M. Harrison: Nova Swing

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 Cafe 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, Anais-Anais 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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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:

"Antoyne? Maybe you don't recognise me. Maybe in this light you don't see me as well as you could."

"I know who you are," Antoyne said.

Aschemann smiled. "I would usually find you at Liv Hula's this time of night, caning it with Vic Serotonin."