Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

  It had been a quiet night. Earlier, a few tailors from the franchise chopshops along Straint came in to celebrate a win at the fights; they had been followed back from Preter Coeur by some tourists off a Beths/Hirston ship-probably the Pro Ana, to which, outbound on her twice-yearly loop of creatively selected Beach destinations, Saudade was little more than a fuel stop. For twenty minutes this was the cause of unhealthy excitement among Liv's shadow operators, but then one of the tourists remembered the name of a new venue off Antarctic Boulevard and they all left. That was the bar trade in a nutshell, Liv thought, as she tidied tables, added up the money in the till and washed the empty glasses, letting the warm water lave her hands. She had the blues for her old life, which was different than this. That afternoon, in her room upstairs, two things had happened.

  First, she had encountered herself by accident in the mirror. The face she saw was too much her own, and too little like Elizabeth Kielar's face. It was tired of never owning a fur coat. It was tired of always being what it was. Its eyes looking out were no longer calm. Up in the Halo you could beat that, you could always reinvent, move yourself on. Because empty space is kind. Everything's negotiable out there. There's so little to run into. But down here your room is what you are.

  The second thing that happened to Liv was this: waking from a shallow sleep, she sat on the edge of the unmade bed and looked out the window and saw Antoyne Messner walking past with Irene the Mona on his arm. Irene had on a new outfit, cropped mohair bolero, latex pedal-pushers, acrylic stilt-heels, all in popular neoteny pink; while the fat man was wearing the pale blue suit she made him buy when he started working for Paulie DeRaad, with his hair arranged in a ridged oily wave on top of his head. They looked ridiculous, but at the same time mysteriously dignified just by being together. They looked like the king and queen of the affect. Seeing them in that unaccustomed light, she had wondered if she should run downstairs, ask them why they never drank at her bar any more. Now, as she watched Vic Serotonin usher his client to a table by the window where they sat down and began to talk earnestly, she found herself thinking the same thing she had thought about Antoyne and the Mona:

  Those two believe they've discovered something new. Good luck to them, then.

  In fact Vic Serotonin was saying, "Maybe in four days we can risk it," and Mrs Kielar was already beginning to shake her head, no. It had to be sooner for her, she said, this was such bad news for her. Her nerves were worse. She wasn't sure, she said, she could wait another day. "I'm not sure I can wait an hour." And it was true, he thought. Whatever was consuming her from inside had upped its ante since she fucked Vic in the Hot Walls apartment.

  "Three days, then," he offered.

  She shook her head. He took her hand, which she was already beginning to pull away as he reached for it, and explained, "It's only because things are going on here I don't understand."

  "No," she said.

  "Two days," Vic said. "Two days, Mrs Kielar, you can allow me that. Something's wrong with Paulie, something's wrong in the site. The police are all over everything like a cheap suit."

  Mrs Kielar, trying to avoid this information the way you would avoid a physical blow, got to her feet so suddenly her chair toppled over. She stared down at it as if a chair being knocked over was already the worst thing that could happen to either of them.

  "I can't," she whispered.

  At that point Vic didn't see a way forward. He was as puzzled by his own behaviour as by hers. "I'm waiting for something to happen," he remembered her saying, "and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." He got up and put his arm round her and set the chair back on its feet. "Look," he said, "there. You see? It's OK. It's no problem." Where his hand touched it, he could feel the whole thin apparatus of her right shoulder rigid and trembling. He was aware of the hot bones, Elizabeth Kielar inscribed through every one of them. "We'll be in there in forty-eight hours' time," he said. "I promise." She was like a hologram; if you looked, every part of her would prove to contain the whole you didn't understand. He tried to persuade her to sit down again. She clung to him instead. They ordered more drinks and sat on opposite sides of the table, not speaking but holding hands. Much later, when Edith Bonaventure walked into the bar dressed in her maroon wool coat and holding her father's site-journal, that was how she found the two of them. "Vic, you cheap shit," Edith said.

  She went over and asked Liv Hula to give her a drink. "I'll take that here at the bar," she told Liv. "You don't mind if I sit on the stool and talk?"

  "You're the customer," Liv Hula said.

  "That's good, that's nice," said Edith. "It's nice because if I face you I don't have to look at that shit by the window." She assessed the bar a moment. "It's a nice business you have here," she advised Liv Hula, "but a little kicked about. It needs a refit. It needs a theme, something cheerful." She put down half her drink in one swallow and wiped alcohol out of the faint down on her upper lip. "Hey, Vic," she called, holding the journal up high in one hand so he couldn't mistake what it was, "Emil was right about you. See this? I walked all the way across town to give it you, now you can whistle."

  "Jesus," Vic said.

  "You can fucking whistle for it, Vic, because you're a cheap toilet and in the end where have you been? Nowhere." Edith finished her drink and stood up. "Thanks for that," she said to Liv Hula. "I enjoyed that. Goodnight."

  Vic Serotonin was on his feet by then. He got to the door first and caught her by the wrists.

  "Edith, we can talk," he said.

  Edith laughed lightly. "No we can't, Vic," she said. "You made an error there."

  Vic tried to think what to say to her. "Listen," he began, "whatever Emil says, something is changing in there." He already saw that this wasn't what she wanted to hear, but he couldn't stop. "A// our experiences of it might be false."

  "How nice it would be if you grew up," she said wistfully, "either of you."

  "Edith-"

  "You know what this reminds me of?" Edith asked him, and her gesture seemed to take in all of it, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar, Liv Hula's bar, the long perspective of Straint Street that she wasn't even looking at, Saudade itself, which was nothing but sand on the Beach, a refuelling stop on someone else's big tour. "It reminds me of the fights."

  "Edith-"

  "It reminds me of that night at the fights," she said.

  She looked down at his hands imprisoning her wrists, then back up at his face. "I don't give a shit what's in there, Vic." Unable to reply, he released her and she walked off down Straint in the rain, stopping once to add without turning round, "And you know it isn't about Emil either," after which the sound of her heels diminished along some simple, exact, inevitable acoustic curve. Vic watched her go. Back inside he found that Mrs Kielar had smashed a glass against the wall and was now sitting huddled like a child on the blackened floorboards by the window, staring along Straint Street towards the event site aureole-which could be seen, at the limits of vision, as a line of rusty walls, broken windows, concertina wire-and refusing to speak.

  Liv Hula patiently swept up the broken glass.

  "I'm losing my sense of humour for this," she told Vic. "Maybe you should find another office." While she thought to herself: This afternoon I was just down. Afternoon is a bad time to be alone anywhere.

  7

  Space Noir

  Vic took Mrs Kielar to Hot Walls in a rickshaw. On his way home the next morning he was arrested. The arrest was quick and deft: a Cadillac convertible, travelling quietly against the grain of the traffic, pulled up alongside the kerb, its front passenger door swinging open just far enough ahead of him for Vic to walk into it. "Hey!" he said. By that time Aschemann's assistant was out on the sidewalk with him, grinning right in his face and saying, "Get in the car, Vic." It was already a nice day, with a light but lively onshore breeze. The sunshine glittered off a wing mirror, slicked along the Cadillac's perfect finish and into Vic's eyes. He must have had an unpredictable look about him that mo
rning, because the assistant's smile broadened and he saw her tailoring cut in, a ripple of nanomotion, subcutaneous and subliminal. Her eyes blanked over. Data poured down her arm, full of excitements of its own.

  "Vic Testosterone!" she said. "Vic, you can try me out, or I can call down a fire-team-" here she glanced meaningfully skywards "-or, how would this be, you could just come with me and no one would be killed at all. What do you say?"

  Vic shrugged and got in the Cadillac.

  She stared down at him expressionlessly for a moment, then shook her head and shut the door.

  "Use the seatbelt," she advised.

  Vic expected to be taken to a holding cell. He expected to be processed. Instead, she drove him around in the light traffic for perhaps five minutes, enough to make him wonder what was happening, then said suddenly:

  "You must have known Lens a long time."

  "Who?" Vic said.

  "Did you ever meet his wife?"

  "Ask your arm," Vic suggested. "Maybe it can tell you." He didn't know what she was talking about. Even if he had known, he wouldn't have wanted to go any further into it. "Or does it just get the fight results?"

  "He's here," the woman said into her dial-up.

  "This is a nice car," said Vic, as if there was a third person in the Cadillac with them, perhaps in the back, "and I enjoy the smell of the real leather bench seats." He turned a chrome knob on the dashboard, music came out. Station WDIA, Radio Retro, airwaves to the planet. Aschemann's assistant, still talking into her dial-up, reached across and switched it off again.

  "No," she said, looking emptily at Vic then back at the street, "he isn't a problem."

  Vic was left alone for about ten minutes in an office on the second floor of the police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. It had been sprayed recently to smell of authentic furniture wax; the blinds were down, though enough narrow strips of sunlight fell through them to make visible the used, uneven but shiny surfaces of everything, the brown leather chair, the knocked-about steel desk and filing cabinets, the polished floor of green linoleum. One or two shadow operators emerged from the corners as Vic sat down, looking worn and under-used at the same time. "He isn't here yet, dear," they apologised. "Would you like a cup of tea?" Vic started to go through the desk drawers. He found some packets of letters written on flimsy pale blue paper which folded cleverly to make its own envelope. They were brittle with age. One of them began, "My dearest Lens," but he had no time to read it, only stuff it back in and close the drawer, because Aschemann walked in the room.

  "Vic, don't get up," the detective insisted. "It's good to see you so relaxed. If these operators bother you, just say."

  "What am I arrested for?"

  "I'll hang my coat up here on this hook," Aschemann said, "to get it out of our way. Vic, you aren't arrested yet."

  Serotonin got up and went to the door.

  "It was nice to see you again," he said.

  "You aren't arrested yet, but this is Site Crime, not a bar on Straint Street. Sit down, talk, is that so hard?"

  Vic sat down again, taking the good leather chair behind the desk, which left Aschemann the hard one in front. If he felt any irritation at this reversal of protocol, the detective didn't show it, only hitched the trousers of his light brown suit-the worn cuffs of which fell back to reveal short black socks, white calves with the beginnings of varicose ulcers-to save their knees, and asked, "Vic, what's it like inside the site?"

  "You're kidding me."

  The detective nodded to himself, as if this was an answer he had expected; as if it was one of several possible answers, all worth consideration, all, perhaps, in the end, of a similar weight. It hadn't, after all, been a fair question. "I'll sit here and smoke my pipe, if you don't mind," he said, "while you think about things."

  Poor quality black-and-white footage of Vic now began playing across one wall. It was like a show without sound, Vic Serotonin walks down a street in Hot Walls, Vic Serotonin plays the fights with a plump woman on his arm, Vic Serotonin buys a hat. Vic walks down his own street, the hat tipped back on his head. His life is comprehensively represented: in one shot he threads his way through the VIP crowd at Paulie DeRaad's Semiramide Club, stopping to exchange a word with Paulie's best girl; the image vanishes abruptly at the door of Paulie's back room and now Vic's all the way over town at the Long Bar, where you can see, through the fog and scratch of irresolvable bad data, the Cafe Surf two-piece playing a tune of their own, a little thing of their own they've called Decoda. This visual record had intelligence, it had narrative, it had edit. It followed Vic into the toilets, passing over chipped paint and chequered linoleum, and then out again, where it caught up with him staring, puzzled, across the damp sand behind the bar, past the line of demarcation into the site. Aschemann watched Vic watch himself. He smoked his pipe. After a few minutes he froze the footage.

  "So," he said. "Next is what happens most nights at this venue. Vic, you aren't in this footage, but perhaps you could pay attention to it as if you were?"

  Up on the wall figures lurched about in half dark, their movements uninterpretable; a doorway at one angle, the neon sign Live Music Nightly at another; another doorway, and then the sea. Nanocameras swarmed in the seafront light like milt. Vic saw what looked like brand new people moving hesitantly away from the Cafe Surf, unformed, emergent, puzzled but as yet un-wounded, full of expectation.

  "Maybe it happens in the day too, maybe we don't watch closely enough."

  Two boys in dress shirts. A girl who dances inexpertly on the sand. They link elbows, ascend Maricachel Hill towards the centre of the city. They try to talk, but it's better they lean together and sing snatches of tunes learned twenty minutes ago in the Cafe Surf. After that, they find what they're looking for, one by one: and vanish. They stare thoughtfully at the neon signs, they regard the street junctions with soft and meditative smiles, then slip into the ink joints and porn parlours. One minute they are in camera-in a million cameras-then the city has absorbed them. The cameras all have blinked.

  Aschemann switched the wall off abruptly.

