Nova Swing (21 page)

“Is this all that happened overnight?”

“Three or four a.m., the system went down again. There’s some footage but it’s not informative.”

“I can believe that,” Aschemann said.

“We should have put people in.”

“Who would we use? This woman knows everyone who drinks at her bar. She’s no fool, even if Vic is.” Liv Hula stood motionless at the zinc counter; she leaned her elbows on the zinc counter. The footage jumped, and she leaned on the zinc counter again. She stared emptily ahead. She looked tired. “Switch this off, for God’s sake.”

Aschemann brushed at the sandy soles of his feet as if this action might clarify his life, or at least connect him to it. Two hours’ sleep in an armchair had given him kidney pain, but it couldn’t explain the feeling that something was approaching him, racing towards him from what part of his past he couldn’t even guess. It couldn’t explain why his hands were so stiff, as if he’d been clenching them tightly in his sleep. Only the dogs could explain that. “At least we know where they’re going,” he said. “We have an embarrassment of confirmation on that.” Just before he closed the dial-up, so that the assistant would have no time to reply, he said, “By the way, did you enjoy that sleep of yours you had in the twink-tank?”

“Watch out for the dogs you hear.”

Aschemann took his kidneys to the toilet, chuckling. “One day I’ll give that tank a try,” he promised himself.

“How will we know we’re in there?”

Vic Serotonin stopped to allow his client to catch up. “Sometimes you don’t,” he said carelessly.

The event—the fall to earth, whatever you described it as—had taken place a generation or more ago, in the city’s old industrial quarter, the warren of factories, warehouses, docks and ship canals which at that time connected Saudade to the ocean. Commerce had ended instantly, but its characteristic architecture remained as a fringe about half a kilometre deep, a maze of empty buildings with collapsing corrugated roofs and broken drainpipes, their iron window frames bashed in and emptied of glass. A mile or two past Liv Hula’s bar, Straint narrowed to a lane; the cobbled cross-streets became little more than industrial alleys, pitted and rutted, littered with lengths of discarded cable and balks of timber. Everything smelled of rust and precursor chemicals. The blue enamelled signs on the street corners had long since corroded into unintelligibility. Elizabeth Kielar studied them and shivered.

“I’ll know,” she said.

“Then why ask me?”

“I’ll feel it.”

“All that happened last time,” he reminded her patiently, “is you lost your nerve.” The only reply she offered was an angry look; as if he were the unpredictable one, the one both of them had to be careful not to trust.

Over the years, Vic had given the question more thought than his tone implied. You knew you had entered the aureole when the weather changed, that was his view. Turn a corner between two factory yards in winter: sunlight would be falling into the well of the street while insects described fast, wavering trajectories from the brassy light into the darkness of the buildings. If it was sunny in Saudade, patches of fog drifted through the aureole. Or the wind would, as now, pile up a few cold, soft short-lived flakes of snow in the gutters. Whatever else happened, the shadows struck at absurd angles for the time of year, as if geography was remembering something else. “The lines of distinction aren’t sharp,” Vic concluded. You had to use your intuition as to when something like that became important.

“When the Kefahuchi Tract first fell to earth, they tried to build permanent controls. Walls, ditches, concrete blocks. But that stuff would be absorbed overnight.” Something went wrong with the air, and next morning your border post had gone and you were looking across a fifty-yard waste lot covered in cheat weed and cracked concrete, at what appeared to be a huge, motionless, empty fairground in the rain. “Now they have a more relaxed attitude. Take the wire up every so often, put it down somewhere else: they call it ‘soft containment.’” Still trying to explain himself, and thinking of the complexities of his relationship with Emil Bonaventure too, Vic added, “Even in the aureole you need luck. I’m not one of those people who believe they’ll have street light in there by next Wednesday.”

“Do any of you understand anything at all?” she said angrily. “Why do you all act as if you know something when you don’t?”

“This area’s thick with police. So try to keep up.”

Twenty minutes later it was full dawn, and the first patrol of the day had caught up with them. Vic hurried Elizabeth through the nearest door and into a derelict warehouse—puddles, ripped-up concrete and foul earth, holes that gaped down into cellars and sewers, everything of worth stripped out long ago—where he pushed her to the floor and put his hand across her mouth. Elizabeth stared up at him in a kind of puzzled supplication, as if she didn’t understand why humiliation should be part of this search for her own nature, while matt-grey Site Crime vehicles forced themselves down the narrow accessway outside, repeatedly occluding the light then allowing it to splash in again rich with steam cooked out of the standing water by the waste heat of the nuclear engines. The air shuddered with the din of it; above that, you could hear the faint realtime shouts of the foot police coordinating their sweep through the buildings.

“They’re not looking for us!” Vic shouted into Elizabeth Kielar’s ear. Nevertheless he made her lie there, listening, until long after the engines and the shouts had passed. Then they left, Elizabeth brushing irritably at her clothes. After that it was more of the same, rusting tracks, flooded rocket-docks with vast discarded machinery visible just beneath the surface of water stinking of the sea but so glamorised by exotic radiochemicals it would glow faintly in the dark. They made good time, and Vic Serotonin was pleased by the professional way things were falling out for once. But as they passed, everything—each alley and abandoned wharf, each collapsed or melted gantry, even the Site Crime patrols—seemed to settle, shift and morph indiscernibly into something else. The aureole was all around, like a wave propagated through everything. Everything was up for grabs. Half an hour later, when rain caught them at the edge of the site itself—a shower which slanted in, mercurial against the direction of the light, to pass within minutes—you couldn’t, as Vic said, be sure where it came from, or how. Though on the face of it things looked simple enough.

Independent of the patrols, Lens Aschemann’s pink Cadillac nosed its way down the pot-holed alleys, waited at each junction, then, accelerating briefly but wildly, left the road and bumped its way through the tall weeds of a concrete lot as if its driver had lost control of the clutch. With the detective himself at the wheel, the car’s character changed. It became like a big, blunt animal, some species adapted neither for stealth nor pursuit but which, despite Darwinian constraints, had decided to learn them both. Aschemann drove as if he couldn’t see well, gripping the wheel tightly and thrusting his face close to the windshield, while his assistant suffered in the passenger seat, steadying herself with both hands and offering him an expression of open hostility.

“I don’t understand why you’re insisting on this,” she said.

“Now you think you’re the only driver in the world?”

“No!”

“Everyone drives. We all like to drive.”

“This is because of yesterday.”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer. Sometimes we have to drive, sometimes we have to ride. Don’t spoil a beautiful day.”

Aschemann’s face looked more than ever like the older Einstein’s, the eyelids even more drawn-down, the cheeks pouchier, with a greyish tinge from lack of sleep. His eyes were veined and watery. They gave him a look of confused enthusiasm. The Cadillac’s front wheels left the ground briefly, then banged back down so hard the suspension bottomed out. She clutched the windshield edge reflexively: this stimulated a response from her forearm dataflow. “Are you familiar with the term ‘lost’?” she said. Satellite navigation signals were still available, but her software could no longer distinguish between several possible sources, ghost emissions, particle dogs, accidents of atmospheric lensing. They might be real, they might not. At least one of them seemed to be in the site itself. “As of now we don’t know where we are.”

Aschemann smiled.

“Welcome to the aureole,” he said.

“This
is
about yesterday,” she accused him.

He leaned over and patted her shoulder. “After all, can we ever say we know where we are?”

There was more orbital traffic than usual that morning: military traffic, alien traffic, surveillance traffic. If you just knew how to look, you found EMC up there in numbers. High-end assets in hair-trigger orbits, calculated to keep an eye on some dubious investment of middle management’s. She had her own investment in play. She followed the data as it bled endlessly down her arm, pausing only to say:

“Please keep both hands on the wheel.”

