Nova Swing (31 page)

“This is a good deal for me,” Edith said, after some thought.

“You could move in as soon as you liked.”

“One thing,” asked Edith, “does he come with it?”

They laughed, and Edith counted out money on the zinc counter, and she left, and that was how it was done. Ten minutes later, without thinking once, Emil Bonaventure’s daughter, a property developer with no coherent plans that would limit her increasing sense of vision, had made her way to the site end of Straint. There she stood for a long time, watching the sunlight shift towards red—which everyone knows is a measure of the speed at which things get away from you—and thinking about Emil. It was the first time she had ever been there. She was jealous, but puzzled too. This was what he had enjoyed all those years: adventures in broken houses and factories, heaps of rubble like streets bombed in a war; rusty road signs like signals from your own unconscious; acres of empty concrete reaching away to standing waves of fog, atmospheric lensing and other forms of optical confusion. A lot seemed to be going on there, but it was hard to make out. She could hear music, as of a fairground. Then a second sunset appeared, great wheeling bars of light flashing alternately purple and green like a cartoon drawing.

“Do you expect me to believe that?” Edith said.

After Edith Bonaventure left, Liv felt too light for comfort. She washed glasses, just to have her hands in warm water. She stared at the money on the bar. Then she counted it again. She sheafed it up into two piles, carried the larger pile over to one of the corner tables and placed it carefully on the tabletop.

“So now I am all the way in,” she told Antoyne Messner.

Antoyne took his turn at counting the money. When he had finished, he didn’t look as pleased as she expected.

“Hey, it’s real,” she assured him.

He knew it was real, he said.

“Then is something the matter, Antoyne?”

He’d come around every afternoon since they looked at the ship together, sometimes with the Mona on his arm, sometimes without; but it wasn’t like the old days when he caned it night after night with Vic Serotonin. Antoyne said less than he used to; and if his mood was generally more stable and energetic, his lows arrived lower. He drank more. His leather flight jacket grew shabby, his chinos oil-stained. He was always on dial-up, saying something like, “Jesus Christ, Andrei, this was supposed to be a favour.” Now he turned sideways on his chair and looked away from Liv for a few moments to compose himself. He looked back, and toyed with his glass, which had a quarter of an inch of his cocktail left in it. However low that drink got in a glass, however often you swirled it around, smart molecules built into the mixer ensured it was still made up of precise pink and yellow layers. The planets where Antoyne had spent his time, that was the height of sophistication. He drank it and made a face.

“I can’t fly no more,” he admitted. “I was going to tell you all along.”

He thought about when he rode the Dynaflow ships, and all the places he saw then, and the things he saw on them. Gay Lung, Ambo Danse, Waitrose Two and the Thousand Suns: he had scattered himself like easy money across the Beach stars and down into Radio Bay. He had gone deep in those days. Surfed the Alcubiere warp. Owned one rocket after another; for want of imagination he called them all the
Kino Chicken
. Smuggled this and that. Kept one step ahead of both EMC and the rogue code from his own navigational systems. But in the end he failed at looking after himself, which men like Antoyne often do, and on Santa Muerte inhaled something that deviated both his septum and his sense of where things were. That was it for being a sky pilot. That was it for believing yourself indestructible. What the hell, he had always tried to think, until he wound up in Saudade as Vic Serotonin’s gopher: nothing keeps. He was surprised to find himself blinking when he tried to think it now.

“I lost the feel for it.”

Liv Hula studied Antoyne for a minute or two. Then she got up from the table and made him put his pilot jacket on.

“Come with me,” she said.

Ten minutes later they stood on Carver Field, in a mild wind and gathering greenish twilight, with the Halo stars coming out, sharp actinic points at the top of the sky, where their ship, the tubby curves of which now gave back a bargain brass glitter to the scattered halogen lights of the port, stood almost ready to fly. Antoyne put his hands in his pockets. He shrugged.

“So why are we here?” he said.

“To enjoy this heap of shit you had us buy.”

