Nova Swing (3 page)

Antoyne was as encouraged by this as any man. He sat on after she finished the drink, trying to engage her with stories of the places he had seen back when he rode the rockets. But Irene had been to all those places too—and more, Liv Hula thought—and Fat Antoyne had all he was going to get for one cheap cocktail drink. Liv watched them from a distance, her own thoughts so churned she didn’t care how it ended. Eventually even Antoyne could see the way things were. He scraped his chair back and retreated to his place by the window. What time was it? How had the things happened that ended him up here? He looked out on to Straint. “It’s day,” he said. “Hey,” he grumbled, “I actually respected the guy. You know?” Meanwhile the stream of cats flowed on like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, until suddenly it turned itself off and Straint was empty again. Across the road at the tailor’s they were flushing Joe Leone’s proteins down the drain.

At the civilian port, the cruise ships, half-hidden in the mist, towered above the buildings; while along the tall narrow streets a traffic of rickshaw girls and tattoo boys had begun, ferrying the tourists from the New Café Al Aktar to Moneytown, from the Church on the Rock to the Rock Church, while around them their shreds and veils of shadow operators whispered, “A sight everyone will be sure to see, a discourse of oppositions.” Fur coats were all over Saudade by eight, the colour of honey or horse-chestnut, cut to flow like some much lighter fabric. What sort of money was this? Where did it come from? It was off-planet money. It was corporate money. However cruel the trade that produced them, you could hardly deny the beauty of those coats and their luxurious surfaces.

Shortly after the last cat had vanished into the city, Vic’s client returned to the bar.

Where Vic had come back filthy, she came back clean. You wouldn’t notice anything new about her, except her shoulders were a little hunched and her face was still. Her hands she thrust into the pockets of her coat. Nothing had been taken away from her: but she held her head more carefully than before, always looking forward as if her neck hurt, or as if she was trying not to notice something happening in the side of her eye. It was hard to read body language like that. She placed herself with care at a table near the window, crossed one leg over the other and asked in a low voice for a drink. After a little while she said, “I wonder if someone could give that other man the rest of his fee.”

Antoyne sat forward eagerly.

“I can do that,” he offered.

“No you can’t,” Liv Hula warned him. To the woman in the fur coat she said, “Vic’s cheap, he left you for dead. You owe him nothing.”

“Still,” the woman said, “I feel he should have the rest of his money. It’s here. And I was fine, really.” She stared ahead of herself. “A little puzzled, I suppose, at how unpleasant it is.”

Liv Hula threw up her hands.

“Why do they come here?” she asked Fat Antoyne in a loud voice. Before he could say anything, she added, “They leave the nice safe corporate tour and they end up in this bar here. They always find our Vic.”

“Hey, Vic’s OK,” the fat man said.

“Vic’s a joke, Antoyne, and so are you.”

Antoyne struggled to his feet and looked as if he was going to challenge that, but in the end he only shrugged. Vic’s client gave him a faint, encouraging smile, but then seemed to look past him. Silence drew out a moment or two; then a chair scraped back and Irene the Mona came over to the table where these events were happening. Her little urethane shoes clattered on the wooden floor. She had wiped her tears and done her lipstick. She was over Joe the Lion now. What had she been on, to invest her considerable life-energy that way? Irene had a future in front of her, everyone agreed, and it was a good, light-hearted one. She had her plans, and they were good ones too. Though it was true she would keep Joe in her heart-pocket many years because that was the kind of girl she knew herself to be.

“That sure is a beautiful coat,” she said. She held out her hand.

For a moment, the woman looked nonplussed. Then she shook Irene’s hand and said, “Thank you. It is, isn’t it?”

“Very beautiful, and I admire it so,” Irene agreed. She gave a little bob, seemed about to add something, then suddenly went and sat down again and toyed with her glass. “Don’t be hard on him, honey,” she called across to Liv Hula. “He’s nothing but a man after all.” It was hard to tell which man she meant.