Along with the agency, its goodwill, and his South End walk-up, Vic Serotonin had inherited from Emil Bonaventure the use of a bolt-hole on the top floor of the old Baltic Exchange building, which faced the event site across a bare expanse of concrete called “the Lots.” This comprised a room twelve feet by fifteen, once an office with frosted glass dividers. Over time Vic had been obliged to defend it against other travel agents: in reprisal, two or three of them, led by a woman born Jenni Lemonade but known in Saudade as Memphis Mist, had used a hand-held thermobaric device to rip a hole in the middle of the floor, through which you could, if you felt like it, contemplate a thirty-foot drop into standing water. Despite this it remained a serious professional location, offering views of the Lots where they rose gently towards the faint thickening of rain-wet air which marked the interface. It offered a place to wait while you assessed the situation. Vic had slept there once; the dreams he experienced convinced him not to do it again. Now he stood at the window, which possessed neither frame nor glass, and was puzzled to hear Elizabeth Kielar say:

“Did you ever want children?”

The view frightened her. She had averted her head as soon as he brought her in and, careful to keep facing the hole in the floor, inched her way round the walls to the corner in which she now squatted, her arms wrapped round her knees. When Vic spoke, she smiled at him confidingly, as if he’d caught her in some even less dignified position. What little oblique, dirty light fell on the side of her face served to occlude rather than disclose. Close to the site something was always wrong with the light anyway; it struck as if refracted through heavy but volatile liquids, aromatics on the edge of evaporation.

“I had children,” she said, “but I left them.”

She laughed at his expression. “To be honest, they were more grown up than me from the start. They were often impatient.” She fidgeted. Looked down at her hands. “I left them,” she said, “because I saw they’d be all right.” Vic didn’t know what to make of this, so he didn’t reply. After a moment, she asked:

“When do we go?”

“Soon.” A certain amount of waiting was required. The wise thing was always to remember the client and not be too hard on her in that way: but, as everyone remarked, Vic stayed well through the exercise of caution. Some adjective from the complex vocabulary of the place, a change in the light or the density of the sounds you could hear, would sooner or later reassure him. He wasn’t anxious, because he wouldn’t commit until he had that reassurance. It was the professional course. “It’s not like waiting for a door to open,” Emil Bonaventure had once advised him. More something you could interpret as permission.

“Come and look,” he invited Elizabeth Kielar.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Vic shrugged as if it didn’t matter. Then he said, framing the experience for her in the voice he reserved for clients:

“This is what you came to see. This is it.”

After a moment she stepped primly round the hole in the floor and joined him, and they stared across at the event site. You were never sure what you were looking at. Beyond the wire, beyond the remains of the original wall, with its fallen observation towers, prismatic light struck off the edges of things. There was a constant sense of upheaval. Loud tolling noises, as of enormous girders falling, or the screech of overdriven machinery, competed with the sudden hum of an ordinary wasp, amplified a million times. It was like a parody of the original function of the place. But also there were snatches of popular songs, running into one another like a radio being tuned through some simple rheostat. You smelled oil, ice cream, garbage, birchwoods in winter. You heard a baby crying, or something clatter at the end of a street—it was like a memory, but not quite. Sudden eruptions of light; dense, artificial-looking pink and purple bars and wheels of light; birds flying home against sunsets and other sweet momentary transitions between states of light. Then you saw things being tossed into the air, what looked like a hundred miles away. Scale and perspective were impossible to achieve because these objects, toppling over and over in a kind of slow motion—or so the eye assumed—were domestic items a hundred times too large and from another age, ironing boards, milk bottles, plastic cups and saucers. They were too large, and too graphic, drawn in flat pastel colours with minimal indication of shape, capable of liquid transformation while you watched. Or they were too small, and had a hyper-real photographic quality, as if they had been clipped from one of the lifestyle-porn magazines of Ancient Earth: individual buildings, bridges, white multi-hull sailing ships, then a complete city skyline toppling across as if it had been tossed up among flocks of green parrots, iron artillery wheels, tallboys, a colander and a toy train running around a toy track. Everything in a different style of mediation. Everything generating a brief norm, reframing everything else. At that time, in that instant of watching and listening, in a moment savagely and perfectly incapable of interpretation, they were all the things that fly up out of a life, maybe your own, maybe someone else’s you were watching. Day to day, you might have more or less of a sense that the things you saw were describable as “real.” In fact, that wasn’t a distinction you needed to make until you crossed inside.