Nova Swing

2 The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf

A couple of evenings after these events a man who resembled Albert Einstein walked into a different kind of bar, off at the money end of Saudade where the aureole, curving across the city like a shaded area on a map, met the sea.

Unlike Liv Hula's joint, the Cafe Surf had two rooms. These were known respectively as the Long and Short bars, the latter being notable for a strictly drink amp; run client-base. The man who looked like Einstein went straight through to the Long Bar, where he ordered a double Black Heart no ice and stared around with satisfaction at the high-end retro decor of marble pillars, designer blinds, cane tables and polished chrome bar taps. Ancient movie stars laughed out at him from brushed aluminium frames on the walls, exotic beers glittered from the shelves of the cooler: while under a red neon sign the Cafe Surf two-piece-keyboard and tenor saxophone-ambled its way through the evening's middle set.

All of this was copied faithfully from a minor hologram work, Live Music Nightly 1989, by the celebrated tableau artiste Sandra Shen. Like the Long Bar constituency itself-a mix of self-conscious young entertainment executives on release from the corporate enclaves just down the beach in Doko Gin and Kenworthy-this seemed to puzzle and amuse him in equal parts. He had the air, cultivated in middle age, of enjoying the things other people enjoy, so long as he didn't have to take part. He smiled to himself and lit his pipe. Most nights, for perhaps a month, he had sat in the same place. He would pull out a chair, sit down, get up again to put a match carefully into an ashtray on the corner of the bar; sit down again. He did all this with a kind of meticulous politeness, as if he was in someone's front room; or as if, at home, his wife required of him a continual formal acknowledgement of her efforts. He would stare at his pipe. He would begin a conversation with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter, getting out his wallet to show her-and her friend, who wore torn black net tights and industrial shoes-something which looked in the undependable Long Bar light like a business card, which they would admire.

In fact he was not as old as he looked; his wife was dead and whatever else he seemed to be doing, his attention never wavered from its object.

His name was Aschemann and he was a detective.

Halfway through his first evening there, Aschemann had uncovered a kind of discontinuity in things at the Cafe Surf. The two-piece, snug under its neon sign on the cramped dais between the Long Bar and the lavatory door, had gained its second wind. It was settling to the long haul, drawing down a kind of haunted bebop from the ectoplasmic night air outside-music four centuries old and off another planet. Between numbers there was laughter and shouting; the smell of food grew momentarily stronger, there was a clutter of Giraffe Beer bottles and crumpled serviettes, dark red lipstick on empty glasses, Anais-Anais scent thick in the air. Yet the tables closest to the musicians were deserted; and in the space between them and the dais, people kept appearing. These people didn't seem to belong in the Long Bar. They were shocked-looking men, white-faced, tall, wearing raincoats; thin shaven-headed boys like camp inmates; women with an eye pulled down at the corner: poor, shabby people, people crippled in small and grotesque ways. They were coming out of the lavatory, to push between the piano and the bar and then wander loose, blinking, looking for a moment both confused and agitated, perhaps by the music, perhaps by the light.

Though they emerged from the lavatory, that was-as Aschemann saw instantly-no guarantee they had ever gone into it. Instead, for a moment, as each of these figures appeared in the orange light, it seemed as if the music itself were squeezing them into existence. As if there was some sort of unformed darkness out there at the back of the Cafe Surf, where the event site met the sea, and the band was squashing it like a fistful of wet sand into these crude forked shapes. They were lively enough. Once they had oriented themselves, they had drinks at the bar and then, laughing and shouting, wandered out into the lighted street. Thoughtfully, the man who looked like Einstein watched them go.

The next night he brought his assistant along.

"You see?" he asked her.

"I see," she said. "But what will you do about it?"

She was a neat, ambitious young woman on a one-month trial from the uniform branch, fluent in three Halo languages, wired for dial-up and with all the usual tailoring. You could tell that from her eyes, which were often unevenly focused, and from the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of one forearm like smart tattoos. Her experience turned out to be in Sport Crime (the word "sport" to be interpreted here, Aschemann told himself, as a convenient misnomer for the fights), her speciality the violation of mysostatin blocker protocols in chopshop proteomes. She had failed early on to convey to him either the intricacies or the appeal of this discipline, and it wasn't much use in Site Crime anyway. They stood outside the Cafe Surf in the warm wind on the beach, looking at the violet breakers, the curious prismatic displays, visible nightly, where the water met the event aureole, and she suggested:

"Do you think they originate in the site?"

Aschemann believed this to be obvious. But he wanted to encourage her, so he only said in a mild way, "I've wondered about that myself." He wasn't comfortable with the possibility. It would mark, he believed, some kind of sea-change. It could only be a marker for change when, without any other help than the music, people came out of the Saudade site who had never gone in.

"Whatever they are," he said, "we don't want them out here."

"I'll call down a team," his assistant said.

Code flickered along her forearm. Her strange eyes, the same colour as the surf, went out of focus as she dialled up. Her lips moved a little even though she wasn't actually speaking. Aschemann put his hand gently on her arm. "Not yet," he cautioned her. His voice collapsed the dial-up. She looked at him vaguely, like someone who has just woken up from a realistic dream.

"I always like to watch a little," he explained, "before I do anything."

There was a note of apology in his voice. Aschemann had a high turnover in assistants because he was fond of advising them, "The true detective starts in the centre of the maze: the crimes make their way through to him. Never forget, you uncover your own heart at the heart of it." Another of his favourites, even more puzzling to young men and women conditioned to seek answers, was, "Uncertainty is all we have. It's our advantage. It's the virtue of the day."

So now he sat in the Long Bar, in what had become his favourite corner, wondering if he had watched enough.

Just as he decided that he had, something changed his feeling about the place and what might be happening there. The door opened and let in a man he recognised, Antoyne Messner, called by everyone who knew him Fat Antoyne. No one cared about Fat Antoyne. He had a history of low-per centage contraband operations a few lights away in Radio Bay. He had stayed ahead by moving only the lightest stuff-exotic isotopes, cultivars of embargoed local species, tailor packages for the kiddy trade-in a hullshot Dynaflow HS-SE or -SE2, its cheap navigation tools leaking the illegal daughter-code used to negotiatate the complex gravitational attractors and junk-matter flows of the Bay. His rule: make two trips maximum then throw the ship away. The code itself was the risk in that trade. Relax, and it would come down out of the mathematical space and into your head at night. As long as your hygiene was good, the code kept you one step ahead of EMC, but you still had to be a pilot. In consequence the stresses were high. Antoyne didn't do anything at all since he fetched up in Saudade except run errands for Vic Serotonin, and he was therefore widely assumed to be a burn-out.

He pushed his way between the tables and sat awkwardly on one of the chromium stools at the Long Bar. He seemed dispirited. He spent some time trying to order a drink which, when it came, the bartender placed in front of him with exaggerated care, and which settled out quickly into distinct layers of pink and yellow. It was popular, he told the people near him, on Perkins' Rent. No one seemed convinced. Aschemann watched him swallow half of it then went over and said, "You're a long way from Straint Street." Then when the fat man stared at him uncertainly:

"Antoyne? Maybe you don't recognise me. Maybe in this light you don't see me as well as you could."

"I know who you are," Antoyne said.

Aschemann smiled. "I would usually find you at Liv Hula's this time of night, caning it with Vic Serotonin."

"Only I got work now. It's temporary."

"That's good news, Antoyne!"

The fat man didn't seem to know how to encounter the enthusiasm of this. "It's temporary work," he said.

"So how is Vic?"

Fat Antoyne swallowed the other half of his drink and stood up. "You know," he said, "I like the light in here. I always liked a low light to drink by. It's the music I don't like." He wiped his mouth and gave the band a look which he transferred somehow to Aschemann.

"I was leaving anyway," he said.

"There's no need for that," the detective insisted. "Look, I'll just sit here and have another drink. You should have one too." He would be hurt, he implied, if Antoyne went off like that. He pulled up the bar stool next to Antoyne's and took a moment to get comfortable on it. "You don't mind if I sit," he said. "We're both out of place here, surely we can sit together?" He took a matchbook off the barman-it had a tiny hologram of the Live Music Nightly sign, which he turned appreciatively this way and that-and then another glass of rum. "Do you mind if I just fold my coat," he asked, "and put it here on the bar?" He held up his drink to the light. He had a habit of smiling around at people to show that he was enjoying the evening the way it had turned out. He tapped his fingers to the music for a minute or two, then concluded, "Myself, I don't mind this. But what I like is that old New Nuevo Tango."

The fat man received the news without interest.

"A lot do," he acknowledged.

Aschemann nodded. "I heard Vic is taking more risks than he needs to," he said, as if that was part of the same discussion.

"Vic's OK," Antoyne said defensively.

"Still, people will get hurt."

"There's nothing wrong with Vic. Vic Serotonin to my mind never hurt anyone."

"And yet, you know, he's in and out of the site, like all those people. We can't stop them finding new entrances-" here, Aschemann gave a small chuckle "-sometimes we have our reasons we don't even want to try. But then the next day he's at the Semiramide Club. He's in bed with Paulie DeRaad. Are those kinds of connexions without risk, do you think? For someone in Vic's trade?" After a moment of reflection he added, "All those travel agents have a reckless streak, Antoyne. The trouble in Vic's life proceeds from that."

Something new seemed to occur to him. He touched the fat man's forearm suddenly to get his attention.

"Antoyne, has Vic upset you in some way?"

Antoyne shrugged.

"I won't give up Vic," he said, and walked off.

"Vic's giving himself up," the detective called after him mildly. "Not just to me. To whatever's in there."

Antoyne did not reply, but instead pushed his way more energetically between the crowded tables to the door. In the end there was a kind of fat dignity to Antoyne, which remained intact despite his habit of always putting himself at a disadvantage, of appearing to disentitle himself in a society where anyone could be what they wanted. No one understood why Serotonin tolerated him, but maybe that was why. For a moment or two Aschemann considered this. Then he retreated to his favourite corner, where he tried to recoup the rhythm of the Cafe Surf, taking his time over another glass, drinking in little sips which coated his mouth with the warm rum taste of burnt sugar. He thought about Vic Serotonin, also Paulie DeRaad, who, of the two, he liked the least. He thought about the tourist trade, or at least the sector of it which was his professional concern.

While he was thinking, the band squeezed out two or three thin boys in white singlets, earrings and studded leather belts. Aschemann watched closely their struggle through the toilet door and into the sticky prismatic light. They looked, he decided, surprised. They looked incomplete, and surprised to find themselves here. Then the music squeezed out an old woman in a hat and a blue print dress and for a moment all four of them swayed clumsily together as if in time to the music. There was a lacuna, a moment of awry-a moment like falling, which happened between them but spread itself out to everyone else in the bar; and then the Cafe Surf was itself again. The new customers bought drinks and headed out into the night.

Aschemann stood at the door and watched them go. The next night he had some of them arrested.

The way this came about was unforeseen. Three women and one man were picked up two miles from the Cafe Surf, in the back lot of another bar, where they were apparently trying to have sex with one another. There was some sense they didn't know how to progress with this but were willing to learn. Aschemann, who got notice of the event from the uniform branch, contacted his assistant and had her go down there. "Take them to a holding cell," he told her. "I can't go myself." He had other things to do-he was out on the edge of the noncorporate port investigating a long-running series of crimes against women-but it seemed pointless to waste the opportunity. "Don't interrogate them," he ordered. "Strictly, there is nothing wrong with trying to have sex in the back lot of a bar, otherwise we would all be in prison. Just settle them in and then you can go home. Oh, and one other thing."

"What's that?"

"Make sure no one hurts them."

She was back on to him perhaps an hour later. Things were fine, she said. It was like handling refugees. Though they were curiously pliable, they were slow to give names. They smelled a little. They didn't seem to be from an alien species. They didn't seem to be hungry. They were not chipped, she said, by any method the holding cell diagnostics understood, neither were any of the usual markers encoded into their DNA; she could therefore assign them no point of origin in the Halo.

"What do they look like to you?" Aschemann asked her.

"They look like idiots," she said.

When she last saw them, that was how they looked. It was perhaps two after midnight. They stood all night like that, puzzledly, in the centre of the cell, talking to one another infrequently in their slow, gluey voices; and in the morning they were gone.

"There's no explanation for it," she said.

Her skin ran with data. It was like a pore-bleed. Nervousness or anger was causing her to clench and unclench one fist, as if by pumping the forearm muscles she could pump the mathematics too. He wondered if she had been taught that, or if it was just a mannerism. "Look at the nanocamera record! We had saturating coverage. There was never a moment those people were specifically and exactly not there. In some lights there still seems to be a trace of them, even now. And even after the holding cell was empty, it turned out they had been seen in other parts of the station." She stared at her arm as if it had let her down. "What can have happened? There was never a moment they weren't there. They just seemed to evaporate.

"There's no explanation," she concluded again.

Aschemann scratched his head. "Higher up they might want one," he decided. "But we don't have to provide it right now." And then, trying to help her, "This isn't anything anyone could have predicted."

Next, she wanted them to raid the Cafe Surf.

"Not yet," he said. "But it's a nice day. Let's visit by all means."

She stared at him. "What?"

"It would make a change for you to drive," he told her, and gave his usual driver the day off. Twenty minutes later she was stuck with him. He sat in the front passenger seat with his arms folded, smiling around comfortably as the pink Cadillac convertible slipped down from his office, between the Moneytown palms and white designer duplexes of Maricachel Hill, to the Corniche. It had rained early, but midmorning sun was etching the last traces of humidity off the surface of the air. He loved to be driven, and he was proud of the car. After a few minutes he told her, "You see? You feel better already. Take your time."

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."

"What will you do?"

He got out of the Cadillac.

"Drink a glass of rum," he said. "Perhaps two."

She drove along the Corniche and back up the hill. The traffic was good until midtown, where the streets were packed with rickshaws. On her own she seemed less animated. If Aschemann had been able to observe her expression he would have described it as "inturned." But how useful a description was that? When she was alone, she knew, she was herself. When she was alone, she did only the things she did. She was a policewoman driving carefully. She was a policewoman glancing at her forearm datableed, then up at the street again. She was a policewoman consulting the driving mirror before she waved on a sweaty rickshaw girl in electric-blue lycra. She left Aschemann's car in the parking garage and went and sat quietly in his office and waited to feel calm. Thin from lack of appreciation, Aschemann's shadow operators crept out of the corners and took up their customary forms, whispering, "Is there any way we can help? Is there anything we can help with, dear?" They knew her. They liked her. She always tried to find them something to do. She had them adjust the slatted blinds so that the light fell across her face in precise lines of black and white. She had them bring her up to date. After a moment or two she asked them:

"Why is he the way he is?"

"All we know, dear," the shadow operators said, "is you don't make the kind of sacrifices that man has made, not without suffering."

"Oh no, dear."

"He's a saint, that man."

"Can you get me his records?"

Aschemann waited out the afternoon in the Cafe Surf. The colour was back in his face. He ate a dish of falafel. He watched pos-sesively the scraps of sunshine move across the floor, change shape, fade to a kind of eggy yellow, like a painting of sunshine, then vanish. The tide came up the sand outside, bringing a reflective violet light all its own. With that arrived the first customers of the evening, who began to talk and laugh-quietly at first, then with more animation.

By seven every table was taken and they were three deep at the bar. The place was rammed. Seven-thirty, the neon sign went on. Then the two-piece arrived, and after a gin rickey for its nerves rolled right over everyone. The keyboard guy-twenty years old, blond spiked hair and sly, mobile mouth-wore a plaid drape suit. He was a clown and a thief. He was a geek genius. Everything he played that evening, the audience understood, would be a joke at the expense of some other tune, some other musician, some other kind of music. They were delighted. They were complicit. Every so often even the saxophonist-an older man, the muscles round his mouth tightened into two deep grooves by years in the job-would stop playing and listen: it was as if he'd heard someone this good once before but now forgot who or when or where. Then, putting these speculations behind him, he would pull sharply on his cigarette, glance down at the saxophone, and pick things up a little. Rhythms flicked and ripped, tangled and separated. They tore into Parking Orbit, Entradista and New Venusport South. Things slipped a little toward the sentimental side with Moonlight in Moneytown; then came right back on track, to rising cheers and whistles, in the genuinely awesome hard bop autopsy and deconstructed chamame beats of Gravity Wave.

At the height of the wave, five men in eveningwear were squeezed from the Cafe Surf lavatory; then two dock-boys with dyed brush-cuts and steel-toed boots, arm in arm with an emaciated blonde who kept wiping her nose on her pliable white forearm.

Aschemann leaned forward tensely in his seat.

They looked half-formed, sticky, fresh from the chrysalis. Half an hour in, the music dried them out. Soon they were straggling aimlessly along the Corniche together, singing, linking arms, running suddenly for no reason. The detective followed, observing their amazement at the moth-haunted cones of light beneath the Corniche lamps. They were awed by everything. They visited another bar, called The Breakaway Station, and from there found their way down to the beach, where the blonde danced off on her own to trip and fall laughing in the thick sand while her new friends clung together in the wind at the edge of the sea. Then all eight of them turned inland and trudged solemnly up Maricachel in the warm scented darkness until they found themselves, as perhaps they had always intended, in Carmody.

Aschemann had the quarter pumped with nanodevices which, drifting like clouds of milt in the neon light, could detect two molecules of human pheromone in a kilometre cube of air, filter the DNA out of a Friday night, illuminate each casual exchange of fluids in wavebands from far infra-red to near ultraviolet. The results of this expensive, operator-rich technique were streamed to him as simultaneous separate edits of the data, which he built into composites and profiles at will. Even so he lost his quarry almost immediately among the bars and transsexual brothels, the streets that stank of perspiration, oil products and lemon grass.

Midtown they still clung together in a group. Then the men, quiet and greedy, peeled off one by one. They had a poor hold on things but they knew what they liked. Fried food, sex, hard drugs, smart tattoos, tank parlours, any kind of music from chamame to rockit dub. One minute they were still distinguishable, gawking up at buildings like black amp; gold cigarette packs against the sky: the next they had entered an alley, climbed a flight of stairs, paid cash to get processed through some pocked security door. They had merged somehow with the life around them. They were gone. Aschemann had a sense of them fading away in front of him. The hardware felt it too.

The blonde was the last to go. Where her friends had appetites, she had a sense of herself. She was puzzled by her own drives. She stood in her short white sleeveless satin dinner frock at the intersection of Montefiore and Bone, smiling at a lull in the traffic. She took off one shoe and rubbed her foot. She took off the other shoe and held them both in her hand. She looked one way, then the other, then back again, smiling expectantly each time as if she would suddenly see something new. But it had all stopped happening. The street remained empty, the neon blinked on and off. The smile faded. Aschemann looked away briefly and when he turned back she was gone.

"Can you confirm that?" he asked his team.

They could. Even so, he expected to look up and see her in the middle distance, trudging purposefully towards the next bar.

Something about the blonde reminded Aschemann of his wife- her sense of expectation, something, he didn't entirely know what. He remained in Carmody another hour, hoping the nanodevice operation would produce results. Things didn't work out that way; and although he could easily have returned to the Cafe Surf to collect a fresh group of suspects, in the end an impulse made him hail a rickshaw and take it down to Suicide Point, where his wife had lived.

By then it was nearly dawn. Along the concrete service road between her house and the beach, Point kids stood about in loose groups waiting for customers. One or two of them glanced up briefly at the rickshaw bowling past, trailing its coloured smoke of junk holographic ads, then away again. They all had small heads and blank faces. Sand blew round Aschemann's shoes as he stood on his wife's doorstep and raised his hand to knock. Before he could complete the gesture he heard his own voice say clearly, "What are you doing?"

He didn't have to knock. He had the key. He could go in any time, nevertheless he went back and sat in the rickshaw and explained to the rickshaw girl:

"My wife's dead."

"It's a problem we'll all have."

"I forgot for a moment," he said.

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."