Nova Swing (25 page)

Dust sifted down. The basin made a cracking noise and pulled away a little. But the pipework held it in place; so, even though what her muscles needed was to feel it tear loose by their unaided effort, she went to look for something to help her break it up. About then she heard the long sonic boom of an ascending K-ship, thunder which seemed to roll all the way round the world and meet itself coming the other way. She glimpsed the ship through the window. It was gone so quickly! A line of light across everything, then only the afterimage downshifting from violet to purple then black, flickering up again, bright sharp neon-green as she blinked, then dimming away for good. Liv Hula’s eyes followed it thoughtfully. She strode over to her bed and stripped the bedclothes. She opened the window and tossed them out into the air, where a breeze caught them so that they ballooned and folded and sideslipped as they fell. Then she went back to the sink and wrenched and wrenched at it. Nothing, except she could see herself in the mirror, red face, shoulders pumped.

Under the bed she kept a heavy tin box, enamelled black, with gypsy-looking red and yellow hand-painted roses. This she hauled out, and used it to bang at the washbasin until the washbasin shattered into three large pieces, two of which fell off the wall. Only then did she go and sit on the bed and look around her angrily. The box stayed where it had fallen. For the moment she couldn’t remember where she had put the key to it. She sat there until the morning was over.

Vic Serotonin arrived at the abandoned checkpoint on the edge of the Lots. He’d heard Aschemann’s Cadillac start up behind him, then stop again. He knew he was safe. Whatever happened to him next, he could forget all that. He followed the fence a hundred yards north to where houses had collapsed across it from inside the site, leaving a steep shingle of bricks and broken tile thinly grown with local weeds. The interface mist closed round him, damp and absorbent. He stood still. Just the other side of things, he could hear water drip; further off, the rhythmic banging of a door in the wind. He smiled, closed his eyes and pushed his face forward as if to receive air kisses. Gentle pressure on cheekbones and lips, as if they were stretching some membrane; it felt cool like the mist.

Perception of a state is not the state.

The phenomenology of the site, Emil Bonaventure had often reminded him, as if Vic needed reminding, was this: what could be observed from the outside, you rarely encountered inside; inside or out, what could be seen or smelled or tasted bore no relationship to physics data collected by EMC’s many expensive orbital assets. As a consequence—for Vic as for Emil and all those earlier Saudade entradistas with their particle guns, their scars and their easy air of knowing something no one else knew—the moment of transition was the moment of maximum uncertainty, maximum payback. That was the rush for him, Vic was ever willing to admit: but it was not a simple one, and you could not write it off entirely to body chemicals or temperament (although on any given day both might be involved). Neither was it the kind of rush people experience from contemplating possible injury, madness, death or sudden personal disfigurement (although a proportion of those things might easily happen to you inside); because, this being 2444, consequences always seemed negotiable—in fact reusable to a degree.

So what kind of rush was it?

“How can I explain?” Vic would have to ask in the end. “You should go in there one day and get it.”

When the membrane broke, there was a smell like a pile of woollen coats and a taste in his mouth like a bad avocado, and he knew he was inside. Vic opened his eyes. The slope was where he expected. It was as barren and dusty as if the houses had just fallen down. No mist. The air was cold. Halfway up he could see the cherry tree in blossom. White petals flushing to pink, bathed in light. An organ sound.

Wind chimes would be acceptable. Wind chimes were within the margin of error, but if ever the petals seemed to emit a soft light of their own, you went some other way; or you left things where they were and went back to Liv Hula’s bar. Otherwise something bad would happen. Your options would close out. Vic struggled up the slope, which fell away from his feet at every step in loose musical cascades of broken tile. Luck was an issue at this point. But if you entered from the Lots, closed your eyes as you passed beneath the cherry tree, turned round three times then opened them again, you would be likely to find next that the slope had turned into a short flight of internal stairs.

