Nova Swing (6 page)

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

“Hey,” he said into the telephone, “yeah, I got it. It’s still here.”

He listened for a moment. “Why would I let that happen?” he asked. Then he said OK and hung up. He wrapped the item in its rag and left the building with it. “I don’t do this for love,” he complained on his way downstairs, as if he was still talking to Paulie DeRaad. DeRaad, one-time vacuum commando, facilitator and all-round Earth Military Contracts factotum, ran a joint he called the Semiramide Club, the visible part of extensive holdings in which EMC subsidiaries were implicated to the hilt. Wait-and-see was Paulie’s working pattern, safety first his motto; and in this case, he said, he preferred Vic to meet with one of his operators, who would check things out and only make the buy if the goods were good.

Vic wasn’t sure who he liked least, Paulie or his operators. Nevertheless he went down through Moneytown to the ocean, and not long after he left home found himself at the Suicide Point end of the Corniche, waiting in the half-dark of a one-room cinderblock structure which might once have been a bar, or a place where you bought cheap finance with predictable consequences, but which now anyway had peeling walls, boarded windows, a signature of disuse. Advertisements for legal services flickered softly round the heads of the Point kids in gun-punk outfits who stood talking between the ragmop palms outside.

Vic waited inside, listening carefully, for some minutes. It seemed a long while before anything happened. Then the palm trees were agitated by a cold breeze, and silvery rain poured down at an angle through the blue light on the beach. The Point kids shouted and ran about in the rain for a minute or two; then they were gone. As if he had been waiting for this, Vic took out the package and held it in one hand; he took out his gun and held it in the other. The room smelled of standing water, electricity, darkness.

Vic stood there watching the weather until he heard a soft voice which sounded as if it originated both inside and outside the building.

The voice said, “Hello, Vic.”

“You want to come in out the rain,” Vic advised.

“That’s funny, Vic.”

“Even so. I’m not here to talk to the climate.”

The voice said, “I’ll send someone.”

Vic shrugged as if it had asked him for something he didn’t intend to give. “The wrong thing happens here,” he warned, “and I’ll shoot the goods. You should be aware of that.”

Another laugh.

When Paulie DeRaad’s operator came in, it came as one of the Point kids, male, maybe ten years old, wearing the usual tawdry Point notion of gun-punk chic, a sun-faded gabardine coat buttoned up tight to the neck and falling away unbelted from there to just below the knee. The kid walked in under his own power, then began to shake violently and fell against the wall. “How come you do this to me?” he asked, in a puzzled voice. “I never even saw you before.” He coughed, wiped the back of one wrist across his mouth and tried to make eye contact with Vic Serotonin, who turned determinedly away. After a minute or two Vic heard a sigh. The light flickered outside. The kid stopped making an effort and slid down the wall.

“Turn around now, Vic,” the operator said.

Vic licked his lips.

“I promise you it’s safe to turn around now.”

Vic turned around. “You look like my mother,” he said. He had no idea why his mother came into his mind, only that he was no longer certain what sex the Point kid was. It stood quite still and calm. Vic thought that if it ever did choose to move, to walk or run or anything understandable like that, it would be as graceful as a dancer. Its face seemed bigger. Its eyes too—they made too much contact with you. There was a kind of morning glow in that face, the unsexed unknowable personality of the Shadow Boy inside, an optimism so bare no one could look at it long.

“This is how it is,” Vic said. “I put Paulie’s goods on the floor between us, and you do whatever it is you do, and I shoot both of you if anything happens I don’t like.”

“You should try and relax more,” the operator recommended.

It smiled disconcertingly until Vic set the artefact on the floor, then a kind of music came out of its throat, three or four thin, pure tones, less like a voice than a musical instrument: to which the item lit up faintly in response, glowing through the cloth Vic had wrapped it in. “This is very real,” the Shadow Boy said, as if it was describing the artefact for someone else. “This is very beautiful stuff.” In a single seamless movement it knelt down, leaned forward and made a circle with its arms, a curiously child-like sheltering gesture which embraced somewhat more space than the artefact occupied. Next, electromagnetic vomit issued from its mouth. Thousands of motes like violet neon tapioca slowly dripped on to the goods. “I just want to see what we’ve got here,” the Shadow Boy said, “before we go any further.” Dazzle from the interfacing operation blew back into its face, temporarily erasing the features. The walls of the room lit up then darkened again. Vic saw graffiti, he saw chipped plaster, exposed rebar.

