Nova Swing (7 page)

“Go by Rosedale Avenue,” Aschemann ordered.

All the streets in that part of town were overlooked. The interstellar cruise ships towered over everything—PanGalactic’s
Jayne Anne Phillips,
the Fourmyle
Ceres,
the Beths/Hirston
Pro Ana
and half a dozen more, their enormous hulls scoured to matt-grey by re-entry fires, ablated to a wafer by the unpredictable gamma-ray storms of Radio Bay. Every planetfall they made, another layer of paint was burned off them; you could tell how far into the tour they were by the effect of burnished metal glowing through the faint reds and blues of their corporate livery. While deep in the engine rooms, particle jockeys in lead suits scratched their heads and tried to reconcile three different kinds of physics—each with its own set of “unimpeachable” boundary conditions—so they could take off again without the customers experiencing G.

Aschemann stared out at the great hulls, shifting relative to one another like trees in a wood with the motion of the car.

“All our troubles come from up there,” he said.

“I thought they all came from the site.”

This went too far, perhaps, because he changed the subject. “I looked in at the Semiramide last night. Who do I see there but Vic’s friend Fat Antoyne, drinking that foul stuff he likes. There was a Mona on his arm.”

“There’s your connection,” she said.

To her it was bankable: Serotonin to Antoyne, DeRaad to Antoyne, Antoyne to the Café Surf. But Aschemann only shrugged. “Perhaps it means something,” he agreed, “perhaps it doesn’t. Stop a moment.”

Something had caught his eye, a movement, a shadow, at the chainlink fence of the tourist port. It was gone next time he looked. It could have been a figure climbing in or climbing out. “Go on,” he said. “Nothing is there.” He had no faith in the tourist port fences. “Or any fence for that matter,” he told his assistant. The ports attracted outlaws and psychic cripples, but that wasn’t why he disliked them. They were just another connection with the undependable, the random, the exterior. The Cadillac turned ponderously north, then down towards the sea, where ragmop palms bent compliantly, showing the napes of their necks to the offshore wind. The rain had stopped. Aschemann was silent for some time. The assistant glanced sideways at him and eventually, as if he was answering something she had said, he murmured:

“Vic Serotonin’s no threat to anyone but himself. But perhaps it’s time we had a proper talk with Paulie.”

Serotonin stood in the rain after they had gone. A rickshaw shushed past, trailing softly coloured butterflies. Two doors down from The World of Today, light poured out of the display window of an Uncle Zip franchise, exciting everything it fell on with the promise of immanence and instant transformation. He spent a minute or two on the sidewalk, staring at its open catalogues—emblems, brands and smart tattoos, loss-leader holograms offering to mod you with the qualities of the great men and women of the past: the genius of Michael Jackson, the looks of Albert Einstein, the nourishing spiritual intelligence of Paul Coelho—wondering if now was the time to make some changes to his self-presentation then leave for another planet. He didn’t want Paulie DeRaad in his life. He didn’t want Aschemann and the Saudade artefact police there either. Possession of an item from the event site would net him ten to life: he couldn’t at that moment recall what he’d get for selling it on through a Shadow Boy.

As if to keep the event site at arm’s length in this, the latter part of his life, Emil Bonaventure had retired hurt to the third floor of a small house in Globe Town, a triangle of quiet, narrow, picturesque streets gentrified by their proximity to the port. There, in the shadow of the big interstellar ships, he was looked after by a woman who called herself his daughter. She mopped up after the deep fevers, the days of hallucinations, the wasting fits and other legacies of Bonaventure’s time in the Saudade site. Her loyalty was fierce, if indistinct. Otherwise she kept herself to herself, in rooms of her own on the ground floor; and her behaviour was such that, for all anyone knew, he might really have been her father.

“I did a stupid thing, Emil,” Vic was forced to admit, after the woman let him in and he climbed the stairs to the third floor. He described what had happened; also Paulie DeRaad’s part in it, and Paulie DeRaad’s operator’s part. Meanwhile, he added, Lens Aschemann was on to some other scam of Paulie’s, right the other side of Saudade at some bar no one had ever heard of; and he had Vic in the frame for that too.

