Nova Swing

3 The Liquid Moderne

After what had happened with his latest client, Vic Serotonin slept a lot. He slept as if he was dead, without any dreams. You spend time on the Saudade site, you don't dream. But you wake up feeling like hell and it gets worse all your life, just something else to look forward to, as Vic always said. The exertion of not dreaming drove you to a sweat.

Vic's home was a coldwater walk-up in South End which he inherited, along with his entree into the business, from a retired en-tradista and tour guide called Bonaventure. He had two rooms and a shower. He never cooked or ate there, though there was an induction stove and the place always smelled of old food. It smelled of old clothes too, old tenancies, years of dust; but it was close enough to the event aureole, which was his professional requirement. Vic slept on a bed, he sat in a chair, he shaved in a mirror; like anyone else he bought all those things at a repro franchise at the end of the road, the day he moved in. He kept his zip-up gabardine jackets and Inga Malink artisan shirts in a wardrobe from Earth, rose veneer over boxwood circa 1932AD, that far away, that long ago. Out one window he had a good view of a bridge; out the other it was a segment of the noncorporate spaceport, primarily weeds and chainlink fence.

Late one afternoon he got up, looked in his mirror and thought:

"Jesus, Vic."

Whatever happened had made him look fifty years old. He still had the taste you get in your mouth after you've been in there recently, and he was still seeing the client run away from him in the weird elongated dawn light. There was something in her panic, there was something in the way she ran: he couldn't remember what it was, but at least he wasn't angry any more.

Among the litter in the apartment Vic kept a Bakelite telephone with cloth-covered cables and a bell that rang. Everyone had one that year; Vic's was as cheap as everything else he owned. Just after he finished shaving, the bell rang and he got a call from a broker named Paulie DeRaad, which he was expecting. The call was short, and it prompted Vic to open a drawer, from which he took out two objects wrapped in rag. One was a gun. The other was harder to describe-Vic sat by the window in the fading light, unwrapping it thoughtfully. It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across the object's surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands. It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither.

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn't know. He didn't want to know.

"Hey," he said into the telephone, "yeah, I got it. It's still here."

He listened for a moment. "Why would I let that happen?" he asked. Then he said OK and hung up. He wrapped the item in its rag and left the building with it. "I don't do this for love," he complained on his way downstairs, as if he was still talking to Paulie DeRaad. DeRaad, one-time vacuum commando, facilitator and all-round Earth Military Contracts factotum, ran a joint he called the Semiramide Club, the visible part of extensive holdings in which EMC subsidiaries were implicated to the hilt. Wait-and-see was Paulie's working pattern, safety first his motto; and in this case, he said, he preferred Vic to meet with one of his operators, who would check things out and only make the buy if the goods were good.

Vic wasn't sure who he liked least, Paulie or his operators. Nevertheless he went down through Moneytown to the ocean, and not long after he left home found himself at the Suicide Point end of the Corniche, waiting in the half-dark of a one-room cinder-block structure which might once have been a bar, or a place where you bought cheap finance with predictable consequences, but which now anyway had peeling walls, boarded windows, a signature of disuse. Advertisements for legal services flickered softly round the heads of the Point kids in gun-punk outfits who stood talking between the ragmop palms outside.

Vic waited inside, listening carefully, for some minutes. It seemed a long while before anything happened. Then the palm trees were agitated by a cold breeze, and silvery rain poured down at an angle through the blue light on the beach. The Point kids shouted and ran about in the rain for a minute or two; then they were gone. As if he had been waiting for this, Vic took out the package and held it in one hand; he took out his gun and held it in the other. The room smelled of standing water, electricity, darkness.

Vic stood there watching the weather until he heard a soft voice which sounded as if it originated both inside and outside the building.

The voice said, "Hello, Vic."

"You want to come in out the rain," Vic advised.

"That's funny, Vic."

"Even so. I'm not here to talk to the climate."

The voice said, "I'll send someone."

Vic shrugged as if it had asked him for something he didn't intend to give. "The wrong thing happens here," he warned, "and I'll shoot the goods. You should be aware of that."

Another laugh.

When Paulie DeRaad's operator came in, it came as one of the Point kids, male, maybe ten years old, wearing the usual tawdry Point notion of gun-punk chic, a sun-faded gabardine coat buttoned up tight to the neck and falling away unbelted from there to just below the knee. The kid walked in under his own power, then began to shake violently and fell against the wall. "How come you do this to me?" he asked, in a puzzled voice. "I never even saw you before." He coughed, wiped the back of one wrist across his mouth and tried to make eye contact with Vic Serotonin, who turned determinedly away. After a minute or two Vic heard a sigh. The light flickered outside. The kid stopped making an effort and slid down the wall.

"Turn around now, Vic," the operator said.

Vic licked his lips.

"I promise you it's safe to turn around now."

Vic turned around. "You look like my mother," he said. He had no idea why his mother came into his mind, only that he was no longer certain what sex the Point kid was. It stood quite still and calm. Vic thought that if it ever did choose to move, to walk or run or anything understandable like that, it would be as graceful as a dancer. Its face seemed bigger. Its eyes too-they made too much contact with you. There was a kind of morning glow in that face, the unsexed unknowable personality of the Shadow Boy inside, an optimism so bare no one could look at it long.

"This is how it is," Vic said. "I put Paulie's goods on the floor between us, and you do whatever it is you do, and I shoot both of you if anything happens I don't like."

"You should try and relax more," the operator recommended.

It smiled disconcertingly until Vic set the artefact on the floor, then a kind of music came out of its throat, three or four thin, pure tones, less like a voice than a musical instrument: to which the item lit up faintly in response, glowing through the cloth Vic had wrapped it in. "This is very real," the Shadow Boy said, as if it was describing the artefact for someone else. "This is very beautiful stuff." In a single seamless movement it knelt down, leaned forward and made a circle with its arms, a curiously child-like sheltering gesture which embraced somewhat more space than the artefact occupied. Next, electromagnetic vomit issued from its mouth. Thousands of motes like violet neon tapioca slowly dripped on to the goods. "I just want to see what we've got here," the Shadow Boy said, "before we go any further." Dazzle from the interfacing operation blew back into its face, temporarily erasing the features. The walls of the room lit up then darkened again. Vic saw graffiti, he saw chipped plaster, exposed rebar.

He said, "I'm not happy with this."

There was complete silence in the place. Intelligence had left the eyes of the kneeling figure, and was now concentrated in the thick honey drip of light, the exchange of code.

"This is going too far," Vic said. "I'm not happy with this."

A faint voice answered him. It was Paulie DeRaad's voice, piped in live from the Semiramide Club on a nanofraction of the operator's bandwidth. "Hey, Vic," it said, "I won't need you any more tonight. The money's in your account."

"Fuck you, Paulie," Vic promised, "if it isn't," and he backed out warily, holding his gun out in front of him in both hands in a gesture less aggressive than imploring. Light continued to flicker and buzz from the doorway for some minutes, as the operator detached itself stage by stage, interface by interface. Eventually there was a kind of muffled sigh, almost of relief, and everything went dark.

By then, Vic Serotonin, heading east again, had crossed the lagoon bridge into the tourist port, where he entered a bar called The World of Today. He had them bring him a bottle of Black Heart to take out; then changed his mind, sat down in one of the booths and ordered a meal. While he was eating he dialled up his account. As soon as he saw how much the sale of the artefact had grossed him, he pushed his plate away. He had lost his appetite.

"I'll take the bottle after all," he told the barman.

Vic knew he wouldn't keep his luck. Money like that, his experience told him, has luck of its own. Money like that doesn't care about you, you should never get involved with money like that. Less than ten steps out of The World of Today he was kerb-crawled by a pink Cadillac convertible digitally revisioned to co-ordinate with the streamline moderne revival popular just then in some Saudade circles. He was as familiar with this car as any other travel agent. It belonged to Lens Aschemann, known to Vic as a high-up in Site Crime; a man who resembled the older Albert Einstein, and whose mild manners and unwearying persistence were a legend from the very beginnings of artefact policing in Saudade. Aschemann had seen them come and go, from Emil Bonaventure onwards. He took the pipe out of his mouth and smiled.

"Hey, Vic," he called, "is that you?"

Vic stopped.

The Cadillac stopped too. "You know it's me," Vic said.

"Vic, get in, we'll drive."

"I don't think so."

"It's a pity to waste this beautiful car."

Vic, who expected Aschemann to come with a team, was trying to look everywhere at once, up and down the street, back into the bar, inside the car. The street was empty. It was coming on to rain again, just enough to lacquer the sidewalk. Aschemann's driver proved to be a woman who gave Vic a smile like salt, which Vic returned. Her face was lighted from complex angles in two or three different registers, by the dashboard, the neon, the splashout from The World of Today doorway: but he could see she had good tailoring and blonde hair cropped down to nothing much. She switched the engine off, got out of the car and came quickly round the trunk towards him. She was substantially taller than Aschemann, which you would expect, and built. Some kind of datableed ran oriental-looking ideograms down the inside of her arm.

"We asked you to get in the car," she said.

Vic made a very small motion of one shoulder. This seemed to be as far as it could go at that time. They regarded one another frankly until the passenger door of the Cadillac swung open. Lens Aschemann bustled on to the sidewalk, breathing heavily and fussing with his raincoat.

"Wait!" he ordered his assistant. "I'm afraid of what you'll do."

He patted her arm. "Calm down," he told her. Then, to Vic, "We can talk here."

"I thought that would prove possible," Vic Serotonin said.

"In this bar if you want, or just here on the pavement," the detective assured him. "We can talk. Sit in the car," he urged his assistant. "Go on. Really, it's fine. You can do that, because Vic would never be a problem to us. Vic, convince her you would never be a problem!"

Vic smiled.

"You're safe with me," he told the woman.

"Vic, she could swallow you with a glass of water. Behave! You should see what they did to her reflexes."

"I know I'd be impressed."

The woman lifted one side of her mouth at Vic and went back round to the driver door. "You're like dogs, you young people," Aschemann called after her. "I wonder you live until you're thirty." He put his arm round Vic's shoulders. "I know I'm getting old, Vic. I dreamed a mandala last night. It was simple, very simple. Just four or five concentric circles, quite compulsive to watch. They were silver in colour."

"That's very interesting," Vic said.

Aschemann looked hurt. "Vic, you've got a moment to listen to me. The mandala, it's a sign you're changing for the better, as a human being. You're accepting a good orderly move from one big room of your life to the next."

"Is that what they say?"

"It is. So I'm pleased with my progress. Maybe I'll retire happy."

Serotonin held the Black Heart bottle up to the light.

"I must be doing well too," he said. "I've seen something like that at the bottom of every one of these."

Aschemann gave a short laugh.

"You're too clever for me. But look!" He used the stem of his pipe to indicate the Kefahuchi Tract, which lay draped across the night sky of Saudade like a string of bad jewels. "I used to dream of that," he said with a shudder. "Night after night, when I was young. You can't get change less ordered. Look at it, so raw and meaningless! The wrong physics, they say, loose in the universe. Do you understand that? I don't." He tapped Vic's forearm, as if he thought Vic hadn't got the point, or as if he wasn't entirely sure he had Vic's attention. "Now it's loose down here too. We have no idea what goes on in the event site. But whatever comes out," he said, "/ have to deal with the consequences."

Vic couldn't think how to answer, so he said nothing.

This only seemed to confirm whatever the detective was thinking, because he shook his head, turned his back and got into the Cadillac, where he sat fussing with his raincoat and pipe. "Do me a favour, Vic," he asked in a remote voice, "and shut this door for me." When Vic had done that, he went on, "You're a tour operator, that's fine. Unless you force it under my nose I can't be bothered with a little traffic of that kind." He shrugged. "Under normal circumstances, get in bed with Paulie DeRaad and that's your loss too. It's between you and him; why should I be interested? But whatever you and Paulie are up to at the Cafe Surf is new."

Vic had never heard of the Cafe Surf.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"Vic, if you're smuggling out some new kind of artefact it will be the end of you, I promise."

"I never heard of this place!" Vic said.

But Aschemann had already turned to his driver and was saying something Serotonin couldn't hear. She replied, and they laughed together. They were a weird pair. Her eyes refocused for a moment, becoming flat, reflective and mysterious in the rain-wet light; the datastream pulsed energetically up and down her arm. She gave Vic a last smile, a louche, amused salute as if to say she would see him again soon. Then she fired up the engine and let it draw the Cadillac slowly from the kerb.

"Hey, Vic?" Aschemann called over his shoulder as the car moved off. "Give my love to Emil Bonaventure next time you see him. Say hello to Emil for me!"

"Well then, what do you think?" Aschemann asked his assistant.

They sat in the warm faux-leather smell of the car, streetlight flickering regularly across their faces. Her hands rested on the wheel. Her feet rested on the pedals. She had a purposive manner, Aschemann had already noted, with anything like that.

"You know him better than I do," she said at length.

"It's clever of you to see that. Is there more?"

"If anything, he seemed surprised."

"That's our Vic," the detective said, "always surprised."

"I don't know what you mean by that." She looked ahead at the empty street. Aschemann gave her time to say more if she wanted to, then smiled to himself. After a moment he made a business of extracting a match from his Cafe Surf matchbook; pulled open the ashtray, which released a stale smell and put the match in there without lighting it.

"You know he could have hurt you," he said.

It was her turn to smile. "You shouldn't worry about me," she assured him. A career in Sport Crime, she said, gave you access to chops the civilian tailors never saw. That was just one of the professional benefits it conferred.

"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 Cafe 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 rag-mop 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:

"If I gave you his book, Vic, would you leave him alone?"

"Don't joke, Edith," Vic said.

When Emil Bonaventure arrived in Saudade thirty years ago, everyone was writing on paper.

It was one of those things. They loved paper suddenly. The nostalgia shops were full of it, all colours of cream and white, blank or with feint lines, or small pale-grey squares, shining softly from the lighted windows which were like religious cubicles or niches. There was every kind of notebook in there, paper between covers you could hardly believe, from wood bark to imitation grey fur to holographic pictures from the narratives of Ancient Earth religious figures, with their fingers and their bovine eyes uplifted, who smiled and raised a cross as you turned the book in your hands in the retro shop light.

As artificial as the textures of the paper itself-an Uncle Zip product franchised out of some chopshop on another planet- these notebooks came in all sizes, fastened any way you could think, with clasps, hasps, magnets, combination locks or bits of hairy string you wrapped around and did up in a beautiful knot. Some were fastened in more contemporary ways, so you could see a little flicker in the air near the edge of the pages-if you're the wrong person don't get your fingers near those!

Everyone was buying these books because it was cute to write your thoughts in them-thoughts, a shopping list, those kinds of things.

People wrote, "Who do I want to be today?"

They wrote diaries.

Everyone suddenly loved paper, no one could say why, and soon they'd love something else. But it was more practical for some than others. Emil Bonaventure kept the habit where others kicked it, and wrote everything down until the day he" went into the Saudade site for the last time. He didn't trust his memory by then. He'd been in there once too often. The stuff he had to remember was complex-directions, bearings, instructions to himself. It was data. It was clues. It was everything you daren't forget in that trade. It was everything he couldn't trust to an operator. Work with the Shadow Boys, Emil used to say, you don't trust any kind of algorithm. Even the tame ones. Among the data he also wrote descriptions about his achievements, of which he had done more than one. He wrote observations, like: "It's always snowing in Sector 7. Whatever time of year it is outside, whatever time of year it is inside." He had the whole site divided up, Sector this, Sector that. In those days, whatever he said now, the entradistas had to believe in facts; they had to believe they knew things no one else knew.

Emil wrote it all down in that water-stained letter-as if he had to convince himself of something-in a kind of slanting disordered scribble which did not reflect his personality. Then he hid the book. He was as cagey as all those entradistas, and when Vic Serotonin bought the goodwill to Emil's business, the book was not included.

"It's no joke, Vic. You remind him of too many things. If I gave you the book would you leave him alone?"

"I wouldn't stop coming here," Vic said.

She stepped in closer, so he was just in the warmth of her. "Oh no?" she taunted. Serotonin tried to kiss her, but she was too quick for him. "Vic, if you got that book we'd never see you again. Anyway, it would be the death of you. It was as good as the death of him.

"Come here, Vic," she said. "And look at this."

Two or three little child-star costumes with short stiff faux-satin skirts a ferocious emerald-green. Pairs of black patent leather shoes with straps and taps, in ascending sizes. Accordions, and parts of them. Some of the accordions she had played until they broke or got too small, some she bought later in life because she liked them. They were all colours, electric-blue, through the same savage green as the outfits, to a kind of resonant maroon, all under a high-lacquer finish with metal emblems of rocket ships, shooting stars, snowy mountains. Each keyboard grin exposed rare ivories adopted from alien animals. The small shoes now made her cry, Edith was forced to admit. Wherever she lived she laid out these keepsakes on shelves, or in breakfront cabinets whose glass doors were etched with exotic scenes from Ancient Earth. Today she had something new to show him.

"I performed in this on Pumal Verde." Folded into yellowed tissue, it looked like some kind of marching band uniform, and actually she couldn't remember wearing it. "I was fourteen years old." She buried her face in the bolero jacket, caught odours she didn't recognise. "You would have liked me then. I was so innocent, Vic. You want to smell it too?"

"That's unjust to me," said Vic, who didn't like her tone.

Edith smiled benignly to herself and decided to look at the skirt next. As she unfolded it something dropped out on to the floor. "Hey, Vic," she said. "What's this?"

It was an old notebook with a leather cover.

"Jesus," Vic Serotonin said.

He was reaching for it when something fell over loudly in the old man's room upstairs. Vic looked at the ceiling despite himself, which allowed Edith to sweep the book quickly from under his hand. Their eyes met.

"Emil's awake, Vic," she said. "You should go see if he needs help."

"I'll want to talk about this," he warned her over his shoulder as he left the room.

Edith watched him go. He would always care for the old man. As for Edith, the Accordion Kid still played to packed audiences in her head, its pipeclay face Uncle Zipped to a perfect Shirley Temple, one instrument following another-bigger and more expensive, with more chromium and japanned rare wood-each year as she played herself clear across the Halo into adolescence and a career in the New Nuevo Tango; always trying to look after Emil because he did such a job of looking after her, packing in a kind of comfortable guilt until now it was a permanent situation, because Emil would never be able to look after either of them again. Close her eyes and the accordion danced, and she felt like a cultivar-a succession of perfect little-girl bodies in shiny skirts with kick-up net petticoats, white socks and round-toed patent leather sandals. She followed Vic Serotonin up the stairs, thinking of these scenes.

Emil Bonaventure's CV was this: he started out indentured to some arm of Earth Military Contracts-in his case on a project known only by the number "121," which he never talked about. After that he brawled and drank and fucked his way across the Halo with his baby daughter in tow until he wound up in the Saudade site and she wound up an adult. That stopped him in his tracks. It got his attention. As a young man he was like any of those people. He had a lot of appetites but until he got to Saudade he had no idea who he was. All those years later Vic found him lying half out of bed in this upper room at the edge of the tourist port. A damp sheet was tangled round his white old upper body, which had bruises in all stages and colours from similar falls and incidents. His face was pushed into the wall by his own weight. "Help me, Edith," he said.

"I'm Vic," Vic said.

"Come on, help him!" said Edith.

Between them they wrestled him back into bed, then she said, "I'll let you two brave entradistas talk." She went to the window, and stared out of it across the port where rain was falling through the halogen lights.

"Vic," Bonaventure whispered, as soon as she had moved away, "come here. Sit down. I thought about the things you said."

"What things were they, Emil?"

"Listen Vic, everybody I ever took in there, I took them on a promise of more than they could have-"

"They want to go, Emil. It's what they want."

"No, listen!" He clutched Vic's arm. "I knew that. I knew that every time. There's something in there, but it's nothing. They always see that in the end. They see you've fooled them."

"Where's this leading, Emil? Is it leading to the same old shit?"

Bonaventure shook his head tiredly.

"I just want to know where you've been, Vic. I want to know what locations we have in common."

"You want to compare dicks," Vic said.

"Because you must have been in Sector 7 and seen that immense white thing like a face, hanging over the roofs-"

"Give it up, Emil."

But Bonaventure refused to be saved. "Listen to me!" he demanded. "Just for once!" Whatever decaying memory had hold of him was pulling him down. His generation all had the same need to rehearse, compare adventures, keep alive the things that terrified them in there. Vic could feel his whole old body trembling with it. "After that the houses are piles of bricks, this fucking utter wasteland of bricks. There's an echo every time a tile falls, and the face watches you-" He saw Vic's expression, and the tension went out of him suddenly. He sighed. "Why am I bothering?" he asked. He shrugged. "If you haven't seen that," he said, "what have you seen? Nothing."

"Here it comes again," Vic predicted.

"He only wants to talk, Vic," Edith said tiredly from the window.

"Stick to the safe edge," Bonaventure advised the world in general, Vic in particular. He said, "Be a tourist like the rest of them."

Vic threw up his hands. "I can go anywhere and have a better time than this." He appealed to Bonaventure's daughter, "I could have a better time than this at the Semiramide Club." Edith shrugged. She gave him a direct look-If you go, the look suggested, don't come back-and resumed examining the street outside as if it was full of things which, though they didn't interest her much, were more interesting than Vic.

"Jesus!" Serotonin said. He had a sudden image of Paulie DeRaad's Shadow Boy, and the face of its doomed proxy lighted by the splashback from whatever operation had gone on at Suicide Point. "No one gives a fuck about the things / have to deal with," he complained. He got up to leave.

"I'm sorry," Bonaventure said. "Vic, it's a big place. Maybe we just saw different parts of it."

Vic said from the doorway, "I don't think so."

"I can't dream, Vic!" Bonaventure called. "I can't dream!"

"You knew it would come to that," Vic said. He didn't know how to help. "You always knew it would come to that."

"Wait till it happens to you, Vic."

"Hush," Vic said absently. "Hush up, old guy."

Edith Bonaventure found him downstairs, coldly ripping pages out of the old man's notebook.

"I thought I hid that again," she said unconcernedly.

"There's nothing written in it."

"Isn't there? It mustn't be the right one, then."

"You already knew it wasn't," Vic said.

She acknowledged this with a smile "Even the ones he's written in aren't necessarily the right one," she said. "Emil wrote a lot of stuff in his time. Do you want a drink?"

Serotonin dropped the notebook on the floor and yawned. "I ought to go," he said. She brought him the drink anyway, and stood in front of him while he swallowed it. "What is that?" he said.

"You finished the good stuff," she reminded him.

Serotonin wiped his mouth. He looked round the room, with its shelves full of little-girl memorabilia; he couldn't resolve into one image the Edith he knew and the Edith who kept those things. He set down his glass and pulled her in close until she was compelled to sit on his knee. "Does he need money?" he asked her. Edith looked away and smiled. She pulled Vic's head down and made him kiss the nape of her neck.

"We always need money," she said. "Mm. That's nice."

After he had gone, she lay on the sofa thinking about him. Serotonin reminded her of all the men she met on her way across the Halo. Everyone she encountered in those days was trying to live out some dream already irretrievable when they were sixteen.

If she was fair she had to include herself in that. On Pumal Verde, for instance, she got bagged on Dr Thirsty's, hallucinating for eleven hours straight a huge white bird flapping slowly and ecstatically through vacuum. Her boyfriend of the time said, "Edith, that bird is your life, and you'd be wise to follow where it leads." He didn't do much with his own life, only joined EMC like the rest, and was made pilot of some kind of fighter craft which necessitated him being rebuilt by the military tailor so that wires came out his mouth and into the controls. They were supposed to have damped out the gag reflex, but sometimes he felt the wires in there like a mass of sinewy fibrous stuff he couldn't swallow. If he panicked, or let his concentration slip, he heard his mother's voice in the cockpit, calm and firm, telling him to do things. It was hard to disobey. She said not to be frightened. Not to be angry. She said, concentrate now and get this part right. Then everyone will be saved. That was mostly the end of him as far as Edith was concerned.

Towards dawn she went back upstairs to see to the old man.

He was still awake, staring ahead of himself as if he was spectat-ing at some event no one else could see; but he must have known she was there, because he took her hand and said, "The worst things we ever brought out of there, we called them 'daughters.' Bring out a daughter and you had nothing but trouble. A daughter would change shape on you. It wasn't alive, it wasn't technology either: no one knew what it did, no one knew what it was for."

Edith squeezed his hand.

"You told me that already," she said.

He chuckled. "It was me who started calling them that. Whatever you brought out, it had better not be a daughter."

"You told me that a hundred times before."

He chuckled again, and she squeezed his hand again, and after a while he went to sleep.

She stayed with him. Every so often she looked round the room, at the painted wainscoting a warm cream colour under the low-wattage lights, the old bed piled up with coloured pillows, bits of mismatched cloth she liked, or thought the old man might like. We saw worse places than this, she thought. There was a flare from the rocket field, then another; they lighted her strong profile and cast its shadow on the wall.