Liv took his hands between both of hers. She made him look in her eyes and understand what she meant. “Antoyne,” she said, “I dialled up Irene to meet us here. Later we can get a drink, the three of us, we can celebrate how our lives will soon move on from what they were. You can explain these stupid old-fashioned engines to me one more time. But for now, look up in the sky. See that red giant there? That’s McKie, fifteen lights out. We can go there. Or we can go there, to American Polaroid. Or there, You’re Worth It. We’ve got a ship. We can go anywhere now in these million stars!”

“Do you think I don’t know places?” he replied, “or the names of them?”

“The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you.” Antoyne tried to pull away from her, angry that she should express such an intuition, even in the middle of an empty field where no one but Antoyne could hear; even though it was only what everyone knew about him already. “I always understood that,” she said. She kept his hands between hers a moment more. Then she let go, because it came to her that they had already left Saudade a hundred light-years behind them anyway. When she looked up at the ship again, it was black and comforting against the afterglow. “In the end, Antoyne, what does it matter to you?” she said.

“Because it means I am not anyone any more.”

“None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it
Nova Swing,
which is the cheapest name I ever heard.”

Antoyne stared at her, and then past her. His eyes lit up.

“Hey,” he said, “here is Irene now.”

Site Crime accountants had followed the money from the back office of the Club Semiramide to a room off Voigt Street, one of the many DeRaad bolt-holes they were finding and closing daily.

Voigt was full of vehicles and flashing lights. Fire-teams had been deployed. Code jockeys worked on the locked, reinforced door. Quarantine and Hygiene were also in attendance, represented mainly by midrank uniforms, exchanging precedence issues by dial-up while they waited with simulated patience for the action to begin. It was the usual scene, except that a tall, heavily tailored young woman with a forearm datableed had overall charge of the operation. They all knew who she was, but no one trusted her, or understood how she had advanced herself so far so quickly. Since the débâcle out on the Lots, they were uneasy working with Site Crime anyway, but their body language and hers confirmed they had no choice.

The lock proved to be mechanical, which no one knew how to finesse. They blew the door off instead.

The teams went in looking confident but feeling nervous. No one wanted to be first at the scene of a big escape. In the event, they were too late. Something weird had happened here, but now it was over. How you would describe it was this: the room stank. It was the same smell, rank and fatty, you got in a quarantine facility, but reduced because it had settled into the fabric—the bare floor, the bed and its foul grey sheets like a disordered shroud, the white walls with their freight of dried human secretions and undecodable graffiti. The room was vacant, but only just. The Site Crime people all understood this. It was a category of fact they were familiar with. Something had lived here until very recently, but how you described that something—or what you understood by the term “lived”—was very much up to you. If you had been able to stand there twenty-four hours ago, they knew, you might have seen the composite entity formerly known as “the Weather” leave its hiding place for the last time. The door would have unlocked itself without agency, then closed and locked itself again. There would have been silence outside, except perhaps for the strong, calming sound of summer rain, children laughing and running for shelter, the bang of a door further down Voigt. Those sounds would have had, for a second, too sharp an edge. The woman with the datableed checked out the graffiti. She consulted the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of her forearm. She shook her head thoughtfully.

“You can finish up here,” she told Hygiene.

She drove herself back to the uptown bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. There she ran nanocam footage of the other big unsolved mystery in her career.

This impeccable record, assembled by the vanished detective himself and projected across the walls by his shadow operators, left no one the wiser. In the year after the death of his wife, Aschemann had continued his investigation of the Neon Heart murders. All the details were there. They summed to zero. He watched, he asked questions and took names, he went by the gates of the noncorporate port and smelled the money and the violence in the air. He went from bar to bar. (“At one time or another,” he told the cameras, with the impish, inturned smile his co-workers had begun to recognise, “all brave men have seen the sky through bars.”) He had himself driven to and from the Bureau every morning and afternoon in a pink Cadillac roadster, 1952. He sat in his office with his feet on the green tin desk, and wrote letters to women, and to Prima. Had he killed her? Was he the Tattoo Murderer? The fact was, the assistant thought, he didn’t know, any more than she did. All he knew was what Saudade wanted from him: that he be a detective, and have some plan for how that worked. That year, and every year after, he was like a man reassembling himself—not as something new, but not entirely in his own image either. His sense of guilt dated from Prima’s death. But his sense of discontinuity dated from marrying her in the first place.

