Nova Swing

6 Tanked on C-Street

An hour later, when Alice Nylon and her punks delivered Vic to the back office of the Semiramide Club, Paulie DeRaad was sprawled in the same chair Vic had last seen him in, as if during the intervening period he hadn't moved at all, only got sick. Alice believed he had sat there for at least a day. She brought him drinks from the bar, she said, but he didn't seem as interested as usual; in fact he didn't seem interested at all. "He's not himself, you know?" she said to Vic. "Generally, you fetch him a Night Train, he'll put it down in one and crush the can that way he has against the side of his head, it's all one fluid move? Well, today he don't drink nothing. Then he wakes up suddenly and asks for you."

"How did he put that?"

"Well, he says, you know, bring that fucking fucker Vic to me," Alice recalled. "Then he's like this again. I mean," she offered, "take a look."

Paulie's legs were straight out in front of him, his head thrown back as if the chair had a headrest, which it did not but was just an ordinary uncomfortable moulded chair. His whole body was in a rigid condition. Where it wasn't the bluish colour of milk, his skin had a heavy-metal tinge particularly evident where it was ablated around his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were closed, though somehow you gained the impression they might flicker open any moment. It was hard to tell how sick Paulie was, and Paulie himself didn't help with this. He was smiling as happily as a girl. Some of those smiles were surprising, they were surprisingly sexy. It was as if Paulie wanted to share something. Sometimes he wanted to share it so much that he was practically winking. Vic Serotonin didn't care to know what it was. These weren't real smiles, he could tell: they were what you got when there was nothing left to smile for.

"Fuck it, Paulie," Vic said.

"He wakes up sometimes, we don't understand what he says."

Vic went to the office door, which he opened a crack. When he looked out into the Semiramide Club it was smoke, music and alcohol fumes, business as usual; no one was looking back in. He shut the door again. "Does anyone else know about this? Any of his EMC connexions?" Alice didn't think they did. "Let's keep it that way, then," Vic recommended. "Those assholes don't need to know, we can agree on that?" As far as she was concerned, Alice said, they could. "Good," said Vic. When he turned back to Paulie, he found Paulie had woken up and got out of the chair and was standing right in Vic's personal space, his face-pumped up with blood under the skin so it was bright red-thrust forward, his blue eyes open as wide as they would go.

"What have you done to me, you fuck?" he screamed.

Vic felt the hair go up on the back of his neck. "Jesus, Paulie," he said, "I don't know." Before he could add anything to that, Paulie had pushed him aside and was kneeling down in front of Alice Nylon.

"Are you my pretty little girl?" he said.

"I am," said Alice.

"Then give me your best smile!" Paulie cajoled her. "There! You see? You feel better already!"

He stood up again and began to lurch restlessly about the room, walking from the hips with his knees stiff. He seemed to get interested in things, then he would stop and stare at the wall and do nothing. After he had been walking around like this for a while, examining the bits and pieces he kept in the office as if trying to understand who he was, he stopped in front of a hologram of himself with the other guys who came out alive from the wreck of the old El Rayo X. They looked a little sunburned but they were all grinning broadly, still in the bottom half of their vacuum suits, giving the thumbs-up with one hand and brandishing various kinds of guns and tools with the other. "Who are these people?" Paulie asked Vic, but when Vic told him, he didn't answer. The blood had leached out of his face again. Vic looked at Alice, who shrugged.

"He ain't the Paulie we know."

Faintly, from the Semiramide Club outside, came the sound of laughter and applause. The entertainment had started in on their second set with the moderne classic Jordan V-10. Vic Serotonin thought a moment.

"Is there another way out?" he said.

"Door at the back there exits in an alley."

"Fetch his rickshaw girl," Vic told her. "Don't talk to anyone else."

When Alice had gone he went through Paulie's clothes until he found the key to the room where Paulie kept the artefact Vic had sold him. This would be an unsettling process for anyone, but Paulie stood compliantly throughout, his head tilted up slightly so he could face the hologram of himself. His eyes were closed again. A few minutes later the rickshaw girl ducked in through the back door.

"This is Annie," Alice said, coming in behind her.

"Oh boy, you don't look good," the Annie told Paulie. Between the three of them they manhandled DeRaad out of there; it took further effort to get him into the rickshaw. Alice Nylon sat on Vic's knee. Vic sat crushed in next to Paulie and tried to work out what sort of situation he was in. He wished he had handled Edith Bonaventure a little better, because perhaps her father's book would have told him more about Paulie's condition. He wondered if he was about to make another mistake.

"I can't believe this is Paulie DeRaad," the rickshaw girl said after a mile or two. "I mean, is he dead?"

"Turn left into Voigt," Vic told her.

"Hey, forget I asked."

"Are we there yet?" said Alice.

