Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  Quarantine wasn't a realistic option for DeRaad because of what would happen to him there. Leaving him to contemplate that, Aschemann went over to the rickshaw and stared down with a kind of puzzled anger growing on his face. "Don't you want me?" the Point kid sang out in his three voices. It wasn't clear how, but he could feel the detective there. He laughed. "No one wants me."

  Aschemann stayed bent over the rickshaw for some time, like an old man studying a baby. "What you've done here isn't good for anyone," he told Vic Serotonin without looking up.

  Out on the Lots, a wary truce had developed.

  Alice Nylon's gun-punks patrolled restlessly, whispering to one another in a gluey-sounding battle language they had refined from the fight argots of Preter Coeur. Aschemann's assistant wasn't prepared to try them out, despite the superiority of her chops. Things couldn't change, she decided, while her fire-team remained trapped up there by a conjunction of bad weather and site-side interference. But the situation wouldn't last forever and then she would see what happened. In keeping with this decision she had switched herself off and now lounged against the offside rear-quarter scoop of the Cadillac, from where she could exchange sneers with Alice Nylon, or stare with a kind of amused distaste at what had happened to Paulie DeRaad. Things could only get worse for Paulie. If he survived another twelve hours, which seemed unlikely, Hygiene would sequester him in an orbital facility. There he would be intubated in every natural orifice, plus some extra. They would run a bunch of wires up through the roof of his mouth and into his brain, in the hope some heavy-duty operator might gain access and fry the code before it became a full-scale escape. Either way he was dead. Meanwhile he presented as a danger to everyone around him, and without Alice's support he would be running out of friends.

  "Bad luck, Paulie," the assistant said.

  "You should keep your eye on the prisoner," Aschemann advised her, "if you want something to do." He treated DeRaad to an apologetic look. "What's your interest in this, Paulie? You gave Vic up, that's the end of it."

  Vic stared at Aschemann, then at Paulie, to whom he said, "You gave me up? Paulie, I'm hurt you did that."

  DeRaad ignored him. "I appear like this in person, it's not in my best interests," he said to Aschemann, "plus the pain and humiliation I got to suffer. But Vic goes down for bringing out an artefact and selling it on. You're hurt?" he screamed suddenly at Vic. Spit came out of his mouth and Vic stepped back in case he got infected by whatever Paulie was incubating. "Fucking Jesus bastard, you brought me a daughter. Look at me!" Screaming only tired Paulie out. He shook his head disgustedly. "You fucked me, Vic, so I fucked you. So much for friends."

  "You fucked yourself, Paulie," Vic said. "I was only the bearer of the bad news."

  But Paulie was already making his way back to the rickshaw in the piss-wet rain, leaning heavily on Alice Nylon's shoulder. He left behind him a feeling that the edge had gone off the situation. Aschemann had Vic. Paulie had his revenge. Aschemann's people would talk to the people who took care of Paulie, and the additional problem he represented would be solved at some other, higher level. Even Paulie accepted that. EMC would send someone for him and he would not bolt, because it was important to him to protect his brand-he was, after all, the last man out of the wreck of the old El Rayo X, which you could watch a genuine holographic record of the incident any evening at the Club Semiramide. He had a myth to manage. As a result, the escape would be contained. Everyone on the Lots that morning could back down without loss of face.

  So it would have remained, but the weather changed. Onshore winds peeled the cloudbase back in raw hundred-metre slabs.

  Inside the cloud unpredictable gusts and eddies came and went, full of rain and daylight one minute, wet snow and night the next. Electromagnetically disoriented and still awaiting instruction, the Site Crime fire-team-comprising code jockeys, weapons specialists and a human pilot hardwired into the DBH delivery vehicle- found itself drifting sideways at a brisk seventy knots into the event site. No one wanted that. The pilot weighed things up, shrugged and side-slipped blind into the first gap that offered itself. She was out of there, she said, for a fact.

  "Abort, abort," ordered Aschemann's assistant.

  The DBH breached the cloudbase, clipped the southeast corner of the Baltic Exchange and, condensation swirling off its asymmetric weapons pods, shot low over Aschemann's Cadillac, ploughing shortly afterwards into the concrete.

