"This is how it is," Vic said. "I put Paulie's goods on the floor between us, and you do whatever it is you do, and I shoot both of you if anything happens I don't like."
"You should try and relax more," the operator recommended.
It smiled disconcertingly until Vic set the artefact on the floor, then a kind of music came out of its throat, three or four thin, pure tones, less like a voice than a musical instrument: to which the item lit up faintly in response, glowing through the cloth Vic had wrapped it in. "This is very real," the Shadow Boy said, as if it was describing the artefact for someone else. "This is very beautiful stuff." In a single seamless movement it knelt down, leaned forward and made a circle with its arms, a curiously child-like sheltering gesture which embraced somewhat more space than the artefact occupied. Next, electromagnetic vomit issued from its mouth. Thousands of motes like violet neon tapioca slowly dripped on to the goods. "I just want to see what we've got here," the Shadow Boy said, "before we go any further." Dazzle from the interfacing operation blew back into its face, temporarily erasing the features. The walls of the room lit up then darkened again. Vic saw graffiti, he saw chipped plaster, exposed rebar.
He said, "I'm not happy with this."
There was complete silence in the place. Intelligence had left the eyes of the kneeling figure, and was now concentrated in the thick honey drip of light, the exchange of code.
"This is going too far," Vic said. "I'm not happy with this."
A faint voice answered him. It was Paulie DeRaad's voice, piped in live from the Semiramide Club on a nanofraction of the operator's bandwidth. "Hey, Vic," it said, "I won't need you any more tonight. The money's in your account."
"Fuck you, Paulie," Vic promised, "if it isn't," and he backed out warily, holding his gun out in front of him in both hands in a gesture less aggressive than imploring. Light continued to flicker and buzz from the doorway for some minutes, as the operator detached itself stage by stage, interface by interface. Eventually there was a kind of muffled sigh, almost of relief, and everything went dark.
By then, Vic Serotonin, heading east again, had crossed the lagoon bridge into the tourist port, where he entered a bar called The World of Today. He had them bring him a bottle of Black Heart to take out; then changed his mind, sat down in one of the booths and ordered a meal. While he was eating he dialled up his account. As soon as he saw how much the sale of the artefact had grossed him, he pushed his plate away. He had lost his appetite.
"I'll take the bottle after all," he told the barman.
Vic knew he wouldn't keep his luck. Money like that, his experience told him, has luck of its own. Money like that doesn't care about you, you should never get involved with money like that. Less than ten steps out of The World of Today he was kerb-crawled by a pink Cadillac convertible digitally revisioned to co-ordinate with the streamline moderne revival popular just then in some Saudade circles. He was as familiar with this car as any other travel agent. It belonged to Lens Aschemann, known to Vic as a high-up in Site Crime; a man who resembled the older Albert Einstein, and whose mild manners and unwearying persistence were a legend from the very beginnings of artefact policing in Saudade. Aschemann had seen them come and go, from Emil Bonaventure onwards. He took the pipe out of his mouth and smiled.
"Hey, Vic," he called, "is that you?"
Vic stopped.
The Cadillac stopped too. "You know it's me," Vic said.
"Vic, get in, we'll drive."
"I don't think so."
"It's a pity to waste this beautiful car."
Vic, who expected Aschemann to come with a team, was trying to look everywhere at once, up and down the street, back into the bar, inside the car. The street was empty. It was coming on to rain again, just enough to lacquer the sidewalk. Aschemann's driver proved to be a woman who gave Vic a smile like salt, which Vic returned. Her face was lighted from complex angles in two or three different registers, by the dashboard, the neon, the splashout from The World of Today doorway: but he could see she had good tailoring and blonde hair cropped down to nothing much. She switched the engine off, got out of the car and came quickly round the trunk towards him. She was substantially taller than Aschemann, which you would expect, and built. Some kind of datableed ran oriental-looking ideograms down the inside of her arm.
"We asked you to get in the car," she said.
Vic made a very small motion of one shoulder. This seemed to be as far as it could go at that time. They regarded one another frankly until the passenger door of the Cadillac swung open. Lens Aschemann bustled on to the sidewalk, breathing heavily and fussing with his raincoat.
