Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "I don't remember."

  "Do you remember anything at all after you left the Baltic Exchange?" He meant, I warned you. He meant, It's dangerous to come here looking for any part of yourself.

  "I was on a beach," she said. "A man was exercising two dogs." She had watched him walk his dogs backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, over the same two hundred yards, even though he had miles of beach available. His reflection kept pace with the reflections of the dogs along the wet sand. Every so often, she said, he seemed to stop and, cupping his hand, splash their undersides with seawater. "They were so patient and accepting!" They stared ahead in whatever position they had come to rest, and eventually one of them curved itself into a taut, elegant hoop and tried to defecate. After that, all three of them trudged away up a steep shingle bank, the rain dissolving them into a single wobbling cipher.

  "You followed them. It was evening, you saw lights."

  "No."

  "You found yourself here," Vic said.

  "They were as fastidious as schoolgirls, those dogs," she said. "I had to laugh." She said, "I felt like a little girl again."

  "It wasn't a beach. They weren't dogs."

  She turned her back on him and began to walk away. "I'm going in, whatever you say."

  "Elizabeth, you're already in."

  "Do you know anything, any of you? Anything at all?"

  He couldn't answer that.

  Smoke was still rising from the Lots half an hour after Vic Serotonin had made himself scarce. Bodies lay in extreme positions where they fell. One of the surviving gun-kiddies had died. The other had stopped crawling and begun to make a peculiar thin keening noise; it had suffered significant head injuries. Site Crime was arriving in numbers, mainly local uniforms in their huge patrol vehicles, responding to the original conflagration: but also specialist teams from Hygiene, Quarantine and Surveillance; teams whose job it was to co-ordinate with EMC; and teams whose job it was to co-ordinate teams. They held informal meetings on the Lots to discuss protocol, collars raised against the rain; or stared up at the roof of the Baltic Exchange, which had collapsed shortly after the departure of the Poule de Luxe. A group of them gathered round the punk, some taking bets, some repeating in loud voices, "Can you hear us?" and, "Can you tell us who did this to you?" then advising each other tiredly:

  "Forget it guys, this one's fucked."

  They avoided Aschemann's car, although they sometimes tried to catch the eye of his assistant, whose reputation had reached them via one Bureau pipe or another. On her part, she had nothing to say. She leaned against the rear quarter of the Cadillac, radiating heat from her ramped-up metabolism-which, like most contemporary Preter Coeur product, had a stage by which it burned forty per cent of its own cellular waste-and treating everything but her datableed with contempt. She hadn't spoken since Vic got away.

  "I'm feeling very shaken up," Aschemann told her.

  He put his hand on her arm. "Thank you for everything you did; perhaps next time you could kill a few less people."

  She shrugged.

  "Are you angry?" he said.

  "This was never an investigation. It was a mess."

  Her eyes went out of focus; she said something flatly into her dial-up. She had called down another fire-team; but it was too late to catch Vic, and Paulie had never been her responsibility. When Aschemann reminded her of that, she levered herself angrily away from the Cadillac and stood off a few paces, looking in any direction but his. She knelt next to Alice Nylon and tidied the hair out of the peaky, dead little face. "I don't understand why any of this had to happen!" she said to Aschemann. "I don't understand why you have to pretend to be old, and get driven around in a car from the historical times. No one in this culture has to be old any more." She lifted Alice by the shoulders, shook her lightly-as if Alice had gone to sleep on some secret which if she had shared it would have changed both their lives-then allowed her to drop back again. "An escape is involved here," she reminded Aschemann. "I don't understand why you can't investigate the way everyone else does."

  "I'm sorry," Aschemann said.

  This response caused her to return to the car, look in at him in a thoughtful way and say, "What's your name?"

  "Pardon?"

  "What's your name?"

  "You shouldn't have to ask," he said. "Aschemann."

  "And that's how your wife spoke to you, is it? Aschemann, pass the hummus, Aschemann, slide the chair over to me so I can stand on it and fetch down this bottle of dark rum. Aschemann, we're old and will die one day."

