M. Harrison - Nova Swing

Lens Aschemann sighed. "Who'll save us from the machines, Vic?" he asked.

No answer. The driver's door swung open in the wind.

Paulie DeRaad's rickshaw girl had watched all this from a couple of hundred yards away on the city side of the Lots.

She didn't know what to make of it. She wasn't prepared to say it was the grossest or most interesting thing she'd ever seen, because here in 2444AD, everyone saw new things all the time. "And when you pull for a living," she remarked to her fare, "you see it all." In this case, "all" meant bodies were scattered over the Lots. White, thick, gritty smoke was still going up from the crashed vehicle. Two small figures-kiddies, you'd say-were helping each other crawl away. She wasn't sure what happened to Paulie DeRaad, though he didn't look well when she last saw him.

One thing: a breeze had got up for a change, so maybe they could look forward to better weather. Another: as the K-ship took off on its line of light like a crack right across the solidity of things, a figure in a black watch cap was sprinting away from the Cadillac. It was the guy Vic who she had talked to. "He can run, that guy," she was forced to admit. "He has a nice action if he would train a little. Or, easier, he could get a package." The rain turned to sleet as it moved away to the west, which briefly made visibility even poorer than before; but she could see he had his bag over his shoulder and his gun in his hand. After a minute or two, the Cadillac's engine started and it rolled slowly over the concrete as if it would follow him. But they never got out of first gear and soon drifted to a halt. Shouting came from inside, some kind of disagreement was in progress. The driver's door opened and a woman got out. Then she got back in again and slammed the door. Vic Serotonin put the Baltic Exchange between him and the Cadillac and disappeared into the event site. Don't blame me, the rickshaw girl thought. I offered the guy a lift.

"Did you see that?" she said. "He went the wrong way."

The fare, who had something wrong with his voice to add to his troubles, made a noise like three notes of music played at the same time. "Moths mated to foxes," he said, "fluttering into their faces in the desert air." He laughed. A few dim motes of light issued from under the rickshaw hood to join its shoal of sponsor ads. "The faces of the foxes are like flowers to them, they circle closer." The Annie shrugged. Some fares wanted your input, some didn't. That was another thing you learned.

"Hey, are we going to haul?" she wanted to know. "Because we got no business here."

"Let's haul," said the three voices, one after another.

"It's your ride, hon."

She took one more look at the pink Cadillac and sighed. That sure was her favourite car. With its subtle paint blends and frenched tail lights, it had been the best part of her day so far. "I'd just once like to be that pretty," she told herself. Then she turned the rickshaw around and trotted off towards Saudade at a steady pace. "Don't you worry," she reassured the Point kid. "I know where they kept you."

"Let's haul."

Liv Hula's room had a blush-pink princess washbasin on the wall opposite the door.

You walked in, and on the right was the white-painted iron bed with its clean oatmeal-coloured throw and its plain wood blanket chest at the foot. Facing that was the window, which had a view over sloping ground, across wet rooftops, lines of narrow streets, pokey yards, to factories and a narrow segment of the event site.

In front of you would be the washbasin mirror, about eighteen inches square, chipped halfway down one bevelled edge; and below that the washbasin itself, shaped and fluted like a clamshell, with its piece of lavender soap and single coldwater tap. In the basin beneath the tap a permanent limescale stain had been artfully added at the point of manufacture, tadpole-shaped, but the crusty greyish-yellow colour of the sole of a foot. Liv owned plenty of other things, but if she asked you up there with her, that was the item you noticed, and it was so ugly you wouldn't understand why she chose it. When she arrived in Saudade, the room had been her bulwark against all the Liv Hulas she had already been. She would shut the door and look in the washbasin mirror and smile, while the cheap repro tap ran cold water on any previous idea of herself.

Liv stayed out in the street long after Vic Serotonin and his client had disappeared. Every so often she stood on her toes and craned her neck because she thought she had seen them again in the distance. It was as if the two of them were still moving away from her in a straight line, so all she needed to do was to resolve them, detach their image somehow from the background with which it had merged. After perhaps an hour, the sun came out. The traffic increased on Straint. Then a thick white plume of smoke began to rise from somewhere in the aureole a point or two to the north, and Liv's uncertainty gave way to dullness.

I can't stay here forever, she thought. I can't stand in the street like this. But she didn't want to be in the bar either. It was too early to have a drink. If she stayed in the bar, she would only clean the counter and count the bottles. So she went up to her room instead, and tried to wrench the washbasin off the wall.

Dust sifted down. The basin made a cracking noise and pulled away a little. But the pipework held it in place; so, even though what her muscles needed was to feel it tear loose by their unaided effort, she went to look for something to help her break it up. About then she heard the long sonic boom of an ascending K-ship, thunder which seemed to roll all the way round the world and meet itself coming the other way. She glimpsed the ship through the window. It was gone so quickly! A line of light across everything, then only the afterimage downshifting from violet to purple then black, flickering up again, bright sharp neon-green as she blinked, then dimming away for good. Liv Hula's eyes followed it thoughtfully. She strode over to her bed and stripped the bedclothes. She opened the window and tossed them out into the air, where a breeze caught them so that they ballooned and folded and sideslipped as they fell. Then she went back to the sink and wrenched and wrenched at it. Nothing, except she could see herself in the mirror, red face, shoulders pumped.

Under the bed she kept a heavy tin box, enamelled black, with gypsy-looking red and yellow hand-painted roses. This she hauled out, and used it to bang at the washbasin until the washbasin shattered into three large pieces, two of which fell off the wall. Only then did she go and sit on the bed and look around her angrily. The box stayed where it had fallen. For the moment she couldn't remember where she had put the key to it. She sat there until the morning was over.

Vic Serotonin arrived at the abandoned checkpoint on the edge of the Lots. He'd heard Aschemann's Cadillac start up behind him, then stop again. He knew he was safe. Whatever happened to him next, he could forget all that. He followed the fence a hundred yards north to where houses had collapsed across it from inside the site, leaving a steep shingle of bricks and broken tile thinly grown with local weeds. The interface mist closed round him, damp and absorbent. He stood still. Just the other side of things, he could hear water drip; further off, the rhythmic banging of a door in the wind. He smiled, closed his eyes and pushed his face forward as if to receive air kisses. Gentle pressure on cheekbones and lips, as if they were stretching some membrane; it felt cool like the mist.

Perception of a state is not the state.

The phenomenology of the site, Emil Bonaventure had often reminded him, as if Vic needed reminding, was this: what could be observed from the outside, you rarely encountered inside; inside or out, what could be seen or smelled or tasted bore no relationship to physics data collected by EMC's many expensive orbital assets. As a consequence-for Vic as for Emil and all those earlier Saudade entradistas with their particle guns, their scars and their easy air of knowing something no one else knew-the moment of transition was the moment of maximum uncertainty, maximum payback. That was the rush for him, Vic was ever willing to admit: but it was not a simple one, and you could not write it off entirely to body chemicals or temperament (although on any given day both might be involved). Neither was it the kind of rush people experience from contemplating possible injury, madness, death or sudden personal disfigurement (although a proportion of those things might easily happen to you inside); because, this being 2444, consequences always seemed negotiable-in fact reusable to a degree.