  "Are they artefacts?" he asked, "or people? Maybe you can help, Vic, our equipment can't make the distinction. Whatever they are, they don't have any practise at life, literally, they're without praxis. They don't have a grip on reality." He paused for a moment. Then he leaned forward, put his pipe on the desk next to the ashtray and said, "My wife was a little like that."

  Vic stared at him. "What?"

  "There's a fierce attrition rate, Vic, most of them worn to nothing inside an hour. But the ones that survive!" Aschemann shook his head. "How can I describe that? They learn how to eat, Vic, how to dress. They learn what the city wants from them. They get a room-"

  He shook his head in admiration.

  "Vic, I have to know what part you're playing in this."

  "Is this what you think we're doing, Paulie and me? Smuggling these people in? This has nothing to do with us!"

  Aschemann shrugged. Vic stared at him angrily. No one was saying anything. Up near the ceiling, the shadow operators clung and shifted, pulling themselves one over another like a colony of bats. Grainy images began to unreel across the office wall again: Vic Serotonin was seen to enter the Long Bar, he was seen to tip his new hat back on his head, exchange a word or two with the bar-keep. He was seen to exit through the lavatories and peer across the wet sand towards the event site aureole, which the cameras rendered as a greyish luminescence. Aschemann nodded his head as if these pictures offered not simply new evidence but scienza nuova, new ways of looking at things. Then he said:

  "Vic, I have to apologise. I understand now from this film that M. John Harrison you were never in the Cafe Surf, or especially out in back by the rusty wire, a stone's throw or less from the site itself, which you don't deny entering on numerous occasions-"

  Vic laughed resentfully.

  "I was never in the Cafe Surf until I heard you thought I was. I went to check it out. Believe me, i
t's the worst jump-off joint I ever saw."

  The detective, impressed by the professionalism of this explanation, seemed to consider it. But whatever conclusion he came to, he put to one side, and when he next spoke it was to continue an earlier train of thought. "Suppose they are fitting in, Vic? Why? What happens to them next?" He didn't know how to answer that, so he sat there contemplating it instead. Eventually he said, "Vic, I'm not the man for this. I need your advice here."

  "I'm just a travel agent."

  Even as he made this claim, which neither of them pretended to take seriously, Vic suffered a raw flashback to the site, and his encounter with the artefact he would subsequently sell to Paulie DeRaad. The artefact was watching him from ten yards away. It remained nervous but it had made eye contact. Vic had taken two or three hours over the journey through the aureole and was by this time perhaps five hundred yards into the site proper, standing under a cherry tree which he knew to have been in bloom for six years. There were the usual smells, as rank as rendered fat; the usual distant animal noises. The bits of music you thought you knew. The sense you had of a voice reciting something. The sense of everything fallen away from sense. It was one of those memories that folds itself quickly out of sight; but it made Vic think, and suddenly he didn't want to be in the detective bureau any more.

  "Nice to talk," he said. "Maybe we'll see each other around."

  Quickly for such an old-looking man Aschemann got between Vic and the door. He clutched Vic's wrist. "Don't go, Vic," he said urgently. "There's more. I went to see Emil today, but he's gone a long way down. He's gone a long way down."

  "What is Emil to do with it?"

  "Vic, this footage of you can be explained to everyone's satisfaction. I can forget everything you've done. Even now."

  "So what will it take for that to happen?"

  "I want to go in there. I want you to guide me in there."

  "Jesus," Vic said. "You're as fucked as me."

  He looked into the detective's face, with its Zipped-in signature features of pouchy cheeks, shocked white hair and amiably drooping eyelids. An inexplicable excitement made the eyes watery and vulnerable; it slackened the corner of the mouth. In forty years, no one had seen through the tailoring to Aschemann, not his assistants, not his superiors, not his wife; now he disclosed himself for no reason to a cheap travel agent, in a shabby empty office in the middle of the morning, with the shadow operators curled up in the corners like dead leaves. Everything that made him the police detective, everything that had made him such a reliable antagonist when Vic met him on the street, was undermined. His obsessive commitment to Site Crime revealed itself, through one simple inversion, to be the very same obsession that had derailed Emil Bonaventure's life, or Vic Serotonin's. Vic's instinct was not to confront this understanding. Instead, he pushed past the old man and out of the office. He didn't want to know Aschemann's motives. He didn't want to know what had changed so suddenly. He didn't want to look into a psyche as weakened and visible as his own, in case the encounter reduced his freedom to act.