Nova Swing (29 page)

She shut the box and then the bar and walked down Straint to the noncorporate port, where she stood for a while in the rim of thick, silky weeds by the chainlink fence in the morning light in her black wraparounds, watching the rockets come and go; then caught a rickshaw the rest of the way to the beach.

“You don’t want the Vientiale,” the rickshaw girl warned her. “It’s wall-to-wall. It’s crawling.”

“Maybe I want crawling.”

“You don’t.”

Monster Beach was wall-to-wall too: after a glance at the rammed fish restaurants and boardwalk amusements, the shoals of beautifully turned-out Monas, the famous sign pointing not to the sand but crazily upwards at the parking orbit, she had the girl take her to the Point end of the bay. There she could get down to her white singlet and black boy-leg underpants and watch children running in and out of the tide. She played the hologram again. You couldn’t tell what she was thinking when she watched it. Her haircuts were just as short in those days, only in bad colours. She gazed out to sea. She ate an ice cream. She picked up a man. The way that happened, she was walking back empty-handed from the ocean, feeling suddenly light and needing something to hold her down. He was a lot younger than her, with a sweet, candid smile, bleached-out yellow hair and a neat triangular tuft of beard under the lower lip. Maybe, he suggested, she would like an ice.

“That’s such a good idea,” she said. “But I’ll buy.”

While they were walking along eating the ices, he said, “Sun and shade sometimes seem like equal things? Both, in a way, kind of illuminating? And both so ungrudging?”

“I’ve often thought that,” Liv said.

She took him back to the bar anyway. Late afternoon he said tentatively, “I’ve seen you somewhere before. Are you someone?”

“It’s 2444. We’re all someone.”

Up in her room, he stared at the broken sink. She could see him trying to find a way of asking about it. The middle of the night, Liv woke and couldn’t get back to sleep. She looked down at his body, the colour of honey and just this side of beautiful. Really, he seemed a lot too young for the sex subtleties he knew. It was probably a chop anyone could get these days. After she thought this over she got up and went down to the bar, where she wrote out a rough sign, FOR SALE, and propped it in the window, low down on the right-hand side. When she got back upstairs, the boy was awake and on his feet. He was worrying about the sink again.

“You didn’t try to piss in that, did you?” she said.

“I could get it fixed.”

“Anyone could get it fixed. I don’t want it fixed. Fix me instead, I need fixing.”

He gave her a long slow smile, which reminded her of Ed.

“But really,” he insisted, “are you someone?”

Liv pretended to look around her room. “Would anyone who was anyone live here? Just come and fuck me.”

“How about I fuck you and come?”

After all, she thought with a certain relief, he was as young as he looked. She laughed. “So what was all that crap about sunshine and shadows?” she said. “Down at the beach?” Next morning she felt lots better about herself. She cleaned bar. She cleaned tables. She wrote out a neater version of the FOR SALE sign, on a piece of white card she found behind the bar. Her energy was back. As if in response, her first customer of the day came in and ordered hot mocha with cream and rum. It was none other than Antoyne Messner, out on his own for once. “I walk past earlier,” he said, “I see your sign. I’m fascinated.” He was on his way to Carver Field, he informed her, to do business. As if to substantiate that, he had on all new clothes. A short brown leather zip-up pilot jacket; cavalry twill chinos with their own expensive belt. It looked as if he already came into money. “Irene,” he made sure to say, “sends her regards. She don’t forget how you were kind to her when Joe Leone died.”

“How is Irene?” Liv said.

“Irene’s good. We’re both good.”

That morning, the world did seem different. Liv felt light, but not so light she would escape gravity and float away. She could convert that into achievements. She cleaned glass. She cleaned the floor. Caught by surprise, her shadow operators furled and clustered round the ceiling fans; then wheeled as one, outdoors into the light and back. Fat Antoyne seemed full of energy too. Out of Vic Serotonin’s shadow, he had a more relaxed way with him. He engaged you more directly, and seemed liberated. Also, as became clear after a couple of drinks, he had a proposition for her; which when she heard it made her think.

Edith Bonaventure, the accordion case slung with a kind of sexy gallantry over one shoulder, trudged home from her by-now-regular gig at the gates of the corporate port. She loved Globe Town. The lights were on. Later, a mist would rise up in the little streets between the tall houses, but for now the air was soft, full of small winds, cooking smells—bream baked in sea-salt, three-way herring. If Edith had a tired look, she could at least afford a new coat, which she wore open over her costume; it was too warm for the evening, but she wasn’t ready to be sensible about something so nice. Edith’s walk said something new too. Edith herself wasn’t sure what. The talent, she would tell her audience silently as she played one more encore (
Carmen Sylva,
in the version made popular by Olavi Virta, king of the old New Nuevo Tango), is fractious now, and hungry. It is ready to take its money and run. The talent gets tired, but never forget it will always have that good special glow.

It was a short commute. One drink with Curt, the barkeep at The World of Today, and Edith was home. She went up the steps and into the hall. She dropped the accordion on the floor.

“Emil,” she called up the stairs. “What do you want to eat?”

When he didn’t answer, she laughed.

“You are a bad old man,” she called. “Emil, you don’t like me to go to the port you should just say, don’t sulk.” She arranged her new coat carefully on a hanger. “Be nice, Emil. I’m having a bath, we’ll eat then.” She lay for half an hour with the hot water up to her chin, up to her pink aureolae, and counted from memory the money she made that afternoon. Saw herself at the port gate, as if from the outside, a fixture, an isolated but energetic figure of a woman in a pool of halogen light, rain or shine. It was a living. Emil slept a lot while she was out. He was going down a little faster now. Sometimes he had a relapse to tell her he missed her. He had an accident. Every day she came back, cleaned and fed him, they looked at his diaries together, he had his hallucinations, his syncopes, his periods of absence far into the night when he would say conversationally, “We’re fucked here, Atmo. We should never have tried to follow the map.” Or: “Where’s the fucking gun?” Edith would wait him out, sleep a few hours from dawn, go down to the port to do it all again.

She hauled herself out of the tub.

“Emil, it’s time you forgive me now!”

Her father sat propped up in his bed with his emaciated legs stretched out in front of him. The sheets were tangled and yellow with sweat. He had been trying to write something and lost patience with himself. Books lay on the floor where they had fallen. She gathered them up. “I was looking,” she read, “at something no one else would ever see.” Emil’s face was papery and grey, with an air of being both exhausted and rested at the same time, as if he had just that moment given up and leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“Emil?”

He smiled. “All my dreams rushed back,” he whispered, “while you were out.” Edith squeezed his hand tight. “You would have loved them,” he said.

“Emil, you had a sweat, you threw up a little, it’s nothing to worry about.”

He opened his eyes. They were a perfect, excited blue she hadn’t seen since he was forty; and that was how they stayed, looking at something no one else would ever see. The smart tattoos crawled slowly about in the crust of white hair on his chest for a while, then stopped. She leaned down to examine one of them before it faded—not a map but a line from a poem, perhaps, in simple red letters:
Send me an eon heart
. “Emil?” She sat there and held his hand for perhaps an hour, perhaps more, waiting for him to wake, or notice her, or whatever would happen next. Nothing did. She was too warm after the bath; then too cold. Streetlight filled the room.

“Emil, that was cruel,” she said.

He was my father, she let herself think eventually. He was my lovely father and I miss him so. After a while she went downstairs and got dressed. She fetched out the money she received for giving up Vic Serotonin and counted it. She took down her new coat and looked at that. When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too. I wanted him to myself, she thought. I wanted him to myself. Edith didn’t know quite how to be on her own yet, so she went back upstairs and held his hand again and sat by him all night.

She knew it was dawn when the black and white cats began to pour into the room through the open door behind her. Those cats! she thought. They would come in anywhere if you left the street door open. Silent, fixated, their eyes flat and a curious dry spiciness to their smell, they packed themselves close to her father’s bed, flowing around it, rubbing heedlessly against any part of Emil they could find in the tight, cramped space.

He was my lovely, lovely father.

At Carver Field, even the tubbiest of the ships on sale tower a hundred feet high. They stand in rows. They’re old. They’re used. They leak. They exhibit the gentle patina of being too long on the ground. They have names like
Radio Mary
and
Soft Error
. They have always hauled their guts on behalf of others. They have muled and trafficked and smuggled and led a life. They have been the mainstay of commerce, the prey of outlaws. By day they emit radiation. By night cheap navigational code trickles through their corroded firewalls like a contract between Marburg fever and a trail of sparks. They began their career five hundred lights across the Halo as someone’s dream and took fifty years to work their way here, where they will inevitably become someone else’s; because even for these tubby little ships there is always someone to exclaim:

“I never saw a thing so beautiful!”

Five-thirty a.m., two or three days after Antoyne Messner called in at Liv Hula’s bar. The gates were already unlocked. Buyers were already out, craning their necks, pointing upward, resembling from a distance the little accurate figures inserted to provide scale in an architectural model. Pale strong light bleached the machine sheds and peeling moderne administration block. All that month Carver had sported a crop of alien weeds, silky, poppy-looking copper-coloured blossoms forcing their way up through the concrete, going strong in the light of this to-them distant sun.

Irene the Mona, box-fresh in metallic linen bolero with matching shorts and transparent sidebutton ankle-boots, glanced sideways at her companion. Hints of anxiety touched her little mouth.

“
Is
it beautiful, Antoyne?” she said.

The ship looked no different than a hundred others. Its hull was just as shot. Its three-fin tail and outboard reactor casings were streaked with just as much birdshit and re-entry stains. But Antoyne and Irene had read in the catalogue that it had carried out many years’ efficient service under the livery of the famous circus and alien show,
Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant
; they were impressed. The story was this, Madame Shen had not been heard of for many years. A man called Renoko now looked after the circus, stripping its assets from an office on some planet light-years down the Beach. So here the ship was, the usual tramp freighter past its best and renamed a dozen times, already warming up for take-off in Antoyne Messner’s mind. He felt the tremble in the tips of its fins. He felt the mystery of it. The oily preflight roll of the Dynaflow drivers rose up to him from somewhere below deck, causing, for the millionth time, the hair to rise on the back of his neck.

Beautiful, Antoyne didn’t know. He had, he said, no remit for beautiful. “This here looks like a good workaday unit,” he told Irene, “though for that it is priced a little high.”

Irene saw right through him and out the other side.

If you understood ships like these, Antoyne had often said to her, this was how your CV could be expected to run:

At thirteen you lived on an orbital factory. Or a farm planet with infinite horizons and no room for you anywhere. Or you lived in a port city which stank of the outright bizarreness of things and made you raw all your childhood with…what? Delight. Anticipation. The desire to escape. The desire to know. Thirteen years of age, you looked older. You were a girl, you were a boy, your gender was indeterminate. You were pressganged by EMC. Or you met a salvage expert from Nueva Cardoso. You loved her instantly for the sheer breadth of stuff she knew; also her alien smut tattoos and neat prosthetic arm. She made you an offer and that’s how you came to ride the rockets. You flew with Fedy von Gang, you flew with Chinese Ed. You spent five years in a research tub at Radio RX-1 with the Kefahuchi Tract hanging over your shoulder like a huge boiling face, stripped, raw, heaving with some emotion you couldn’t recognise. It’s been fun. It’s been heartbreak all the way. It’s never been less than a trip.

Whose story was he telling when he said these things?

Irene thought she knew. “Antoyne,” she felt bound to remind him now, “I’m beautiful, and you understood enough to find your way to me through this life.”

“Anyway,” Antoyne said, “we got to wait to find out more.”

They didn’t wait long. Soon enough, Liv Hula threaded her way across the crowded field to find them. She checked out the gathered ships, and had the air of someone in her own world. For a moment they thought she would walk right past, and when Antoyne called her name, she seemed surprised to hear it. A barkeep always looks vulnerable away from the bar. Liv Hula, it was the Mona’s opinion, seemed often too defensive in her personal presentation; yet when Liv considered that ship—its ripe-avocado geometry, its hull blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core—she certainly was business itself.