Nothing much had changed in the room off Voigt Street. The smell was still bad. Paulie, who had woken up again as soon as they got close, caught it from twenty yards away. His head went up and his nostrils dilated. He stood passively enough on the steps outside, while Vic struggled with the door and the rickshaw girl clopped away into the night of the noncorporate hinterland, but you could tell he was interested.

If Paulie was interested, so was the boy inside. When they got in the room, he had dragged himself off the bed and pressed himself into a corner. He was naked. He watched them with a soft smile while his hands made shy, pushing motions in Paulie's direction. Paulie smiled too. The boy's whole body shivered once, from head to foot: under the filth it had a clear, waxy look, and it had contracted in on itself a little as if something had been used up inside. "I don't want you," he said in that three-toned voice which sounded more like electronica chords than anything human. A few bright motes trickled out of one eye. Suddenly he made a break for the door, but Paulie reached out and caught his upper arm. The force of the boy's lunge swung them both around. "Hey," Paulie said, as if to himself, "naughty, naughty." They tottered for a moment, clutching at one another, then fell on the bed, where they lay winded and face-to-face. Paulie got a wide gentle smile on his lips and laid his cheek close to the boy's; he whispered something. The boy looked up at the ceiling emptily at first, then he started smiling too.

Vic had no idea what was happening.

"We've got to stop this!" he said.

Alice didn't think there was any need. "Paulie won't hurt him now," she said. "Look. They're friends."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Vic said.

The situation remained like that for perhaps two minutes, then the boy's face got a light in it exactly as if someone had switched on a lamp inside his skull. His mouth opened slowly and light poured out over the room and all over Paulie DeRaad, as bright and fierce as the radiation that took his skin off all those years ago. It was a light you could hear. It had organ values. It issued from the boy's mouth but reflected so instantly off the walls that it seemed to come from everywhere else too. Vic and Alice covered their eyes but they could still see the light unabated, and they thought they could feel heat though no heat was there. Then it had passed, and the room was quiet and dark again, and the boy on the bed was just a Point kid lying confused and naked in his own filth and tangled clothes. Paulie DeRaad lay next to him with his eyes staring open, screaming at his old friend Vic:

"You fuck! You fuck!"

"Paulie, I-"

"It's daughter-code, Vic. You fucking unprofessional fuck, you brought me a daughter and I'm walking around dead!"

He wasn't walking around at all. Paulie was lying there on his back immobile except for some of his face, mostly the eyes and mouth. His eyes were popped out with the effort of holding something at bay. His jaw was clenched so hard his voice sounded as if it came down a bad datapipe from some location in the parking orbit. You could hear his teeth crack. His hands plucked at his clothes. "This isn't me," he said. "Am I me?" He laughed suddenly. It was the distinctive DeRaad laugh, they heard it from CorCaroli to Motel Splendido, wherever there were difficult times to be had. "Hey! Vic! Like the old days!" This thought seemed to relax him. He sighed and turned to face the boy; code began to pour t out the boy's mouth like cold tapioca. Vic and Alice pulled them apart. The boy convulsed, rolled away, curled up in a foetal position, held a murmured conversation with himself in three different voices. By then Paulie DeRaad was unconscious again. He had managed to get some of his clothes off and his bare arms had the same waxy pliable look as the boy's.

"This was such a fucking mistake," Vic said. "We should take him back to the club."

Alice shook her head.

"Leave it with me," she said. "He needs to be in his own place now. I don't want the Semiramide crowd to know about this."

"I can't tell what you're thinking, Alice."

Alice smiled vaguely. "I'll take care of him for now," she said. Her eyes were inturned and he realised that she had dialled someone up. Just because Alice was eight didn't mean she was bad help: the contrary was true, or she wouldn't be Paulie DeRaad's best little girl. She was already on it. She was making arrangements. "Yeah," she said, "ten minutes, Map Boy. Back of Voigt. By the way, a rickshaw won't do it. Hey, don't try to fuck me with that. And don't come in," here she gave a flat little chuckle, "unless you ain't got enough problems of your own. Yeah, yeah, fuck off, I heard it all before." She joked a little more with Map Boy, then her eyes refocused and she said, "You still here, Vic? To be honest I don't need you around now." Serotonin shrugged and went to the door. He was halfway out when she called:

"You'd better know how to sort this out, Vic."

It was two a.m. by then, and he felt peripheral to everything, especially Paulie. DeRaad always thought of Vic as one of his contemporaries. Though nothing could be further from the case, there being twenty years in it as far as Vic knew, Vic had always understood this as a compliment he might one day deserve-as though in Paulie's book you could be elected to a generation particularly favoured by craziness and poor judgment. At the beginning of their relationship Vic had been flattered, but for some years now he had no intention of ending up like Paulie or any of Paulie's friends. It complicated his position that he found himself responsible for a bad turn in Paulie's life.

