Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  That was the crisis for Antoyne Messner. It got easier for him after that, and he was increasingly able to learn the gifts of happiness and self-belief.

  Momentum ran the Cadillac halfway up a long bank of broken earthenware tiles before it slowed suddenly, slid a little way back, then rolled on to its driver side in a cloud of dust. For a minute or two, as the slope restabilised itself through the medium of small random avalanches decreasing in force and frequency, the man who looked like Einstein did nothing. He was content to rest, hanging awkwardly against the seatbelt with his chin pushed into his clavicle.

  A bluish, sourceless light lay over everything. Everything seemed mixed together. Just as fluids trickled out of the car, all sorts of thoughts and images trickled out of his mind. "This was never an investigation," he heard his assistant complain. His wife said, "Aschemann, you would give the world the whole of yourself-if only you could find it." Meeting her for the first time, he had thought the same of her. That was on the Corniche, late one summer afternoon, with the light on the sea like mild steel. She was sitting outside a cafe, in a yellow silk frock and glasses so dark that she had to raise them to see him, eating an ice. Her air was one of disorientation, her eyes looked as bruised as if their life together had already occurred. An hour later she was sitting on his lap in the back of a rickshaw, with the silk frock up round her waist.

  Aschemann smiled at this memory.

  He extracted himself from the seatbelt, and then the Cadillac.

  He turned over the broken tiles with the toe of his shoe. "So now you're inside," he thought, "whatever happens can't be good." Then, opening a page of Emil Bonaventure's journal at random, he attempted to compare it with the landscape, as if Emil's memories could be used as a guide to his own relationship with the world.

  "Vehicle broke down immediately," Bonaventure had written. "We slept in the old outfall pipe. G woke often, heard rats in the night. His ulcers no better. Four litres of water remain." This was accompanied by something between a map and a drawing, in which dotted lines connected various roughly sketched features in an arrangement without perspective, height on the page replacing distance from the viewpoint. "The expansion chamber flooded repeatedly, amp; we were forced to retrace our steps. Lupercu records 'parliament of insects' here, but I saw only woods on high ground, and an [illegible]."

  "Emil, Emil," Aschemann chided, as if the old entradista was at his side. "None of us do anything for the right reasons."

  He threw the book away and walked off in the direction he was facing, which happened to be upslope. After that, he seemed to wander about for some weeks. He didn't get hungry or thirsty, although he was cold at night, and his clothes fell apart rapidly. What he took to be devastation stretched away under what he took to be moonlight. Waves of difference passed through the landscape, but it remained obstinately coated with buildings. Though many of these remained intact, their doors and windows had been stripped out, and they had been emptied of anything domestic, or even human. You could see down into basements filled with tight flattened clusters of large bone-white lice, or an ionised slurry of broken smart ads like ectoplasm. To begin with, black and white cats lined the gutters, all facing away from him. There was always a note in the window; a rickshaw disappearing round a corner; a laugh but no one there. There was a smell over everything like rendered fat, which made him recall a conversation with Vic Serotonin, that corrupt tour-operator of the soul.

  "Only the simple ever claim it's simple down there," Vic had said. "And what do they bring back? Fuck all. You couldn't pay for a motel room with sheets that used. The air's like lard. It's the smell of code. You see something, you break the rules, ptoof: death. Worse than death. Never pick anything up. Never let anything pick you up." As if to confirm this, or at least to gloss it, the dying advertisements detached themselves from their basement slurry to make him half-remembered promises, offers no one could ever accept or fulfil:

  We carry all sex medds at bargin price

  99% approval rate to take advantage of this Limited Time opportunity do not reply They were the tidal dogs, the unremembered memories, of a place never the same place twice. The most determined of them followed him for days, taking the form of small coloured lanterns or, less often, drawings of small coloured lanterns, which bobbed in the air slightly behind his left shoulder. The attrition rate was fierce. Soon only one was left. Such eloquent timepieces, it tirelessly informed him, are supposed to be owned by gorgeous females. And: You can get your deploma today. Did this count as being picked up? The detective couldn't tell. He had lost his assistant. He had lost his car. He had lost his purchase on the ordinary. In return, the site awarded him this wispy companion, lacking in stamina yet full of persistence. He wasn't sure yet what it would require of him in return. When he lay all night half-asleep in some shallow stream, he drew comfort from the ad's simple tune and soft mothy flicker; he came to feel an equally simple affection towards it.

