M. Harrison: Nova Swing

She gave him a look from the side of her eye.

"Oh ho," Aschemann said. "Now I'm irritating you."

"I can't believe you're so undisturbed. I can't believe you're not angry."

"I'm angry," he said, "but not with you."

He allowed her to absorb that; then, to change the subject, began telling her about the killings at the noncorporate port. Called to the scene of the original crime some years before, he had discovered two lines of a poem tattooed in the armpit of the victim: Send me a neon heart/Unarmed with a walk like a girl. "She was a Mona from five lights down the Beach. The usual juvenile in box-fresh urethane shoes. This tattoo was unique," he said, "in that it was not smart. It was just ink, driven into the skin by some antique process. Forensic investigation later proved it to have been made after the heart stopped beating, in the style of an artist now dead but popular a year or two before."

"Is that possible?" his assistant wanted to know.

Aschemann, who had been trying to light his pipe, threw another spent match out of the Cadillac. "Look around you," he advised her. "In the middle of the city we're less than two miles from the event aureole. No one is certain what happened in there.

Anything is possible. What if crimes are motiveless now, whipped off the crest of events like spray, with no more cause than that?"

"A surprisingly poetic idea," she said. "But the murders?"

The man who looked like Einstein smiled to himself. "Maybe I'll tell you more later, when you learn to ask better questions."

"I think we're here."

The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf was full of fractured sunlight and bright air. Sand blew across the floor from the open door; the staff were sleepy and vague. Someone's toddler crawled about between the cane tables wearing only a T-shirt bearing the legend SURF NOIR. Meanings-all incongruous-splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a "world" implied in two words, dispelled in an instant; which is foam on the appalling multi-textual sea we drift on. "Which is probably," Aschemann noted, "the name of an aftershave."

He beamed down at the toddler, which burst into tears. "Show us the toilets," he heard his assistant demanding at the bar.

They skirted the dais and went through the doorway. Thereafter the floors were checkerboard black and white linoleum, the walls papered red and enlivened at intervals with reproductions of the poster art of Ancient Earth. There was a smell of urine, but that was artificial. Smart grafitti made the usual promises and demands- size, weight, preferred metabolic disorder. "A toilet is a toilet," Aschemann concluded shortly, "though these could be less contemporary. Nothing is here."

She looked at him in surprise.

"You're wrong."

"Suddenly I'm the assistant," he complained.

"I can feel something." She tilted her head as if listening. "No. The code can feel something. We should get an operator in here."

"I don't work with an operator."

"But-"

"That's all now," he insisted. "We go outside."

She shrugged. "Apparently this door is never closed."

A condemned pier awaited them out back. Rusty cast-iron pillars, forty feet high, marched out towards the distant water, the wet sand dimpled and weedy around their bases. Reflected sea-light flickered and wheeled across the rotten boards above. Somewhere between the pillars, the event aureole began. There would be no firm distinction. One moment you would be here, the next you would be on the other side. No warning, only a tangle of rusty wire which fell to powder at your touch. The Cafe Surf, you saw immediately, backed straight into the darkening greenish volume of it. You could hear the water lapping tentatively far out. You could hear other sounds less easy to describe, which to Aschemann sounded like children reciting something in a playground. The air was cold and soft. He bent down and squeezed some of the wet sand into a lump which he brought near his face.

"What do you think?" he heard his assistant say.

"I wonder they were allowed to build here," he answered. "I wonder there isn't more wire. I wonder if I ought to close them down now and not proceed any further with this farce." It was his responsibility after all. He dropped the handful of sand at her feet, where it fell apart easily and without a sound. "How far would you go in?" he asked her in return.

"Into the site?"

"I'm interested to know."

Even as they stood looking at one another, a wave passed through them. It went through Aschemann like a drop in temperature, and he saw for an instant the beach behind the Cafe Surf tipped ten degrees off the horizontal; and, falling softly through the air into the water, snow. A metal taste in his mouth-very quick, it was a memory of something-then snow, or something like it, whirled between the pillars, and through it he saw a row of houses fallen into disuse stretching away beneath the pier. Then a room, with more snow falling into it on some live thing he couldn't make out, he was close in and trying to back away, its head tilted to one side in the coy manner of a child asking a question. Human, or perhaps not.

At the height of the wave anyway, that was what he saw. An upper room papered with faded roses, open to the air. Something that might have been a child. But it was soon gone, and just as suddenly he found himself sitting down in the damp sand, listening, for what he didn't know, while his assistant bent over him to ask:

"Are you all right? What did you see?"

"Snow!" he said, looking up at her in a kind of desperation. He gripped her arm, but, imagining he could feel the data running through it under the skin, let go again immediately. "You saw something too? Can you confirm that? Snow on houses? I-"

But she had seen something else altogether.

"I was in the bottom of a narrow valley, very warm. Mosses grew on everything." She found herself standing in front of a building full of disused turbines. "It was a turbine hall, very old," she said, "by a river. It went back into darkness with arched windows either side. Great annular shapes. Spindles absolutely crimson with rust, laminated like choux pastry. Chalk marks. 6II/600rpm." This made her shiver. "They had put chalk marks on many surfaces," she said. The building was open to the sky. That was the only particular she would agree, a building open to the sky. "You looked up through the roof and saw the valley side going up and away to limestone knolls thick with vegetation. Light fell through at sharp angles onto the machinery. But it was very damp. Very humid-"

Aschemann tried to get up.

"I don't feel well. Can you help me?"

They stumbled along the beach and sat in his car.

"Do you want a drink?" he offered. He laughed shakily. "I would feel safer if I had a drink." She began to laugh too, but neither of them wanted to go back into the bar.

"It's only the aureole," she said.

Neither of them said anything else for five minutes. Then Aschemann went on to dial-up, with a request for increased surveillance on Vic Serotonin. "Well, do what you can, then," she heard him instruct whoever was at the other end. "What? No." He cut them off suddenly. "Always a problem," he complained. "The fact is," he admitted to her, "it may have been a mistake to go so easy on Fat Antoyne. He is the link between this and Vic."

"You can always pick him up again."

Instead of answering, Aschemann stared across at the Cafe Surf. "I feel braver now," he said. "How about you?"

She shrugged. She wasn't sure.

"If you're better now," he said, "go back to the office." He patted her arm. "Take this beautiful car, I'm feeling generous."