Nova Swing

7 Space Noir

Vic took Mrs Kielar to Hot Walls in a rickshaw. On his way home the next morning he was arrested. The arrest was quick and deft: a Cadillac convertible, travelling quietly against the grain of the traffic, pulled up alongside the kerb, its front passenger door swinging open just far enough ahead of him for Vic to walk into it. "Hey!" he said. By that time Aschemann's assistant was out on the sidewalk with him, grinning right in his face and saying, "Get in the car, Vic." It was already a nice day, with a light but lively onshore breeze. The sunshine glittered off a wing mirror, slicked along the Cadillac's perfect finish and into Vic's eyes. He must have had an unpredictable look about him that morning, because the assistant's smile broadened and he saw her tailoring cut in, a ripple of nanomotion, subcutaneous and subliminal. Her eyes blanked over. Data poured down her arm, full of excitements of its own.

"Vic Testosterone!" she said. "Vic, you can try me out, or I can call down a fire-team-" here she glanced meaningfully skywards "-or, how would this be, you could just come with me and no one would be killed at all. What do you say?"

Vic shrugged and got in the Cadillac.

She stared down at him expressionlessly for a moment, then shook her head and shut the door.

"Use the seatbelt," she advised.

Vic expected to be taken to a holding cell. He expected to be processed. Instead, she drove him around in the light traffic for perhaps five minutes, enough to make him wonder what was happening, then said suddenly:

"You must have known Lens a long time."

"Who?" Vic said.

"Did you ever meet his wife?"

"Ask your arm," Vic suggested. "Maybe it can tell you." He didn't know what she was talking about. Even if he had known, he wouldn't have wanted to go any further into it. "Or does it just get the fight results?"

"He's here," the woman said into her dial-up.

"This is a nice car," said Vic, as if there was a third person in the Cadillac with them, perhaps in the back, "and I enjoy the smell of the real leather bench seats." He turned a chrome knob on the dashboard, music came out. Station WDIA, Radio Retro, airwaves to the planet. Aschemann's assistant, still talking into her dial-up, reached across and switched it off again.

"No," she said, looking emptily at Vic then back at the street, "he isn't a problem."

Vic was left alone for about ten minutes in an office on the second floor of the police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. It had been sprayed recently to smell of authentic furniture wax; the blinds were down, though enough narrow strips of sunlight fell through them to make visible the used, uneven but shiny surfaces of everything, the brown leather chair, the knocked-about steel desk and filing cabinets, the polished floor of green linoleum. One or two shadow operators emerged from the corners as Vic sat down, looking worn and under-used at the same time. "He isn't here yet, dear," they apologised. "Would you like a cup of tea?" Vic started to go through the desk drawers. He found some packets of letters written on flimsy pale blue paper which folded cleverly to make its own envelope. They were brittle with age. One of them began, "My dearest Lens," but he had no time to read it, only stuff it back in and close the drawer, because Aschemann walked in the room.

"Vic, don't get up," the detective insisted. "It's good to see you so relaxed. If these operators bother you, just say."

"What am I arrested for?"

"I'll hang my coat up here on this hook," Aschemann said, "to get it out of our way. Vic, you aren't arrested yet."

Serotonin got up and went to the door.

"It was nice to see you again," he said.

"You aren't arrested yet, but this is Site Crime, not a bar on Straint Street. Sit down, talk, is that so hard?"

Vic sat down again, taking the good leather chair behind the desk, which left Aschemann the hard one in front. If he felt any irritation at this reversal of protocol, the detective didn't show it, only hitched the trousers of his light brown suit-the worn cuffs of which fell back to reveal short black socks, white calves with the beginnings of varicose ulcers-to save their knees, and asked, "Vic, what's it like inside the site?"

"You're kidding me."

The detective nodded to himself, as if this was an answer he had expected; as if it was one of several possible answers, all worth consideration, all, perhaps, in the end, of a similar weight. It hadn't, after all, been a fair question. "I'll sit here and smoke my pipe, if you don't mind," he said, "while you think about things."

Poor quality black-and-white footage of Vic now began playing across one wall. It was like a show without sound, Vic Serotonin walks down a street in Hot Walls, Vic Serotonin plays the fights with a plump woman on his arm, Vic Serotonin buys a hat. Vic walks down his own street, the hat tipped back on his head. His life is comprehensively represented: in one shot he threads his way through the VIP crowd at Paulie DeRaad's Semiramide Club, stopping to exchange a word with Paulie's best girl; the image vanishes abruptly at the door of Paulie's back room and now Vic's all the way over town at the Long Bar, where you can see, through the fog and scratch of irresolvable bad data, the Cafe Surf two-piece playing a tune of their own, a little thing of their own they've called Decoda. This visual record had intelligence, it had narrative, it had edit. It followed Vic into the toilets, passing over chipped paint and chequered linoleum, and then out again, where it caught up with him staring, puzzled, across the damp sand behind the bar, past the line of demarcation into the site. Aschemann watched Vic watch himself. He smoked his pipe. After a few minutes he froze the footage.

"So," he said. "Next is what happens most nights at this venue. Vic, you aren't in this footage, but perhaps you could pay attention to it as if you were?"

Up on the wall figures lurched about in half dark, their movements uninterpretable; a doorway at one angle, the neon sign Live Music Nightly at another; another doorway, and then the sea. Nanocameras swarmed in the seafront light like milt. Vic saw what looked like brand new people moving hesitantly away from the Cafe Surf, unformed, emergent, puzzled but as yet un-wounded, full of expectation.

"Maybe it happens in the day too, maybe we don't watch closely enough."

Two boys in dress shirts. A girl who dances inexpertly on the sand. They link elbows, ascend Maricachel Hill towards the centre of the city. They try to talk, but it's better they lean together and sing snatches of tunes learned twenty minutes ago in the Cafe Surf. After that, they find what they're looking for, one by one: and vanish. They stare thoughtfully at the neon signs, they regard the street junctions with soft and meditative smiles, then slip into the ink joints and porn parlours. One minute they are in camera-in a million cameras-then the city has absorbed them. The cameras all have blinked.

Aschemann switched the wall off abruptly.

"Are they artefacts?" he asked, "or people? Maybe you can help, Vic, our equipment can't make the distinction. Whatever they are, they don't have any practise at life, literally, they're without praxis. They don't have a grip on reality." He paused for a moment. Then he leaned forward, put his pipe on the desk next to the ashtray and said, "My wife was a little like that."

Vic stared at him. "What?"

"There's a fierce attrition rate, Vic, most of them worn to nothing inside an hour. But the ones that survive!" Aschemann shook his head. "How can I describe that? They learn how to eat, Vic, how to dress. They learn what the city wants from them. They get a room-"

He shook his head in admiration.

"Vic, I have to know what part you're playing in this."

"Is this what you think we're doing, Paulie and me? Smuggling these people in? This has nothing to do with us!"

Aschemann shrugged. Vic stared at him angrily. No one was saying anything. Up near the ceiling, the shadow operators clung and shifted, pulling themselves one over another like a colony of bats. Grainy images began to unreel across the office wall again: Vic Serotonin was seen to enter the Long Bar, he was seen to tip his new hat back on his head, exchange a word or two with the bar-keep. He was seen to exit through the lavatories and peer across the wet sand towards the event site aureole, which the cameras rendered as a greyish luminescence. Aschemann nodded his head as if these pictures offered not simply new evidence but scienza nuova, new ways of looking at things. Then he said:

"Vic, I have to apologise. I understand now from this film that M. John Harrison you were never in the Cafe Surf, or especially out in back by the rusty wire, a stone's throw or less from the site itself, which you don't deny entering on numerous occasions-"

Vic laughed resentfully.

"I was never in the Cafe Surf until I heard you thought I was. I went to check it out. Believe me, it's the worst jump-off joint I ever saw."

The detective, impressed by the professionalism of this explanation, seemed to consider it. But whatever conclusion he came to, he put to one side, and when he next spoke it was to continue an earlier train of thought. "Suppose they are fitting in, Vic? Why? What happens to them next?" He didn't know how to answer that, so he sat there contemplating it instead. Eventually he said, "Vic, I'm not the man for this. I need your advice here."

"I'm just a travel agent."

Even as he made this claim, which neither of them pretended to take seriously, Vic suffered a raw flashback to the site, and his encounter with the artefact he would subsequently sell to Paulie DeRaad. The artefact was watching him from ten yards away. It remained nervous but it had made eye contact. Vic had taken two or three hours over the journey through the aureole and was by this time perhaps five hundred yards into the site proper, standing under a cherry tree which he knew to have been in bloom for six years. There were the usual smells, as rank as rendered fat; the usual distant animal noises. The bits of music you thought you knew. The sense you had of a voice reciting something. The sense of everything fallen away from sense. It was one of those memories that folds itself quickly out of sight; but it made Vic think, and suddenly he didn't want to be in the detective bureau any more.

"Nice to talk," he said. "Maybe we'll see each other around."

Quickly for such an old-looking man Aschemann got between Vic and the door. He clutched Vic's wrist. "Don't go, Vic," he said urgently. "There's more. I went to see Emil today, but he's gone a long way down. He's gone a long way down."

"What is Emil to do with it?"

"Vic, this footage of you can be explained to everyone's satisfaction. I can forget everything you've done. Even now."

"So what will it take for that to happen?"

"I want to go in there. I want you to guide me in there."

"Jesus," Vic said. "You're as fucked as me."

He looked into the detective's face, with its Zipped-in signature features of pouchy cheeks, shocked white hair and amiably drooping eyelids. An inexplicable excitement made the eyes watery and vulnerable; it slackened the corner of the mouth. In forty years, no one had seen through the tailoring to Aschemann, not his assistants, not his superiors, not his wife; now he disclosed himself for no reason to a cheap travel agent, in a shabby empty office in the middle of the morning, with the shadow operators curled up in the corners like dead leaves. Everything that made him the police detective, everything that had made him such a reliable antagonist when Vic met him on the street, was undermined. His obsessive commitment to Site Crime revealed itself, through one simple inversion, to be the very same obsession that had derailed Emil Bonaventure's life, or Vic Serotonin's. Vic's instinct was not to confront this understanding. Instead, he pushed past the old man and out of the office. He didn't want to know Aschemann's motives. He didn't want to know what had changed so suddenly. He didn't want to look into a psyche as weakened and visible as his own, in case the encounter reduced his freedom to act.

"Arrest me or let me go," he said. "I'm not comfortable with any of this."

"No one is comfortable," Aschemann reminded him, "out here in the Halo." He watched Vic walk away down the corridor. "You should take care from now on," he called, "in case I can't protect you from yourself." He dialled up his assistant. "Put every camera we have on him," he ordered. But the orbital component of the surveillance system, a smart fog of microsatellites sold on from some small war ten or twelve lights along the line, was down for service. "Those pSi engines burn too hot for their own ceramics," the assistant informed him. They would be out that day, she apologised, and all the next; consequently there would be a reduced service. There would be some loss of coverage. Even as he flagged down a rickshaw in broad daylight at the junction of Uniment and Poe, Vic Serotonin was becoming as invisible as his friend DeRaad.