  Aschemann felt hurt at this.

  "It's Lens," he said.

  "Well then, Lens, it's been nice. You never once asked me my name, but at least now I asked yours. I resign."

  "I don't-"

  "I'm in for a transfer as soon as this disaster winds itself up."

  He didn't seem to hear.

  "When I left Utzie," he said, "she would dial me up and say, 'People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else.'" He chuckled. "Two days later it would be, 'Cooped up with yourself twenty-four hours a day, that's life, without remission. Lens, the worst thing in the world is to be inside yourself, you don't even want to be rescued. Yet to be as happy as we were-to be so open to someone else-invites the failure of everything.'" One minute she would be phoning to tell him her plans, she was going to have a garden behind the bungalow-wallflowers, poppies, an iris modified to smell of chocolate-the next her brother had died of bowel cancer. Who died of bowel cancer since the twenty-first century? It was a choice. That whole family had disaster as a lifestyle.

  "No one has to lose anyone now," Aschemann said to his assistant. "Perhaps I wanted to know what that was like. Utzie-"

  "I know all about Utzie," the assistant interrupted.

  Aschemann stared at her. "Who made you responsible for me?"

  "You make everyone responsible for you."

  He watched her walk away and get into conversation with the uniforms. They were all clustered round the dying child now, he couldn't see why. "You were a good assistant," he called after her. "What are you afraid of, that you might learn something? How could you, when you know everything already?" Then he slid behind the wheel and started the car. He was happy enough with the way things had gone. He had lost Vic, but he still had Emil Bonaventure's notebook. He thought he would drive with the roof down, it was a nice enough day. He picked up first then second gear, nice considerate changes with the unhurried old engine well below its red line. Despite that, he was soon up to fifty or sixty miles an hour. He dabbed the horn at knots of uniforms. People were beginning to shout into their dial-ups. All across the Lots, they watched with mounting puzzlement as the roadster plunged across the concrete and into the interface mist. The assistant- who, if she were honest with herself, had all along expected something like it-loaded her tailoring to its operational limits in an attempt to cut him off; but it was already too late.

  Perhaps ten minutes after Vic caught up with her, Elizabeth Kielar discovered abandoned in the road a plaster mannequin meant to represent a child of five or six years old.

  It was naked, bald, a greyish-fawn colour, with a sweet, strange expression, the sort of demonstration piece you saw in the window of any Uncle Zip, outfitted with a black uniform beret from some recently-glamorised interstellar war, torso crawling with colourful live pins, the proteins for which had been derived from phyllobate DNA. Its arms were jointed at the shoulders to allow movement, but otherwise its body was moulded in one seamless piece. To the best of Vic's knowledge it had been lying there for a year and a half. He had to persuade her not to pick it up. She looked mutinous, then smiled and said:

  "How sad he must be that he has no genitals!"

  The shadow of an unseen bird flickered across a window at the end of the street.

  "Vic, let's go that way!"

  "Do you know why you're here?"

  She wouldn't say. It wa
s a contest of wills. "It's safer," he tried to explain, "if you keep your expectations low." But Elizabeth was already working them in deeper by the minute, her expedient simple: if he disagreed with her she simply walked away. The further off the beaten path Vic got, the more nervous he became and the easier it was to persuade him to take another wrong turn. It was what he had always feared.

  The landscape continued to change, one moment residential and deserted (though you saw women waiting expectantly at a corner in their best clothes, they were gone as soon as you reached them); the next industrial and derelict. Flares rose from something like a coking plant in the distance, but everything close at hand was fallen down and overgrown. Old separation tanks became shallow lakes, with mudbanks streaked a dark chemical maroon. Something huge passed across the sky: you winced away from its shadow, then saw it was a toy duck looking down-looking in-at you from above with its intelligent bright-blue painted eyes. It was a hypermarket of the meaningless, in which the only mistake-as far as Vic could discern-was to have shopping goals. The idea that you might map things in there in terms of your needs was what had so entrapped and confused Emil Bonaventure's generation. It was safer to learn how things worked, then assemble the portfolio of habits, behavioural tics just this side of the psychotic regime, that stood in for having a clear frame of reference and kept the travel agent from harm.

