Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  "It's on the move again," he said, "for the first time since your day." The boundaries were newly elastic; at the same time, something was changing deep inside, and everything that happened to Vic in there felt as if it represented something else. "It's like a metaphor, Emil," he thought of saying. But he was still in awe of Bonaventure's generation, and of Bonaventure's generation's definitions, so in the end all that came out was, "I think things are taking a whole turn for the worse."

  The old man didn't want to know. He only lifted the bottle to his mouth again, then let it fall on to the bed and stared into himself instead, his face stubbled, leaden, collapsed. "It was a long time ago," he said. "Everyone had his own ideas."

  "You remember more than that, Emil. Don't pretend you don't."

  Bonaventure shook his head. "In those days, everyone had his own ideas," he repeated. Then he seemed to relent, and asked Vic, "Were you ever at the Triangle? Were you ever in that deep?" When he saw Vic had no idea what he meant, he shrugged. "Because for a while Atmo Fuga thought that was the centre of it all. He was there once and it was all shoes. The air was perfectly still but full of old shoes, floating around one another as if they'd been lifted up on a strong wind. As if shoes had a gravity of their own. He said they exhibited something that looked like flocking behaviour. Filthy old shoes, cracked and wrinkled, soles hanging off. He saw other stuff too. It was Atmo's belief the Triangle was at the centre of it." He shrugged. "But if you were never there-"

  "I've been further in than anyone I know," Vic was able to state, "and I never saw anything like shoes."

  Bonaventure couldn't seem to grasp this. Perhaps he didn't want to. He blinked and bit his lip, and it seemed to Vic he was refusing some basic understanding-something about the world he knew well but wouldn't share because he preferred to be in denial. He stared over Vic's shoulder for a moment, weak tears coming to his eyes. "None of these kids know anything," he appealed to the room at large, as if there was someone other than Vic he could talk to. "It's all show with them."

  "You are talking about me," Vic said. Despite his good intentions he felt his face contract and harden. "Well then, fuck you, old man." He pulled out the Chambers gun and dropped it on the bed where it lay against Bonaventure's frail form defined by the bedclothes, its magazine a matt-black roil of particles held in suspension by some kind of magnetic field. "I'm forty years old, so fuck you."

  Bonaventure winced away from the gun. He curled up and threw one arm across his eyes.

  "Don't leave me, Atmo!" he cried. "Not here!"

  "You're fucked with me," Vic Serotonin said. "Why should I keep coming here, for you to insult me?" He regretted that immediately. He picked his gun up again and secured it. "I'm sorry, Emil," he said. He laid his hand on the old man's shoulder. "Hey, if only you'd help sometimes," he said. "Just help out."

  "You've got a low startle point," Bonaventure said finally.

  Vic laughed. "It's how I survive," he said. "Come on, finish the rum. No one buys Black Heart to keep it for tomorrow!"

  After he had calmed the old man down, and got him to sleep, he hid the empty bottle with several others under the bed and made his way downstairs; where Bonaventure's daughter reminded him quietly:

  "He sold you a business, Vic. That doesn't make him your father."

  "Does it make him yours?" Vic asked her.

  She shrugged. "Say what you like to me," she said. "You're not so clever as to make a difference."

  She was a black-haired woman, with wide blunt hips, who blushed up quickly under her olive skin. Whatever Vic thought, she had made her way here across the Halo, planet to planet, starting out two years old in the crook of Emil Bonaventure's arm. He named her Edith, no one knew why, and though she did not resemble him at all, was always careful not to drop her. That was almost forty years ago. She had no idea where they started from, or why, but she could still remember the endless stubby Dynaflow freighters, noncorporate rocket ports, afternoons in sawdust bars, Monas and barkeeps exclaiming over her, filling her with bad bar food and milk blued by the effort of keeping itself milk in the face of where it found itself. In return she filled the vacuum for them, the day they saw her and maybe even thereafter, as a cheap blurred smiling memory they could keep until whatever they'd been denying caught up with them at last.