  What is a daughter?

  Late one evening eight weeks after Vic Serotonin and Lens Aschemann disappeared, Edith Bonaventure squeezed into the costume she had worn at seventeen years of age and took herself to the gates of the Saudade corporate port. There, she opened an accordion case on the cement sidewalk, strapped on the instrument it contained and began to play. Cruise ships from all the major lines were in, towering above her like a mobile downtown, their abraded, seared-looking hulls curving gently into the low cloud-base. That time of night it was both raining and mist. The port halogens shone out blurry white globes, the pavement was black, slick, cut with transitory patterns of rickshaw wheels. Edith's costume, stiff faux-satin a fierce maroon colour, still fitted; though it made her look a little stocky. Unaccustomed excitement reddened her cheeks and bare thighs. For once, Edith had left her father to his own devices. He could choose to fall out of bed or he could choose to stay there: this evening, she had informed him, that was up to him. It was everyone's right to choose.

  "Emil, you can watch the tour ships lift off, or maybe enjoy throwing up on yourself. Me, I am off to The World of Today to pick up a man."

  "If it's convenient, the two of you can bring me back a bottle-"

  "You wish."

  "-then do what you do quietly for a change." Emil seemed well, perhaps he was getting over Vic's defection. Why she told him such a lie, she didn't know. All she was sure of, she wanted this other thing, she wanted to play. She had picked an accordion to match the outfit, maroon metalflake blends under a thick lacquer finish, with stamped chrome emblems of rockets and comets which caught the spaceport light like mirrors. Sometimes, as a child, Edith had less wanted to own an instrument like this than to be one, to find herself curled up inside one, like a tiny extra dimension of the music itself. Edith played Abandonada. She played Tango Zen. She played that old New Nuevo standard, A Anibal Lectur. She was quick to merge with the night, to become part of its possibility for the paying customer. Rickshaw ads fluttered round her the colours of fuchsia. The rickshaw girls called out requests as they passed; or stood a moment listening despite themselves, puzzled to be still for once, their tame breath issuing into the wet air. While up and down the rickshaw queues, the off-world women shivered-as the sad passionate tango songs made, in cheap but endlessly inventive language, their self-fulfilling prophecies of the entangledness and absurdity and febrile shortness of life-and pulled their furs around them. It was the briefest mal de debarquement. Saudade! Its very name was like a bell, tolling them back to their true, enjoyably complex selves! They laughed to wake up so far from where they started, so momentarily at a loss in the face of night and a new planet, yet so in control of the brand new experiences awaiting them there. In search of a gesture that could contain, acknowledge and celebrate this inconsistency, they threw money into the salmon pink silk interior of the fat, odd little busker's open accordion case. Sometimes the banknotes they threw floated around Edith herself like confetti at the marriage of earth and air, while she played I Am You, Motel Milongueros, and
an up-tempo version of Wendy del Muerte she learned in a pilot's bar on Pumal Verde. She had no idea, really, why she had come to the gates. She was forty-two years old. She was a black-haired woman with wide, blunt hips who couldn't afford to be anyone but the self she had chosen at eleven and who, consequently, blushed up quickly under her olive skin. She was a woman of focus, a woman of whom men said to each other:

  "You can't blame Edith. Edith understands her own needs."

  When the stream of rickshaws had abated and she felt she had had enough, she gathered up the money, packed the instrument in its case and shuddered suddenly, struggling into her old maroon wool coat. "The winds of memory," she misquoted to herself, "approach this corner of my abandonment." At least it wasn't far along the side streets to the bar they called The World of Today, by then, a little like herself, just a lighted yellow window from which all custom had fled. Edith pulled up a stool and counted her cash. It was more than she hoped, less than she imagined when she saw those fur coats, the cosmetics by Harvard and Picosecond, the Nicky Rivera luggage custom-stitched from alien leathers.