The streets were deserted, and a thin salty mist in the air would be rain by morning. Vic stood undecided for a minute at the corner of Voigt and Altavista; then, rather than go back to the Semiramide Club, turned up his coat collar and took himself off to Straint Street and Liv Hula's bar, where he found Liv herself yawning on one side of the zinc counter, while, from the other, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar made halting conversation.

At about the same time, in his office across the city, Lens Aschemann, a man who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the aged Einstein, was informing his assistant:

"Just from its surface you know when water is deep. As a child you learn to interpret the colour, the movement, the way the light plays on it." Hard orange street light played on Aschemann's surfaces; while his shadow operators, unused and unloved, moved uncomfortably in the corners of the room. "We have a species need," he went on, "to make estimates like that. By implying everything that isn't there-not just in the case itself but in the world the case seems to have some relation to-crime awakes in the detective a similar need.

"Do you understand? No. Well then, think about it, while I go see my friend Emil Bonaventure."

"I'll drive you," the assistant offered.

"A man can't visit his old friend without bringing the police along?" Aschemann asked. He waved his hand dismissively. "Take the night off," he instructed. "Go home, wash your hair."

She studied him as if she had never seen him before.

"Oh, now I offended you again. So go to a bar, whatever: I can give you a list of nice ones, only don't get caught trying to have sex in the back lot."

"Thanks for that advice of yours," she said.

This amused him. "We're getting to know one another now," he acknowledged. He offered her the keys to the Cadillac. After the Semiramide Club raid, he had forbidden her to return there, or to the Cafe Surf, alone.

As soon as he left, she had the shadow operators open a pipe to his records. Unnerved by the inappropriateness of this, they fussed around, whispering, "Is there anything else we can bring you, dear?" while she sprawled in Aschemann's leather chair and stared into space like someone in the early stages of arousal, her lips moving gently as the raw data cascaded down the inside of her arm. There was an item about the death of his wife. She kept returning to it because although it seemed to hold the key to him, she had no idea how to turn it in the lock. "Are you sure you're comfortable?" the shadow operators asked. "It looks such an awkward way to sit."

"I'll be fine," she said. Later, she drove Aschemann's Cadillac down to the Corniche and parked facing out to sea.

It was a quiet night, with low cloud and a crack of greenish light just above the horizon. Onshore breezes whipped up the sand around the ragmop palms, hissed over the bodywork of the car. She walked down the access road to the bungalow where Aschemann's wife had lived. It was damper down there. Inside, the bungalow had a stale smell, not quite food or people. She stood in the kitchen, in the passageway, in the single reception room, in the cobalt dark and the shush of the sea, with her eyes closed, waiting for Aschemann and his wife to assemble themselves in front of her. Nothing like that happened. They were absent and dead respectively: they would never self-disclose. She would have to find them, in the old furniture, the stale carpets. She decided to begin with the bundles of letters piled in the fake bureau.

"To be as happy as this," the detective had written to his wife just after they met, "to be this open to someone else, is something I never expected." It was a prophetic failure of nerve. He never settled. He was unfaithful from the moment they married, in tourist hotels during the afternoon and the back lots of bars at night. She forgave him over the years but he could never forgive himself; suddenly you found him telling her, "Part of me has lost patience with both of us. It wants to fall back into life. In the end, one person always gives more than the other and is disappointed." He had left her because she couldn't defend herself against him, but this only made him, as miserable as she was. "Late afternoon it rained," he wrote, from an apartment on Third Street. "I felt completely lonely and upset without you. For a second all I wanted was to be at home, among the things I knew, as if this life I have here was just some visit I had made without you." Her name was Prima, but for reasons the assistant couldn't make out, he often called her Utz or Utzie. Dear Utz. Hello Utzie. After they separated, he stopped writing about himself and wrote to her about the city instead. He wrote to her about ordinary things. He wrote to her about his job. To catch the criminal, he said, you had to go down inside: that's where you would find him.

Throughout the correspondence, if that was what it could be called, he had favoured a flimsy, almost transparent paper, light blue, prefolded so that it could be made into its own envelope. The earliest letters, full of endearments and graphic descriptions of the sex they had (as if by reliving it, perhaps, he could prove to himself he was there), were brittle but intact; while the later ones, though cruel, fell apart at the folds, as if they had been handled every day since.

Why had he chosen to write letters to her, when they lived in the same city, the same house? Had Prima ever answered them? It was impossible to know. "I'm increasingly shortsighted," he had written, three days before her death, "yet my dreams are as compactly constructed as advertisements."

Aschemann's assistant reread all the letters, then stood at the window. Outside the bungalow it was the sound of waves on the beach, the smells of salt and marram, a blowing mist, all condensing into one substance like a block of smoky plastic. Nevertheless, she seemed to hear something out there: a cry or a laugh. As she trudged back to the car, a group of kids emerged from the darkness, hunched up in their shiny gun-punk rainwear, exchanging casual murmurs, jostling one another, eyeing her frankly. "Try me out," she invited them, her smile so accommodating that they slipped away into the mist shaking their heads. "You see?" she whispered. On the way home, she looked in the driving mirror, she looked in the wing mirrors, she shifted gears with care: a policewoman, practical and calm but never still. She wondered why she understood neither Aschemann nor his wife, who, aware of their disaster from the outset, had encouraged it to roll over them anyway. She wondered if only half of her was there.

Aschemann always described as equivocal his relationship with Edith Bonaventure. "What he means," Edith would say, "I don't like him." Aschemann and her father were friends and sparring partners from the very first days of artefact policing in Saudade. Almost as soon as Emil arrived on-planet, touching down at the noncorporate port with a Halo tan and a would-be accordion-star daughter, Aschemann was arresting him. "Those were the good old days," Bonaventure always reminded Edith, as if at thirteen years old she hadn't been mature enough to appreciate them for herself. "Things weren't so serious."

Even at thirteen Edith had had her doubts about that; but was never less than loyal. "I don't like a man who arrests my father," she told Aschemann now. "On any grounds."

The detective sat on a wooden chair in her room, smiling round at the holograms and trophies, the costumes pinned on the wall with their pretty skirts fanned out as if she was still in them. Accordions like old dogs, wind broken, teeth bared in rippling tango smiles, eyed him savagely from the shelves and glass-front cabinets. "Still," she said, offering the Black Heart, "have a drink before you go up. Vic Serotonin brought us this, just the other day." Aschemann, who had seen nanocam footage of Edith and Vic's ringside disagreement at Preter Coeur, didn't believe her; but it wasn't displeasing to have Vic's name come up so soon in the conversation.

"That Vic," he said with a smile. He shook his head, as if the travel agent's character was a burden they could share.

Edith regarded him equably.

"Vic's generous to his old friend, just like you."

"Everyone loves Emil," Aschemann said. "That's what you get for being famous in your day." He took a drink. "This is good rum of Vic's," he congratulated her.

"Have some more."

"I'm fine."

"After another glass perhaps you'll be brave enough to cuff Emil. He's upstairs like always. A little weaker today, he'll be no trouble."

Aschemann would not be distracted.

"A pity Vic is caught up in something bad," he offered.

"We're all caught up in something bad."

"Vic opened a door, I don't even know if he meant to. New sorts of artefacts are coming out of it."

Edith made a spoiled face. "What's new about new?"

"They walk about," Aschemann was surprised to hear himself say, "as if they own the place."

Edith was still thinking about new. Everything presented as new in those days; as a result, the argument went, nothing was. She had seen that written on a wall. Her philosophy: you had your time at being new.

"Maybe they do," she said.

"Another thing: Paulie DeRaad gets involved, suddenly we can't find Paulie. Our equipment doesn't see him. It's good equipment, perhaps a little old, but someone has talked to it in a language we can't afford. Perhaps this is a military language. Perhaps his friends from EMC will soon be asking questions we don't know how to answer." After all, Aschemann decided, he'd have another drink. While he was pouring it for himself, he said, "I daren't let Vic go into the site again until I know what's happening. Edith, what you know you should tell me, because this isn't just a little tourism. It isn't just a little thrill for the offworld girl with time on her hands."

Several expressions passed across Edith's face, complex, but with contempt as their keynote feature.

"You would know all about that," she accused.

She took Aschemann's glass out of his hand, emptied it back into the bottle and put the bottle away. "My father is upstairs," she said. "Remember him?"

"I was hoping he would help me."

"How can he? He gave up long ago. You and Vic are all he has, but when he sees you, you make it worse-" Edith stopped suddenly. She stared up at the musical instruments in their presentation cases, like someone confronting all over again the boundary conditions of her life. Then she said tiredly, "I won't give Vic up, forget it."

Aschemann had expected nothing else.

"Let's go and see Emil," he suggested, as if it was a new idea.

Bonaventure slept half upright against the head of the bed. The pillows had slipped out from behind him so that his emaciated trunk made a slumped S shape against the whitewashed wall. He was staring vaguely into the furthest corner of the room. At the left side of his mouth the upper lip had drawn back off his teeth, but this expression seemed to have little to do with anything he might be thinking. When he saw Aschemann, his eyes lit up.

"Hi, Vic!" he said.

"I'm not Vic," Aschemann said.

The animation faded from Emil's face. "So arrest me," he said faintly. After that he appeared to fall asleep.

"Is this something new?" Aschemann asked Edith,

"No," she said shortly. "It's just the same old thing, Lens: your friend's dying." He had cancers they couldn't describe, let alone cure. Everything ran wild inside of him, as if his body was trying to be something else but had no plan: his organs switched on and off at random, his bones didn't make platelets anymore. The latest thing, Edith told Aschemann, was some hybrid virus which self-assembled in his cells from three or four kinds of RNA and a manufactured gene no one could identify. "That's nothing in itself," she said. "The worst thing is he still can't dream. I'm going to leave you with him. I get enough of him all day, it's a relief someone comes to visit."

"I don't like to see him like this," Aschemann said.

He sat on the hard chair by the bed for a while, but nothing happened. "I need to talk to you, Emil," he said. "There's a problem with the site." Then, "You could help me with this, it doesn't matter we're on opposite sides. I worked out something none of us knew." Bonaventure moved restlessly in his sleep. "Don't bring it near me," he said, and the detective leaned in close; but it was only one or other of the fevers talking. Emil's breath smelled as if he was already dead, as if all those nightmares he couldn't have were hanging round him like a gas. "I'm sorry, Emil," Aschemann said eventually. "You would have been interested in what I worked out."

Downstairs, Edith was sitting on the floor, sorting intently through a box of notebooks in all sizes, full of deranged handwriting and diagrams in different inks, their covers faded and water-stained. They had an air of being handled harshly, folded into pockets, dropped and trodden on, bled into, lost and found, over the years. She would take one out, open it in two or three places at random, riffle through all the pages in one movement as if she was hoping something would fall out, then put it back in the box. There was a smell of real dust in the air. When Aschemann appeared, she shut the box and pushed it away. He thought she was in a better mood. "Don't get up," he said. "I have to go."

"Do you want that other drink?"

"No. But this is for you."

Edith gave him a vicious look. "It's not money we need," she said. She put herself between Aschemann and the door. "Remember how I used to sit in your lap when Emil first brought me to Saudade?" she reminded him. "Those were the days! Sit on your lap in your private office with you." She laughed derisively, but it wasn't clear which of them she was laughing at. "You shouldn't have let yourself be persuaded. You should have locked him up forever, so his life would be saved now."

Aschemann couldn't think of a reply to that.

"I'll call a rickshaw," he said.

She shrugged and stood out of his way.

"Another thing," she called after him, "I don't like you going after Vic the way you do. He's a moron but he never hurt anyone." After a pause she was forced to concede, "Not deliberately anyway," but by then the detective had gone.

Aschemann had always admired Bonaventure's generation, though his admiration diluted itself over the years. They thought of themselves as uncut diamonds, in reality they were drunks, junkies, sky-pilots and entradistas. But in their day the site had only recently fallen to earth. It was unmappable to a degree. No one knew a dependable route through the aureole-which was more active then-or, if they made it through, where they would end up inside. They weren't even sure if inside/outside concepts had meaning. Despite that they launched themselves in there daily, on foot, by air, and in every kind of cheap local petrol-driven vehicle. They came home, if they came home, three weeks later: only to find that twelve hours had passed outside. Just as often it was the other way around. No perspective, no data, no count of any kind could be depended upon.

As for artefacts, they were scooping them up off the ground in open contravention of common sense. They were digging them out of earth as ripe as cheese, fetching them down on the run with a variety of anaesthetic darts and lite particle beams. As a result they died in numbers, of odd diseases or inexplicable accidents inside and outside the site, leaving wills too exuberant to understand and last testaments tattooed on their buttocks. These treasure maps, whose psychic north pegged itself to equally unreliable features of the Kefahuchi Tract in the night sky above, always proved worthless.

"But, hey," Emil Bonaventure would say, in the tone of voice of a survivor about to bring forth the sum of his and others' experience-then, after a longish pause, shrug perplexedly because he had forgotten what he was talking about.

Aschemann had the rickshaw take him to his ex-wife's bungalow. "Go by the noncorporate port," he told the Annie. Traffic was light. The port seemed reassuringly inactive, its fences intact under the halogen lights. By the time he got to Suicide Point the night's offshore breezes had started up and were blowing the mist back out to sea. There was a light oiliness to the water, and from round the curve of the bay he could hear something being loaded on to a ship. A few Point kids, upped on cheap AdAcs, were running about the beach in an aimless way. Aschemann spoke to them briefly and as a result got in touch with his assistant.

"I'm puzzled that you would come here," he said, "without asking me."

The assistant felt ambushed. She felt slow and confused. She had spent her night off in a C-Street tank farm. There, a hundred per cent immersed in the role of housewife in the moderne world of 1956AD, she had mopped a floor; gone for a spin on a fairground ride called the Meteorite; then, in an inexplicable third episode, discovered herself posing in front of a wardrobe mirror dressed only in loose transparent satin briefs. Her breasts were heavy, with big brown aureoles; the rest of her body, by the standards of her own day, soft and running to fat. After a little while, she pushed one hand deftly down the front of the briefs and began to practise saying, "Oh Robert, it's so nice to have you in there. Are you going to fuck me, Robert? Are you fucking me?" until quite suddenly she came, with a sharp blue line of light cracking across her vision, and felt exhausted. As a night off it was different, but less fun than she expected. It was an "art" experience. In the end she had preferred the Meteorite, which consisted of a wheel like a huge flat openwork drum, mounted on a bright red steel arm which levered it seventy or eighty degrees from the horizontal. You entered, the Meteorite began to spin, faster and faster. You were pinned against the wall by simple but implacable physical forces.

"It was a mistake I made," she apologised to Aschemann. "I thought you said you would be there." She glanced at the data flowing endlessly up and down her arm; for a moment, despite all her training, she couldn't do anything with it. I was trying to understand you, she thought of explaining: but in the end only advised him, "You should get some sleep," and cut the connection.

After Aschemann left, Edith Bonaventure went to her father's room, stood looking down for a minute or two at the blue hollows behind his collarbones, then took him by the shoulders and shook him until he woke. "Listen to me, Emil," she said. "Listen. Look at me and help." He coughed suddenly. "I'm sorry to do this, Emil," she said. She pulled him forward so that he lolled against her, weightless and rank, his chin on her shoulder taking the weight of his head like a baby's, while she felt around, first under the pillows then under his hot skinny buttocks. "I need it and it has to be here somewhere." Suddenly she shoved him away and began to beat his chest with her fists. "I'm serious," she said, "I'm serious, Emil." Emil made vague defensive motions.

"Hey," he said thickly. "There's no need for this."

"Where is it?"

There was a longish pause and she thought he had passed out again. Then he laughed.

"It's under the bed."

"You bastard, Emil. You fuckhead."

"It's under the bed with the bottles. It was always there," Emil said. "You could have looked any time." His laughter grew quieter and stopped. "It won't do Vic Serotonin any good," he warned her. "There's no good giving it to Vic." Contempt came into his voice. "Why? Because he's a tourist." He leaned carefully over the side of the bed and vomited a thin line of bile on to the floor. "Sorry," he said. He hung there exhausted, his face a foot from the boards, sentient tattoos crawling for cover like lice between the sores and shadows of his ribs. His skin was rich with a smell she couldn't explain. Edith hauled him back into bed and mopped up. She wiped his face, which had once had the power to solve every problem for her, but which now seemed all bone and stubble, hurt eyes like a boy. It was a face which for sixty years admitted desire but not alleviation. He had always moved on to the next thing; he had never taken shelter, and as a result he didn't know how. She clutched him and rocked him. "You were always useless," she told him. "You were a useless father." She began to cry. "I don't know what to do," she said.

"I'm sorry about your life," Emil whispered.

She let him fall, and sat back in disgust. "Won't you grow up even now?" she shouted.

The journal was there, pushed as far as he could reach into the darkness under the bed, where the only way to find it was to sweep your hands to and fro in blind disgust until one of them touched it. What else was underneath? Edith didn't want to know. "Spew up on me while I'm down here," she warned him, "I'll kill you." No answer. But as soon as she had the book and stood up to go, he grabbed her arm and drew her down towards him. She was astonished by his strength-understood, for the first time, that everybody in his life had been too.

"Where's Vic?" he said.

"Vic's not here, Emil."

"I never went deeper," he said. "This is the record of it. A year inside the site, and this book is everything I saved."

"Emil-"

"Fifty of us set out, two came back. We travelled to the heart of it. Where's Vic Serotonin been? Nowhere."

"Emil, you're hurting me."

"It was worth it," he said.

His eyes went out of focus very suddenly and he let go her arm. "A year passed in there, Billy boy," he shouted, "less than a day out here. What do you make of that?"

After she had calmed him down she brought the journal to her own room. It looked worse in the light. Her father's adventures had aged it the same way they aged him. Its covers were bruised and greasy; like Emil's, its spine was rotten. Every page was stained, spattered, slashed; some had been torn in half longitudinally, to leave only curious groups of words-"emergent behaviour,"

"sunset of the amygdila" and "outputs accepted as input." But these were just problems of legibility. The site being as it was, an electromagnetic nightmare, writing was the only way to get anything out: but how do you write the fakebook to a place that is constantly at wofk to change the ink you write with, let alone the things you see? Her father's script tottered into the gale of it, stumbling off the edge of one page to fall by pure luck on to the next.

He tried to remain calm. Of a misfired attempt to go in from the sea using inflatable boats, he recorded, "Two miles from [illegible] Point, wrecks show themselves at half tide." Then, "Satnav and dead reckoning both unreliable here but keep Mutton Dagger in line with the derelict fuel refinery and you might clear the sand. Ben Moran says he went in hard and got two feet clearance at low water." Scribbled across this, in a hand so distraught it looked like someone else's, was the instruction, "Forget it." Then underneath: "Something ate Billy in the fog. We lost the [illegible] amp;c had to walk out. Four days in here, a week passed outside."

And then: "How do we know that what we come back to is the same?"

Edith shut the book there and then. To read any more would be to read too far into Emil. How do we know that what we come back to is the same? Less a cry of horror than of triumph. In plain fact her father was only alive when he was in there, where everything was toxic, indefinable, up for grabs. Whatever he said about it-whatever he said about himself-it was the anxiety he loved. He loved the shadows, the wrenched way the light fell, the unpredictability of it all. So what he wrote in the journal was nothing like the assured face he showed the world, or even the one he showed himself, and that was why his handwriting had this disordered, scribbled, racing look about it. As for Vic Serotonin, he was the same. Despite Emil's bad opinion, Vic was the same, so maybe the book would be a help to him. Maybe, after all, it would give him the edge in his situation with Lens Aschemann and Paulie DeRaad. Whatever that was.

"Vic, you moron," Edith said gently, as if he was in the room with her.

When she looked up, the accordions glared at her from the walls; out the window she could see the street full of cats, their black and white fur untouched by the fierce gold needles of rain falling through the streetlight. Despite these omens Edith tucked the book away, put on her maroon wool street coat and found her umbrella. "I'm going out!" she called up to her father. For the longest time there was no answer; then just before she slammed the outside door, Emil, who had lain there alert and intelligent with a curious hard smile on his face since she took the journal, called down:

"It won't do him any good. My advice, give it to Aschemann, at least he's dependable."

"Emil, you love Vic!"

This made her father laugh; the laugh turned quickly into a cough. "So what?" Emil Bonaventure asked the ceiling when he could speak again. You can love a disappointment.

Earlier that evening, Vic Serotonin had walked into Liv Hula's place in time to hear Liv say to Mrs Kielar:

"Sometimes I could do without that."

He had no idea what they were talking about. Reduced to essentials by the strong overhead light, leaning towards one another from each side of the zinc bar, the two women made between them a shaped gap, a Rubin's vase illusion. Though none of their differences could be said to be resolved by this, it gave them something in common for once: more, at any rate, than Elizabeth Kielar's cup of chocolate cooling on the counter by her hand; more than either of them might have in common with Vic Serotonin. Vic was surprised to catch that glimpse of them. They spoke for a moment longer, then, becoming aware of him, seemed to move languidly apart and break the spell.

"Hi, Vic," Liv Hula said. "Get you something?" Then, as if he couldn't already see, "Your client's here."

It had been a quiet night. Earlier, a few tailors from the franchise chopshops along Straint came in to celebrate a win at the fights; they had been followed back from Preter Coeur by some tourists off a Beths/Hirston ship-probably the Pro Ana, to which, outbound on her twice-yearly loop of creatively selected Beach destinations, Saudade was little more than a fuel stop. For twenty minutes this was the cause of unhealthy excitement among Liv's shadow operators, but then one of the tourists remembered the name of a new venue off Antarctic Boulevard and they all left. That was the bar trade in a nutshell, Liv thought, as she tidied tables, added up the money in the till and washed the empty glasses, letting the warm water lave her hands. She had the blues for her old life, which was different than this. That afternoon, in her room upstairs, two things had happened.

First, she had encountered herself by accident in the mirror. The face she saw was too much her own, and too little like Elizabeth Kielar's face. It was tired of never owning a fur coat. It was tired of always being what it was. Its eyes looking out were no longer calm. Up in the Halo you could beat that, you could always reinvent, move yourself on. Because empty space is kind. Everything's negotiable out there. There's so little to run into. But down here your room is what you are.

The second thing that happened to Liv was this: waking from a shallow sleep, she sat on the edge of the unmade bed and looked out the window and saw Antoyne Messner walking past with Irene the Mona on his arm. Irene had on a new outfit, cropped mohair bolero, latex pedal-pushers, acrylic stilt-heels, all in popular neoteny pink; while the fat man was wearing the pale blue suit she made him buy when he started working for Paulie DeRaad, with his hair arranged in a ridged oily wave on top of his head. They looked ridiculous, but at the same time mysteriously dignified just by being together. They looked like the king and queen of the affect. Seeing them in that unaccustomed light, she had wondered if she should run downstairs, ask them why they never drank at her bar any more. Now, as she watched Vic Serotonin usher his client to a table by the window where they sat down and began to talk earnestly, she found herself thinking the same thing she had thought about Antoyne and the Mona:

Those two believe they've discovered something new. Good luck to them, then.

In fact Vic Serotonin was saying, "Maybe in four days we can risk it," and Mrs Kielar was already beginning to shake her head, no. It had to be sooner for her, she said, this was such bad news for her. Her nerves were worse. She wasn't sure, she said, she could wait another day. "I'm not sure I can wait an hour." And it was true, he thought. Whatever was consuming her from inside had upped its ante since she fucked Vic in the Hot Walls apartment.

"Three days, then," he offered.

She shook her head. He took her hand, which she was already beginning to pull away as he reached for it, and explained, "It's only because things are going on here I don't understand."

"No," she said.

"Two days," Vic said. "Two days, Mrs Kielar, you can allow me that. Something's wrong with Paulie, something's wrong in the site. The police are all over everything like a cheap suit."

Mrs Kielar, trying to avoid this information the way you would avoid a physical blow, got to her feet so suddenly her chair toppled over. She stared down at it as if a chair being knocked over was already the worst thing that could happen to either of them.

"I can't," she whispered.

At that point Vic didn't see a way forward. He was as puzzled by his own behaviour as by hers. "I'm waiting for something to happen," he remembered her saying, "and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." He got up and put his arm round her and set the chair back on its feet. "Look," he said, "there. You see? It's OK. It's no problem." Where his hand touched it, he could feel the whole thin apparatus of her right shoulder rigid and trembling. He was aware of the hot bones, Elizabeth Kielar inscribed through every one of them. "We'll be in there in forty-eight hours' time," he said. "I promise." She was like a hologram; if you looked, every part of her would prove to contain the whole you didn't understand. He tried to persuade her to sit down again. She clung to him instead. They ordered more drinks and sat on opposite sides of the table, not speaking but holding hands. Much later, when Edith Bonaventure walked into the bar dressed in her maroon wool coat and holding her father's site-journal, that was how she found the two of them. "Vic, you cheap shit," Edith said.

She went over and asked Liv Hula to give her a drink. "I'll take that here at the bar," she told Liv. "You don't mind if I sit on the stool and talk?"

"You're the customer," Liv Hula said.

"That's good, that's nice," said Edith. "It's nice because if I face you I don't have to look at that shit by the window." She assessed the bar a moment. "It's a nice business you have here," she advised Liv Hula, "but a little kicked about. It needs a refit. It needs a theme, something cheerful." She put down half her drink in one swallow and wiped alcohol out of the faint down on her upper lip. "Hey, Vic," she called, holding the journal up high in one hand so he couldn't mistake what it was, "Emil was right about you. See this? I walked all the way across town to give it you, now you can whistle."

"Jesus," Vic said.

"You can fucking whistle for it, Vic, because you're a cheap toilet and in the end where have you been? Nowhere." Edith finished her drink and stood up. "Thanks for that," she said to Liv Hula. "I enjoyed that. Goodnight."

Vic Serotonin was on his feet by then. He got to the door first and caught her by the wrists.

"Edith, we can talk," he said.

Edith laughed lightly. "No we can't, Vic," she said. "You made an error there."

Vic tried to think what to say to her. "Listen," he began, "whatever Emil says, something is changing in there." He already saw that this wasn't what she wanted to hear, but he couldn't stop. "A// our experiences of it might be false."

"How nice it would be if you grew up," she said wistfully, "either of you."

"Edith-"

"You know what this reminds me of?" Edith asked him, and her gesture seemed to take in all of it, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar, Liv Hula's bar, the long perspective of Straint Street that she wasn't even looking at, Saudade itself, which was nothing but sand on the Beach, a refuelling stop on someone else's big tour. "It reminds me of the fights."

"Edith-"

"It reminds me of that night at the fights," she said.

She looked down at his hands imprisoning her wrists, then back up at his face. "I don't give a shit what's in there, Vic." Unable to reply, he released her and she walked off down Straint in the rain, stopping once to add without turning round, "And you know it isn't about Emil either," after which the sound of her heels diminished along some simple, exact, inevitable acoustic curve. Vic watched her go. Back inside he found that Mrs Kielar had smashed a glass against the wall and was now sitting huddled like a child on the blackened floorboards by the window, staring along Straint Street towards the event site aureole-which could be seen, at the limits of vision, as a line of rusty walls, broken windows, concertina wire-and refusing to speak.

Liv Hula patiently swept up the broken glass.

"I'm losing my sense of humour for this," she told Vic. "Maybe you should find another office." While she thought to herself: This afternoon I was just down. Afternoon is a bad time to be alone anywhere.