Nova Swing

4 At the Club Semiramide

Liv Hula opened her bar in the late mornings. However she caned it the previous night she could never sleep more than two or three hours, but after that would wake suddenly from dreams of being sucked down, listen in a daze but hear nothing except the usual sounds from Straint Street outside-a rickshaw rumbling and bumping downhill into Saudade on the uneven pavement; a woman singing. Or she would have dreams of some other planet, from which she always woke thinking, "Where was that? I had a better time there." These minute, crisp little visions of her past not connecting one with another, or to here and now, she would look round at the room with its clean bare white walls, then get up suddenly and kick last night's clothes around the floor.

It was easier to be downstairs. Sweep, push tables about, wash glasses, breathe the stale air, splash cold water on your face from the bar sink. You unlocked the door, daylight poured in on the slant and the shadow operators flickered about in it for a minute or two like reef fish before retreating to their corners. At about the same time Liv Hula retreated behind the bar. She always stood in the same place. Polished the zinc with her elbows, moved the cash drawer in and out. By now her feet fit a dip in the springy floorboards. She didn't want to remember how many years she spent behind the bar in Black Cat White Cat.

Check stock, order food, watch the chopshop traffic, watch the light swing slowly round the room, and by early afternoon she would have her first customer. She was glad to see anyone. Usually it would be Fat Antoyne, but Fat Antoyne hadn't been in since Joe Leone died. Or if it wasn't Antoyne it would be Vic Serotonin the travel agent, who at that hour hardly looked better than Liv herself.

Today it wasn't either of them.

When Vic Serotonin did arrive, it was with that preoccupied air of his-hands in pockets, shoulders in a permanent shrug, needy eyes fixed away from everything-as if he was thinking so hard about his life he didn't know what part of the city it was going on in. He leaned on the bar and said:

"Rum."

"Hi, Vic," Liv Hula said. "Nice to see you."

After a pause she said in a fair imitation of Serotonin's voice, " 'Nice to see you, Liv.' "

"Cut it out," said Vic Serotonin.

"When you pay your tab I will," she said sweetly. "Black Heart over ice? Well, how did I know that?" She let him drink it- standing a little back from the bar with something between satisfaction and amusement in her eyes-then said, "Your client's back, Vic."

Vic looked round and saw the client had been sitting there all the time on one of the window stools, staring out the misty glass into the street. Her face was tilted so the light fell evenly across it and, without disclosing anything, gave it a milky, transparent look. A cup of hot chocolate was in front of her. She didn't seem to be drinking from it. The moment Vic saw her he was aware of other images spinning off her, too quick to really see. He had images of running, then a board fence green with lichen in the rain. An abandoned street from a wrong angle.

Generally Vic would walk away from anything difficult. Clients came to him, he looked them over; he knew a time-waster.

"I don't want to see you here agaift," he said.

He walked quietly up behind her where she sat on the stool and put his mouth near her neck and said, "I don't want to see you here again." He was startled by his own intensity. She stared at him for a moment, as if she was trying to understand something in a foreign language. Then she got to her feet and began to fumble in her bag, out of which eventually she took a business card. She said:

"This is where I live. I wish you would help me. If you change your mind, I still feel as if I want to go in there."

"That's the problem," Vic said.

"I'm sorry?"

Vic said, "I know my mind. You don't know yours." He stood in the doorway and watched her walk away down Straint. This time she was dressed in a black tulip skirt to midcalf. Over that was a little silver fur peplum jacket with lightly padded shoulders; the jacket came with a matching pillbox hat. She hailed a rickshaw and got in it.

"She wishes you would help her, Vic," Liv Hula called from behind the bar. Vic told her he would like another drink.

On the card the woman had given him was an address in Hot Walls, which Vic recalled as tall old-fashioned townhouses on the wrong side of being corporate, run down twenty years ago when the current generation of executives traded up into the purpose-built complexes of Doko Gin. He wished he hadn't said anything to her at all, because that made a connection between them.

"Why would a tourist have an address on Hot Walls?" he asked Liv Hula.

"I'd ask how she got your name, Vic."

"That too."

Liv watched him tear the card up and toss the pieces on the bar. Later, though, he collected them together and put them in his pocket.

Vic got another call from Paulie DeRaad.

DeRaad seemed irritated. At the same time he was dissociated and vague. He wanted to talk about the artefact he had bought, he said. He said he was puzzled. He said he wasn't sure what he had. But each time Vic asked him what was wrong, his attention seemed to be somewhere else. "Is something going on where you are, Paulie?" Vic asked him. "Because yaw should attend to it if there is, especially when you don't have anything to say to me."