  "Everything smells of sulphur," Elizabeth said. "Does it smell of sulphur to you?" She said, "Do you ever go into a building while you're here? Vic, let's go in one of these buildings! We could fuck in a building, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't you be excited by that?" He explained to her why it was a bad idea. Soon after, her mood deteriorated. She was silent for long periods, then said bitter things in a tired, desolate voice, as if she was in conversation with some ex-lover. "Don't you see," she said, "that I can't talk now? Here?" Vic hadn't asked her to talk. "The life I'm living now," she said, "the life I've been living: I wasn't like this, but now I am." She said:

  "It never gets any further away."

  "What?"

  "That factory. You know, Vic, we walk towards it but it never gets any further away."

  "You'll find that in here," he said, just to contribute.

  Eventually they were driven off the streets by the rain and the approaching dark. Vic wasn't keen to enter any space he didn't know-they could so quickly become the arena of your worst expectations. But it was night as Saudade knew it, and Elizabeth was cold. She looked up into the rain, which seemed to fall towards her through layers of unsourced light, then down at her clothes. "I'm shivering, Vic," she said in a surprised voice. "Take me home now." Somehow it was the least human thing she had said all day.

  Everywhere they tried was full of cats, facing into the corners, lined up along the walls, balancing on the arms of chairs, pressed together too tightly to move. Vic was relieved to find them at such densities. "It means we aren't too far in yet." The ground floor of the building he chose had no internal walls, although you could see the stub brickwork where they had been. A recent flood had left it banked with dirt, which had a packed and crusty look until you touched it, when it fell in on itself in soft wafery structures marbled with colour. There was some kind of expansion chamber fifteen or twenty feet below, through which they could hear volumes of water rushing at intervals. Otherwise it was empty but for echoes. Elizabeth listened for a moment, then nodded as if acknowledging the inevitable. "I remember snow falling very slowly," she said, "the size of coins. Into the long garden in the dark. I remember trodden snow on the pavement outside. Then I remember a street market, a dead cat in the gutter." Vic thought she was describing a process, a sequence, not the memories themselves. He put his coat, then his arm, around her shoulders. They huddled against one of the walls, as far away from the sound of water as they could get. She held his face and began kissing him, then opened her legs and guided his hand down there.

  Later, when he asked, "Where were you born?" she answered, as he had expected she would, "Vic, I don't know."

  A little over a month after they gave up Vic Serotonin to Site Crime, Fat Antoyne and Irene the Mona sat at the Long Bar in the Cafe Surf. Antoyne had on a new suit-yellow double-breasted drape with hologram buttons of Irene laughing and saying how Antoyne would always be a star to her-and they were drinking Boiru Black with chasers of something local Irene had never tried before, which she called "dickweed," although Antoyne thought he could have misheard that. It was early evening after a day of sunshine and showers along the Corniche, both heartbreaking and heartwarming; a day, as Irene said, which allowed you to see the true, beautiful balance of things, with both positives and negatives of your mood reflected back to you in the weather.

  "It's good," she told him now, "that we take part in the great see-saw of life, but never forget, Antoyne, that the balance for this girl must always be on the positive side."

  It was a slow night under the Live Music Nightly sign. Twenty minutes ago, its equipment assembled, its gin rickey appreciatively swallowed, the two-piece had begun chasing down a groove via the twenty minute interrogation of a tune of their own they called Adipose Annie. But Annie wasn't disclosing herself to them or anyone else tonight. Offered a solo, the saxophone shrugged no. They took fours briefly, restated the theme and left town on the first rocket out, while the paying clientele shook their heads judiciously and dug into their reserves of goodwill. Band and audience saving themselves for later on: a recipe for mutual misunderstanding.

  Antoyne and Irene clapped desultorily, along with the rest, and Antoyne ordered more drinks.