"Wait!" he ordered his assistant. "I'm afraid of what you'll do."
He patted her arm. "Calm down," he told her. Then, to Vic, "We can talk here."
"I thought that would prove possible," Vic Serotonin said.
"In this bar if you want, or just here on the pavement," the detective assured him. "We can talk. Sit in the car," he urged his assistant. "Go on. Really, it's fine. You can do that, because Vic would never be a problem to us. Vic, convince her you would never be a problem!"
Vic smiled.
"You're safe with me," he told the woman.
"Vic, she could swallow you with a glass of water. Behave! You should see what they did to her reflexes."
"I know I'd be impressed."
The woman lifted one side of her mouth at Vic and went back round to the driver door. "You're like dogs, you young people," Aschemann called after her. "I wonder you live until you're thirty." He put his arm round Vic's shoulders. "I know I'm getting old, Vic. I dreamed a mandala last night. It was simple, very simple. Just four or five concentric circles, quite compulsive to watch. They were silver in colour."
"That's very interesting," Vic said.
Aschemann looked hurt. "Vic, you've got a moment to listen to me. The mandala, it's a sign you're changing for the better, as a human being. You're accepting a good orderly move from one big room of your life to the next."
"Is that what they say?"
"It is. So I'm pleased with my progress. Maybe I'll retire happy."
Serotonin held the Black Heart bottle up to the light.
"I must be doing well too," he said. "I've seen something like that at the bottom of every one of these."
Aschemann gave a short laugh.
"You're too clever for me. But look!" He used the stem of his pipe to indicate the Kefahuchi Tract, which lay draped across the night sky of Saudade like a string of bad jewels. "I used to dream of that," he said with a shudder. "Night after night, when I was young. You can't get change less ordered. Look at it, so raw and meaningless! The wrong physics, they say, loose in the universe. Do you understand that? I don't." He tapped Vic's forearm, as if he thought Vic hadn't got the point, or as if he wasn't entirely sure he had Vic's attention. "Now it's loose down here too. We have no idea what goes on in the event site. But whatever comes out," he said, "/ have to deal with the consequences."
Vic couldn't think how to answer, so he said nothing.
This only seemed to confirm whatever the detective was thinking, because he shook his head, turned his back and got into the Cadillac, where he sat fussing with his raincoat and pipe. "Do me a favour, Vic," he asked in a remote voice, "and shut this door for me." When Vic had done that, he went on, "You're a tour operator, that's fine. Unless you force it under my nose I can't be bothered with a little traffic of that kind." He shrugged. "Under normal circumstances, get in bed with Paulie DeRaad and that's your loss too. It's between you and him; why should I be interested? But whatever you and Paulie are up to at the Cafe Surf is new."
Vic had never heard of the Cafe Surf.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"Vic, if you're smuggling out some new kind of artefact it will be the end of you, I promise."
"I never heard of this place!" Vic said.
But Aschemann had already turned to his driver and was saying something Sero
tonin couldn't hear. She replied, and they laughed together. They were a weird pair. Her eyes refocused for a moment, becoming flat, reflective and mysterious in the rain-wet light; the datastream pulsed energetically up and down her arm. She gave Vic a last smile, a louche, amused salute as if to say she would see him again soon. Then she fired up the engine and let it draw the Cadillac slowly from the kerb.
"Hey, Vic?" Aschemann called over his shoulder as the car moved off. "Give my love to Emil Bonaventure next time you see him. Say hello to Emil for me!"
"Well then, what do you think?" Aschemann asked his assistant.
They sat in the warm faux-leather smell of the car, streetlight flickering regularly across their faces. Her hands rested on the wheel. Her feet rested on the pedals. She had a purposive manner, Aschemann had already noted, with anything like that.
"You know him better than I do," she said at length.
"It's clever of you to see that. Is there more?"
"If anything, he seemed surprised."
"That's our Vic," the detective said, "always surprised."
"I don't know what you mean by that." She looked ahead at the empty street. Aschemann gave her time to say more if she wanted to, then smiled to himself. After a moment he made a business of extracting a match from his Cafe Surf matchbook; pulled open the ashtray, which released a stale smell and put the match in there without lighting it.
"You know he could have hurt you," he said.
It was her turn to smile. "You shouldn't worry about me," she assured him. A career in Sport Crime, she said, gave you access to chops the civilian tailors never saw. That was just one of the professional benefits it conferred.
"Go by Rosedale Avenue," Aschemann ordered.
All the streets in that part of town were overlooked. The interstellar cruise ships towered over everything-PanGalactic's Jayne Anne Phillips, the Fourmyle Ceres, the Beths/Hirston Pro Ana and half a dozen more, their enormous hulls scoured to matt-grey by re-entry fires, ablated to a wafer by the unpredictable gamma-ray storms of Radio Bay. Every planetfall they made, another layer of paint was burned off them; you could tell how far into the tour they were by the effect of burnished metal glowing through the faint reds and blues of their corporate livery. While deep in the engine rooms, particle jockeys in lead suits scratched their heads and tried to reconcile three different kinds of physics-each with its own set of "unimpeachable" boundary conditions-so they could take off again without the customers experiencing G.
Aschemann stared out at the great hulls, shifting relative to one another like trees in a wood with the motion of the car.
"All our troubles come from up there," he said.
"I thought they all came from the site."
This went too far, perhaps, because he changed the subject. "I looked in at the Semiramide last night. Who do I see there but Vic's friend Fat Antoyne, drinking that foul stuff he likes. There was a Mona on his arm."
"There's your connection," she said.
To her it was bankable: Serotonin to Antoyne, DeRaad to Antoyne, Antoyne to the Cafe Surf. But Aschemann only shrugged. "Perhaps it means something," he agreed, "perhaps it doesn't. Stop a moment."
Something had caught his eye, a movement, a shadow, at the chainlink fence of the tourist port. It was gone next time he looked. It could have been a figure climbing in or climbing out. "Go on," he said. "Nothing is there." He had no faith in the tourist port fences. "Or any fence for that matter," he told his assistant. The ports attracted outlaws and psychic cripples, but that wasn't why he disliked them. They were just another connection with the undependable, the random, the exterior. The Cadillac turned ponderously north, then down towards the sea, where rag-mop palms bent compliantly, showing the napes of their necks to the offshore wind. The rain had stopped. Aschemann was silent for some time. The assistant glanced sideways at him and eventually, as if he was answering something she had said, he murmured:
"Vic Serotonin's no threat to anyone but himself. But perhaps it's time we had a proper talk with Paulie."
Serotonin stood in the rain after they had gone. A rickshaw shushed past, trailing softly coloured butterflies. Two doors down from The World of Today, light poured out of the display window of an Uncle Zip franchise, exciting everything it fell on with the promise of immanence and instant transformation. He spent a minute or two on the sidewalk, staring at its open catalogues- emblems, brands and smart tattoos, loss-leader holograms offering to mod you with the qualities of the great men and women of the past: the genius of Michael Jackson, the looks of Albert Einstein, the nourishing spiritual intelligence of Paul Coelho- wondering if now was the time to make some changes to his self-presentation then leave for another planet. He didn't want Paulie DeRaad in his life. He didn't want Aschemann and the Saudade artefact police there either. Possession of an item from the event site would net him ten to life: he couldn't at that moment recall what he'd get for selling it on through a Shadow Boy.
As if to keep the event site at arm's length in this, the latter part of his life, Emil Bonaventure had retired hurt to the third floor of a small house in Globe Town, a triangle of quiet, narrow, picturesque streets gentrified by their proximity to the port. There, in the shadow of the big interstellar ships, he was looked after by a woman who called herself his daughter. She mopped up after the deep fevers, the days of hallucinations, the wasting fits and other legacies of Bonaventure's time in the Saudade site. Her loyalty was fierce, if indistinct. Otherwise she kept herself to herself, in rooms of her own on the ground floor; and her behaviour was such that, for all anyone knew, he might really have been her father.
"I did a stupid thing, Emil," Vic was forced to admit, after the woman let him in and he climbed the stairs to the third floor. He described what had happened; also Paulie DeRaad's part in it, and Paulie DeRaad's operator's part. Meanwhile, he added, Lens Aschemann was on to some other scam of Paulie's, right the other side of Saudade at some bar no one had ever heard of; and he had Vic in the frame for that too.
"You're in a worse condition than me," Bonaventure said, "if this is the way you're going now."
"Tell me something I don't know," Vic said.
He offered Bonaventure the bottle, which he had sneaked upstairs hidden under his jacket. Bonaventure took it and stared greedily at the label. Sometimes his vision was as bad as his memory: it wasn't a physiological problem. "Is this Black Heart?" he said.
"I overpaid if it isn't," Vic said.
"Want some advice?"
"No."
Bonaventure shrugged and let himself fall back against his pillows, holding the bottle in a defeated way as if it was too heavy to drink from. He was in his sixtieth year, but he looked older, a long, disjointed man with white hair like a crest which in profile accentuated the weight and hook of his nose. Eventually he got the bottle to his mouth and left it there for some time. While this was going on, Vic looked round the room at the bare floorboards and clean linen; then he said, "Jesus, Emil. That was for both of us."
"I can't seem to get enough to drink," Bonaventure said. "Don't ever pick up anything in there, Vic," he begged suddenly, as if he had brought the subject up himself. He gazed at Vic sidelong, the whites of his eyes yellowing in the lamplight. "Promise me you won't?"
Vic smiled. "It's a little late for that, Emil. Besides, you brought stuff out by the truckload."
"Things were different then," Bonaventure said, looking away.
He was so frail you could see the drink on its way into him, percolating from vein to vein. His hair was the colour of cigarette ash, and the white stubble in the lines of his face never seemed to get any longer. He didn't leave the house now. He rarely left the bed. On a good day his eyes were a bright blue, still amused, but on a day like this they looked boiled. All his energy went into a Parkinsonian shake, a buzz of low-grade fever, a kind of continuous electrical discharge under his skin which gave it the colour of heavy metal poisoning. On a day like this even his bedclothes seemed to be infected. He looke
d like a bag of rags. He tried to say something more, but in the end could only repeat:
"Things were different."
"I wanted to talk to you about that," Vic said carefully. "Something's happening in there."
The old man shrugged. "Something's always happening in there," he said. Then, with a logic typical of his generation: "That's how you know you aren't out here." He gave Vic a moment to process this. "Take my advice," he went on, "don't be like the kids who think they have it all mapped out."
"Which kids are those, Emil?"
Bonaventure chose to ignore him. "They never heard of contingency," he said, "that's the fact of it." He stared at the label of the Black Heart bottle as if he was trying to remember how to read. "These kids," he asked himself, "what are they? Entradista Lite. They think there's a career structure in that business! They've got a map they bought from Uncle Zip, and a Chambers pistol they'll never shoot. Good thing, because that gun's a particle jockey's nightmare."
"Hey, Emil," Vic said. "Give me the bottle."
"They dress for the tourist trade. They talk like bad poets. They never say anything about themselves but at the same time they can't bear you not to know who they are."
"Who are you talking about, Emil?"
"They never get lost in there, Vic: they never risk anything."
"Are you talking about me?" Vic Serotonin said.
He tried to describe what had happened to him in the aureole the last time he was there, but it already seemed like some event in another world, and maybe that was what it was. It was a clear but meaningless event from some other world, already folded over itself, and-worse-over other memories of his. The client ran away from him across a pile of partly overgrown rubble, her fur coat open to the spitting rain. At the same time the artefact he had sold to Paulie DeRaad was zigzagging down the slope towards him like an animal whose curiosity had got the better of it. It was a deer or a pony, or perhaps a large dog-lurching but graceful, a hairless animal with cartoon human eyes. Then he was back in Liv Hula's bar and threatening to shoot Antoyne the fat man for having a history. "The site's expanding," he tried to explain to Emil Bonaventure: "We're in for some movement there, Emil, and none of us knows what to do." By that Vic meant himself, because who else did he know? No one stupid enough to go in there on a daily basis. That was why he needed Bonaventure's view of it, but to ask directly would feel like giving something away.
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