  In those days Edith was both pretty and talented. She had clever feet. She learned to play the accordion early, dance on a table while she squeezed. Her energy was endless, especially for any kind of public appearance.

  "You can say what you like, Vic Serotonin, but we were nationwide. Emil the entradista and his Accordion Kid."

  "I never heard of you," Vic said.

  Some days when he said that it would make her laugh. Today it made her think of being eleven years old.

  "Hey, make yourself at home," she said. "Do you want a drink? Or was the rum enough?" When Vic looked away she said, "You think I didn't notice? You shouldn't encourage him to drink." That was a caution he'd heard before, so he was surprised to find her standing in close to him suddenly, saying:

  "If I gave you his book, Vic, would you leave him alone?"

  "Don't joke, Edith," Vic said.

  ***

  When Emil Bonaventure arrived in Saudade thirty years ago, everyone was writing on paper.

  It was one of those things. They loved paper suddenly. The nostalgia shops were full of it, all colours of cream and white, blank or with feint lines, or small pale-grey squares, shining softly from the lighted windows which were like religious cubicles or niches. There was every kind of notebook in there, paper between covers you could hardly believe, from wood bark to imitation grey fur to holographic pictures from the narratives of Ancient Earth religious figures, with their fingers and their bovine eyes uplifted, who smiled and raised a cross as you turned the book in your hands in the retro shop light.

  As artificial as the textures of the paper itself-an Uncle Zip product franchised out of some chopshop on another planet- these notebooks came in all sizes, fastened any way you could think, with clasps, hasps, magnets, combination locks or bits of hairy string you wrapped around and did up in a beautiful knot. Some were fastened in more contemporary ways, so you could see a little flicker in the air near the edge of the pages-if you're the wrong person don't get your fingers near those!

  Everyone was buying these books because it was cute to write your thoughts in them-thoughts, a shopping list, those kinds of things.

  People wrote, "Who do I want to be today?"

  They wrote diaries.

  Everyone suddenly loved paper, no one could say why, and soon they'd love something else. But it was more practical for some than others. Emil Bonaventure kept the habit where others kicked it, and wrote everything down until the day he" went into the Saudade site for the last time. He didn't trust his memory by then. He'd been in there once too often. The stuff he had to remember was complex-directions, bearings, instructions to himself. It was data. It was clues. It was everything you daren't forget in that trade. It was everything he couldn't trust to an operator. Work with the Shadow Boys, Emil used to say, you don't trust any kind of algorithm. Even the tame ones. Among the data he also wrote descriptions about his achievements, of which he had done more than one. He wrote observations, like: "It's always snowing in Sector 7. Whatever time of year it is outside, whatever time of year it is inside." He had the whole site divided up, Sector this, Sector that. In those days, whatever he said now, the entradistas had to believe in facts; they had to believe they knew things no one else knew.

  Emil wrote it all down in that water-stained letter-as if he had to convince himself of something-in a kind of slanting disordered scribble which did not reflect his personality. Then he hid the book. He was as cagey as all those entradistas, and when Vic Serotonin bought the goodwill to Emil's business, the book was not included.

  "It's no joke, Vic. You remind him of too many things. If I gave you the book would you leave him alone?"

  "I wouldn't
stop coming here," Vic said.

  She stepped in closer, so he was just in the warmth of her. "Oh no?" she taunted. Serotonin tried to kiss her, but she was too quick for him. "Vic, if you got that book we'd never see you again. Anyway, it would be the death of you. It was as good as the death of him.

  "Come here, Vic," she said. "And look at this."

  Two or three little child-star costumes with short stiff faux-satin skirts a ferocious emerald-green. Pairs of black patent leather shoes with straps and taps, in ascending sizes. Accordions, and parts of them. Some of the accordions she had played until they broke or got too small, some she bought later in life because she liked them. They were all colours, electric-blue, through the same savage green as the outfits, to a kind of resonant maroon, all under a high-lacquer finish with metal emblems of rocket ships, shooting stars, snowy mountains. Each keyboard grin exposed rare ivories adopted from alien animals. The small shoes now made her cry, Edith was forced to admit. Wherever she lived she laid out these keepsakes on shelves, or in breakfront cabinets whose glass doors were etched with exotic scenes from Ancient Earth. Today she had something new to show him.

  "I performed in this on Pumal Verde." Folded into yellowed tissue, it looked like some kind of marching band uniform, and actually she couldn't remember wearing it. "I was fourteen years old." She buried her face in the bolero jacket, caught odours she didn't recognise. "You would have liked me then. I was so innocent, Vic. You want to smell it too?"

  "That's unjust to me," said Vic, who didn't like her tone.

  Edith smiled benignly to herself and decided to look at the skirt next. As she unfolded it something dropped out on to the floor. "Hey, Vic," she said. "What's this?"

  It was an old notebook with a leather cover.

  "Jesus," Vic Serotonin said.

  He was reaching for it when something fell over loudly in the old man's room upstairs. Vic looked at the ceiling despite himself, which allowed Edith to sweep the book quickly from under his hand. Their eyes met.

  "Emil's awake, Vic," she said. "You should go see if he needs help."

  "I'll want to talk about this," he warned her over his shoulder as he left the room.

  Edith watched him go. He would always care for the old man. As for Edith, the Accordion Kid still played to packed audiences in her head, its pipeclay face Uncle Zipped to a perfect Shirley Temple, one instrument following another-bigger and more expensive, with more chromium and japanned rare wood-each year as she played herself clear across the Halo into adolescence and a career in the New Nuevo Tango; always trying to look after Emil because he did such a job of looking after her, packing in a kind of comfortable guilt until now it was a permanent situation, because Emil would never be able to look after either of them again. Close her eyes and the accordion danced, and she felt like a cultivar-a succession of perfect little-girl bodies in shiny skirts with kick-up net petticoats, white socks and round-toed patent leather sandals. She followed Vic Serotonin up the stairs, thinking of these scenes.

  Emil Bonaventure's CV was this: he started out indentured to some arm of Earth Military Contracts-in his case on a project known only by the number "121," which he never talked about. After that he brawled and drank and fucked his way across the Halo with his baby daughter in tow until he wound up in the Saudade site and she wound up an adult. That stopped him in his tracks. It got his attention. As a young man he was like any of those people. He had a lot of appetites but until he got to Saudade he had no idea who he was. All those years later Vic found him lying half out of bed in this upper room at the edge of the tourist port. A damp sheet was tangled round his white old upper body, which had bruises in all stages and colours from similar falls and incidents. His face was pushed into the wall by his own weight. "Help me, Edith," he said.

  "I'm Vic," Vic said.

  "Come on, help him!" said Edith.

  Between them they wrestled him back into bed, then she said, "I'll let you two brave entradistas talk." She went to the window, and stared out of it across the port where rain was falling through the halogen lights.

  "Vic," Bonaventure whispered, as soon as she had moved away, "come here. Sit down. I thought about the things you said."

  "What things were they, Emil?"

  "Listen Vic, everybody I ever took in there, I took them on a promise of more than they could have-"

  "They want to go, Emil. It's what they want."

  "No, listen!" He clutched Vic's arm. "I knew that. I knew that every time. There's something in there, but it's nothing. They always see that in the end. They see you've fooled them."

  "Where's this leading, Emil? Is it leading to the same old shit?"

  Bonaventure shook his head tiredly.

  "I just want to know where you've been, Vic. I want to know what locations we have in common."

  "You want to compare dicks," Vic said.

  "Because you must have been in Sector 7 and seen that immense white thing like a face, hanging over the roofs-"

  "Give it up, Emil."

  But Bonaventure refused to be saved. "Listen to me!" he demanded. "Just for once!" Whatever decaying memory had hold of him was pulling him down. His generation all had the same need to rehearse, compare adventures, keep alive the things that terrified them in there. Vic could feel his whole old body trembling with it. "After that the houses are piles of bricks, this fucking utter wasteland of bricks. There's an echo every time a tile falls, and the face watches you-" He saw Vic's expression, and the tension went out of him suddenly. He sighed. "Why am I bothering?" he asked. He shrugged. "If you haven't seen that," he said, "what have you seen? Nothing."