“You’re in a worse condition than me,” Bonaventure said, “if this is the way you’re going now.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Vic said.

He offered Bonaventure the bottle, which he had sneaked upstairs hidden under his jacket. Bonaventure took it and stared greedily at the label. Sometimes his vision was as bad as his memory: it wasn’t a physiological problem. “Is this Black Heart?” he said.

“I overpaid if it isn’t,” Vic said.

“Want some advice?”

“No.”

Bonaventure shrugged and let himself fall back against his pillows, holding the bottle in a defeated way as if it was too heavy to drink from. He was in his sixtieth year, but he looked older, a long, disjointed man with white hair like a crest which in profile accentuated the weight and hook of his nose. Eventually he got the bottle to his mouth and left it there for some time. While this was going on, Vic looked round the room at the bare floorboards and clean linen; then he said, “Jesus, Emil. That was for both of us.”

“I can’t seem to get enough to drink,” Bonaventure said. “Don’t ever pick up anything in there, Vic,” he begged suddenly, as if he had brought the subject up himself. He gazed at Vic sidelong, the whites of his eyes yellowing in the lamplight. “Promise me you won’t?”

Vic smiled. “It’s a little late for that, Emil. Besides, you brought stuff out by the truckload.”

“Things were different then,” Bonaventure said, looking away.

He was so frail you could see the drink on its way into him, percolating from vein to vein. His hair was the colour of cigarette ash, and the white stubble in the lines of his face never seemed to get any longer. He didn’t leave the house now. He rarely left the bed. On a good day his eyes were a bright blue, still amused, but on a day like this they looked boiled. All his energy went into a Parkinsonian shake, a buzz of low-grade fever, a kind of continuous electrical discharge under his skin which gave it the colour of heavy metal poisoning. On a day like this even his bedclothes seemed to be infected. He looked like a bag of rags. He tried to say something more, but in the end could only repeat:

“Things were different.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Vic said carefully. “Something’s happening in there.”

The old man shrugged. “Something’s always happening in there,” he said. Then, with a logic typical of his generation: “That’s how you know you aren’t out here.” He gave Vic a moment to process this. “Take my advice,” he went on, “don’t be like the kids who think they have it all mapped out.”

“Which kids are those, Emil?”

Bonaventure chose to ignore him. “They never heard of contingency,” he said, “that’s the fact of it.” He stared at the label of the Black Heart bottle as if he was trying to remember how to read. “These kids,” he asked himself, “what are they? Entradista Lite. They think there’s a career structure in that business! They’ve got a map they bought from Uncle Zip, and a Chambers pistol they’ll never shoot. Good thing, because that gun’s a particle jockey’s nightmare.”

“Hey, Emil,” Vic said. “Give me the bottle.”

“They dress for the tourist trade. They talk like bad poets. They never say anything about themselves but at the same time they can’t bear you not to know who they are.”

“Who are you talking about, Emil?”

“They never get lost in there, Vic: they never risk anything.”

“Are you talking about me?” Vic Serotonin said.

He tried to describe what had happened to him in the aureole the last time he was there, but it already seemed like some event in another world, and maybe that was what it was. It was a clear but meaningless event from some other world, already folded over itself, and—worse—over other memories of his. The client ran away from him across a pile of partly overgrown rubble, her fur coat open to the spitting rain. At the same time the artefact he had sold to Paulie DeRaad was zigzagging down the slope towards him like an animal whose curiosity had got the better of it. It was a deer or a pony, or perhaps a large dog—lurching but graceful, a hairless animal with cartoon human eyes. Then he was back in Liv Hula’s bar and threatening to shoot Antoyne the fat man for having a history. “The site’s expanding,” he tried to explain to Emil Bonaventure: “We’re in for some movement there, Emil, and none of us knows what to do.” By that Vic meant himself, because who else did he know? No one stupid enough to go in there on a daily basis. That was why he needed Bonaventure’s view of it, but to ask directly would feel like giving something away.

“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: