M. Harrison: Nova Swing

He felt embarrassed. The rickshaw girl, who had clambered out of the shafts and was rubbing down her legs with a pertex towel, seemed willing to forgive him. "Hey, I'm called Annie," she said. "Just like the rest of them, I guess. I mean, I know you didn't ask." Like all those Annies, she had opted for the extreme package. She was tailored up as big as a pony-with eighteen inches on Aschemann even when she stooped-and her damp candy-coloured lycra exuded a not-dissimilar reassuring smell. Cafe electrique and a malfunction of her onboard testosterone patch caused her to stamp about restlessly in a fog of her own perspiration. "Maybe you ought to go somewhere else?" she suggested. "Your wife being dead and all? This time of night I'll take you anywhere."

Aschemann said he would like to go back to Carmody.

He made a vague gesture towards the sea, which could be heard sucking meditatively at the sand behind the house. "It's nicer in the day," he said. "Really I just come here to think."

"Most people visit the chopshop and get a cultivar," the rickshaw girl observed. "They get back the person they love that way." She reinserted herself between the shafts, turned her vehicle round and faced it up the hill. "No one has to lose anyone now," she said. "I wonder why you don't do that, the way everyone does."

Aschemann often wondered too.

"She lived here on her own," he said. "She retreated." He wasn't sure how to expand on this. "With her it was drink, fuddled political principles, old emotional entanglements. Help only confused her."

Two or three times a week she had wanted to talk about their lives together, to find out what the weather was like where he was, discuss the view from her window or his. "You see that boat out in the Bay? Do you see it too? The blue one? What sort of boat is that?" Then she would encourage him: "Come over! I'll get the Black Heart Rum you like so much." He always said yes. But in the end he rarely had the courage or energy to make the visit, because if he did she would soon sigh and say, "We had such times together, before you took up with that whore from Carmody."

"At Christmas," he told the rickshaw girl, as the rickshaw slipped along between the ragmop palms and peeling pastel-coloured beach houses either side of Suntory Boulevard, "I bought her a perfume she liked called Ashes of Roses." The rest of the time he had tried to stay away. "I was no longer in a position to m. John Harrison look after her, yet she wouldn't look after herself. Because of this I felt not only guilt but an increasing sense of irritation."

"Ashes of Roses!" the rickshaw girl said. "No shit."

Thinking he heard voices back on the access road, he turned to look out the rear window. Sand was blowing across the concrete in the purple light. No one was there, not even the Point kids.

"Go back!" he said. Then: "I'm sorry."

The rickshaw girl shrugged.

"Hey," she said. "I don't care where you go."

After what had happened with his latest client, Vic Serotonin slept a lot. He slept as if he was dead, without any dreams. You spend time on the Saudade site, you don't dream. But you wake up feeling like hell and it gets worse all your life, just something else to look forward to, as Vic always said. The exertion of not dreaming drove you to a sweat.

Vic's home was a coldwater walk-up in South End which he inherited, along with his entree into the business, from a retired en-tradista and tour guide called Bonaventure. He had two rooms and a shower. He never cooked or ate there, though there was an induction stove and the place always smelled of old food. It smelled of old clothes too, old tenancies, years of dust; but it was close enough to the event aureole, which was his professional requirement. Vic slept on a bed, he sat in a chair, he shaved in a mirror; like anyone else he bought all those things at a repro franchise at the end of the road, the day he moved in. He kept his zip-up gabardine jackets and Inga Malink artisan shirts in a wardrobe from Earth, rose veneer over boxwood circa 1932AD, that far away, that long ago. Out one window he had a good view of a bridge; out the other it was a segment of the noncorporate spaceport, primarily weeds and chainlink fence.

Late one afternoon he got up, looked in his mirror and thought:

"Jesus, Vic."

Whatever happened had made him look fifty years old. He still had the taste you get in your mouth after you've been in there recently, and he was still seeing the client run away from him in the weird elongated dawn light. There was something in her panic, there was something in the way she ran: he couldn't remember what it was, but at least he wasn't angry any more.

Among the litter in the apartment Vic kept a Bakelite telephone with cloth-covered cables and a bell that rang. Everyone had one that year; Vic's was as cheap as everything else he owned. Just after he finished shaving, the bell rang and he got a call from a broker named Paulie DeRaad, which he was expecting. The call was short, and it prompted Vic to open a drawer, from which he took out two objects wrapped in rag. One was a gun. The other was harder to describe-Vic sat by the window in the fading light, unwrapping it thoughtfully. It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across the object's surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands. It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither.

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog, first moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was. It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn't know. He didn't want to know.

"Hey," he said into the telephone, "yeah, I got it. It's still here."

He listened for a moment. "Why would I let that happen?" he asked. Then he said OK and hung up. He wrapped the item in its rag and left the building with it. "I don't do this for love," he complained on his way downstairs, as if he was still talking to Paulie DeRaad. DeRaad, one-time vacuum commando, facilitator and all-round Earth Military Contracts factotum, ran a joint he called the Semiramide Club, the visible part of extensive holdings in which EMC subsidiaries were implicated to the hilt. Wait-and-see was Paulie's working pattern, safety first his motto; and in this case, he said, he preferred Vic to meet with one of his operators, who would check things out and only make the buy if the goods were good.

Vic wasn't sure who he liked least, Paulie or his operators. Nevertheless he went down through Moneytown to the ocean, and not long after he left home found himself at the Suicide Point end of the Corniche, waiting in the half-dark of a one-room cinder-block structure which might once have been a bar, or a place where you bought cheap finance with predictable consequences, but which now anyway had peeling walls, boarded windows, a signature of disuse. Advertisements for legal services flickered softly round the heads of the Point kids in gun-punk outfits who stood talking between the ragmop palms outside.

Vic waited inside, listening carefully, for some minutes. It seemed a long while before anything happened. Then the palm trees were agitated by a cold breeze, and silvery rain poured down at an angle through the blue light on the beach. The Point kids shouted and ran about in the rain for a minute or two; then they were gone. As if he had been waiting for this, Vic took out the package and held it in one hand; he took out his gun and held it in the other. The room smelled of standing water, electricity, darkness.