"I thought we were arresting him," the assistant said.

"We changed our minds."

Police work, the man who looked like Einstein always tried to teach his subordinates, is an activity drained of romance yet suffused with every possible kind of mystery. It was the opposite life, he believed, to the one his wife had lived: although he knew that his ability to see himself clearly-to encounter himself as a continuity-had, quite early on in their relationship, been corrupted by his attempts to bring her into focus. Did that matter, now that he had begun to understand what was happening in the teeming epistemological gap between Saudade and the event site?

Vic Serotonin went straight from the detective bureau to the Semiramide Club, the nearest place he could think of to get a drink. It was like a warehouse at that time of the morning, with much the same ambience if you discounted the smell of high-end pheromone patches and low-end liquor. The cleaning service was in. A few people of Paulie's, disconcerted by his absence, sat around tables at the back, among them Fat Antoyne Messner and Antoyne's squeeze, Irene, who were discussing the hottest subject in the Halo at that or any other time-what they would do with their lives if they ever got off-planet. Irene could envisage herself owning a little business. She had as many ideas what that might be, she confessed, as she had smiles; but she knew just what she'd call it, however her good fortune turned out: Nova Swing. That was a name the fat man could appreciate, indeed he received it as he received all Irene's plans, with the look of someone already convinced. On his part, the suggestion was they buy a ship. Nova Swing would be as good a name for a rocket, he believed, as for a boutique; and a rocket was, whatever angle you looked at it from, a business. Antoyne would always know how to make money out of a rocket. At which Irene gripped his hand across the table and smiled with every part of her body.

"We only could get our start, Antoyne, there'd be no limit to the things we did!"

That was how Vic found them.

"Hey, Fat Antoyne!" he said, pulling up one of the many empty chairs so he could sit down. "I was just thinking of you on the way over."

This approached the truth, although what had engrossed Vic most, as the rickshaw girl plodded through her midmorning low, was his promise to Elizabeth Kielar. Now wasn't a good time to take a client into the site. On the other hand, he had no doubt that circumstances would soon make it impossible for him to go in at all. He wasn't sure which he was most afraid of: being caught in whatever operation Paulie DeRaad was running through the Cafe Surf (because now he was certain it must be Paulie's op, financed for their own purposes, perhaps, by his shadowy backers in EMC); or allowing himself to be sucked into the meltdown of psychic confusion and professional misjudgment Paulie had triggered at Site Crime. Thinking too much about this had caused Vic a crisis of confidence. That was why he was glad to see Fat Antoyne, though a moment's consideration might have changed his mind about the offer he now made.

"I was thinking of how you always wanted to go into the site," he said. "Well, now you can." He beamed at Antoyne, who did not reply, and then at Irene, who gave him an unfriendly look and said:

"Excuse me, I got the urge for the powder room."

"It's work, Antoyne, if you want it."

"I work for Paulie," Antoyne pointed out. "Also, I don't see you for days, maybe weeks, suddenly you want me to go in the site with you. You never wanted my help when I offered."

"That was perhaps insensitive of me," Vic allowed.

Antoyne only repeated, "You never wanted my help when I offered."

"I see that," Vic said. He knew it wasn't enough, but he didn't know what else Antoyne wanted him to say. After a pause he went on, "Paulie's not feeling well. I expect you heard." He shuddered. "I got it from Paulie himself, you don't want that experience. He doesn't look good, Antoyne. It will be a while before there's work for anyone in that direction. Look around you." He indicated the gun-kiddies, desultorily threatening to shoot one another over a dice game called Three Dick Hughie. Every time someone came in the front door they all looked up at once, their little six- and seven-year-old faces full of light, in case it was Alice Nylon with news. "These guys know that. Hey, what about a drink?"

Vic sat back. Antoyne stared at him as if he was in the middle of planning what to say. They remained in that position until Irene returned from the powder room in an improved mood and accepted a cocktail, as she put it, on both her and Antoyne's behalves. "You two men can still be friends," she judged, after the drinks arrived, "if you just but trust each other. You know I'm right." She tried to catch Vic's eye.

"That's nice, Irene," Vic said, looking away. "That's as true as anything I heard. I was thinking of going in tomorrow," he told Antoyne.

Some discussion followed-on how they would meet, exactly where and when the jump-off would take place, what Fat Antoyne might expect in the way of remuneration-and then Vic went home. "That is a very lonely man," Irene concluded as she and Antoyne watched him leave the Semiramide, "whose journey is always the long way round. Antoyne, there's something I have to ask you, and I want you to think hard before you answer because it could mean so much for our hopes and dreams."

In one corner of Vic Serotonin's South End walk-up, on a small wooden chest of drawers hand-painted dark green, were arranged some items he had brought out of the site. There was nothing fatal about them. Look away from an artefact and you always feel for a moment that it lives another life-that in fact it takes the opportunity to live another life. But these were not artefacts, or at any rate they did not announce themselves as such; they were ordinary objects he had picked up in there-a brass lizard three inches long; a bowl full of beads in hot colours; one or two dusty ceramic tiles featuring pictures of fruit.

Vic examined them for a moment or two, thinking how they stood out in some reassuring way from the cheap repro which otherwise filled the room. Then he sighed, pulled open one of the drawers and unwrapped his Chambers pistol from the soft cloth he kept it in.

He swept the top of the chest clear, unfolded a second cloth and laid the gun out on that in pieces; these he inspected, cleaning the mechanical parts carefully before reassembling them. Throughout the process, the weapon itself reminded him in a gentle, persistent voice that its non-mechanical parts weren't user-serviceable. A chip was supposed to keep the physics under control, but the Chambers pistol was known as a particle jockey's nightmare, feared by humans and aliens alike. Vic had his at a discount from Paulie DeRaad, who had it gratis with a crate of other stuff from an EMC armoury sergeant up the line; they'd been in some war together. Every time he cleaned it, Vic heard Paulie's voice advising: "Treat that fucker with respect, maybe it'll kill someone else instead of you."

Once the job was finished, Vic didn't seem to know what to do next. The light moved round the room to afternoon. The air cooled and there was a mist over the far edge of the noncorporate port. Occasionally he would get up and look out the window down into the street, but mostly he sat on the bed, wrapping and unwrapping the pistol until Mrs Elizabeth Kielar knocked at his door and he let her in.

"I felt so afraid," she said.

She stood awkwardly just inside the room, as if she was expecting a further invitation. "I walked, I don't know why. I went to the bar but then I remembered you wouldn't be there." Before Vic could speak she said quickly, "Are you all right with this?" She turned up the collar of her coat, then turned it down again so that the light from the window accentuated the sharp line of her jaw. "You did tell me to come."

"Don't you ever say what you mean?" Vic asked.

He touched her where the light fell. Both of them went very still, and she looked up at him with a bemused expression.

"We never know what we mean," she said. "We act it out, moment to moment. We never know what we mean until it's too late." Then, when Vic let his fingertips slip until they found the pulse in her neck:

"Why don't you fuck me? It's what we both want."

Vic woke up later in the dark from a thick and disturbing sleep, half-convinced that someone had that moment dialled him up with the kind of message no one wanted to hear-a change of plan, a debt called in, a dead parent, the kind of message that in 2444AD could only divert your attention from the feelings that made you real to yourself. Elizabeth Kielar's satin underclothes were on the bed, pooled slippery as water. Elizabeth herself was kneeling close by, turned away a little from the waist, feet tucked under, iodine shadows delineating each muscle and rib. There was a harsh, dry smell about her, which Vic, excited, took to be her sex. She had opened up her diary and was holding it towards the window so that the street light caught the pages. When she saw he was awake, she smiled.

"Why do I do this?" she asked.

"Only you can answer that."

"I looked out of your windows while you were asleep," she said. "And I looked through all your things. Was that wrong of me?" She shivered, staring ahead as if she could see a long way off. "I write because I don't remember anything about myself. Do you remember your childhood, Mr Serotonin?"

"I'm Vic," Vic said.

He put out his hand and touched her arm above the elbow. "You don't have to panic," he said. "Read me something."

"I'm afraid of what will happen tomorrow," Elizabeth said.

"Are you reading that or is it what you feel?"

"I'm reading it and it's what I feel," she said.

"You don't have to go in there," Vic suggested, though he knew she did. She shut the diary and dropped it on the bed, began to put on her clothes. Vic picked up the diary, smelled its pages, leafed through them. He could feel her watching him, trying to anticipate what he would do. When he found an entry he could almost understand, he read it aloud. " 'Some sea-travellers,' " she had written, " 'never regain their land legs. They come ashore but from now on, for them, walking will always be as difficult as walking on a mattress. But it's worse to sit still, or try to sleep. At least when they move about the symptoms are minimised.' "

"Don't," she said. "Don't!"

" 'They call this mat de debar quement? "

She put her hand over his mouth to stop him. "What do my fingers smell of?"

Vic laughed. "The sea," he said.

"Well then, make me wet."

He turned her hand over, licked the inside of the fingers and placed them against her sex. "You do that," he was beginning to say, when his dial-up cut in and Alice Nylon's voice filled his head without warning. "If this is Vic Serotonin," Alice said, "Paulie wants to talk to you," and after that, Paulie himself came on. Vic pushed Mrs Kielar away.

"Hey, Paulie," he said.

Among Paulie DeRaad's bolt-holes he kept an apartment on the top floor of Beddington Gardens, a system-built beachside tower in retro-Socialist chic circa 1965AD, its cracked curtain walls accurate down to the wads of newspaper the original contractors had used as separators in place of cement. A bald rectilinear space with inset lighting, its window a single sweep of glass taking in the full curve of the bay to Suicide Point, the apartment was furnished and styled moderne, with the wet bar at one end and at the other racks of what resembled faux-wooden TV consoles from the historical times, connected to the FTL routers by which Paulie kept abreast of his interests up and down Radio Bay.

White carpet was fitted throughout.

Alice had brought her boss there two days before, and she had been looking after him ever since. She made what food she knew how, mainly ordered-in falafel and brownies, but Paulie wasn't interested in eating. She mixed him drinks from the wet bar, but, inexplicably, Paulie wasn't drinking. When he was asleep she wiped his forehead with a cloth, or stood up on tiptoe to admire his possessions. She liked best the white singlets and underpants he kept nice and clean in a drawer, which she buried her face in when she first found them, but only looked at thereafter in case she spoiled them. The rest of the time she spent talking to the Semiramide people, intercepting problems, cleaning house across the city, trying to gauge how panicked everyone was. "He's all right," she told her friend Map Boy, who, because he wasn't one of that crowd, she could open up to a little. "On the other hand you don't want to get close to him. I'm cautious about it. You know?"

The brief spells Paulie was awake, he didn't pay her a lot of attention, uplinking instead with his offworld contacts. Nothing much came of this, so to start with she was relieved Paulie got hold of Vic. She stayed in the pipe in case either of them needed her, but with a hope that the conversation would take the weight off her. That was a short-lived hope, because when Vic said, "Hey, Paulie," all Paulie replied was:

"Don't hey me. Who are you to hey me, you cheap fuck?"

Vic told Paulie he should steady down.

DeRaad gave a thick laugh. "Can you believe this?" he asked Alice Nylon. Whatever else was wrong with Paulie, he remained sharp enough to know she had stayed in the pipe with him. Security was always first things first with Paulie. She said:

"I can't believe this, Paulie, no."

When he heard Alice's voice, Vic sounded relieved. "How are things going?" he asked her.

"You don't fucking talk to Alice," Paulie shouted, "while I'm still here. You fucking talk to me." No one could afford for things to develop further in that direction, so there was a silence on all sides. "Cheap fuck," Paulie said into it, not to Alice or Vic but maybe, given his present situation, to himself. Then he went on in a calmer voice, "What are you doing to help me, Vic? I'm hiding from my own people. I'm sick. I'm losing trade. It's in me, Vic. I feel it there, I hear it trying to talk to me. They say 'Shit it out,' but when I can't have a bowel movement that's great advice. Meanwhile what are you doing to help?"

"Paulie, I don't know how to answer that."

It was easy to appreciate the position Vic found himself in.

Paulie had lost perspective on things, Alice could see that-she was still his best girl, but it was easy to see he had lost his perspective on things.

"If I brought you a daughter," Vic was saying, "that's the risk you always knew you took." Alice could feel him searching around for something else to say, but in the end he only added, "I'm running a client in tomorrow from the Baltic Exchange, just after dawn. Maybe I'll find something in there to help you," and all three of them knew what that was, speaking of shit. There followed another silence, then Paulie DeRaad said, "Vic, you're fucked with me," and broke the connection.

"Alice?" he called. "Are you still my best bet?"

"You know I am, Paulie."

"So set me up a pipe to Lens Aschemann. I got some information for him."

The first night they were at Beddington Gardens, Paulie had screamed for four hours solid in his sleep while lights seemed to crawl up his own arms and into his mouth. Next day, he sent her to Voigt Street to fetch the sick kid he kept there, who had started all this and who had radioactive blood or whatever. When she got back, which took all morning with the kid stinking and throwing up and falling out the rickshaw and wandering off into shopping malls singing to itself while its face shone with an exultation Alice did not envy, Paulie had rigged up a curtain to divide the main room in half. From then on he passed his time behind that with the kid and wouldn't let her come through, or look at him again. They had a chemical toilet in there. She had to pass things round the curtain to the two of them. She did once see that the bed was slick, and they were slick too, with something which resembled a clear resinous liquid. Maybe they spewed up this stuff and that's why Paulie wouldn't eat the food she made him. After perhaps eight hours a smell started to fill the room; also, since Paulie went behind the curtain something was wrong with his voice. It started out each sentence with thick tones, as if it was far back in his throat or he had been eating Roquefort cheese; then halfway through it jumped an octave into a music kind of sound. Alice knew that sound. She didn't like it.

"He's here now," she told Paulie when the police detective came on. This time she stayed out of the pipe. You never knew what operators Site Crime might be running in there.

Perhaps an hour before Paulie called Vic, certainly not more, Lens Aschemann could have been found walking briskly along the Corniche to the Cafe Surf, where, instead of entering the Long Bar and occupying his customary seat in the corner, he took shelter in the darkness under the condemned pier behind the building, tapping his foot to the faint jazz music that leaked out into the night, until he saw Antoyne Messner approaching him along the beach.

"So," he called. "A nice night, Fat Antoyne."

"It's just Antoyne," Antoyne said.

He looked doomed and sodden, as if someone had recently pushed him in the sea. The foldaway rainwear ballooning up around him in each gust only partly covered his royal blue suit. The night's weather had pursued him from bar to bar, The World of Today to The Breakaway Station, lacquering his hair across his reddened face: every time he went in somewhere, the rain eased off; every time he decided to move on, it got worse. Now he stopped short of the pier and, eyeing its pitted cast-iron supports, said, "I won't come under there, thanks." And, failing to take heart from the detective's smile: "I been walking up and down for hours in case I missed you."

"This was the time we agreed."

"I was never good with time. I got anxieties around it." The rain lashed at him suddenly. To avoid it he stepped without thinking into the shadow of the pier.

"You see?" murmured Aschemann, as if Antoyne had proved something to him. "It's not so bad." They contemplated the junk that had gathered beneath the pier, too heavy for the sea to move; then the line of rusty barbed wire and barely discernible fluorescence at the eastward extent of the event site itself.

"Are you afraid of it, Antoyne?"

"I don't care about it one way or the other."

Aschemann pretended to give this some consideration. "I thought I saw something move over there," he said. "Just before you arrived." He couldn't quite decide if it was the kind of movement you would expect from, say, a rag, or a bit of wastepaper tumbling briefly across mottled sand; or whether it was more animate than that. "Everyone cares about it," he said. "Otherwise, what would we talk about?" Antoyne shrugged. Aschemann struggled to light his pipe, then gave up and suggested that, since nothing was happening now, they go into the Long Bar. "It would be warmer there, we could get that cocktail drink you introduced everyone to." But Antoyne didn't want to be seen in the Cafe Surf.

"I came to give up Vic," he said.

"That will put a different gloss on it," the detective admitted. "Also, I remembered you don't like the music there. Come with me, then, let's stare this thing right in the eye, you can tell me everything you know about it." He took Antoyne's arm and urged him to look across the old fence into the site, marvelling, "A piece of the Kefahuchi Tract! A piece of the heart of things that fell to earth! I'm afraid of it, Antoyne, I don't mind admitting; I'm afraid of what it means to us, and that's why I asked you how you felt." All he got in response was the white of Antoyne's eye. The fence wire was so rusty it fell apart at a touch, into a kind of wet grit. Rubbing a little of it between his fingers, the way you might crush a leaf of mint, Aschemann smelled the strong iron smell. "No one's replaced this since the original event," he guessed. "Antoyne, why would you want to give up Vic Serotonin?"

"I don't like it here," Antoyne decided suddenly.

Aschemann kept hold of his arm. "But you're used to it, a man like you. Vic's been in and out by this route all year."

Antoyne laughed.

"No one in their right mind would go in from here," he said. "Is that what you thought? Vic would jump off from here? Look at it!" There was no aureole to speak of, there was only the thinnest skin between the different states of things. You would be straight into the worst of it without warning. "Look at the air over there!"

It was like a heat shimmer, only cold and dark, and its very existence seemed to bring home to Antoyne the falseness of his position. "I'm hanging by a thread here," he complained. After a short struggle, he detached himself from Aschemann's grip and began to walk rapidly away from the wire, out from under the pier and into the wind and rain, his rainslicker flapping and cracking wildly. "I never went in there with Vic or anyone else," he called over his shoulder.

Aschemann, stumbling after him, heard none of it. Even as they talked, something had been changing on the other side of the fence; halfway to the safety of the Cafe Surf the wavefront bowled them over. Fat Antoyne knelt in the wet sand, opening and closing his mouth, while the detective, temporarily unable to order his legs, stopped and stared out to sea, where he believed he could see, moored in broad daylight, two or three ancient, rusting cargo vessels. An electric current appeared to be arcing between his clenched jaws. "Irene won't like what you've done to your nice suit," he made himself say. At that, Antoyne's face turned up, dead white in the streaming rain.

"I got the information. Where Vic'll start from tomorrow. Who the client is. But it's reasonable I get money for it."

Aschemann continued to stare out to sea.

"I could find you something," he conceded vaguely.

The rain drenched Antoyne. It poured down his face. His hands and knees made large smooth dimples in the sand, spacetime curves in a surface that seemed elastic with water. "More than something," he said. "I supported Vic in his ambitions, like all those Black Cat White Cat people. But I got to admit now he didn't truly reciprocate, and it's time to take back from him the responsibility for my life." He looked up at the detective. "It was a waste of my heart the day I tried to be friends with a man as lonely as Vic Serotonin, and this is the only favour he'll ever do me."

But Aschemann wasn't listening; his eyes were focused off to the side, in that vague way people have when they are taking a dial-up.

"Hello, Paulie," he said.

Only shortly after these events, across the city in Globe Town, Edith Bonaventure woke guiltily from a dream in which she was thirteen years old and nationwide, a dream like the glitter of accordion chrome in smoky light, expanding and contracting as queasily as accordion bellows in that way which seems to the listener to bear only the most cursory relationship to the music produced: a repeating dream which, despite its general noise and dancing and evident nostalgic glamour, she sometimes thought, did not have her best interests at heart. Globe Town, by contrast, presented to itself-or at least to the waking Edith-as quiet and dark, a little triangle of gentrified streets still faintly resonant with some recent displacement of air, some implacable release of energy, some outrage committed on one kind of physics by another. A great tour ship (probably, Edith thought, the Beths/Hirston Skeleton Queen, destination Santa Muerte, brochured as "Planet of the Alphane Moons," fifty lights or more down the Beach) had just left its berth for the parking orbit.

Edith got her feet over the side of the bed. "If you think I'm believing any of that," she told her dream, "you're wrong." The floor was cold, her nightdress tangled around her waist, as if making music in your sleep was as much of a struggle as making it awake. She knew better than to blame the Skeleton Queen for waking her; more probably it was Emil's kidneys. "Hey," she called up to him, "don't do anything, I'm on my way. It's OK. Leave it to me. It's OK whatever you did."

No answer.

"I'm coming," she called.

Emil had crawled under his bed and become wedged at the hips. She attempted to haul him out. "Hey, are you trying to help?" she said. "Because don't."

"We're fucked, Billy. Those things out there aren't human. Whatever we do now is the end of us."

"Come on, Emil, it was only a cruise ship."

"Look at that fucker! That's better than any floating pile of shoes!"

The room was dark, though random blue and green lights crawled across the walls: hard ultraviolet, absorbed from the tour ship's exhaust flare by a system of fluorescent butterfly-scale pigments and tailored Bragg reflectors in Emil's smart tattoos, now re-emitted in the visible spectrum. The departure of the Skeleton Queen had also brought on a mild fit, during which his bowels, it seemed, had let go. Edith, exhausted and suddenly depressed, began to wonder what she was doing here-what either of them had ever been doing, wherever they were. She lay on the floor near her father and started crying. "You don't help me," she said, turning angrily away from him like a wife. "I have to do all this myself." And then, turning back, "We came in from the stars, Emil, but the stars were our home. We gave up all that fun so you could go mad."

Emil returned her stare dubiously. "This isn't the only bed I've ever been under."

Edith wiped her hand across her tears and laughed.

"I know," she said.

"You know why I think I get this?" he said. "Neuronal soft errors. We're all brain-fried in Globe Town. Seriously, we should move somewhere safer. Those departures are a quantum jockey's nightmare."

"You get this because you left your mind in the site."

"That too," he admitted. Then: "If anything, the arrivals are worse."

"Jesus, Emil, you really smell."

"If you pull my arm I think I can push with my other leg."

Eventually, in the weird fading light his tattoos had stored up out of the physics bounty of the Skeleton Queen, she extricated him and cleaned him up. She spread fresh twill sheets on the bed and got him back into it. She propped him against the pillows and sat beside him. He looked nice. "You look nice," she told him, "like a proper old man. You even have that thin white hair the best old men have." When she was sure he was asleep again, she went downstairs and sat in a chair leafing through a volume of his site journal dated fifteen years before. The room cooled. It stayed night. Looking up occasionally at the rows of teen costumes on the walls, like afterimages of herself in some scientifically inexplicable medium, Edith found she had forgotten where she was, or what part of her life she was in. "Go to sleep in here, you dream entirely in tiny mad paintings," Emil had written. "This is what I got last night: a man spews up a snake, someone else is helping him. They entwine, bent in the shapes of alien body language." She was dozing over this when Vic Serotonin dialled up.

"Hey, Edith," he said.

"Funny you should say that, Vic," she replied, and closed the pipe.

When Vic came on again and asked how Emil was, which she had known he would, she answered, "He's fine. He's happy. You can always see what Emil's thinking, through the holes in his head." There was an ominous rhythmic croaking sound in the pipe, along with a common type of visual interference which made things spin out sideways from under her gaze. She felt fine with her eyes closed; but when she tried to look at things, they slipped away from her. It was the story of her life. "Why'd you call me, I wonder?" she said. And before Vic could reply, "Well, you just want to say you're sorry. You're going into the site tomorrow. Maybe I would change my mind about the book."

"Edith-"

"But who's there with you, Vic? You see, you don't answer that one."

This time it was him who broke the connection.

"So no diary for you, then, my boy," Edith whispered. She waited a little, as much to give him the benefit of the doubt as to clear her head. Inshore winds drove the rain down the street towards the corporate port. A smaller ship left the ground on a line of light like a crack across things. The world stopped spinning. When he didn't get back to her she opened a new pipe and said to the voice at the other end:

"I want to report a site crime."

Upstairs, Emil Bonaventure was propped upright against the pillows like a corpse, his skin yellow in the streetlight from the window, his old ribs slatted with shadows. The energy had drained out of his smart tattoos and he was breathing ever so lightly. Edith watched the pulse in his neck. She could almost see the life through the skin, the thoughts in his head, and what were they but the dreams he couldn't any longer have? Shallow water over cracked chequerboard tiles and cast-off domestic objects, books, plates, magazines, empty tunnels smelling of chemicals, a black dog trotting aimlessly round him in his sleep on some dirty waterlogged ground neither in nor out of anything you could think of as the world, while a woman's voice mourned open-throat from a house not far enough in the distance.

"Emil," she whispered. She meant: I'm here. She meant: It's OK. She meant: Don't go. After a moment he opened his eyes and smiled.

"Where's Vic?" he asked.

"Vic won't be coming to see us any more," Edith said.

Later that night, down by the seafront, the wind dropped. The rain turned to drizzle and then stopped; in its place, fog stole in across the Corniche, muffling the sounds of merriment from the Cafe Surf. A man who looked like the older Albert Einstein sat on the cold seawall for a while, content, it seemed, to watch the rickshaws come and go in the oystershell lot, or exchange scraps of talk with the Monas in their lime-green tube skirts and orange fake-fur boleros. He liked them to flirt with him, and in return showed them pictures of someone they took to be his granddaughter. The limits of visibility fell, give or take, at a pleasant twenty or thirty yards, describing a comfortable, colourful space lit from within by flocks of smart ads. Everyone, really, was having fun, when into the lot wheeled a pink 1952 Cadillac custom roadster, blessed or cursed, according to where you stood on the subject, with the low skirts and frenched tail lights of a later, impure aesthetic, a giant vehicle which blunt-nosed its way between the rickshaws, scattered the ads and see-sawed to a halt on its real mechanical suspension, while from an unimpeachable white leather interior the sounds of WDIA, Radio Retro, Station to the Stars, thugged their way in solid blocks across the voice of some hysterical commentator at Preter Coeur.

"Very impressive," Lens Aschemann congratulated his assistant. "I'll just fold my wet raincoat before I get in, if you don't mind, and put it in the back here."

"Those Monas seem to know you well," the assistant said.

"It's charity work. Let's drive a little before you take me in." He fastened his seatbelt. "Go anywhere you like since we'll only be killing time. By the way," he said, "are you back at Sport Crime? If not, you needn't listen to this indifferent music the fighters like." He leaned across and switched off the radio. "Later we can have a proper breakfast, maybe you'd like to go to Pellici's, which I know you enjoyed before. Then I'll let you do what you always wanted: arrest Vic Serotonin."

He chuckled. "That Vic," he said, "Betrayed three times in the same night. It's hard not to laugh."

They took the coast road. At first, when the assistant looked up into the driving mirror all she could see was the nacre reflection of her own headlights diffused around the car; further along, though, the fog, stirred up by temperature differentials out at sea, broke into patches. As soon as Aschemann saw where she was taking him, his mood changed. He folded his arms and stared ahead. "You drive too fast," he complained. "How can anyone enjoy themselves?" About fifteen miles out, they got perfect visibility. Shortly afterwards, the assistant pulled into a headland viewpoint and stopped the car facing out to sea.

"It's a long time since I sat here," Aschemann said.

Cold air filled the Cadillac, but he wouldn't allow her to close the roof. Instead, he stood up with his hands on the top edge of the windscreen and watched the big ocean waves shovelling the remains of themselves into the bay. Far out, the assistant could see the single, desolate fluttering blue light of some lost rickshaw advertisement: otherwise, the headland was black, the sky and the sea different shades of grey. "Was this place on the record?" he said eventually. "I'm surprised. It was never part of the investigation."

"You're thorough," she said. "Everyone says that. You came here the day they found her, so you had it recorded."

"It looks nicer in daylight."

There he stuck, staring out over the sea.

Alerted by neighbours, the uniform branch had found the body of his wife, six o'clock on a hot summer evening, sprawled among the broken furniture, boxes of clothes, the piles of local dope-sheets, fashion magazines and old record albums which had divided the floor of the bungalow into narrow waist-high alleys, filled at that time of day with the rich yellow light filtering between the mille-feuille slats of the wooden blinds.

"They called me immediately," Aschemann said. "It was hot in there." Up from all the yellowed pages, stronger than the smell of the corpse, came a stifling odour of dust and salt. "It got in your mouth as well as your nose." She had fallen awkwardly, wedged sideways with one arm trapped beneath her and the other draped across a copy of Harpers amp; Queen, her left hand clutching an empty tumbler, her cheap sun-faded print dress disarranged to show a yellow thigh: but not one of those piles of repro-shop junk, the uniformed men remarked, had been disturbed by her fall. There were no signs of a struggle. It was as if her murderer had been as constrained in here as anyone else. Tattooed in her armpit were the lines: Send me a neon heart/Send it with love/Seek me inside.

When they turned her over, she proved to be holding in her other hand a letter Aschemann had sent her when they were still young. Invited reluctantly to the scene by an investigator several years his junior, Aschemann examined this for a moment-giving less attention, it seemed, to what he had written than to the thin blue paper he had written it on all that time ago-then went and stood puzzledly in the centre of the maze. The assembled uniforms spoke in low voices and avoided his eyes. He understood all this but it was as if he was seeing it for the first time. If he peered between the slats of the blind, he knew, he would be able to see Carmody, Moneytown, the Harbour Mole, the whole city tattooed stark and clear in strong violet light into the armpit of the bay.

"What could I do?" he now asked his assistant.

"They were right not to allow you to investigate."

"Were they?" He shrugged, as if at this distance it didn't matter. "I told them, 'Do a good job.' I said, 'Bring me the details to my office later.' Then I had someone drive me up here, someone as bright and ambitious as you, who could speak just as many languages. I was a suspect, though I never worked Carmody or knew tattooing."

He looked around.

"It's nicer in the day. Nice light."

Nice light, a warm wind at the edge of the cliff, the whisper of the tide far below. A few eroded bristle-cone pines, a patch of red earth bared and compacted by tourists' feet. An extraordinary sense of freedom, which he had regretted every day since.

"Take me back," he told her. "We won't have breakfast after all."

On the drive back he was as preoccupied as he'd been when Vic Serotonin left his office the previous afternoon. At the bungalow he stood with his sodden raincoat over his arm and watched her K-turn the Cadillac so she could head back up Maricachel towards the centre of Saudade.

"You got this from my shadow operators," he accused, "that was clever. I hope it was what you wanted."

"I will never understand you."

"No one ever understands anyone," he said. "We should both get a little rest."

All her ambush had achieved was to drive him further back inside himself, a place the assistant now understood as a maze which made the one his wife had lived in look simple. Instead of going home, she made her way across town to C-Street and the tank farm. Against reason, she had begun to enjoy the flabby, rather slow-witted version of herself the tank had proposed. She cleaned 1950s house; chose 1950s clothes, especially silk knickers; and waited for 1950s man to come home, wondering what he'd say to her if he ever did. Mostly, she imagined his blunt, nicotine-stained fingers on her. The tank's flexible programming enabled her to do the shopping in Aschemann's Cadillac, though she refitted it with a rolled, peaked and vented hood, reshaped rear-quarter scoops and lowered skirts; and-after considering paint chips both authentic and inauthentic-resprayed it the pearlescent blue of a boiled sweet. She had the steering wheel chromed, but otherwise kept the chrome down to the fenders and grille. The front bench seat was long enough to lie full-length on in the fairground parking lot, so she could watch the Meteorite spin violently above her while she masturbated, and after ten minutes or so come with a deep sigh. It was as good as a sleep.

While she was telling herself that, Aschemann sat listening to the sea and trying to fit what he knew about himself and his wife into what he knew about the event site. As part of giving up Vic, Edith Bonaventure had rickshawed her father's site journals over to him. It was something, she said, she needed to do. Leafing through them (a little puzzledly, because, despite all his experience on the other side, Emil had so clearly lacked the one understanding Aschemann now came to), he fell asleep almost as if by accident, and for the first time in fifteen years found himself dreaming of something other than the dead woman: water flowing as cool as early daylight over his feet and around his ankles; voices laughing in excitement. It was, he assumed, some memory of childhood.