“I feel he should have his money,” appealed the woman in the fur coat. When no one answered she set the cash on the table in front of her, in high-denomination notes. “Anyway, it’s here for him,” she said. She got to her feet in that careful way she had developed. “If he comes back…” she began. She made her way to the door and stood there for a moment peering up Straint Street towards the event zone, wreathed—silent, heaving and questionable—in its daytime chemical fogs, as if trying to decide what to do. Eventually, she smiled at the other two women; said, “Thank you anyway” and walked off back towards the city. They heard her heels go away for what seemed a long time.

“Jesus,” was Liv Hula’s comment. “Hey, Antoyne,” she said, “you want another drink?”

But the fat man had gone too. He had lost patience with the way they treated him in there. He was just a man trying to fit in, someone who had seen as much as anyone else, more than some. It made him angry they didn’t listen.

What the hell, he thought. Nothing keeps.

At least he was out of that bar now, into the morning somewhere he could breathe, heading for Moneytown and the strip mall wonderland running south of Straint, down past the spaceports to the sea. He was narrowing his eyes in the strong light glittering up off the distant water, as if he could discern something which didn’t belong there, something he hadn’t lost after all. Something, perhaps, you couldn’t lose. He was going to look for work. There was always work in the ports.

A couple of evenings
after these events a man who resembled Albert Einstein walked into a different kind of bar, off at the money end of Saudade where the aureole, curving across the city like a shaded area on a map, met the sea.

Unlike Liv Hula’s joint, the Café Surf had two rooms. These were known respectively as the Long and Short bars, the latter being notable for a strictly drink & run client-base. The man who looked like Einstein went straight through to the Long Bar, where he ordered a double Black Heart no ice and stared around with satisfaction at the high-end retro décor of marble pillars, designer blinds, cane tables and polished chrome bar taps. Ancient movie stars laughed out at him from brushed aluminium frames on the walls, exotic beers glittered from the shelves of the cooler: while under a red neon sign the Café Surf two-piece—keyboard and tenor saxophone—ambled its way through the evening’s middle set.

All of this was copied faithfully from a minor hologram work,
Live Music Nightly 1989,
by the celebrated tableau artiste Sandra Shen. Like the Long Bar constituency itself—a mix of self-conscious young entertainment executives on release from the corporate enclaves just down the beach in Doko Gin and Kenworthy—this seemed to puzzle and amuse him in equal parts. He had the air, cultivated in middle age, of enjoying the things other people enjoy, so long as he didn’t have to take part. He smiled to himself and lit his pipe. Most nights, for perhaps a month, he had sat in the same place. He would pull out a chair, sit down, get up again to put a match carefully into an ashtray on the corner of the bar; sit down again. He did all this with a kind of meticulous politeness, as if he was in someone’s front room; or as if, at home, his wife required of him a continual formal acknowledgement of her efforts. He would stare at his pipe. He would begin a conversation with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter, getting out his wallet to show her—and her friend, who wore torn black net tights and industrial shoes—something which looked in the undependable Long Bar light like a business card, which they would admire.

In fact he was not as old as he looked; his wife was dead and whatever else he seemed to be doing, his attention never wavered from its object.

His name was Aschemann and he was a detective.

Halfway through his first evening there, Aschemann had uncovered a kind of discontinuity in things at the Café Surf. The two-piece, snug under its neon sign on the cramped dais between the Long Bar and the lavatory door, had gained its second wind. It was settling to the long haul, drawing down a kind of haunted bebop from the ectoplasmic night air outside—music four centuries old and off another planet. Between numbers there was laughter and shouting; the smell of food grew momentarily stronger, there was a clutter of Giraffe Beer bottles and crumpled serviettes, dark red lipstick on empty glasses, Anaïs-Anaïs scent thick in the air. Yet the tables closest to the musicians were deserted; and in the space between them and the dais, people kept appearing. These people didn’t seem to belong in the Long Bar. They were shocked-looking men, white-faced, tall, wearing raincoats; thin shaven-headed boys like camp inmates; women with an eye pulled down at the corner: poor, shabby people, people crippled in small and grotesque ways. They were coming out of the lavatory, to push between the piano and the bar and then wander loose, blinking, looking for a moment both confused and agitated, perhaps by the music, perhaps by the light.