  "I am blue," he said. "I admit that."

  "And I know why, Antoyne," the Mona said, resting her hand on his forearm. "Don't think I don't. At least," she said, "it's good to get an evening away."

  When Paulie DeRaad's connexions came down to Saudade two days after Vic and Paulie disappeared, the first thing they did was take over Paulie's club. The Semiramide was less fun after that. As Irene said, the work was there but you missed Paulie, who always had something to say to a girl. All these EMC guys wanted was to track down Paulie's bolt-holes, which no one could tell them much about; also his habits after he got ill. They stayed in the back office all day; they had filled it with FTL routers, also they were going through Paulie's shadow operators with heavy-duty professional software, looking for something, they wouldn't say what, perhaps they didn't even know. All this would be fine, Irene said, but they didn't do much business themselves, whereas until his illness Paulie was always interested that way.

  "That man was as unsparing with his money as he was with himself," she concluded. "He had the knack of making you feel wanted."

  Antoyne looked into his drink.

  "He'll be missed," was all he could think of to say.

  "Antoyne," the Mona told him, "you lost the art of enjoying yourself since all this. How are we going to get that back?"

  Antoyne shook his head and looked away.

  The bar now made its long day's journey into night. In addition to her signature dish, chocolate lasagna, the chef offered Emmenthal amp; capers in choux pastry followed by a cappuccino of chickpeas; as if in response, keyboard and saxophone discovered their missing groove hidden in a chamame remix of the popular standard Barking Frog Buzz. Smells, music, kitchen heat: a seachange could now take place in the room, shy and emergent at first, in little pockets all around, then catastrophic, irreversible, global. Noise levels rose. The regular clientele, settling into the irradiated zone under the Live Music sign, began volume consumption of Ninety Per Cent Neon and Giraffe beer. Soon it was like any other night at the Surf. Deep into the first set, figures began squeezing themselves out of the space between the band and the bar. They were tentative-unsure what was required of them or what they required for themselves-yet young, pliant, labile, willing to dance. Their faces were as yet unwritten-to, their eyes only reflections of the lights in the bar, lights flickering off glass and bottle, reflections of reflections which though warm had no expression
you could read. At first it was as if they were meant to be viewed only under this kind of illumination-and only for a moment, before your eyes took in something else. They had appetites, but didn't yet know what they were. They blinked in the neon, they drank thirstily at the bar, they struck up the quick friendships of children or animals and, arms linked suddenly, adventured out into the night.

  Looking, Irene wondered, for what?

  She thought love. She thought fulfilment. "Don't you think that too, Antoyne?"

  Antoyne said he had no opinion.

  "But don't you hope that's what it is?"

  He could only reiterate what he already said, Antoyne told her. Then he stood up so suddenly he knocked over his stool. "Jesus," he whispered to himself. He tipped back his drink, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and, without a word to Irene, pushed his way through the Long Bar crowd until he could stand trembling on the Corniche looking down at the beach where, a month before, he had sold Vic Serotonin to Site Crime. The tide was high. Two women and a man were trying to have sex on the thin strip of sand under the Corniche lamps. Laughter rose in the cold air. "Here! No, here!" Someone sang two or three bars of tango music. The man's face was a white smear of pleasure under swept-back black hair. Antoyne wanted to call out but could not. He felt as if he was frozen in some other kind of time. As he watched, they came up from the beach adjusting their clothing and, arms linked, wandered off into the lamplight.

  Irene found him standing there, staring along the Corniche towards Saudade. Tears ran down his face.

  "Antoyne, honey," she said, "what is it?"

  "It was Vic. I saw him."

  "Honey, you didn't. Vic is gone now and he won't return. He was too inner a man to know another way. Don't do this to yourself any more! Vic Serotonin had no heart, but Antoyne, you have all the heart in the world! Come back inside. Please come back in." Antoyne shook his head, no, but allowed her to lead him back to the Long Bar. The two-piece played, the people were squeezed out into the room. He watched them leave.

  "Life always goes on, Antoyne. It always goes on."