Nova Swing (28 page)

“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 chrysalis 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 hummocky ground between the trees. The tide was low, the light so bright on the revealed mud he couldn’t look at it. The trees tumbling 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.”

He caught her hand, pulled her out; she broke away and huddled in a corner, watching him intently. All afternoon, white-faced but quick and deft, she kept the room between them, always moving off to the next corner if he got near her. Vic was cautious. He didn’t think she would harm him, but he didn’t want her to harm herself. He thought that eventually she would tire, although he had no idea what he would do then. Nothing he already knew about her seemed to apply. After an hour or two, she began to pull off her clothes, as awkwardly as if she had forgotten how clothes worked, or as if she had never known in the first place.

“I don’t want these,” she said. “Why should I want these?”

“Elizabeth,” he said. “Please.”

She laughed, then crouched down to urinate fiercely. “No,” she said. “You don’t know enough to stay safe, Vic.”

“Elizabeth!”

“I got your sperm anyway.”

By dark, her skin had deep, ivory qualities, as if each layer had accreted over time then died, achieving a dull shine. She smelled of distress and unknown hormones. She lay panting from a heat Vic couldn’t feel, watched him sidelong as she lapped up water from the black and white tiles. The light in the room frightened him. He was only a facilitator here. He thought again of leaving; but when he looked outside, the inlet had curled itself away like a missing dimension, and all he could see was a dune-like landscape with isolated patches of fog, protruding rocks, a litter of fluorescent white bone. There were flickers of what might be lightning, or rocket-exhaust on the horizon. She called him back. Her voice, always a pure contralto, had taken on harmonics, as if someone was speaking in unison with her but not quite loudly enough to hear. She positioned herself in the centre of the abandoned cafeteria in the loose darkness, adopting one desperate, open posture after another.

“Vic,” she said, “people lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again.”

She darted past him and out of the door, moving away quickly into the drifting chemical fogs, her gait already not quite human, her skin fluorescing in the dry fitful lightning glare.

“Elizabeth!”

All night she ran aimlessly back and forth across the faces of the dunes. It was hard to say at what point she became something else. This thing—pivoted sharply at the hips so that it could walk on all four limbs with the palms of its hands flat on the ground, its head too small and streamlined, somehow, to accommodate the great blue candid cartoon human eyes—called Vic’s name until he put his hands over his ears and went inside. Next morning he set out to follow its tracks; but he lost them quite soon, where the dunes turned to rolling purple grass.

Over the dusty months and years of searching that were to follow, Vic Serotonin penetrated the site deeper than he, or anyone, had ever done before. He threw away his gun. He ate what he found. He lived a life in there. Every day he walked until he found somewhere safe to sleep, somewhere he liked, and at night he grew used to the sound of radios shifting randomly from station to station; girders tolling as they fell; the intrusive quack of the plastic duck. He heard the landscapes swing apart and grind themselves together again. The empty rooms no longer smelled foul to him. He never met anyone else, though he woke one morning in a deserted plaza to the sound of a woman’s voice singing some passionate open-throat lament. Pigeons flew up; they flew up again. The cold air was perfectly still, but full of old shoes—old shoes cracked and wrinkled, soles hanging off, floating around one another as if they’d been lifted up on a strong wind—as if shoes were an organism, one which, given the correct conditions, could exhibit flocking behaviour. Vic knew then that Emil Bonaventure had been right about one thing; but he understood too that neither this location nor any other could be said to be the centre of anything. Vic aged. Wind and sun whitened and bleached him. His memories of Emil and Edith, his memories of caning it nightly at the Black Cat White Cat bar with his friends Liv and Antoyne, eventually even his memories of Vic Serotonin, faded. But he never forgot his client, and he searched for her until the day he died.

Aschemann the detective followed rising cindery ground for a week, only to find himself facing a three-hundred-metre vertical drop into what seemed to be a vast replica of the Long Bar at the Café Surf. This he took to be a metaphor.

He stood at the edge. His coat blew out behind him in a gale of music and light. He held on to his hat. He looked down thirstily at the Black Heart spirit optic, glittering in the warm barlight. Everything around him tottered on the edge of change, but when the wave came it was Aschemann who fell. He saw an architect’s drawing. Pies. Polaroid snaps of dogs. A man’s bracelet chronometer, very large. He saw playing cards. A wooden toy penguin with rubber feet. Then his old friend and sparring partner Emil Bonaventure, asleep on a mudbank in rising water. He saw bluebirds and chipmunks against a sunset. In response, a kind of seizure overcame him and when he recovered from it he was lying a few metres downslope, unable to move his legs. It was only what you expected in here, where plate tectonics held sway and one reality was always sliding beneath the next. It was night. He examined his legs: nothing seemed untoward, but he couldn’t deny they felt peculiar, perhaps with all the walking.

“Something has happened to you,” he acknowledged. “You can’t do anything while you don’t know what it is.”

He was able to accept that. He lay there a long time. Night replaced day replaced night. Equally regular pulses of change propagated through the ground beneath him. From upslope, close and comforting, could always be heard the sounds of a lively evening at the Long Bar. He was content; but the smart ad, which had accompanied him thus far without demur, grew increasingly anxious.
You can have the pe[nis] of y0ur dre ams,
it suggested, and:
Call out Gouranga be happy
. It roamed upslope and down, straying further and further away, fading to the ghostly blue and orange of burning alcohol; a marsh light as lost as its victim, an ignis fatuus in reverse.

Finally it gave up on him and drifted off.

“Send me a sign,” Aschemann called. “Seek me inside.” This made him chuckle. On balance he felt more sympathy for the ad than he did for himself. “Send me a neon heart.”

This made him think about his crime. About his wife, expecting everyone to come to her in her minotaur’s cave; about the Marilyn Monroe look-alike, going out along the high wire from her room to everyone. He thought about the damp sand at the back of the Café Surf, squeezed together daily by the implacable shaping forces of the Long Bar—improvisation, iconolatry and red light—to make new inhabitants for the city. What if he were part of that cycle too? Later he told himself in surprise: “Aschemann, I think you’re dying!” He felt enlarged—swollen, but not exactly sick. Some time on the third, or perhaps the fourth day, he looked down at himself and saw the lower part of his legs dissolving into thousands of bright, energetic white sparks. He felt no pain. Despite that—and though no sound accompanied the process—he had a lively sense of himself as part of the entertainment. He was fizzing and crackling into the dark like a firework. He wondered what would happen when the fire reached his cock. The sparks blew away uphill on a light breeze, and out over the lip of the cliff, where they rained down, he could only suppose, on to the Café Surf two-piece under its sign
Live Music Nightly
. His legs had plenty in reserve. They went on pouring out the benefit in them as sparks and illuminated smoke. They were certainly good value for money. Then he saw his wife toiling up the slope towards him at last, waving and smiling across the wasteland. She was calling his name. She had on the yellow silk dress he remembered so well. No shoes.

“Aschemann, is that you?” she called. “Is that you? Aschemann, always something new! You’ll never change!”

What if there was no new species, after all, only the same old one trapped in its same old circularity of reinvention? Would some fresher version of himself soon be staggering down the Corniche away from the Café Surf, singing, full of appetites, ready to be amazed? Or had that already happened?

What if we’re all code?

“Utzie, hurry!” he called. “Hurry, or I’ll be gone before you get here!”

He was glad to have been alive.

In subsequent weeks, better
weather came to Saudade. The dogs of April raced up and down Straint Street from the site to the sea, rattling the boarded-up windows. Above, the sky was bluer than usual, wider and emptier than the buildings would seem to permit. You could smell the ocean. People had a feeling of energy and wanting to be outside. In the New Men warrens, they aired the bedding. Even the chopshops opened their doors, giving sidelong views of matt-black internal walls, dusty shoot-up posters, out-of-guarantee proteome tanks crawling with LEDs and smart readouts; while the tailors played Three Dick Hughie on the pavement or showed off their chops to a passing Mona.

Black Cat White Cat was not exempt from this change of habit: Liv Hula declared a holiday. First she went upstairs.

In the tin box she had used to smash the princess sink, among all the other junk of being forty years old, she kept a cheap hologram which related some of her exploits before she arrived in Saudade, the voiceover of which began, “Liv Hula was mediated Halo-wide after she dived her flimsy dipship, the
Saucy Sal,
five thousand kilometres into the photosphere of France Chance IV.” A long, almost documentary item, it went on in that vein for a full ninety seconds, over images of Liv as a child, Liv as a teenage rocket-sport bum in the bar of the Venice Hotel on France Chance; then a sequence of the ship, if you could call anything that small a ship, the paint job fried right off it, cooling in the parking orbit. They had most of it wrong.
Saucy Sal
wasn’t a dip, for instance: she was the first of the true hyperdips, with a lot of subtle magnetic field action and some kind of hot alien sponge-carbon hull. But they had footage of Liv being hugged by Chinese Ed himself, who she beat to that particular achievement, which was nice if only because Ed—tall and undependable, with the usual Halo tan and associated burden of debt—was acknowledged a dipship legend in his own time. The record didn’t hold long, she never expected it to; but, “Go deep!” they had shouted for the cameras, her and Chinese Ed, pilots of the future gurning out at the Halo together, rocket-sport being so fully hot at the time, and all of that made the trip worth it. How do you get rid of a hologram? Liv, who never invested in a gadget patch, didn’t even know what they were made of. She decided to throw it in the sea.