“All crimes,” she remembered him advising, “are crimes against continuity—continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity.”

She sighed.

“Switch this off,” she ordered.

Not yet midnight. It was too soon to visit the tank farm on C-Street. The office blinds were down, admitting erratically pulsed strips of neon light, rose-pink and a lively poisonous blue. The furniture smelled of authentic furniture polish. Every so often the assistant said something into her dial-up. Or the shadow operators fluttered close, murmuring, “If you could just sign this, dear.” Or they pulled themselves about on the desk in front of her like grounded bats, through the jumbled papers and stripes of neon, hoping that she would notice them. Data ran down the inside of her arm. It was her office now. She had a major escape to deal with. She had operations of her own. She could wait another hour before she made her next move. She could wait another hour after that. But she was restless and didn’t know what to do this minute. Damp winds chased wastepaper across the intersection outside, to where a lost blonde stood in her short white dinner frock, smiling vaguely at the deserted pavement and holding both her shoes in one hand.

Another month passed, the
Nova Swing
completed her refit. They had port authority approval. They had a new paint job. They had a company name, Bulk Haulage, thought up after hours of numb effort by Antoyne; and a corporate mission statement which Irene discovered written on her heart, “Aim to the Future.” They had hot new upgrades in the drive train. Early one wet autumn day, with rain lashing across Carver Field, Liv Hula heated up the rocket engines, swallowed the pilot interface with the usual combination of optimism and self-disgust, and with Antoyne strapped in the second chair, went all-out for the parking orbit.

“Shit,” she was saying five minutes later, her voice issuing eerily from the ship’s speakers. “It works.”

“Isn’t that something,” agreed Antoyne.

They stared out at space a moment, then at each other in wild surmise. Space! Tests on the infrastructure showed what they already knew. “It’s a tub but it actually works!” Scared and elated, anxious, yet somehow secure in their professionalism, they scuttled for home, where they found Irene the Mona looking pale but happy in rose-pink pedal-pushers, refreshing her make-up from her little shiny red urethane vanity case Antoyne remembered so well. “So does it work?” she wanted to know. During the take-off, she admitted, she sat in the administration building bar with a White Light sundae and didn’t even dare watch. “But I saw the flash went over everything. You lit up the rain, I got to say that. I had my legs crossed for you.”

“I can’t believe it works,” Liv Hula said.

After that, they lived in the ship, all three of them, and made frequent baby steps like this, little journeys into space. Though they had their differences of viewpoint, Liv and Irene got on well together, as long as they could manage Antoyne in their different styles. Antoyne was content to be managed. In the end, it was what he was used to, although he wouldn’t admit that to the Mona. There was always something to talk about. Antoyne and Irene talked about their personal development and aspirational goals. Irene and Liv talked about the importance of self-presentation. Liv and Antoyne talked about Vic Serotonin, who had in so many senses brought about their present business venture.

“I always got involved with people stronger than me,” Antoyne told Liv. “In the end you would have to say it was a pattern. But it can work out well.”

Liv shuddered.

“People like Vic are too strong for everyone around them.”

But when she repeated this opinion to Irene, it received only a sniff. “Vic Serotonin was as weak a man as I ever saw,” the Mona stated firmly. “Trust me, I seen a few of them.” She laughed. “And fucked them all,” she added, “disincluding Vic himself.”

This conversation occurred about thirty thousand miles off-planet. Without they took her off the beach, Antoyne said, and into the surf, everything was known about the
Nova Swing
that could be known. So now they were going to switch on the Dynaflow drivers for a nanosecond or two and see if she survived that blatant challenge to physics. But before they could do that, they had to fly through this huge secret-looking region of derelict ships they found themselves in. Cutting arcs flared as bright as pSi engines, through a smart fog of nanotech like ionised gas. Tugs were pushing and pulling the enormous rusty hulks about. It was a region of activity stretching away like a shell round the whole planet, an expanding wavefront a thousand, two thousand miles deep. Irene stared out the porthole. She knew human beings a little, she said, and that was hard enough because there were so many of them to know; but she would never cease to be surprised about the endless wonders you saw up here in space.