  Since there was no correct interpretation of this move, everyone used their initiative. Vic Serotonin got down behind the Cadillac. Alice Nylon's gun-kiddies engaged the remains of the fire-team with hand-held thermobarics and Chambers guns. The fire-team, unable to respond at that time, called for help. Alice Nylon got off a shot at Aschemann's assistant, but the assistant had tailored up and was already speeding across the concrete towards the wreckage of the DBH, shedding curious frozen images of herself where she had paused just long enough for your eye to retain some detail. Each of these pauses represented one of Alice's little troops taken up, damaged, and thrown down in a disjointed attitude.

  "None of this was intentional," Aschemann told Paulie.

  "You fucks are all dead for this," Paulie told Aschemann.

  Inside the DBH, the situation was out of everyone's grasp. The hull had been breached. The code jockeys were dead. The pilot's roof-of-the-mouth implant, ripped out by G-forces, hung from the console, a mass of fine gold wires, each one tipped with fresh brain matter. In an attempt to save itself, the ship had disengaged. In an attempt to save the pilot it had pumped her full of epinephrine and SSRIs, but her eyes were looking in different directions and her smile was as unplugged as her hardware. Worst of all, code had begun to leak through the compromised navigational firewalls and crawl over the living personnel who, hampered by their impact injuries, were kicking and screaming and struggling to crawl away from it.

  Aschemann's assistant paused in the breach and assessed all of this. They saw her through the drifting sparks of light, consulting her forearm datableed. They were begging and pleading with her. If you had asked right then what they made of her expression, they might have described it as "blank." But what did that mean? She was a policewoman, aiming her pistol from the approved stance. She was a policewoman, shooting the survivors before she used a high temperature incendiary to torch the wreckage. She had an aptitude for that practical kind of thing. She was a policewoman, who thought she would watch the thick white smoke rise a moment or two longer, just to be sure, before she let her tailoring take over again and guide her on to the next thing.

  No one wanted another escape on their hands.

  Annie the rickshaw girl stood around, filled with a kind of awkward dismay at the way things were going and wondering what her fare would want to do next. She couldn't catch his attention, so she got out of her shafts and went behind the Cadillac, which she recognised from all over the city, especially downtown, and tried to strike up a conversation with the guy Vic who was sitting on the wet ground with his legs stretched out in front of him unwrapping a gun from a bit of oily rag.

  "Is this your car?" she asked him.

  "No."

  "Only you'd have thought it was, from what Paulie said. I seen it around. 1952. You got your V8 pushrod, 330 cubic inches, bore amp; stroke 3-13A x 3-%. Best engine they ever made. Nice body too." She trailed her fingers down the smooth candy-and-pearl blends of the rear quarter. "And you got your wide whites. Fact is," she said wistfully, "I'd rather be one than own one. So, are these here your friends?"

  "Not really," Vic said.

  "Only I work for Paulie most of the time."

  "No one more generous than Paulie," Vic said, "when he's on the right side of himself." He said, "You should keep your head down now." He worked along the body of the Cadillac until he could stick his own head out past the front fender. That moment the fuel-cell of the Site Crime vehicle went up with a kind of damp crump and a lot of white smoke trails curving randomly into the sky. Bits and pieces began
clattering to earth. Vic winced away, then made himself have another look. "Fuck," he said. "She's still alive." A little later he added, "In fact I think she's the only thing alive out there." When he said this, he appeared puzzled but also as if a small sluice of panic had opened inside him. He crawled back to the rickshaw girl. "If she comes this way," he advised, "you should make it a point to leave."

  "I got no fare," the Annie said. "I don't leave without a fare."

  "Suit yourself."

  Weird mint-coloured light broke through the overcast, angling down on to the Lots where the policewoman, uncharacteristically still, continued to stare at the burning wreckage as if she was failing to understand something. This made Vic impatient as well as angry, so to divert him the Annie said, "Paulie has a good heart, but he's often a little too focused, you could say that of him. You know, I hate gunfire. I would leave, but for another thing they got this boy in my rig, no one seems sure what to do with him. I pulled him around a lot in the last couple days."

