Nova Swing

10 The Nova Swing

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.

"You didn't try to piss in that, did you?" she said.

"I could get it fixed."

"Anyone could get it fixed. I don't want it fixed. Fix me instead, I need fixing."

He gave her a long slow smile, which reminded her of Ed.

"But really," he insisted, "are you someone?"

Liv pretended to look around her room. "Would anyone who was anyone live here? Just come and fuck me."

"How about I fuck you and come?"

After all, she thought with a certain relief, he was as young as he looked. She laughed. "So what was all that crap about sunshine and shadows?" she said. "Down at the beach?" Next morning she felt lots better about herself. She cleaned bar. She cleaned tables. She wrote out a neater version of the FOR SALE sign, on a piece of white card she found behind the bar. Her energy was back. As if in response, her first customer of the day came in and ordered hot mocha with cream and rum. It was none other than Antoyne Messner, out on his own for once. "I walk past earlier," he said, "I see your sign. I'm fascinated." He was on his way to Carver Field, he informed her, to do business. As if to substantiate that, he had on all new clothes. A short brown leather zip-up pilot jacket; cavalry twill chinos with their own expensive belt. It looked as if he already came into money. "Irene," he made sure to say, "sends her regards. She don't forget how you were kind to her when Joe Leone died."

"How is Irene?" Liv said.

"Irene's good. We're both good."

That morning, the world did seem different. Liv felt light, but not so light she would escape gravity and float away. She could convert that into achievements. She cleaned glass. She cleaned the floor. Caught by surprise, her shadow operators furled and clustered round the ceiling fans; then wheeled as one, outdoors into the light and back. Fat Antoyne seemed full of energy too. Out of Vic Serotonin's shadow, he had a more relaxed way with him. He engaged you more directly, and seemed liberated. Also, as became clear after a couple of drinks, he had a proposition for her; which when she heard it made her think.

Edith Bonaventure, the accordion case slung with a kind of sexy gallantry over one shoulder, trudged home from her by-now-regular gig at the gates of the corporate port. She loved Globe Town. The lights were on. Later, a mist would rise up in the little streets between the tall houses, but for now the air was soft, full of small winds, cooking smells-bream baked in sea-salt, three-way herring. If Edith had a tired look, she could at least afford a new coat, which she wore open over her costume; it was too warm for the evening, but she wasn't ready to be sensible about something so nice. Edith's walk said something new too. Edith herself wasn't sure what. The talent, she would tell her audience silently as she played one more encore (Carmen Sylva, in the version made popular by Olavi Virta, king of the old New Nuevo Tango), is fractious now, and hungry. It is ready to take its money and run. The talent gets tired, but never forget it will always have that good special glow.

It was a short commute. One drink with Curt, the barkeep at The World of Today, and Edith was home. She went up the steps and into the hall. She dropped the accordion on the floor.

"Emil," she called up the stairs. "What do you want to eat?"

When he didn't answer, she laughed.

"You are a bad old man," she called. "Emil, you don't like me to go to the port you should just say, don't sulk." She arranged her new coat carefully on a hanger. "Be nice, Emil. I'm having a bath, we'll eat then." She lay for half an hour with the hot water up to her chin, up to her pink aureolae, and counted from memory the money she made that afternoon. Saw herself at the port gate, as if from the outside, a fixture, an isolated but energetic figure of a woman in a pool of halogen light, rain or shine. It was a living. Emil slept a lot while she was out. He was going down a little faster now. Sometimes he had a relapse to tell her he missed her.

He had an accident. Every day she came back, cleaned and fed him, they looked at his diaries together, he had his hallucinations, his syncopes, his periods of absence far into the night when he would say conversationally, "We're fucked here, Atmo. We should never have tried to follow the map." Or: "Where's the fucking gun?" Edith would wait him out, sleep a few hours from dawn, go down to the port to do it all again.

She hauled herself out of the tub.

"Emil, it's time you forgive me now!"

Her father sat propped up in his bed with his emaciated legs stretched out in front of him. The sheets were tangled and yellow with sweat. He had been trying to write something and lost patience with himself. Books lay on the floor where they had fallen. She gathered them up. "I was looking," she read, "at something no one else would ever see." Emil's face was papery and grey, with an air of being both exhausted and rested at the same time, as if he had just that moment given up and leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

"Emil?"

He smiled. "All my dreams rushed back," he whispered, "while you were out." Edith squeezed his hand tight. "You would have loved them," he said.

"Emil, you had a sweat, you threw up a little, it's nothing to worry about."

He opened his eyes. They were a perfect, excited blue she hadn't seen since he was forty; and that was how they stayed, looking at something no one else would ever see. The smart tattoos crawled slowly about in the crust of white hair on his chest for a while, then stopped. She leaned down to examine one of them before it faded-not a map but a line from a poem, perhaps, in simple red letters: Send me an eon heart. "Emil?" She sat there and held his hand for perhaps an hour, perhaps more, waiting for him to wake, or notice her, or whatever would happen next. Nothing did. She was too warm after the bath; then too cold. Streetlight filled the room.

"Emil, that was cruel," she said.

He was my father, she let herself think eventually. He was my lovely father and I miss him so. After a while she went downstairs and got dressed. She fetched out the money she received for giving up Vic Serotonin and counted it. She took down her new coat and looked at that. When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too. I wanted him to myself, she thought. I wanted him to myself. Edith didn't know quite how to be on her own yet, so she went back upstairs and held his hand again and sat by him all night.

She knew it was dawn when the black and white cats began to pour into the room through the open door behind her. Those cats! she thought. They would come in anywhere if you left the street door open. Silent, fixated, their eyes flat and a curious dry spici-ness to their smell, they packed themselves close to her father's bed, flowing around it, rubbing heedlessly against any part of Emil they could find in the tight, cramped space.

He was my lovely, lovely father.

At Carver Field, even the tubbiest of the ships on sale tower a hundred feet high. They stand in rows. They're old. They're used. They leak. They exhibit the gentle patina of being too long on the ground. They have names like Radio Mary and Soft Error. They have always hauled their guts on behalf of others. They have muled and trafficked and smuggled and led a life. They have been the mainstay of commerce, the prey of outlaws. By day they emit radiation. By night cheap navigational code trickles through their corroded firewalls like a contract between Marburg fever and a trail of sparks. They began their career five hundred lights across the Halo as someone's dream and took fifty years to work their way here, where they will inevitably become someone else's; because even for these tubby little ships there is always someone to exclaim:

"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."

At this point Antoyne opened his mouth to confess something. If Liv had let him speak, perhaps that would have changed her mind about the whole deal as Antoyne had put it to her, but she didn't, only went on, "By the way, I dialled up hardware reports too. Jesus, don't even talk about them. Those engines it has? With the power cable, and big flywheels? What kind of physics is that about? Antoyne, don't look like that, I'm teasing you. Anyway, they'll last two, maybe three trips." She finished her drink and said aside to Irene, "Be sure and make him wear his lead pants; the hull's ablated to a wafer."

The Mona, who had been looking out the window and thinking about poor Joe Leone, repeated, "Lead pants," and laughed.

"I'll fix all that," Antoyne said.

"Rather you than me."

If you understand ships like the one Antoyne wanted to buy, you can always make a connexion. You can walk into a bar on Motel Splendido or New Venusport and always see someone you know. They owe you money. They owe you a drink. They owe you an explanation. And it's true that you owe them all or most of those things too; in fact it's the only reason you can do business at all. Perhaps Liv was thinking about this when she nodded judiciously and said:

"At least change the name, Antoyne."

Antoyne took Irene's arm. They smiled at each other. "We plan on that," the Mona said.

Thirty thousand miles above Liv Hula's bar, Paulie DeRaad had recently arrived in the quarantine orbit.

He was not the Paulie they had known. Gone were the sharp nose, the lively blue eyes, the shock of white-blond hair in its signature widow's peak, the fragile radiation-thinned skin which in some lights gave you the illusion you could see right down into the musculature of his face. Like everyone on the ship that brought him in, Paulie was by now more of a notion than a person you could actually describe. Individual voices might still be heard in the human quarters. But while, in a sense, Paulie was still being Paulie-that is, someone who never closed, who still liked and wanted everything-and you had the clear feeling that someone was still genuinely alive in there, you knew it would be hard now to separate Paulie from the members of the vacuum commando that had brought him in. What these connexions-volunteers to a man-said oftenest about Paulie was:

"You fucking fuck, DeRaad. You fucking tourist." Most of the quarantine ships were huge; pocked and used-looking; alive with the dim crawling lights of beacons and particle dogs. Typically you found old pipeliners that had worked the Carling line, obsolete Alcubiere warps the size of planetisimals even with their relativity drivers torn off, anything with a thick strong hull, especially if it was easy to reinforce further. Other things they had in common: they were mined, with high-yield, top-shelf assets from the EMC catalogue; and their hatches were welded tight. No one was sure what kind of atmosphere they now contained, if any. Inside, whatever their age or origin or state of outer preservation, they had only two qualities: pitch dark or light too bright to bear. Hundreds of them, as far as you could see, rolling around forever in gluey braided orbits, drifting together and then apart. Once in six months, complex resonance effects put them on collision courses. Alarms went off. An engine fired for a millisecond or two in the dark. For a day or two afterwards the vacuum between the hulks took on an ionised look, as phase-changes rippled through a smart gas of nanodevices designed to monitor hull thickness, skin temperature, core temperature, and emissions in all regimes including, curiously, soundwaves, generated by so-far undescribed events inside.

How many human beings were stored in the quarantine orbit? How many escapes did they represent?

No one knew.

Any number of smaller vessels could be found drifting between the hulks. They were still volatile. Their trajectories were impossible to map. They were a danger to everything with their fragile contemporary hulls and lively contents. They still had windows and hatches. One of them was the K-ship Poule de Luxe, originally on grey ops out of Radio Bay, but lately seconded to Quarantine.

Poule de Luxe, everyone's favourite survivor of the Nastic Wars, tumbled aimlessly end over end, her armaments extending and retracting meaninglessly, her riding lights off. She had come a long way since exfiltrating Paulie DeRaad from the Saudade Lots. When they understood it was too late to find DeRaad a place in a hygiene facility-too late not just for Paulie but for themselves- the vacuum commando had tried to steal her. To their credit they got halfway across the Halo before her K-captain regained control. It had been a long flight back. There had been some problems. There had been shrieks and screams from the human complement as they realised fully what Paulie had brought them. Now, its mission completed, the mathematics had switched itself off. The K-captain had switched herself off too, in case she could be extracted at a later date. Power was down.

Aft, in the crew quarters, it was cold but not dark. Charred and buckled bulkheads contained the escape, which presented, like the majority of escapes, as a loose, luminous fluid medium sometimes the consistency of rice pudding or lentil soup, sometimes having the visual qualities of a pool full of chlorinated water agitated gently in powerful sunlight; often too bright to look at, and developing intricate internal flows independent of input. If there was code in there, no one knew what it was doing. No one knew how it bound to the substrate of proteins and nanomech. It looked beautiful, but stank like rendered fat. It would absorb you in seconds. Was it an end-state? Was it a new medium? No one knew. The hulks were full of it. No one knew what to do with it. No one knew what it was: except that, in this case, in a previous life, some of it had been a Saudade gangster and some of it had been his friends from EMC. Shock fronts raced through it. Random state changes were precipitated. Every so often a shape assembled itself with difficulty and made its way to the porthole, and a barely audible voice whispered:

"Wow. Fuck. See that? Alcubiere, right off the port bow! See?" Hard to know if the shape was Paulie; if he was able to retain that much of a sense of himself. But perhaps nothing is hopeless, and perhaps he had found a way to enjoy life again. Meanwhile the remainder of the mass boiled resentfully and said: "DeRaad, you cunt."

Edith Bonaventure, in the aftermath of Emil's death, found it hard to know what to do with herself. She worked the port gate and the tourist traps. She visited a new bar every night, after which she went home determined to throw out Emil's things, and couldn't, and couldn't sleep either, and in her state only ended up sitting on the floor as if he was still alive, reading his journals aloud.

"The site," he had written, "behaves just like a child with a secret. No one must know, but everyone has to try and guess."

Edith had other needs than working her father through her life and into his proper place, if ever that turned out to be possible. These needs were less readily defined. They sent her to the fights in the soft early darkness of summer evenings, but at Prefer Coeur the smells of fried food, alcopops and haemoglobin held less goodness than before. (You can claim, and people do, that every fighter is different: but it is a difference, Edith had begun to feel, that works itself out within sameness: so that when you've seen one monster cock you've truly seen them all.) They sent her to stand in the pool of light outside the Uncle Zip and Nueva Cut franchises, but though she wanted to be new, she couldn't believe in newness; though she wanted to travel, she was reluctant to leave. Window shopping Straint Street one early evening, for a cheap deal on a different self, she passed the Black Cat White Cat bar, where she saw the notice in the window and inside found the barkeep standing in the usual trance behind the zinc counter.

"Do you really want to sell this place?"

Liv Hula, who had spent the morning wiping arcs in a decade's dirt and the afternoon in bed, yawned and said, "It isn't much."

"I see that."

"For instance, that wall was white when I came here."

Edith tuned out. She closed her eyes, so that when she opened them again they would be adjusted to the gloom. The first thing she saw was the light running like water over black floorboards, reflecting off the bottles behind the bar, seeping into the plastered wall, which remained yellow despite the barkeep's efforts. She saw the mismatched tables of different heights with their chrome legs and chipped marble tops; and above them, up in the ceiling corners, the cobwebby mass of shadow operators. She saw the wet cloth on the zinc bar. There were two or three customers at tables but she could tune them out too-she could see that there were times of day when almost no one came into Black Cat White Cat because it was too late to eat and too early to get bagged. She went to the window and looked up and down Straint Street, which for a moment she visualised as a new Globe Town: after Edith started her business people would come home at night to live there, or at least visit for more than just a makeover. That wasn't quite it, though. That wasn't what you wanted from a bar. Nevertheless she said:

"You know what I see here?"

"What."

"Nothing yet. But I hear music. That's the thing I hear."

"Can I get you a drink?" Liv asked.

Edith said she could. She could make it rum. "You can make it rocks." She put half the drink down her in one brisk move, then leaned on the bar. "At any time," she felt bound to point out, "you could have had the shadow operators clean the walls for you."

"It wouldn't seem authentic."

"I'll never be sentimental that way," promised Edith.

Between them they contemplated the implications of this form of words. Eventually, Liv said, "Maybe you don't remember me. You were here before." This received no response. "I was sorry," she pressed, "about what happened with you and Vic."

"I don't think about him," warned Edith.

They talked another five minutes in the same fashion, during which Liv's beach bunny came downstairs and smiled shyly at Edith. "Hey," he said. He poured himself a glass of tapwater, put his arm round Liv's waist while he drank it thirstily and wandered off to stand in the doorway where the illumination slanting in from the street could show off his legs through the calf-length unbleached linen pants he wore. Liv made more drinks. Then Edith asked what Liv wanted for the bar, and Liv told her, adding, "There is accommodation upstairs. Though the plumbing is not complete at the moment."

"This is a good deal for me," Edith said, after some thought.

"You could move in as soon as you liked."

"One thing," asked Edith, "does he come with it?" They laughed, and Edith counted out money on the zinc counter, and she left, and that was how it was done. Ten minutes later, without thinking once, Emil Bonaventure's daughter, a property developer with no coherent plans that would limit her increasing sense of vision, had made her way to the site end of Straint. There she stood for a long time, watching the sunlight shift towards red-which everyone knows is a measure of the speed at which things get away from you-and thinking about Emil. It was the first time she had ever been there. She was jealous, but puzzled too. This was what he had enjoyed all those years: adventures in broken houses and factories, heaps of rubble like streets bombed in a war; rusty road signs like signals from your own unconscious; acres of empty concrete reaching away to standing waves of fog, atmospheric lensing and other forms of optical confusion. A lot seemed to be going on there, but it was hard to make out. She could hear music, as of a fairground. Then a second sunset appeared, great wheeling bars of light flashing alternately purple and green like a cartoon drawing.

"Do you expect me to believe that?" Edith said.

After Edith Bonaventure left, Liv felt too light for comfort. She washed glasses, just to have her hands in warm water. She stared at the money on the bar. Then she counted it again. She sheafed it up into two piles, carried the larger pile over to one of the corner tables and placed it carefully on the tabletop.

"So now I am all the way in," she told Antoyne Messner.

Antoyne took his turn at counting the money. When he had finished, he didn't look as pleased as she expected.

"Hey, it's real," she assured him.

He knew it was real, he said.

"Then is something the matter, Antoyne?"

He'd come around every afternoon since they looked at the ship together, sometimes with the Mona on his arm, sometimes without; but it wasn't like the old days when he caned it night after night with Vic Serotonin. Antoyne said less than he used to; and if his mood was generally more stable and energetic, his lows arrived lower. He drank more. His leather flight jacket grew shabby, his chinos oil-stained. He was always on dial-up, saying something like, "Jesus Christ, Andrei, this was supposed to be a favour." Now he turned sideways on his chair and looked away from Liv for a few moments to compose himself. He looked back, and toyed with his glass, which had a quarter of an inch of his cocktail left in it. However low that drink got in a glass, however often you swirled it around, smart molecules built into the mixer ensured it was still made up of precise pink and yellow layers. The planets where Antoyne had spent his time, that was the height of sophistication. He drank it and made a face.

"I can't fly no more," he admitted. "I was going to tell you all along."

He thought about when he rode the Dynaflow ships, and all the places he saw then, and the things he saw on them. Gay Lung, Ambo Danse, Waitrose Two and the Thousand Suns: he had scattered himself like easy money across the Beach stars and down into Radio Bay. He had gone deep in those days. Surfed the Alcubiere warp. Owned one rocket after another; for want of imagination he called them all the Kino Chicken. Smuggled this and that. Kept one step ahead of both EMC and the rogue code from his own navigational systems. But in the end he failed at looking after himself, which men like Antoyne often do, and on Santa Muerte inhaled something that deviated both his septum and his sense of where things were. That was it for being a sky pilot. That was it for believing yourself indestructible. What the hell, he had always tried to think, until he wound up in Saudade as Vic Serotonin's gopher: nothing keeps. He was surprised to find himself blinking when he tried to think it now.

"Host the feel for it."

Liv Hula studied Antoyne for a minute or two. Then she got up from the table and made him put his pilot jacket on.

"Come with me," she said.

Ten minutes later they stood on Carver Field, in a mild wind and gathering greenish twilight, with the Halo stars coming out, sharp actinic points at the top of the sky, where their ship, the tubby curves of which now gave back a bargain brass glitter to the scattered halogen lights of the port, stood almost ready to fly. Antoyne put his hands in his pockets. He shrugged.

"So why are we here?" he said.

"To enjoy this heap of shit you had us buy."

Liv took his hands between both of hers. She made him look in her eyes and understand what she meant. "Antoyne," she said, "I dialled up Irene to meet us here. Later we can get a drink, the three of us, we can celebrate how our lives will soon move on from what they were. You can explain these stupid old-fashioned engines to me one more time. But for now, look up in the sky. See that red giant there? That's McKie, fifteen lights out. We can go there. Or we can go there, to American Polaroid. Or there, You're Worth It. We've got a ship. We can go anywhere now in these million stars!"

"Do you think I don't know places?" he replied, "or the names of them?"

"The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you." Antoyne tried to pull away from her, angry that she should express such an intuition, even in the middle of an empty field where no one but Antoyne could hear; even though it was only what everyone knew about him already. "I always understood that," she said. She kept his hands between hers a moment more. Then she let go, because it came to her that they had already left Saudade a hundred light-years behind them anyway. When she looked up at the ship again, it was black and comforting against the afterglow. "In the end, Antoyne, what does it matter to you?" she said.

"Because it means I am not anyone any more."

"None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard."

Antoyne stared at her, and then past her. His eyes lit up.

"Hey," he said, "here is Irene now."

Site Crime accountants had followed the money from the back office of the Club Semiramide to a room off Voigt Street, one of the many DeRaad bolt-holes they were rinding and closing daily.

Voigt was full of vehicles and flashing lights. Fire-teams had been deployed. Code jockeys worked on the locked, reinforced door. Quarantine and Hygiene were also in attendance, represented mainly by midrank uniforms, exchanging precedence issues by dial-up while they waited with simulated patience for the action to begin. It was the usual scene, except that a tall, heavily tailored young woman with a forearm datableed had overall charge of the operation. They all knew who she was, but no one trusted her, or understood how she had advanced herself so far so quickly. Since the debacle out on the Lots, they were uneasy working with Site Crime anyway, but their body language and hers confirmed they had no choice.

The lock proved to be mechanical, which no one knew how to finesse. They blew the door off instead.

The teams went in looking confident but feeling nervous. No one wanted to be first at the scene of a big escape. In the event, they were too late. Something weird had happened here, but now it was over. How you would describe it was this: the room stank. It was the same smell, rank and fatty, you got in a quarantine facility, but reduced because it had settled into the fabric-the bare floor, the bed and its foul grey sheets like a disordered shroud, the white walls with their freight of dried human secretions and undecod-able graffiti. The room was vacant, but only just. The Site Crime people all understood this. It was a category of fact they were familiar with. Something had lived here until very recently, but how you described that something-or what you understood by the term "lived"-was very much up to you. If you had been able to stand there twenty-four hours ago, they knew, you might have seen the composite entity formerly known as "the Weather" leave its hiding place for the last time. The door would have unlocked itself without agency, then closed and locked itself again. There would have been silence outside, except perhaps for the strong, calming sound of summer rain, children laughing and running for shelter, the bang of a door further down Voigt. Those sounds would have had, for a second, too sharp an edge. The woman with the datableed checked out the graffiti. She consulted the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of her forearm. She shook her head thoughtfully.