He said, “I’m not happy with this.”

There was complete silence in the place. Intelligence had left the eyes of the kneeling figure, and was now concentrated in the thick honey drip of light, the exchange of code.

“This is going too far,” Vic said. “I’m not happy with this.”

A faint voice answered him. It was Paulie DeRaad’s voice, piped in live from the Semiramide Club on a nanofraction of the operator’s bandwidth. “Hey, Vic,” it said, “I won’t need you any more tonight. The money’s in your account.”

“Fuck you, Paulie,” Vic promised, “if it isn’t,” and he backed out warily, holding his gun out in front of him in both hands in a gesture less aggressive than imploring. Light continued to flicker and buzz from the doorway for some minutes, as the operator detached itself stage by stage, interface by interface. Eventually there was a kind of muffled sigh, almost of relief, and everything went dark.

By then, Vic Serotonin, heading east again, had crossed the lagoon bridge into the tourist port, where he entered a bar called The World of Today. He had them bring him a bottle of Black Heart to take out; then changed his mind, sat down in one of the booths and ordered a meal. While he was eating he dialled up his account. As soon as he saw how much the sale of the artefact had grossed him, he pushed his plate away. He had lost his appetite.

“I’ll take the bottle after all,” he told the barman.

Vic knew he wouldn’t keep his luck. Money like that, his experience told him, has luck of its own. Money like that doesn’t care about you, you should never get involved with money like that. Less than ten steps out of The World of Today he was kerb-crawled by a pink Cadillac convertible digitally revisioned to co-ordinate with the streamline moderne revival popular just then in some Saudade circles. He was as familiar with this car as any other travel agent. It belonged to Lens Aschemann, known to Vic as a high-up in Site Crime; a man who resembled the older Albert Einstein, and whose mild manners and unwearying persistence were a legend from the very beginnings of artefact policing in Saudade. Aschemann had seen them come and go, from Emil Bonaventure onwards. He took the pipe out of his mouth and smiled.

“Hey, Vic,” he called, “is that you?”

Vic stopped.

The Cadillac stopped too. “You know it’s me,” Vic said.

“Vic, get in, we’ll drive.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a pity to waste this beautiful car.”

Vic, who expected Aschemann to come with a team, was trying to look everywhere at once, up and down the street, back into the bar, inside the car. The street was empty. It was coming on to rain again, just enough to lacquer the sidewalk. Aschemann’s driver proved to be a woman who gave Vic a smile like salt, which Vic returned. Her face was lighted from complex angles in two or three different registers, by the dashboard, the neon, the splashout from The World of Today doorway: but he could see she had good tailoring and blonde hair cropped down to nothing much. She switched the engine off, got out of the car and came quickly round the trunk towards him. She was substantially taller than Aschemann, which you would expect, and built. Some kind of datableed ran oriental-looking ideograms down the inside of her arm.

“We asked you to get in the car,” she said.

Vic made a very small motion of one shoulder. This seemed to be as far as it could go at that time. They regarded one another frankly until the passenger door of the Cadillac swung open. Lens Aschemann bustled on to the sidewalk, breathing heavily and fussing with his raincoat.

“Wait!” he ordered his assistant. “I’m afraid of what you’ll do.”

He patted her arm. “Calm down,” he told her. Then, to Vic, “We can talk here.”

“I thought that would prove possible,” Vic Serotonin said.

“In this bar if you want, or just here on the pavement,” the detective assured him. “We can talk. Sit in the car,” he urged his assistant. “Go on. Really, it’s fine. You can do that, because Vic would never be a problem to us. Vic, convince her you would never be a problem!”

Vic smiled.

“You’re safe with me,” he told the woman.

“Vic, she could swallow you with a glass of water. Behave! You should see what they did to her reflexes.”

“I know I’d be impressed.”

The woman lifted one side of her mouth at Vic and went back round to the driver door. “You’re like dogs, you young people,” Aschemann called after her. “I wonder you live until you’re thirty.” He put his arm round Vic’s shoulders. “I know I’m getting old, Vic. I dreamed a mandala last night. It was simple, very simple. Just four or five concentric circles, quite compulsive to watch. They were silver in colour.”

“That’s very interesting,” Vic said.

Aschemann looked hurt. “Vic, you’ve got a moment to listen to me. The mandala, it’s a sign you’re changing for the better, as a human being. You’re accepting a good orderly move from one big room of your life to the next.”

“Is that what they say?”

“It is. So I’m pleased with my progress. Maybe I’ll retire happy.”

Serotonin held the Black Heart bottle up to the light.

“I must be doing well too,” he said. “I’ve seen something like that at the bottom of every one of these.”

Aschemann gave a short laugh.

“You’re too clever for me. But look!” He used the stem of his pipe to indicate the Kefahuchi Tract, which lay draped across the night sky of Saudade like a string of bad jewels. “I used to dream of that,” he said with a shudder. “Night after night, when I was young. You can’t get change less ordered. Look at it, so raw and meaningless! The wrong physics, they say, loose in the universe. Do you understand that? I don’t.” He tapped Vic’s forearm, as if he thought Vic hadn’t got the point, or as if he wasn’t entirely sure he had Vic’s attention. “Now it’s loose down here too. We have no idea what goes on in the event site. But whatever comes out,” he said, “
I
have to deal with the consequences.”

Vic couldn’t think how to answer, so he said nothing.

This only seemed to confirm whatever the detective was thinking, because he shook his head, turned his back and got into the Cadillac, where he sat fussing with his raincoat and pipe. “Do me a favour, Vic,” he asked in a remote voice, “and shut this door for me.” When Vic had done that, he went on, “You’re a tour operator, that’s fine. Unless you force it under my nose I can’t be bothered with a little traffic of that kind.” He shrugged. “Under normal circumstances, get in bed with Paulie DeRaad and that’s your loss too. It’s between you and him; why should I be interested? But whatever you and Paulie are up to at the Café Surf is new.”

Vic had never heard of the Café Surf.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Vic, if you’re smuggling out some new kind of artefact it will be the end of you, I promise.”

“I never heard of this place!” Vic said.

But Aschemann had already turned to his driver and was saying something Serotonin couldn’t hear. She replied, and they laughed together. They were a weird pair. Her eyes refocused for a moment, becoming flat, reflective and mysterious in the rain-wet light; the datastream pulsed energetically up and down her arm. She gave Vic a last smile, a louche, amused salute as if to say she would see him again soon. Then she fired up the engine and let it draw the Cadillac slowly from the kerb.

“Hey, Vic?” Aschemann called over his shoulder as the car moved off. “Give my love to Emil Bonaventure next time you see him. Say hello to Emil for me!”

“Well then, what do you think?” Aschemann asked his assistant.

They sat in the warm faux-leather smell of the car, streetlight flickering regularly across their faces. Her hands rested on the wheel. Her feet rested on the pedals. She had a purposive manner, Aschemann had already noted, with anything like that.

“You know him better than I do,” she said at length.

“It’s clever of you to see that. Is there more?”

“If anything, he seemed surprised.”

“That’s our Vic,” the detective said, “always surprised.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” She looked ahead at the empty street. Aschemann gave her time to say more if she wanted to, then smiled to himself. After a moment he made a business of extracting a match from his Café Surf matchbook; pulled open the ashtray, which released a stale smell and put the match in there without lighting it.

“You know he could have hurt you,” he said.

It was her turn to smile. “You shouldn’t worry about me,” she assured him. A career in Sport Crime, she said, gave you access to chops the civilian tailors never saw. That was just one of the professional benefits it conferred.