"Hey, be polite, Vic," Paulie advised him. Eventually, he said Vic should come over to his club, the Semiramide. That would be the best way of doing it, he thought. There was something Vic should see; he could see it for himself.

"I've got other things to do," Vic said.

"You haven't got things more important than this," DeRaad said. "Hey, Vic, I'll send someone to pick you up, save you any trouble."

"There's no need for that," Vic said.

The Semiramide lay midtown like a cruise ship at dock, placed to attract a mix of tourists and local players, class and income to be decided by Paulie himself. When Vic got there, six-thirty p.m., he found an ongoing situation. It was empty but for the customary DeRaad footsoldiers, a dozen contract gun-kiddies sitting round the back tables excitedly comparing weapons and throwing dice. Some of the furniture was tipped over and a couple of charred holes in the walls indicated someone had let go recently with a reaction pistol. Paulie's people seemed less connected than usual.

"Paulie won't be happy you go in there," one of the gun-punks informed Vic when he tried to get in the office.

"The fuck he won't," Vic said, looking down at her.

The punk's name was Alice Nylon, she was eight years old and wore a blue plastic rainslicker buttoned up to the neck. Cafe elec-trique rotted Alice's front teeth before she was seven, giving her an interesting speech defect. She enjoyed cookery, aquacise sessions at the local pool, and in her spare time was studying to do her own accountancy. "Vic," she told him, "you would not believe the raid we had. No, really! Right here at the Semiramide Club." She shook her head in disbelief, slowly from side to side. "Those losers from Site Crime, all over us like a cheap holo of the Kefahuchi Tract. That guy who looks like Albert Einstein? We had to be tuff, Paulie said, and not do what comes naturally. We had to keep a tight rein."

"I wish I'd seen that, Alice," Vic said politely.

Alice shrugged. She was a professional. It was nothing to her.

"We would of iced them, Vic, but what do you do?" She gave him her tired, raddled little smile. "So maybe it would be best if you waited here? For Paulie?"

Vic said OK and went over to one of the tables.

"Hey, Vic," Alice called after him. "This morning I cooked brownies on my own!"

Vic hated the Semiramide.

As a storefront it was an insult to the intelligence.

It wasn't much of a joint either.

The instant you walked in you knew Paulie DeRaad made his money elsewhere. There were forty tables, each to seat four, in a circular high-ceiling space originally the premises of a predictable alien technology scam calling itself FUGA-Orthogen. (This scam founded itself on the ownership of three mining machines parked above some unknown gamma-emitter in Radio Bay. At best guess they'd been there one million years already, and no one knew how to operate them. "What those jockeys were going to dig up was also a little unclear," Paulie used to say with a faint smile. "So we had to let them go.") When he moved in he had the walls cal-cimined white and illuminated with selected UV frequencies. Paulie liked high-end light because it reminded him of his glory days. Holograms floated about, advertising product; Monas floated about, taking commissions for the back room where people could be more comfortable. Paulie's customers could eat, they could play dice a little. He had a band so they could listen to music. Paulie's only major proviso, they should dress well: his was a weakness, he completely acknowledged, for the glitterati.

Vic bought a drink.

To pass the time, he pieced together the visiting card his ex-client had left him when he threw her out of Black Cat White Cat. It puzzled him that a tourist would keep an apartment in Saudade-a Hot Walls address was too genteel to be cheap, not gentrified enough to be corporate.

It was seven by then, and the joint was beginning to fill, mainly with couples who would get a cocktail before they went on elsewhere. Seven-ten, Vic was surprised to see Antoyne Messner walk into the Semiramide and head for the tables at the back. "Antoyne!" he called, but though the fat man acknowledged him with a nod, he didn't come over. Instead, he sat down with the gun-punks and they all threw dice together. "Well, fuck you, Fat Antoyne," Vic said to himself. Just then the office door opened, and Paulie DeRaad's voice was heard calling:

"Hey, Vic! You incompetent fuckhead! Where are you?"

Paulie DeRaad was younger than Vic Serotonin. He had a sharp nose, a shock of white-blond hair that went back in the famous

"widow's peak" of his service years, highlights of which sometimes played as holograms in the main room of the Semiramide Club.

Paulie was at Cor Caroli, fourteen years old. Later he was one of the three people who got out alive from El Rayo X after its orbital collision with the Nastic heavy cruiser Touching the Void. Since then he had been wiry and intense and bunched-up, and when he became excited the skin of his face would seem to get thinner and shinier and the blood would seem to lie too close to the surface. This was a legacy of radiation burns, and a general ablative thinning of his skin which he didn't have repaired and wore like a badge. Paulie never stopped. He liked everything. He wanted everything. That, at least, was the first impression he gave you: behind that, you sensed almost immediately, his plan was to stay alive and prosper.

"You want to take a look at this?" Paulie asked Vic.

He meant his office, which was in worse condition than his club. The air smelled of ionisation and char, the furniture was strewn about. There had been some kind of fight in there. It was a small room for that. Worse for Paulie, though, Aschemann's team had brought in equipment that went through his shadow operators as if they were a wooden filing cabinet. So now they were in the ceiling corners, folded up so tight across themselves it would take days to get them down again. They were in shock. They felt violated. They had nothing left to disclose. Paulie looked bad too. He was sweating, and his face had gone a hard, meaty colour.

"Do you know anything about this?"

Vic said he didn't.

"Well, fuck, Vic, you ought to."

Vic went and found a chair, which he tipped the right way up so he could sit down. This gesture allowed Paulie DeRaad to sit down too, and wipe his face. "Some new kind of artefact is coming out the site," he said, "this is Aschemann's story. He has us in the frame for it." He put his fingers in his mouth then took them out again and stared at them. "Look in my mouth, Vic, tell me if my gums are bleeding."

"Fuck off, Paulie."

DeRaad laughed. "I nearly got you, though, Vic. You were halfway out the seat." He was calming down, looking amused. He was enjoying his life again. He said, "You know this joint they call the Cafe Surf?"

"I never heard of it," Vic said.

"Hey, you can talk to me, Vic, I'm your friend."

If Vic was worried about nanocam coverage, he said, there was no need. Site Crime's equipment was a disgrace. It was ten years old. It was insanely expensive to run. Ninety per cent of the time it was out of service. Paulie had EMC cover anyway, he implied. "You're invisible, you go anywhere with me." Vic, who until that moment hadn't been remotely worried, stared at him, then shrugged.

"Is that why you brought me here?"

Paulie stopped looking amused.

"No," he said. "There's something I want you to see." He got to his feet. "Well, come on," he said. "Do you think I keep it here?"

"I wouldn't know, Paulie."

DeRaad called for his rickshaw girl. He winked at Vic. "We're not going far, but why should we walk?" The evening had turned chilly. Marine airs swept through midtown, condensing out on the street furniture, the rickshaw shafts. You could hear service work going on in the military yards. Every so often a K-ship fired up and went for the parking orbit at Mach 40, capturing everything from Straint to the Corniche in its brutal torch glare, varnishing the side of Paulie DeRaad's sharp face so that for a second you had the illusion you could see right down into the musculature. Paulie hung out the rickshaw. He loved all of that military stuff. "Look at the fucker, Vic! Just look at it!" You had to smile at Paulie, a bottle-rocket going off could put him in a good mood.

"Hey," he told the rickshaw girl, who was running up hard into her shafts, "you needn't kill yourself over this."

"I ain't got but the one pace, Paulie."

"Your funeral, kid," he advised her. "It's just down here," he said to Vic Serotonin.

Paulie had bolt-holes all over Saudade. This one was a bleak single room off Voigt Street in the noncorporate hinterland, no different from the rest except Paulie kept a military cot there, which he always made up himself; along with a few things he valued from his vacuum commando days. He also ran some of his communications through it, via the various FTL uplinkers and orbital routers which made him nationwide. As soon as he opened the door, a foul smell came out. It was like shit, urine and standing water.

"Jesus, Paulie," Vic said.

Paulie told him he didn't know anything yet. Along with the smell, there was a kind of bubbling sound. Lying on Paulie's cot, partly out of its clothes, was the entity that called itself "the Weather." Last time Vic saw it, they were at Suicide Point together. Somehow it had choked on Vic's artefact, and the two of them were glued together at some level no one but another Shadow Boy could understand. A wedding had taken place. Whatever tied the knot had also wed them to the proxy. They were all three stuck with one another-although, to judge by the Point kid's unfortunate condition, not for long. He looked frightened and ill. He had tried to undress himself and get under the blanket, for comfort as much as warmth. His shorts were half-down, his skin a fishy white under the low wattage illumination. Every so often he convulsed, his mouth gaped open and he threw up what looked like cold tapioca.

"So what's this, Vic?" Paulie DeRaad wanted to know.

The kid heard Paulie's voice. It sat up trembling and looked from one to the other of them. It caught Vic's eye. It recognised him. He could see the operator far down inside, and the Point kid, and in there with them both the artefact, still white and unknown, some animal-like thing running towards Vic across the event site. There was no way to avoid the directness of this: something wrong was happening. Wherever Vic and Paulie situated themselves in the room they couldn't hide from it. They still caught flashes of the Shadow Boy's unhomely charm. For a moment the foul air would be full of rain falling through sunlight, the smell of the sea. Between moans from the proxy and bursts of code like music, they heard its voice.

