschemann by the door looking old, white-faced, perplexed; and Elizabeth Kielar, who jumped neatly into the hole in the floor and vanished, only to reappear a little later sprinting and weaving across the Lots towards the site boundary. Aschemann's assistant strode calmly to the window and began to shoot at her. Chambers bolts curved slowly down through the rain, making a noise like defective neon and setting fire to the thin vegetation.

  "Stop that," Aschemann said. His voice tones shut down the assistant's tailoring and she stared at him angrily.

  "You see?" he appealed to Vic.

  "Yes," Vic said. Something had happened to his arm; it was tnumb to the shoulder and he hadn't even seen her move. "Vic, I told you she could drink you with a glass of water!" Vic rested on the floor. He stared out the window. He'd been arrested before, but he had no dependable sense of what would happen next. Meanwhile Elizabeth Kielar was nowhere to be seen. Fuck me while I look at it. In the end that was what most of his clients wanted. They never got any further than the Lots. They had sex with you in open view of the thing out there-as if that was how they understood it; not as a state of affairs but as a live thing, perhaps even a conscious thing, they wanted it to be watching when they came-and then didn't speak on the way back. It was just a choice that made life more interesting. Vic wouldn't say he made his living from that impulse, or that he had any opinion about it; but the risk was lessened for everyone when that was what the client wanted. Though her resources were in disarray, he didn't think it was like that with Elizabeth Kielar; and he was beginning to regret how little he had discovered about her sense of herself.

  ***

  They took Vic out on to the Lots and put him in the back of the pink '52 Cadillac repro while Aschemann sat in the front and lit his pipe. At the same time the detective got a dial-up to the police bureau. "It's no problem," he said, shaking out a match, pulling open the dashboard ashtray, smiling and nodding at Vic. "The weather's more of a problem this morning. He's here, he's fine, we kept him in one piece. No, that's other business." While Aschemann was talking, the assistant walked impatiently up and down outside the car. Every so often she stopped and peered across at the event site, as if she had seen something no one else could. The outline of her body rippled a little as her tailoring, pumped and excitable from its encounter with Vic, cut in and out; the data-bleed ran red and green pictographs interspersed with jet-black oriental-looking characters in rows down her forearm. She leaned into the car and smiled amiably in Vic's face, as if she would like
to start a conversation.

  "Vic," she said, "what I've got switches offwhat you've got. Do you follow? That's why your arm hurts so."

  "Go and look for his client," Aschemann ordered.

  Vic said, "Her name's Elizabeth. She's nervous; it might make her difficult. Please try not to shoot her for that." The assistant glared at him, then down at her datableed. Then she jogged off through the rain.

  "Don't go in the site," Aschemann called after her.

  He examined the bowl of his pipe, then-as if they were of equal value in a wider context-turned his attention to the event site. Something vast and orange-coloured flew up into the air, but you could barely see it through the rain. It hung there for a moment then folded itself sectionally until it disappeared. The whole incident was over in forty seconds, and there was no way of describing the accompanying noise. Aschemann watched with a kind of calm approval. "A slow day today," he said. "A few hours ago, it was quite different. Down by the Cafe Surf, it bowled me over." He seemed delighted by the memory. "Literally, physically. Our friend Antoyne too. Today, I think a wave is coming, nothing happens."

  Vic Serotonin shrugged. "You wouldn't find it so quiet inside," he predicted. He wanted to make it clear that while the detective was perfectly entitled to an opinion, of the two of them Vic had the bulk of the experience. "How was Fat Antoyne?"

  "A little upset."

  "Antoyne feels things more than he'll admit."

  "I still want to go in, Vic."

  "Why?"

  "Because my wife's in there. What we're seeing is the life-cycle of a new species of artefact, and I think my wife was one of them."

  Vic made so little of this he didn't know how to respond. "What species?" he said eventually.

  "Walk round the centre of Saudade any night, visit the clubs, the shooting galleries, the music venues. That species. Or come and see them in the holding cells, fresh from the Cafe Surf and still gazing around like idiots, wondering how they came to be on our side of things. They love it-who wouldn't? Who doesn't love sex, fried food, hard drugs? The tough ones do what anyone would, get a room, go to ground, wait out their appetites, pupate; they look wounded but that's because they're just not us. They try to make contact, they try to strike up a conversation with our world, or someone in it. They're here for a change of state, but we're too much who we are to have any idea what that might consist of. While you think they're human you see them as having interesting qualities, but they're only confused. They're like insects, Vic: after a few years, whatever instinct drove them out of the site takes over and drives them back in again."

  It was a two-way traffic, he said, one which, as a result of their own anxieties, people like himself had overlooked from the outset. "Ever since the Tract fell to earth, we thought we knew what an escape looked like. It didn't look human. It looked like a catastrophe. We were clear on that, we could make rules for that. You've seen them in the quarantine centres, Vic: half-flesh, half-artefact, falling to pieces, speaking in tongues while the daughter code pours out of their mouths like light to infect a whole city block. We weren't prepared for anything more subtle."

  "Your wife's dead," Vic said. "Everyone knows that."

  Aschemann stopped talking immediately. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes.

  "I'm sorry," Vic said.

  They stared at one another in discomfort.

  "This rain," Aschemann said, holding one palm out flat. "Do you ever wish you were on some other planet?" He wiped the rain off his face, which looked tired and unkempt. He fiddled with the dashboard ashtray. Then he had a brief exchange with his assistant by dial-up, which he concluded by telling her, "Come back now. You're wasting everyone's time. Vic wants to get his arrest over with, and be put in a nice cell." A minute or two later she appeared quietly out of the Lots, her face, hands and gun beaded with water. "You can sit in the car," Aschemann said, patting the bench seat beside him. "Come and sit here in the driver's seat, the way you like. Put the convertible roof up if you're wet."

  "We're all wet," Vic said.

  "Shut up, Vic."

  They watched appreciatively as the convertible roof, which was the same shade of white as the upholstery, closed slowly over their heads. Then Aschemann said, "Vic, this woman here had a fire-team set up to bring you in." He chuckled. "That's how determined she is. They're still up there in the fog somewhere, trying to find their way home. Visibility's down to ten yards and the site is cooking their communications. She expected more trouble from you. To be honest, so did I. How's your arm? That numbness will wear off.".

  When this didn't get a response, he shrugged. "The reason you're in custody is this: you didn't give me what I want. Never underestimate that as a cause for arrest."

  "What about the tourist?" the policewoman wanted to know.

  "We'll have to leave the tourist," Aschemann said, without much reluctance. "After all, they come here for the risk." He leaned over the back of his seat and said to Vic Serotonin, "You know, I could wish it was Emil sitting here instead of you. Emil would be more interested. He never saw the site as a career opportunity; it was always an adventure he couldn't extricate himself from. I respect that. Vic, how was Emil last time you saw him?"

  "He wasn't good."

  "He wasn't good the last time I saw him either. But Edith seemed fine." To his assistant Aschemann said, "Start the engine. Let's take Vic away."

  This proved more difficult than he could have imagined. They were in the middle of one of the Cadillac's wallowing long-wheelbase turns when a rickshaw lurched round the corner at the other end of the Baltic Exchange and sped towards them, trailing a stream of ads in colours that crackled against the soft wet air, lighting up the puddles around the Annie's thudding feet. She pushed hard into her shafts, breathing like a horse. Vic could hear a voice calling from inside the rickshaw, but not what it was saying; nevertheless, it gave him the sense that things had become too complicated to control.

  From the other end of the Exchange, two dozen figures emerged wearing the signature rainslickers and waterproof hats of gun-punk chic. As soon as she saw them, Aschemann's assistant knocked Aschemann off the seat beside her and pushed him down into the footwell so that the engine was between him and the danger. Then she shoved open the driver's door and rolled out into the rain, shouting commands into her dial-up. Her tailoring had cut in by now; she was visible only as a sort of fibrous blur. Aschemann, his neck bent at an odd angle, blinked at the carpeted transmission hump. "What's happening?" he asked Vic. "Can you see what's happening?" Meanwhile the Cadillac continued to swing through half a circle, slowing down as it went, until it halted side-on to the approaching rickshaw. The driver's door now hung open to its full extent, allowing Vic to recognise the little figure of Alice Nylon riding the rickshaw step.

  "This is a fucking disaster," he said to Aschemann. "Warn that lunatic of yours not to shoot at anyone." He leaned forward and stuck his head out. "Alice," he shouted. "For fuck's sake, Alice, it's me. It's Vic."

  "Hi, Vic," Alice called. "Look at me!"

  "Call your kiddies off," Vic told her. "No one wants an incident. And don't ride the step like that," he added. "It's not clever and you'll only get hurt."

  Before Alice could respond, the rickshaw pulled up.

  "Three-up's two too many," the rickshaw girl said, "even for a pony my size." She leaned forward in the shafts, vomited with practised accuracy between her own feet and examined the result. "Nothing a dexamil won't cure," she decided. "I got plenty if anyone else wants it."

  A thick yet curiously musical laugh came from the rickshaw's interior.

  "Nice car, Vic," the occupant said.

  "It is a nice car, Paulie," the rickshaw girl agreed. "1952 roadster. Pushrod V8, 330 ft lbs at 2700 rpm; I respect an engine can pull. You know?"

  "Jesus," Paulie DeRaad said. "Everyone an expert here on Radio Retro. Open this thing up, Alice, so I can get a look at my old friend Vic."

  "Paulie, don't have anyone shot," Vic
said.

  "Paulie me at your own risk," DeRaad promised him. "What are you fucking looking at?"

  When Alice Nylon unlatched the hard apron of the rickshaw, a faecal smell rolled out and you saw immediately that Paulie was in a bad way. They had crammed him in with the remains of the Point kid and the two of them were embracing awkwardly, as if it was new to them despite all the practise they had. They were breathing gently into one another's eyes. Neither of them had much on, and their china-white bodies were covered in a thin, slick, resinous film which, though it looked liquid when you first saw it, was constantly hardening and cracking off, like something they exuded to protect them from the air. Paulie was still roughly the right shape, but the boy had begun to fatten, soften and blur. He had aged thirty or forty years since Vic first saw him in the building at Suicide Point. However you looked at him, he seemed to be out of focus. He had no idea where he was, or what was happening to him. Despite that, he came across as happy. Every so often, motes of light emerged from his mouth like very small moths, accompanied by a note or two of music.

  Paulie, less satisfied with his condition, flailed one arm about. "Alice, it's fucking stuck to me again," he said.

  Alice peeled them apart carefully so her employer could get out of the rickshaw. It made things difficult that Paulie couldn't bring himself to look at his own body. "You got to help me, Paulie," Alice begged; but he kept looking up and away from himself, and from Alice too. He didn't want to admit she was helping him. Eventually she manoeuvred him on to the concrete in front of Vic Serotonin, where he stood swaying and stinking and opening his arms. Part of his face went out of focus, then back in again.

  "Do you see, Vic? Do you see what you did?"

  Vic was saved from answering by Lens Aschemann, who clambered out of the Cadillac on the passenger side, buttoning his overcoat. "This rain," the detective complained, "will never stop. You should stay out of it, Paulie, because you don't look well." He gave Paulie a thin smile. "Better still, go to a Quarantine bureau, where I'll be able to find you."