M. Harrison - Nova Swing

"I never saw a thing so beautiful!"

Five-thirty a.m., two or three days after Antoyne Messner called in at Liv Hula's bar. The gates were already unlocked. Buyers were already out, craning their necks, pointing upward, resembling from a distance the little accurate figures inserted to provide scale in an architectural model. Pale strong light bleached the machine sheds and peeling moderne administration block. All that month Carver had sported a crop of alien weeds, silky, poppy-looking copper-coloured blossoms forcing their way up through the concrete, going strong in the light of this to-them distant sun.

Irene the Mona, box-fresh in metallic linen bolero with matching shorts and transparent sidebutton ankle-boots, glanced sideways at her companion. Hints of anxiety touched her little mouth.

"7s it beautiful, Antoyne?" she said.

The ship looked no different than a hundred others. Its hull was just as shot. Its three-fin tail and outboard reactor casings were streaked with just as much birdshit and re-entry stains. But Antoyne and Irene had read in the catalogue that it had carried out many years' efficient service under the livery of the famous circus and alien show, Sandra Shen's Observatorium amp; Native Karma Plant; they were impressed. The story was this, Madame Shen had not been heard of for many years. A man called Renoko now looked after the circus, stripping its assets from an office on some planet light-years down the Beach. So here the ship was, the usual tramp freighter past its best and renamed a dozen times, already warming up for take-off in Antoyne Messner's mind. He felt the tremble in the tips of its fins. He felt the mystery of it. The oily pre-flight roll of the Dynaflow drivers rose up to him from somewhere below deck, causing, for the millionth time, the hair to rise on the back of his neck.

Beautiful, Antoyne didn't know. He had, he said, no remit for beautiful. "This here looks like a good workaday unit," he told Irene, "though for that it is priced a little high."

Irene saw right through him and out the other side.

If you understood ships like these, Antoyne had often said to her, this was how your CV could be expected to run:

At thirteen you lived on an orbital factory. Or a farm planet with infinite horizons and no room for you anywhere. Or you lived in a port city which stank of the outright bizarreness of things and made you raw all your childhood with… what? Delight. Anticipation. The desire to escape. The desire to know. Thirteen years of age, you looked older. You were a girl, you were a boy, your gender was indeterminate. You were pressganged by EMC. Or you met a salvage expert from Nueva Cardoso. You loved her instantly for the sheer breadth of stuff she knew; also her alien smut tattoos and neat prosthetic arm. She made you an offer and that's how you came to ride the rockets. You flew with Fedy von Gang, you flew with Chinese Ed. You spent five years in a research tub at Radio RX-1 with the Kefahuchi Tract hanging over your shoulder like a huge boiling face, stripped, raw, heaving with some emotion you couldn't recognise. It's been fun. It's been heartbreak all the way. It's never been less than a trip.

Whose story was he telling when he said these things?

Irene thought she knew. "Antoyne," she felt bound to remind him now, "I'm beautiful, and you understood enough to find your way to me through this life."

"Anyway," Antoyne said, "we got to wait to find out more."

They didn't wait long. Soon enough, Liv Hula threaded her way across the crowded field to find them. She checked out the gathered ships, and had the air of someone in her own world. For a moment they thought she would walk right past, and when Antoyne called her name, she seemed surprised to hear it. A bar-keep always looks vulnerable away from the bar. Liv Hula, it was the Mona's opinion, seemed often too defensive in her personal presentation; yet when Liv considered that ship-its ripe-avocado geometry, its hull blackened by tail-down landings from Motel Splendido to the Core-she certainly was business itself.

"It's a dog," she said.

Antoyne chuckled. "Go inside," he invited, "tell me something I don't know."

The ship smelled of old food, sweat, Black Heart. It smelled of refugees, contraband, animal shows. It had the air of a place just vacated. Liv Hula wasn't sure how she felt about being there alone. Her footsteps filled the dimly lighted hull, then echoed out past it and into some other kind of space. Shadow operators, clustered round the portholes like tourists, whispered and touched one another as she passed. The air in there was colder than outside. Liv found the dusty pilot seat and sat in it. At the sound of her voice the equipment dialled itself up. Direct connexions made themselves available, in the form of a nanofibre mass.

Liv said, "Accept."

She sat back and gaped. The system grew itself deftly through the soft roof of her mouth and into her brain.

This used to be her profession. A sun-diver like the Saucy Sal was more mathematics than substance. It didn't really know what to be, and without an active pilot interface would revert instantly to a slurry of nanotech and smart carbon components, a few collapsing magnetic fields. It was in the class of emergent artefacts, a neurosis with an engine. You don't so much fly your hyperdip as nurse it through a programme of dynamic self-reinvention. You have to tell it a story about itself. Long before she went deep at France Chance-which in a sense ended her career because she never matched that achievement but just did the rocket-sport circuit like anyone else-Liv bought the best chops you could get for that kind of work. So now there was a disconnected moment when she wasn't even Liv Hula but some New Venusport code monkey, then she was all over the freighter's mathematics like a life coach.

"So then. What can you tell me about yourself?"

Navigational holograms, dull. Star charts and fakebooks, dull. Fifty years of cargo manifests, agency fuel purchases and parking orbit stamps, dull, dull, dull. Main dealer service record (none). Infrastructure schematics. Cabins and crew quarters. Holds (empty); fuel tanks, empty, empty. The mathematics could show her a view of Carver Field, on which she easily discerned the little architectural figures she knew as Irene and Antoyne. It could even show her, via proxies and an ageing FTL uplinker, and for reasons unclear, realtime images of selected parking orbits from three to a thousand lights along the Beach.

Liv viewed all this without sympathy.

"I don't know why you're so shy," she said. "You've got nothing I haven't seen before."

She waited a nanosecond, then added:

"What I'm already reading here, just in this short time, you have the most extraordinary qualities if you would only let people know about them. You won't mind me saying this, but somehow you've forgotten that it's all about you. And about presenting yourself."

Twenty minutes later, a little nauseous, a little nostalgic, she was blinking in the sunshine again.

"I need breakfast," she said, and took her friends back to Straint Street, where she made a relaxing rum no ice for herself and their favourite cocktail drink for Irene and Antoyne. Then she sat across a table and laid out the information Antoyne had paid to hear; also the benefit of her experience for what that was worth. "You got fifty years of guano in there," she advised him, "but what's new? Also they used the code to run something my chops don't get, some type of alien bolt-on. Maybe, and this is weird, I admit, some kind of an outboard motor?" The concept caused her to look perplexed for a moment, after which she made a gesture of who knows anything, this world we're in? "Whatever it was, it's not there right now, so I don't think you need worry about it. Otherwise the ship's clean. Navigation tools don't leak. Good hygiene, given its age. The code itself? Pussy for me, but not for some. Antoyne, you will have to upgrade, or one night wake up with it crawling into your nose."