"You can finish up here," she told Hygiene.

She drove herself back to the uptown bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. There she ran nanocam footage of the other big unsolved mystery in her career.

This impeccable record, assembled by the vanished detective himself and projected across the walls by his shadow operators, left no one the wiser. In the year after the death of his wife, Aschemann had continued his investigation of the Neon Heart murders. All the details were there. They summed to zero. He watched, he asked questions and took names, he went by the gates of the noncorporate port and smelled the money and the violence in the air. He went from bar to bar. ("At one time or another," he told the cameras, with the impish, inturned smile his co-workers had begun to recognise, "all brave men have seen the sky through bars.") He had himself driven to and from the Bureau every morning and afternoon in a pink Cadillac roadster, 1952. He sat in his office with his feet on the green tin desk, and wrote letters to women, and to Prima. Had he killed her? Was he the Tattoo Murderer? The fact was, the assistant thought, he didn't know, any more than she did. All he knew was what Saudade wanted from him: that he be a detective, and have some plan for how that worked. That year, and every year after, he was like a man reassembling himself-not as something new, but not entirely in his own image either. His sense of guilt dated from Prima's death. But his sense of discontinuity dated from marrying her in the first place.

"All crimes," she remembered him advising, "are crimes against continuity-continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity."

She sighed.

"Switch this off," she ordered.

Not yet midnight. It was too soon to visit the tank farm on C-Street. The office blinds were down, admitting erratically pulsed strips of neon light, rose-pink and a lively poisonous blue. The furniture smelled of authentic furniture polish. Every so often the assistant said something into her dial-up. Or the shadow operators fluttered close, murmuring, "If you could just sign this, dear." Or they pulled themselves about on the desk in front of her like grounded bats, through the jumbled papers and stripes of neon, hoping that she would notice them. Data ran down the inside of her arm. It was her office now. She had a major escape to deal with. She had operations of her own. She could wait another hour before she made her next move. She could wait another hour after that. But she was restless and didn't know what to do this minute. Damp winds chased wastepaper across the intersection outside, to where a lost blonde stood in her short white dinner frock, smiling vaguely at the deserted pavement and holding both her shoes in one hand.

Another month passed, the Nova Swing completed her refit. They had port authority approval. They had a new paint job. They had a company name, Bulk Haulage, thought up after hours of numb effort by Antoyne; and a corporate mission statement which Irene discovered written on her heart, "Aim to the Future." They had hot new upgrades in the drive train. Early one wet autumn day, with rain lashing across Carver Field, Liv Hula heated up the rocket engines, swallowed the pilot interface with the usual combination of optimism and self-disgust, and with Antoyne strapped in the second chair, went all-out for the parking orbit.

"Shit," she was saying five minutes later, her voice issuing eerily from the ship's speakers. "It works."

"Isn't that something," agreed Antoyne.

They stared out at space a moment, then at each other in wild surmise. Space! Tests on the infrastructure showed what they already knew. "It's a tub but it actually works!" Scared and elated, anxious, yet somehow secure in their professionalism, they scuttled for home, where they found Irene the Mona looking pale but happy in rose-pink pedal-pushers, refreshing her make-up from her little shiny red urethane vanity case Antoyne remembered so well. "So does it work?" she wanted to know. During the take-off, she admitted, she sat in the administration building bar with a White Light sundae and didn't even dare watch. "But I saw the flash went over everything. You lit up the rain, I got to say that. I had my legs crossed for you."

"I can't believe it works," Liv Hula said.

After that, they lived in the ship, all three of them, and made frequent baby steps like this, little journeys into space. Though they had their differences of viewpoint, Liv and Irene got on well together, as long as they could manage Antoyne in their different styles. Antoyne was content to be managed. In the end, it was what he was used to, although he wouldn't admit that to the Mona. There was always something to talk about. Antoyne and Irene talked about their personal development and aspirational goals. Irene and Liv talked about the importance of self-presentation. Liv and Antoyne talked about Vic Serotonin, who had in so many senses brought about their present business venture.