Water ran down its yellowed left-hand wall, under intermittent flashes of light. Between one step and the next, day changed to night and back again; while in the room at the top of the flight, it was always afternoon, with unreal warm-coloured light streaming in through the open window. There was always the question of what you might see in there, and the day of the week seemed to have bearing on that: for instance, Vic had noticed early in his career that if you left the Lots on a Wednesday, the room would be empty, but there would always be a cigarette burned halfway down in an ashtray on the windowsill. It was hard not to feel someone had just left, in which case you could only suspect they’d passed you on the stairs.

Today the room was slow with the tick of a mechanical clock. Every flat surface—the gate-leg table with its green chenille cloth, the huge brown furniture, the mantelpiece, the shelves, everything but the floor—was covered with black and white cats.

You smelled their sour cat smell in here the way you never would in Saudade; it was as heavy and thick as talcum powder. They sat motionless, pressed together too tightly to move. Wherever Vic went in the room, they were facing away from him. Even Emil Bonaventure agreed: if you entered between dawn and dusk, from the Lots, these cats would be filling the outer regions of the site. Accounts varied, as they always did: but you would, in Vic’s experience, always have some cats in your life; and in places they would come to resemble a thick fur on everything, a kind of deposit. They were always motionless, turned away from you, sitting on their haunches with their faces pressed into the walls, the corners, the cobwebs, each other. It was as if they were ignoring you. But it was also as if they had no choice—wherever your gaze fell, they had to face away from it. Emil believed that this was evidence which, though anecdotal, might one day be correlated with science from outside the site.

Vic Serotonin had no theory about the cats.

He stood in the middle of the room.

A street ran left to right just below his eyeline. There was a real sense of bustle down there. Laughter. Women’s heels tapping back and forth. Rickshaws rang their bells. Deep summer lunchtime, and the old New Nuevo Tango issued from every open door. There were the smells of
Café electrique,
Calpol, and other exotic stimulants from the history of Ancient Earth. There was hammering and banging, the scrape of spades through wet cement, trowels through mortar, the rattle of construction machinery. Everyone down there was busy, or they were having a working lunch, pears in brine with a really interesting small salad of alien leaves. It was always like that until you went to the window and looked out. Then the noises cut off instantly and you saw that something was wrong with the street. It was a representation. Curving sharply away in both directions to identical early sunsets, the offices and shops, the sidewalk cafés and street lamps, were
drawn on,
in unrealistic sunshine tones, thick poster yellows cut with blues and reds, strong blacks to make the outlines.

It was empty. It was silent. Vic stared out.

After a minute or two, an accordion started up, then, half a bar into
Hernando’s Hideaway,
stopped again; and he saw, as he had hoped he would, Elizabeth Kielar struggling away from him down the middle of the street. Time doesn’t pass the same way in there, and sometimes luck will help you with that, and sometimes it won’t.

“Elizabeth!” he called, “Elizabeth!”

When she turned, her face was rubbed-out white, the features gone, and he wondered for a moment if it was her after all. By then he was in the street and Elizabeth was twenty yards away, walking fast, as if she wanted to get away from him, as if Vic was part of the place, just another weird thing you couldn’t depend on and didn’t want to engage. Nothing was the same down there, but Vic had expected that. The street looked real again, but it looked older and dirtier too. Ripped awnings over the shop windows. Brick with a hard finish, a metallic, clinkered look. When you passed an open doorway, smells of old carpet, leather chairs, furniture polish, some insistently medical smell you couldn’t name. Elizabeth stopped suddenly and waited for him to catch up.

“I’m frightened. How did I get here?”

“I thought I’d lost you,” Vic said. When he tried to embrace her, she backed away.

“No,” she said. “Look, I was on a beach. And now it’s this.” She stared around her with a bruised expression. “I didn’t pay for this. Where have you been?” She put her hands in the pockets of her coat. “Where have
I
been?” she asked herself.

“Perhaps you could tell me what was it like,” Vic said.

“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
any
thing, 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.”