  "Give me a bottle of Black Heart to go," she suggested to the barkeep; then, "in fact, why don't I drink it here."

  "It's your party," the barkeep said.

  Later she asked him if he thought she was too old to get a smart tattoo. Still later, unable to remember his answer, she found herself on the sidewalk in front of an Uncle Zip outlet two doors down.

  Uncle Zip the gene cutter had turned out to be his own most successful product. Years after his mysterious disappearance in the Radio RX-1 wormhole, you found an Uncle Zip franchise, maybe two or three of them, on every Halo planet. You found the man himself on a stool inside, sweating with his own energy, a fat clone with a sailor's mouth who'd tailor you by day then-well known to be the patron saint of the piano-accordion-play his music all night. His cuts were still fresh and new. He was cutting for EMC, he was cutting for the glitterati and the common man alike; he was cutting, they said, for alien beings. He was nationwide, all the way to the Core. If there was a religion of the Beach stars, Uncle Zip was its theologian, because he showed you how you could always change and move on, how you never needed to be an old-fashioned fixed entity, with all the gravitational penalties that might incur. Uncle Zip was tender to you, as he was tender to everyone, in that if you hurt you could stare in his window, the way Edith was staring now, and see liquid new possibilities for yourself in a thousand drifting holograms which looked as beautiful as boiled sweets, or ancient postage stamps glowing in the true colours of dragonfly and poison dart frog. You just had to have them! You could be Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and sit cute and hungover on Gregory Peck's lap wearing his pyjamas. You could be Princess Diana and sing like a Bronx nightingale at the fatal Kennedy fundraiser in your see-through Givenchy gown. You could go missing from your own life as someone no one ever heard of, by courtesy of DNA pulled at random from a prison hulk at Cor Caroli. You could go half alien, or, it was rumoured, whole hog. You could have the cheapest smart tattoo (known traditionally as a Fifteen Dollar Eagle); or you could get neural chops complex enough, and comprehensive enough, for a management position in the supply-side sex economy of Radio Bay. Whatever you chose, the almost spiritual light spilling out of Uncle Zip's window suggested, you would come out not just new. You would come out someone else and go far away.

  Edith shrugged.

  She stood there a moment, asking herself if she had truly worn her heart on her sleeve in this life. No answer came. "You had your turn at being new," she told herself. She felt good. She felt like going home and saying to Emil, "When you named the daughter-code after me, you were wrong. While a daughter is all of those things you implied, she's none. She is what comes out of you, why do you need to go in the site to look for her?" But when she found him waiting up for her like any father, in the blue darkness of his room, what she actually said was:

  "It's raining again."

  Across the bed lay scattered the remaining volumes of his journal. All of them were open, some flat and broken-spined, some with their yellowing pages fanned out stiffly in the streetlight. Smart diagrams in sharp bright reds and greens. Minute brooch-like maps which would speak when you knew the code for them. Directions to places that shifted and vanished twenty years-or twenty seconds-ago, if they could ever really have been said to be there at all. So much of it put together after the fact, which as everyone in this life knows is far too late. Emil's eyes were inflamed from trying to read his own history written this way, caked at the corners, deeper-set than when she left the house. Over the last two days, he had developed a small growth on one eyelid. It was fantastically delicate, convoluted and infolded like petals of flesh, and in some lights resembled a rose.

  Edith sat down on the edge of the bed with her elbows on her knees. She felt tired now.

  "So read me something you wrote," she said.

  "You read. Half a lifetime is in there, I can't even understand my own handwriting. Here, you can read this."

  "H. claimed to have made a drawing in Sector Three. Expected [illegible] but got more. A rolling, endless landscape of tall grass. In the foreground, lying in the grass in front of a bench, something that looked partly like a woman partly like a cat. Though it seemed immobile at first, H. said it was slowly changing from one shape to the other. H. said he was 'struck silent' by the potential of this. He was 'full of a tranquil sense of his own possibilities.' Cat a kind of ivory-white colour."