  "Here it comes again," Vic predicted.

  "He only wants to talk, Vic," Edith said tiredly from the window.

  "Stick to the safe edge," Bonaventure advised the world in general, Vic in particular. He said, "Be a tourist like the rest of them."

  Vic threw up his hands. "I can go anywhere and have a better time than this." He appealed to Bonaventure's daughter, "I could have a better time than this at the Semiramide Club." Edith shrugged. She gave him a direct look-If you go, the look suggested, don't come back-and resumed examining the street outside as if it was full of things which, though they didn't interest her much, were more interesting than Vic.

  "Jesus!" Serotonin said. He had a sudden image of Paulie DeRaad's Shadow Boy, and the face of its doomed proxy lighted by the splashback from whatever operation had gone on at Suicide Point. "No one gives a fuck about the things / have to deal with," he complained. He got up to leave.

  "I'm sorry," Bonaventure said. "Vic, it's a big place. Maybe we just saw different parts of it."

  Vic said from the doorway, "I don't think so."

  "I can't dream, Vic!" Bonaventure called. "I can't dream!"

  "You knew it would come to that," Vic said. He didn't know how to help. "You always knew it would come to that."

  "Wait till it happens to you, Vic."

  "Hush," Vic said absently. "Hush up, old guy."

  Edith Bonaventure found him downstairs, coldly ripping pages out of the old man's notebook.

  "I thought I hid that again," she said unconcernedly.

  "There's nothing written in it."

  "Isn't there? It mustn't be the right one, then."

  "You already knew it wasn't," Vic said.

  She acknowledged this with a smile "Even the ones he's written in aren't necessarily the right one," she said. "Emil wrote a lot of stuff in his time. Do you want a drink?"

  Serotonin dropped the notebook on the floor and yawned. "I ought to go," he said. She brought him the drink anyway, and stood in front of him while he swallowed it. "What is that?" he said.

  "You finished the good stuff," she reminded him.

  Serotonin wiped his mouth. He looked round the room, with its shelves full of little-girl memorabilia; he couldn't resolve into one image the Edith he knew and the Edith who kept those things. He set down his glass and pulled her in close until she was compelled to sit o
n his knee. "Does he need money?" he asked her. Edith looked away and smiled. She pulled Vic's head down and made him kiss the nape of her neck.

  "We always need money," she said. "Mm. That's nice."

  After he had gone, she lay on the sofa thinking about him. Serotonin reminded her of all the men she met on her way across the Halo. Everyone she encountered in those days was trying to live out some dream already irretrievable when they were sixteen.

  If she was fair she had to include herself in that. On Pumal Verde, for instance, she got bagged on Dr Thirsty's, hallucinating for eleven hours straight a huge white bird flapping slowly and ecstatically through vacuum. Her boyfriend of the time said, "Edith, that bird is your life, and you'd be wise to follow where it leads." He didn't do much with his own life, only joined EMC like the rest, and was made pilot of some kind of fighter craft which necessitated him being rebuilt by the military tailor so that wires came out his mouth and into the controls. They were supposed to have damped out the gag reflex, but sometimes he felt the wires in there like a mass of sinewy fibrous stuff he couldn't swallow. If he panicked, or let his concentration slip, he heard his mother's voice in the cockpit, calm and firm, telling him to do things. It was hard to disobey. She said not to be frightened. Not to be angry. She said, concentrate now and get this part right. Then everyone will be saved. That was mostly the end of him as far as Edith was concerned.

  Towards dawn she went back upstairs to see to the old man.

  He was still awake, staring ahead of himself as if he was spectat-ing at some event no one else could see; but he must have known she was there, because he took her hand and said, "The worst things we ever brought out of there, we called them 'daughters.' Bring out a daughter and you had nothing but trouble. A daughter would change shape on you. It wasn't alive, it wasn't technology either: no one knew what it did, no one knew what it was for."