M. Harrison - Nova Swing

After a moment she stepped primly round the hole in the floor and joined him, and they stared across at the event site. You were never sure what you were looking at. Beyond the wire, beyond the remains of the original wall, with its fallen observation towers, prismatic light struck off the edges of things. There was a constant sense of upheaval. Loud tolling noises, as of enormous girders falling, or the screech of overdriven machinery, competed with the sudden hum of an ordinary wasp, amplified a million times. It was like a parody of the original function of the place. But also there were snatches of popular songs, running into one another like a radio being tuned through some simple rheostat. You smelled oil, ice cream, garbage, birchwoods in winter. You heard a baby crying, or something clatter at the end of a street-it was like a memory, but not quite. Sudden eruptions of light; dense, artificial-looking pink and purple bars and wheels of light; birds flying home against sunsets and other sweet momentary transitions between states of light. Then you saw things being tossed into the air, what looked like a hundred miles away. Scale and perspective were impossible to achieve because these objects, toppling over and over in a kind of slow motion-or so the eye assumed-were domestic items a hundred times too large and from another age, ironing boards, milk bottles, plastic cups and saucers. They were too large, and too graphic, drawn in flat pastel colours with minimal indication of shape, capable of liquid transformation while you watched. Or they were too small, and had a hyper-real photographic quality, as if they had been clipped from one of the lifestyle-porn magazines of Ancient Earth: individual buildings, bridges, white multi-hull sailing ships, then a complete city skyline toppling across as if it had been tossed up among flocks of green parrots, iron artillery wheels, tallboys, a colander and a toy train running around a toy track. Everything in a different style of mediation. Everything generating a brief norm, reframing everything else. At that time, in that instant of watching and listening, in a moment savagely and perfectly incapable of interpretation, they were all the things that fly up out of a life, maybe your own, maybe someone else's you were watching. Day to day, you might have more or less of a sense that the things you saw were describable as "real." In fact, that wasn't a distinction you needed to make until you crossed inside.

Vic Serotonin felt nothing but relief each time he arrived at the Lots. At this point you weren't committed, you could always turn around and go home. But it was another chance to engage, and as a result a kind of peace went through you. You felt stabilised again. You felt both excited and relaxed.

"It's quiet today," he said.

Elizabeth smiled uncertainly. "This is awful," she whispered. "I can't bear this."

"Will you be able to do it this time?"

"I can't bear not to."

"Well then," he said, "we should start."

He went to the door calm and happy, but when he looked back she was still at the window. "This is the right time to go," Vic encouraged her. When he took her by the shoulders, though, there was that tautness so permanent, so designed-in, so far down in her it was like touching some stretched internal membrane and pausing to wonder what you would do next. Elizabeth seemed to understand this. Caught between Vic and the window, she twisted into him; pulled his face towards hers and bit him sharply. "Fuck," Vic said. He let her go and put his hand to his cheek. She knelt down, worrying inefficiently at his clothes, then her own. "Yes," she said, "fuck. Fuck. Get in me, Vic," she said. "I want something to take in with me."

He stared at her.

"Christ, Vic, don't you see? Fuck me while I look at it."

That was how the man who resembled Albert Einstein found them. He arrived in the doorway-excited from driving his Cadillac, a little out of breath from the stairs-and remarked to his assistant, who was standing next to him giving Vic her flat smile:

"They're hot, these two. I never saw two this hot."

"We're always getting lots of Vic on Elizabeth action," she agreed. "Lots of girl on girl."

Vic reached for his Chambers pistol: the assistant's tailoring, which had reactions down in the millisecond range, turned itself on in response: there was a blur of motion from her, during which she seemed to be in several places at once, and then an actinic flash, in the aftermath of which nothing much could be seen at all except Aschemann by the door looking old, white-faced, perplexed; and Elizabeth Kielar, who jumped neatly into the hole in the floor and vanished, only to reappear a little later sprinting and weaving across the Lots towards the site boundary. Aschemann's assistant strode calmly to the window and began to shoot at her. Chambers bolts curved slowly down through the rain, making a noise like defective neon and setting fire to the thin vegetation.

"Stop that," Aschemann said. His voice tones shut down the assistant's tailoring and she stared at him angrily.

"You see?" he appealed to Vic.

"Yes," Vic said. Something had happened to his arm; it was tnumb to the shoulder and he hadn't even seen her move. "Vic, I told you she could drink you with a glass of water!" Vic rested on the floor. He stared out the window. He'd been arrested before, but he had no dependable sense of what would happen next. Meanwhile Elizabeth Kielar was nowhere to be seen. Fuck me while I look at it. In the end that was what most of his clients wanted. They never got any further than the Lots. They had sex with you in open view of the thing out there-as if that was how they understood it; not as a state of affairs but as a live thing, perhaps even a conscious thing, they wanted it to be watching when they came-and then didn't speak on the way back. It was just a choice that made life more interesting. Vic wouldn't say he made his living from that impulse, or that he had any opinion about it; but the risk was lessened for everyone when that was what the client wanted. Though her resources were in disarray, he didn't think it was like that with Elizabeth Kielar; and he was beginning to regret how little he had discovered about her sense of herself.

They took Vic out on to the Lots and put him in the back of the pink '52 Cadillac repro while Aschemann sat in the front and lit his pipe. At the same time the detective got a dial-up to the police bureau. "It's no problem," he said, shaking out a match, pulling open the dashboard ashtray, smiling and nodding at Vic. "The weather's more of a problem this morning. He's here, he's fine, we kept him in one piece. No, that's other business." While Aschemann was talking, the assistant walked impatiently up and down outside the car. Every so often she stopped and peered across at the event site, as if she had seen something no one else could. The outline of her body rippled a little as her tailoring, pumped and excitable from its encounter with Vic, cut in and out; the data-bleed ran red and green pictographs interspersed with jet-black oriental-looking characters in rows down her forearm. She leaned into the car and smiled amiably in Vic's face, as if she would like to start a conversation.

"Vic," she said, "what I've got switches offwhat you've got. Do you follow? That's why your arm hurts so."

"Go and look for his client," Aschemann ordered.

Vic said, "Her name's Elizabeth. She's nervous; it might make her difficult. Please try not to shoot her for that." The assistant glared at him, then down at her datableed. Then she jogged off through the rain.

"Don't go in the site," Aschemann called after her.

He examined the bowl of his pipe, then-as if they were of equal value in a wider context-turned his attention to the event site. Something vast and orange-coloured flew up into the air, but you could barely see it through the rain. It hung there for a moment then folded itself sectionally until it disappeared. The whole incident was over in forty seconds, and there was no way of describing the accompanying noise. Aschemann watched with a kind of calm approval. "A slow day today," he said. "A few hours ago, it was quite different. Down by the Cafe Surf, it bowled me over." He seemed delighted by the memory. "Literally, physically. Our friend Antoyne too. Today, I think a wave is coming, nothing happens."