Nova Swing (15 page)

“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.