Though they emerged from the lavatory, that was—as Aschemann saw instantly—no guarantee they had ever gone into it. Instead, for a moment, as each of these figures appeared in the orange light, it seemed as if the music itself were squeezing them into existence. As if there was some sort of unformed darkness out there at the back of the Café Surf, where the event site met the sea, and the band was squashing it like a fistful of wet sand into these crude forked shapes. They were lively enough. Once they had oriented themselves, they had drinks at the bar and then, laughing and shouting, wandered out into the lighted street. Thoughtfully, the man who looked like Einstein watched them go.

The next night he brought his assistant along.

“You see?” he asked her.

“I see,” she said. “But what will you do about it?”

She was a neat, ambitious young woman on a one-month trial from the uniform branch, fluent in three Halo languages, wired for dial-up and with all the usual tailoring. You could tell that from her eyes, which were often unevenly focused, and from the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of one forearm like smart tattoos. Her experience turned out to be in Sport Crime (the word “sport” to be interpreted here, Aschemann told himself, as a convenient misnomer for the fights), her speciality the violation of mysostatin blocker protocols in chopshop proteomes. She had failed early on to convey to him either the intricacies or the appeal of this discipline, and it wasn’t much use in Site Crime anyway. They stood outside the Café Surf in the warm wind on the beach, looking at the violet breakers, the curious prismatic displays, visible nightly, where the water met the event aureole, and she suggested:

“Do you think they originate in the site?”

Aschemann believed this to be obvious. But he wanted to encourage her, so he only said in a mild way, “I’ve wondered about that myself.” He wasn’t comfortable with the possibility. It would mark, he believed, some kind of sea-change. It could only be a marker for change when, without any other help than the music, people came out of the Saudade site who had never gone in.

“Whatever they are,” he said, “we don’t want them out here.”

“I’ll call down a team,” his assistant said.

Code flickered along her forearm. Her strange eyes, the same colour as the surf, went out of focus as she dialled up. Her lips moved a little even though she wasn’t actually speaking. Aschemann put his hand gently on her arm. “Not yet,” he cautioned her. His voice collapsed the dial-up. She looked at him vaguely, like someone who has just woken up from a realistic dream.

“I always like to watch a little,” he explained, “before I do anything.”

There was a note of apology in his voice. Aschemann had a high turnover in assistants because he was fond of advising them, “The true detective starts in the centre of the maze: the crimes make their way through to him. Never forget, you uncover your own heart at the heart of it.” Another of his favourites, even more puzzling to young men and women conditioned to seek answers, was, “Uncertainty is all we have. It’s our advantage. It’s the virtue of the day.”

So now he sat in the Long Bar, in what had become his favourite corner, wondering if he had watched enough.

Just as he decided that he had, something changed his feeling about the place and what might be happening there. The door opened and let in a man he recognised, Antoyne Messner, called by everyone who knew him Fat Antoyne. No one cared about Fat Antoyne. He had a history of low–per centage contraband operations a few lights away in Radio Bay. He had stayed ahead by moving only the lightest stuff—exotic isotopes, cultivars of embargoed local species, tailor packages for the kiddy trade—in a hullshot Dynaflow HS-SE or -SE2, its cheap navigation tools leaking the illegal daughter-code used to negotiatate the complex gravitational attractors and junk-matter flows of the Bay. His rule: make two trips maximum then throw the ship away. The code itself was the risk in that trade. Relax, and it would come down out of the mathematical space and into your head at night. As long as your hygiene was good, the code kept you one step ahead of EMC, but you still had to be a pilot. In consequence the stresses were high. Antoyne didn’t do anything at all since he fetched up in Saudade except run errands for Vic Serotonin, and he was therefore widely assumed to be a burn-out.

He pushed his way between the tables and sat awkwardly on one of the chromium stools at the Long Bar. He seemed dispirited. He spent some time trying to order a drink which, when it came, the bartender placed in front of him with exaggerated care, and which settled out quickly into distinct layers of pink and yellow. It was popular, he told the people near him, on Perkins’ Rent. No one seemed convinced. Aschemann watched him swallow half of it then went over and said, “You’re a long way from Straint Street.” Then when the fat man stared at him uncertainly: