M. Harrison: Nova Swing

Later, when Antoyne came and tried to make conversation with her, she gave him the full benefit of her looks. He bought her a drink which settled out the same colours as her skirt, pink and yellow, and which he said they drank on some dumb planet he knew fifty lights down the line.

"I been there, Fat Antoyne," she told him with a sad smile.

That original Irene, she thought, wasn't good at being on her own. She would sit on the bed one place or another, listening to the rain and trying to hold herself together. On the other hand, she never lacked ambition. The stars of the Halo were like one big neon sign to her. The sign said: All the shoes you can eat. When she bought the Mona package, the tailor promised her hair would always smell of peppermint shampoo. She had gone through the catalogues, and that was what she wanted, and the tailor designed it in. On the Saudade streets it was her big selling point.

"I been there," she told Antoyne, letting him get the peppermint smell, "and just now I'm glad to meet someone else who's been there too."

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 Cafe 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 Cafe Surf had two rooms. These were known respectively as the Long and Short bars, the latter being notable for a strictly drink amp; 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 decor 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 Cafe Surf two-piece-keyboard and tenor saxophone-ambled its way through the evening's middle set.