M. Harrison - Nova Swing

He was able to accept that. He lay there a long time. Night replaced day replaced night. Equally regular pulses of change propagated through the ground beneath him. From upslope, close and comforting, could always be heard the sounds of a lively evening at the Long Bar. He was content; but the smart ad, which had accompanied him thus far without demur, grew increasingly anxious. You can have the pe[nis] of yOur dre ams, it suggested, and: Call out Gouranga be happy. It roamed upslope and down, straying further and further away, fading to the ghostly blue and orange of burning alcohol; a marsh light as lost as its victim, an ignis fatuus in reverse.

Finally it gave up on him and drifted off.

"Send me a sign," Aschemann called. "Seek me inside." This made him chuckle. On balance he felt more sympathy for the ad than he did for himself. "Send me a neon heart."

This made him think about his crime. About his wife, expecting everyone to come to her in her minotaur's cave; about the Marilyn Monroe look-alike, going out along the high wire from her room to everyone. He thought about the damp sand at the back of the Cafe Surf, squeezed together daily by the implacable shaping forces of the Long Bar-improvisation, iconolatry and red light- to make new inhabitants for the city. What if he were part of that cycle too? Later he told himself in surprise: "Aschemann, I think you're dying!" He felt enlarged-swollen, but not exactly sick. Some time on the third, or perhaps the fourth day, he looked down at himself and saw the lower part of his legs dissolving into thousands of bright, energetic white sparks. He felt no pain. Despite that-and though no sound accompanied the process-he had a lively sense of himself as part of the entertainment. He was fizzing and crackling into the dark like a firework. He wondered what would happen when the fire reached his cock. The sparks blew away uphill on a light breeze, and out over the lip of the cliff, where they rained down, he could only suppose, on to the Cafe Surf two-piece under its sign Live Music Nightly. His legs had plenty in reserve. They went on pouring out the benefit in them as sparks and illuminated smoke. They were certainly good value for money. Then he saw his wife toiling up the slope towards him at last, waving and smiling across the wasteland. She was calling his name. She had on the yellow silk dress he remembered so well. No shoes.

"Aschemann, is that you?" she called. "Is that you? Aschemann, always something new! You'll never change!"

What if there was no new species, after all, only the same old one trapped in its same old circularity of reinvention? Would some fresher version of himself soon be staggering down the Corniche away from the Cafe Surf, singing, full of appetites, ready to be amazed? Or had that already happened?

What if we're all code?

"Utzie, hurry!" he called. "Hurry, or I'll be gone before you get here!"

He was glad to have been alive.

In subsequent weeks, better weather came to Saudade. The dogs of April raced up and down Straint Street from the site to the sea, rattling the boarded-up windows. Above, the sky was bluer than usual, wider and emptier than the buildings would seem to permit. You could smell the ocean. People had a feeling of energy and wanting to be outside. In the New Men warrens, they aired the bedding. Even the chopshops opened their doors, giving sidelong views of matt-black internal walls, dusty shoot-up posters, out-of-guarantee proteome tanks crawling with LEDs and smart readouts; while the tailors played Three Dick Hughie on the pavement or showed off their chops to a passing Mona.

Black Cat White Cat was not exempt from this change of habit: Liv Hula declared a holiday. First she went upstairs.

In the tin box she had used to smash the princess sink, among all the other junk of being forty years old, she kept a cheap hologram which related some of her exploits before she arrived in Saudade, the voiceover of which began, "Liv Hula was mediated Halo-wide after she dived her flimsy dipship, the Saucy Sal, five thousand kilometres into the photosphere of France Chance IV." A long, almost documentary item, it went on in that vein for a full ninety seconds, over images of Liv as a child, Liv as a teenage rocket-sport bum in the bar of the Venice Hotel on France Chance; then a sequence of the ship, if you could call anything that small a ship, the paint job fried right off it, cooling in the parking orbit. They had most of it wrong. Saucy Sal wasn't a dip, for instance: she was the first of the true hyperdips, with a lot of subtle magnetic field action and some kind of hot alien sponge-carbon hull. But they had footage of Liv being hugged by Chinese Ed himself, who she beat to that particular achievement, which was nice if only because Ed-tall and undependable, with the usual Halo tan and associated burden of debt-was acknowledged a dipship legend in his own time. The record didn't hold long, she never expected it to; but, "Go deep!" they had shouted for the cameras, her and Chinese Ed, pilots of the future gurning out at the Halo together, rocket-sport being so fully hot at the time, and all of that made the trip worth it. How do you get rid of a hologram? Liv, who never invested in a gadget patch, didn't even know what they were made of. She decided to throw it in the sea.

She shut the box and then the bar and walked down Straint to the noncorporate port, where she stood for a while in the rim of thick, silky weeds by the chainlink fence in the morning light in her black wraparounds, watching the rockets come and go; then caught a rickshaw the rest of the way to the beach.

"You don't want the Vientiale," the rickshaw girl warned her. "It's wall-to-wall. It's crawling."

"Maybe I want crawling."

"You don't."

Monster Beach was wall-to-wall too: after a glance at the rammed fish restaurants and boardwalk amusements, the shoals of beautifully turned-out Monas, the famous sign pointing not to the sand but crazily upwards at the parking orbit, she had the girl take her to the Point end of the bay. There she could get down to her white singlet and black boy-leg underpants and watch children running in and out of the tide. She played the hologram again. You couldn't tell what she was thinking when she watched it. Her haircuts were just as short in those days, only in bad colours. She gazed out to sea. She ate an ice cream. She picked up a man. The way that happened, she was walking back empty-handed from the ocean, feeling suddenly light and needing something to hold her down. He was a lot younger than her, with a sweet, candid smile, bleached-out yellow hair and a neat triangular tuft of beard under the lower lip. Maybe, he suggested, she would like an ice.

"That's such a good idea," she said. "But I'll buy."

While they were walking along eating the ices, he said, "Sun and shade sometimes seem like equal things? Both, in a way, kind of illuminating? And both so ungrudging?"

"I've often thought that," Liv said.

She took him back to the bar anyway. Late afternoon he said tentatively, "I've seen you somewhere before. Are you someone?"

"It's 2444. We're all someone."

Up in her room, he stared at the broken sink. She could see him trying to find a way of asking about it. The middle of the night, Liv woke and couldn't get back to sleep. She looked down at his body, the colour of honey and just this side of beautiful. Really, he seemed a lot too young for the sex subtleties he knew. It was probably a chop anyone could get these days. After she thought this over she got up and went down to the bar, where she wrote out a rough sign, FOR SALE, and propped it in the window, low down on the right-hand side. When she got back upstairs, the boy was awake and on his feet. He was worrying about the sink again.