  "So there's your fare," Vic pointed out.

  "He ain't so much a fare as a liability," she said. "You smell him? Jesus." The fact was, she said, she felt sorry for him, he was nothing but a Point kid who did no harm to anyone-though she believed there were always two sides to that kind of passivity- and she wondered if he would get home all right. As a result, when Vic said that, it was like having permission. No one else was interested in her-they were just standing around in shock waiting to see what the policewoman would do next-so she went over to her rig, got between the shafts and wheeled it round to Vic's side of the Cadillac. Vic was back to sitting with his legs in front of him.

  "I could take you too," she offered.

  At that moment, Alice Nylon stepped round the trunk of the Cadillac. "Paulie wants you to know he's had it with you, Vic," she said formally. She thought for a moment. "We been good friends you and me, and I'm sorry I got to do this." Even with Vic sitting on the floor, she had to point her gun up at his face, gripping it hard in both hands and squinting one eye across the sights at him. "But I'm being as tuff about it as I can."

  "For fuck's sake, Alice," they heard Paulie call out, "just kill him. I got a right to feel betrayed here."

  "You can see his point," Vic told Alice. "Paulie should be on his way home to Beddington Gardens now, in the hope he can get baked enough to forget what's happening to him."

  "Fuck you," DeRaad said. "I heard that."

  During all of the foregoing, Paulie had walked about nervously, sweating and gesturing; or sat on the concrete for a minute or two with his hands between his knees and followed everything that was going on, his expression quiet and knowing. He stared up at the Baltic Exchange building, then down at his own skin, leaden and white at the same time, and as shiny as if it had a resin laminate, and, once, across at the site. He said, "I think it's in my legs. I can feel it in my legs somehow." Then he was up again and lurching around, thrusting his face into the face of Aschemann the police detective, to whom he spoke only when he needed a break from sneering at Vic Serotonin. "You and me, Lens, we're above this crap," he said. He examined the facade of the Baltic Exchange once more, as though puzzled by its iron pillars, its rows of windows in the blue-grey weather light. Then he added:

  "We're at another level from crap like this."

  Aschemann's arrival on the Lots had nothing to do with Paulie DeRaad; it had, especially, nothing to do with DeRaad's myth-odology. So when Paulie spoke to him like this, he couldn't think what to say in return, but stood with the rain in his white hair, feeling disarranged and contentless, while smoke from the wrecked vehicle caught in his throat and Paulie shouted in his ear. Nothing was happening for Aschemann's intelligence to get leverage on; it wasn't his kind of situation. In a moment everyone might be dead. "Paulie," he managed to say finally, "things here have tipped in the worst possible direction." But Paulie's attention had wavered and moved on. A level of ADHD was written into his cuts, as a professional requirement. He indicated the policewoman, locked in her inexplicable fugue out on the Lots; shook his head to illustrate that, despite his depth of experience, even he could be at a loss.

  "Lens, those chops of hers aren't military," he guessed.

  "She came to me from Sport Crime," Aschemann admitted, glad to find something they could talk about, "on a one-month trial. God knows what she had them do to her there."

  At last Paulie looked worried. "Shit," he said.

  "To be fair, she drives well and she's good at languages."

  "I got connexions could switch her off," Paulie offered. "If that's the problem."

  Aschemann had a clear little vision of DeRaad's connexions, floating in restless fragmentary orbits somewhere miles above, dipping down at random so their stochastic resonance software could slice through the electromagnetic clutter from the event site. Unlike him, they knew exactly where they were; where everything was. Miles away seemed too close. "Paulie, Paulie, you frighten me!" he said, although it wasn't Paulie he could see so well in his mind's eye. "I won't need that," he promised hastily. "It's generous of you to offer, but I won't need that." He dialled up the assistant again. "For God's sake, answer," he begged her. He was already opening a second pipe in case he needed more help. Meanwhile, he laid his hand on DeRaad's upper arm in what was intended to be a reassuring gesture.