  As she read, Emil's face became loose and unfocused, like a face seen at the bottom of a stream. Eventually she saw he was crying. She put down the book and, taking his hands in hers, brought them together so he would be in touch with himself for once. "Are you entradistas always as brave as this?" she said. Emil tried to smile, then something caught his attention, some flash of light on the walls too quick for Edith to see, and she knew he was back in there, with his plans falling apart before he had a chance to put them into practice. He said:

  "I dreamed of Vic. I dreamed that Vic came back."

  "You never dream, Emil."

  Vic Serotonin and his client spent their third night site-side in an abandoned cafeteria. It was in a curious state. Loops of power cable had been dragged out of the walls by some event you could only describe as visceral, while at the same time the stainless steel ranges and glass-fronted food cabinets remained intact and spotlessly clean. Snow fell steadily from near the ceiling, below which, for a couple of hours around midnight, the body of a child about eight years old materialised, wrapped in a crocheted shawl so that only its face was visible. The snow never reached the floor. Elizabeth Kielar stared up at the child and would not look away. He was careful with her after that. In the morning, sun poured in through the knocked-out windows. Vic woke up and found her kneeling in the middle of the black and white tiled floor staring into a flat clear trickle of water. At first she seemed fine. "Look! Look!" she called excitedly. "Fish!" There were smudges of dirt on her face, but her smile was radiant. "Two tiny fish!" By the time Vic joined her, the sun had gone in, so all he saw in the water was his own reflection. It seemed tired, and under some strain, and its hair had turned grey. He looked away before anything else could happen to it.

  "That's nice," he said.

  "Do you think we can drink this?"

  "If you're thirsty, drink the water I brought in. Nothing here is what it seems."

  "After all, the fish drink it."

  "The fish," Vic explained, "aren't fish."

  "I used that water to wash myself. If you fuck often you have to stay clean." She shrugged. "When one fish turns the other turns with it. Did you know that everywhere in the universe shoaling is controlled by the same very simple algorithms?"

  Vic stared at her, unsure what to say next.

  It was a difficult morning. Though he tried to persuade her, she wouldn't eat anything. Before they could leave, the child was back, wrapped tightly in its shawl, spinning this way then that below the ceiling like a chr
ysalis in a hedge. Elizabeth crouched as far away as she could get from it, and when he tried to put his arm round her, bit his hand. It was behaviour he recognised from their previous trip. The sensible thing would be to leave her and try to make his way back to Saudade, but they were too far in, and he had broken too many of his own rules. Without personal goals, he was at the mercy of whatever had driven her into the site.

  "You must be careful of me, Vic. I'm not really here."

  Vic stood up, rubbing his hand. "Where are you, then?" he said.

  "I don't know."

  "Where did you come from?"

  When she didn't reply, only staring up at him as if he ought to know the answer to that already, he shrugged and went outside and sat in the warm sunlight and cool air. The cafeteria, a single-storey white building that looked as if it had been built for some heavier duty, lay on the bank of a tidal inlet, held in a crook of hills and woods. Gulls, green weed, dappled sunshine on the hum-mocky ground between the trees. The tide was low, the light so f bright on the revealed mud he couldn't look at it. The trees tum* bling down the opposite shore of the inlet vanished into a dazzle of reflections in which stranded multi-hulled ships rested like insects tired after some long intense flight to mate. Beyond that, it was two or three kilometres of dried-up chemical ponds, then long rolling slopes of tall grass. Vic felt hollowed out-as if the site was about to present him, if he wasn't careful, with a self he didn't want. After an hour or two, he went back inside in the hope of persuading her to eat, or leave, at least make some decision he could take a position on. It was cold in there. Elizabeth had spent some time squeezing into the gap between two food cabinets. She was still staring up at the ceiling. Something happened to the light when it reached her. It was wrapping itself around her in a way that made her face smooth and eroded, less featured than you would expect. The rest of the room looked acceptable.

  "Elizabeth?"

  "Don't come near me, Vic."