"I always got involved with people stronger than me," Antoyne told Liv. "In the end you would have to say it was a pattern. But it can work out well."

Liv shuddered.

"People like Vic are too strong for everyone around them."

But when she repeated this opinion to Irene, it received only a sniff. "Vic Serotonin was as weak a man as I ever saw," the Mona stated firmly. "Trust me, I seen a few of them." She laughed. "And fucked them all," she added, "disincluding Vic himself."

This conversation occurred about thirty thousand miles off-planet. Without they took her off the beach, Antoyne said, and into the surf, everything was known about the Nova Swing that could be known. So now they were going to switch on the Dynaflow drivers for a nanosecond or two and see if she survived that blatant challenge to physics. But before they could do that, they had to fly through this huge secret-looking region of derelict ships they found themselves in. Cutting arcs flared as bright as pSi engines, through a smart fog of nanotech like ionised gas. Tugs were pushing and pulling the enormous rusty hulks about. It was a region of activity stretching away like a shell round the whole planet, an expanding wavefront a thousand, two thousand miles deep. Irene stared out the porthole. She knew human beings a little, she said, and that was hard enough because there were so many of them to know; but she would never cease to be surprised about the endless wonders you saw up here in space.

"What are those things?" she whispered to herself.

"The quarantine orbit," Liv Hula told her, "gets bigger every day."

Straint Street: Edith Bonaventure knocked out Liv Hula's old zinc bar and had a small stage built where it used to be. The floor was ripped up and replaced with black and white tiles. A contractor fixed her some wall panels of faux mahogany in a warm burnt-orange shade. Edith dispensed with the ceiling fans and fitted chandeliers in their place. She had a new bar manufactured from one long block of artfully melted glass, backlit glass shelves behind.

With the change of theme she wanted light. The theme was Edith. It was all of Edith's memorabilia, with which she could now experience a different, much more certain, much more creative relationship. Light was everywhere, gilding the keyboard ivory of fifty or sixty accordions in their deluxe presentation cases lined with every shade of pink from salmon to neotony; glittering as off shallow water from clear resins over maroon and ginger met-alflake finishes; spiking the corner of your eye with reflections and interference patterns of otherworldly weirdness. There were silver buckles on every strap to catch it, and brass-plate rocket ships craftsman-tacked to silky alien wood finishes: but chrome shooting star emblems predominated.

"Because," Edith would explain, "that's what I was, in my day."

Twice a week she got up on stage and played tango standards to a packed house, adding curios and marginal items for variety and to demonstrate the strength in depth of her technique. Some of these-Lindie's Alcine Rein, for instance, which was really a polka written for a five-million-year-old instrument no one was sure how to play-grew popular in their own right. Despite the fading ads recovered from venues all over the Halo, which she set to fluttering round the room with news of gigs she had played twenty years before, no one remembered her. Instead, they received her act as something novel and surprising. This hardly mattered to Edith, to whom it seemed enough that she should rediscover herself. She stood dazzled in the spotlight in her straps and taps, her pipeclayed face, her too-tight little costume, perhaps with a cowboy theme that night, and she could hardly tell herself from the thirteen-year-old Accordion Kid in the hologram. She had begun to feel awkward again without the burden of the instrument, as if perpetually released to lean backwards from the waist. She practised new tunes in the afternoon.

Edith was always on the premises, but she didn't keep bar. For that, she had hired Liv's ex-beach bunny, who, it turned out, called himself Nicky Rivera because he liked that upscale brand of luggage. Nicky was a successful choice. He lived quietly above the business. He fixed the sink. His people skills proved pivotal in attracting trade. He helped out with new acts too: Edith was picking up musicians from all over the city. Within months they were crammed every night.

The crowd was new to the tango, pleased with itself because it learned so quickly when to cheer and when to be rapt. Its signature was high-end cocktails, honey-coloured fur; its underwear, Nicky could confirm, was from Uoest. It was a slumming crowd, and if she hoped to gentrify the street by her efforts, Edith could only be disappointed. But as a result of her investment in herself, the reputation of her venture grew out beyond Straint, and even Saudade itself, out into the Beach stars and across the Halo, and she had to be content with that. Not many people get two chances to be new. She stopped playing the gates of the corporate port. Instead, she placed her own ads with the rickshaw companies, and later with the tourist lines themselves.