  Of late, Paulie's tailoring package had been preoccupied. Its dialogue with the daughter-code wasn't going well. Nanopatches bolted on to Paulie's adaptive immune system, back in the El Rayo X glory days, had not held up. Now the daughter was chewing its way through the system itself (slowed only by the discovery that in Paulie's case the military Zip had used, in place of the usual im-munoglobins, proteins with leucine-rich repeats generated from lamprey DNA). Nevertheless the package overall had been excellent in its day, and despite these difficulties remained aware enough of the world outside Paulie to misinterpret Aschemann's motives. Nerve impulse propagation speeds ramped up by factors of four; simple instructions were issued to the rags of Paulie's central nervous system. The conscious mind processes at forty bits a second, the CNS at millions. Disorder is infinitely deep. Before he even knew he what he was doing, Paulie DeRaad had kicked the detective twice in the upper torso and once each in the throat and left ear. He looked down. He looked surprised. He shrugged and said, "Fuck you, Lens."

  Then he said, "Hey, I honestly didn't mean to do that. Sorry."

  Across the concrete, the policewoman woke up in a startled way and looked around her just in time to see Aschemann stumble backwards and fall over. She took a generous millisecond to assess the situation, then disappeared into the weather and reappeared quite suddenly in front of Alice Nylon.

  "Uh oh," Alice said.

  The assistant smiled and let her tailoring take over. After it had finished with Alice, it blurred its way over to Paulie DeRaad and put him down too. Then somehow she was back on Vic's side of things again, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with him, so close he could feel her skin on his, staring in the same direction as him- her body quivering, the air around her soupy with waste heat from her mitochondrial add-ons and exotic ATP transport upgrades- as if she wanted to see exactly what Vic was seeing. She smelled as sharp and sour as an animal cage. She had a look on her face he couldn't interpret. She was smiling. "Come on, Vic Testosterone," she whispered. "Try me out. Show me your special move." Vic shivered. He kept as still as he could. The minutes passed. He closed his eyes until he felt her chops shut down and she laughed and ran one finger lightly across the pulse in his neck and said, "Hey, Vic, you're safe now," and moved away. Next time he saw her she had dragged Aschemann into the back of the Cadillac, where she could work on him out of the weather. Except for the datableed running its perpetual Chinese Chequers down her forearm, she seemed so ordinary. She was some Sport Crime tailor's experiment or joke, laid like an ambush for people like Vic. She was something new.

  Vic had a struggle to get to his feet.

  He felt cold and stiff from sitting in the ra
in.

  Alice Nylon lay in a shallow puddle, one arm flung out, her blue slicker ballooning up intermittently in the wind to reveal pink pedal-pushers. Her hat had fallen off. A single line of blood ran from the left corner of her mouth. Alice had bitten her tongue when she fell, but the damage was elsewhere. Vic found guarding in the muscles of the abdomen and lower back-she was as hard as a pear down there. The whites of her eyes were yellow. His diagnosis, the spleen had let go; there were ruptures to other organs too. Not a mark on her, but everything was pureed inside. Her eyes looked tired, her teeth were rotten from speed use, her spoiled, peaky, unlined little face looked very old.

  "Shit, Alice," he said.

  Her eyes opened. "I lost my gun, Vic," she whispered.

  "Paulie will buy you a new one."

  "You know what?" she said.

  "What, Alice?"

  "Me and Map Boy did it. We had a fuck, Vic!"

  She chuckled. A small convulsion went through her.

  "I'm that bit younger than him," she said, "so I wasn't so interested. But he's nice enough, and at least I got to do it before I died. Vic, you ever meet Map Boy?"

  "I never did, no."

  "He's cute. Vic?"

  "What?"

  No answer.

  "Alice?"

  Paulie DeRaad was kneeling on the concrete, muttering into a dial-up. Vic went up to him and said:

  "Alice is dead, and to an extent, Paulie, I blame you." During his encounter with Aschemann's assistant, both of Paulie's shoulder joints had been popped. His arms didn't work, which, if nothing else, gave him some trouble maintaining position-each time his body threatened to fall forward, he left it to the last moment then writhed his torso in a curiously graceful motion to stay upright-but despite this he didn't seem upset or even interested. He let them dangle, like the sleeves of a coat. His face was grey, though patches of high colour sprang up where the old radiation burns had thinned the skin.