Sometimes the applause at the end of the evening caused her some tears. Then she would whisper, "This encore I would like to dedicate to the one who meant most to me in this life, Emil, my father: Le Tango du Chat, which he particularly enjoyed," which was how Liv Hula's bar came by its new name.

One afternoon near Christmas, Liv herself could be found sitting at a table with the Accordion Kid, drinking vodka and Brilliantine, no ice. Out on Straint the chopshops were closed early. Little hard gusts of wind ran up and down the street, driving the flurries of snow before them; while inside, on the dusty unlit stage, three teen sisters in sequinned one-pieces cast sidelong glances at Nicky the barkeep, who sat on the edge of the stage in conversation with their manager. "Sun and shade sometimes seem like equal things," Liv heard him say. "Both, in a way, kind of illuminating?"

At this the Accordion Kid, her sensibilities honed by thirty years in bars, smiled and closely watched Liv Hula's face.

"So now how do you like what I did?" she said.

Liv wasn't sure. It was Christmas. It was coming dark. Next day she would be out on the cusp of a new life, a rocket jockey delivering unwaybilled cargoes to ports she didn't know on planets she was the last to hear of; some of those cargoes would be more clandestine than others. The first time Liv came back to the Tango of the Cat, some weeks before, she had been ready for change, but also nervous what she would find. When she went inside, ten years of her life tucked themselves away in an instant, like the theoretical dimensions of long-ago cosmology. This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed cata-strophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either. Pondering these notions, she heard herself say:

"It seems very successful."

"I promised you I wouldn't be sentimental," Edith said, and fetched Liv another drink.

They were joined by Irene and Fat Antoyne, whose first time it was at Le Tango. Anyone would have mixed feelings, was Irene's belief, about returning to a previous stamping ground. She had forgotten, she had to own, what Black Cat White Cat looked like in those past days; though it would always stay mixed up in a part of her life she could not find it in her heart to reject. The fat man, meanwhile, rubbernecked around, then fell into a game of Three Dick Hughie with Nicky the barkeep, so no one knew what he thought. Night drew on. After a few more drinks they left for Carver as a threesome. It was a pity, Edith said as she walked Liv Hula to the door, that it had been too early in the day to get an idea of what a good trade she did.

"Though I never knew it so slow, even at this time."

When they had gone, calling to one another, "Hey, this snow!" in receding voices down the street, she picked up her instrument of choice at that time-a worn old three-row diatonic in pearlescent mint-blue, with a contrasting bellows which revealed in its open phase the ace of hearts, or perhaps a welcoming vulva-and played a few notes. That didn't seem to suit her. She refused another drink. She picked up one of Emil's notebooks she always kept by her, and leafed through it. Five o' clock, a tall woman entered the bar and sat down at a table by the door.

This woman had blonde hair cropped down to nothing much, and a fuck-off way of moving only the heavily tailored can achieve. Some kind of datableed ran oriental-looking ideograms down her arm. She parked a pink 1952 Cadillac roadster at the kerb outside. Known to everyone as a police detective operating out of what used to be called Site Crime, she was a frequent visitor at Le Tango. You also saw her at the fights. She knew the talent, she knew their chops. She knew Straint. She would come by early and stay late. Her order: double Black Heart rocks. She would stare around at the clientele as if they puzzled and amused her in equal parts. This evening she sent Nicky the barkeep away with a smile which said she would probably see him again soon; then nodded over at Edith Bonaventure.

"Good book?" she said. "You're always reading it."

It was a busy night in the end. They had a guest two-piece over from some surf bar down on the Corniche, an old man who'd had himself Zipped to look like Samuel Beckett, a young man in a suit a size too big, keyboards and saxophone, bebop jazz, complicit, clever deconstructions of simple popular tunes, stuff Edith didn't get, but a clear winner with the corporate clientele who came in once a week to hold shouted conversations and spill Giraffe beer. Three a.m. it was all over. The two-piece packed itself away, took its money, melted into the night. Dry snow continued to blow up and down the street outside. It didn't settle. After the barkeep said goodnight and went upstairs, only Edith and the police detective remained. It worked out like that most nights. They sat at their separate tables. Every so often one of them might look up and smile at the other, or go to the door and stare along Straint Street towards the event site. A rocket from the noncorporate port cut the sky like scissors.