"Am I here?" it appealed to Paulie. "I can't seem to see myself." "This happened two or three days afterwards," Paulie said to Vic. "I can't pass this off on my buyer. I can't use it for myself, even if I knew what it was. This ain't good business, Vic." "I see that," Vic said. "Can we get out of here?" The Point kid laughed. "No one gets out of here," it whispered, in three separate voices at once.

"I'm revolted," Paulie DeRaad said.

He locked the kid back in and the rickshaw returned them to the Semiramide, where the evening had warmed up a little. The air was thick with music and talk. The tables were full. Monas wafted between them on four-inch urethane heels, reeking mainly of peppermint or vanilla essence, though some had chosen cinnamon when they bought the package. Images from EMC actions at Cor Caroli and Motel Splendido were showering across the walls, along with footage of Paulie DeRaad's old ship, the Hellflower, going up in a silent flat-plane blast after it took a hit from some top-end Nastic asset. Vic and Paulie sat down in the office again, and Paulie had Alice Nylon shut the door to keep the noise out. They got drinks, and Paulie said, "You see the direction I'm thinking. I have to ask, Vic: did you bring something bad from in there?" "Everything in there's bad," Vic said. "You know the risks." "I'm the buyer," Paulie reminded him. "You're the one with the professional skills." He seemed to be having trouble with his swallow reflex. Also, his hands had a tremor which was new to Vic Serotonin. "You take the risks," said Paulie. "Not me. What if I caught something from that thing?"

"Well, then, you would begin to feel bad. But you look fine to me, Paulie."

"I ain't fine," Paulie said. "I got a temperature ever since this started. I don't care about my food. You bring a Mona in, I even forget she's there for a moment or two. I get vague. What sort of life is that?"

"One thing," Vic advised, "you should shoot it."

Paulie stared.

"I tried that right away. But it reassembles itself, Vic. White lights rolling together from all over the floor. Eeriest fucking thing you ever saw, crying and whining the whole time." He added, as Vic got up to leave, "By the way, I got your boy Antoyne working for me now, that's OK with you."

Eleven p.m., too late to go anywhere, too early to go home. Vic was puzzled by everything he had seen and heard. He thought about going to visit Emil and Edith Bonaventure. He thought about going home to bed. In the end he didn't do either of those things. On his way out he stopped at the table where Fat Antoyne Messner sat. Antoyne, who was wearing a brand new royal blue drape suit over a yellow shirt, had been joined by one of the club Monas. At close quarters this vision turned out to be Joe Leone's ex-squeeze, Irene. Irene was leaning in close so Antoyne could see deep into the promise of her hot-ochre Mexican-style blouse. She had her fingers on his wrist as if she was taking his pulse, and they were both drinking those pink and yellow drinks he liked. "Hi, Irene," Vic said, "Fat Antoyne! Nice suit!" He had to shout to be heard over the crowd. "Why don't I sit down with you?" he suggested. When they looked at each other then back at Vic and didn't answer, Vic made a What can you do? gesture, as if the general noise levels were causing him to mishear what everyone said, and sat down anyway. He ordered drinks.

"So: everyone works for Paulie now?"

"It's temporary, Vic," Fat Antoyne replied quickly, as if he had been expecting that question.

"It's work," Irene corrected him, at the same time giving Vic a look. "Everyone has to work," she said. "I don't care how direct I am when I say that."

Naturally, a person with Antoyne's skills sought port work, shipyard work, Irene went on to explain; but the civilian yards weren't doing as well as anyone thought. "He looked everywhere, and evidently I found him this opportunity instead." Things were tough all over, she reminded Vic, and in a shortening labour market you couldn't always have your first choice: luckily Paulie DeRaad was there to fill the gap. She had always found Paulie to be a fair employer, also he was known for good pay. Vic could see how well it was working out, she said, by the new sharp way Antoyne could afford to dress.

Vic agreed he probably could.

"I didn't have no real place there," Antoyne said suddenly, meaning Liv Hula's bar. As he saw it, that was the problem. "All I wanted was a chance to fit in, Vic."

"Still," Vic said, "don't you miss those nights we caned it with Liv?"

"Another benefit is, here they just call me by my name. Which I prefer that. Not 'Fat Antoyne' like in some other joints."

"It's great you lost weight," Vic said.

To Irene, with her honed Mona instincts for the feeling nature of life, Vic Serotonin had the face of someone who walked around the town a lot on his own. When he finished his drink and said goodbye to them both, and added courteously to Irene, "Be sure and have a nice night," she felt all the things Vic didn't know about himself quiver in her own nerves. She watched him make his way through the Semiramide crowd, passing a moment with Alice Nylon on the door, and told herself sadly, "I knew a million men like him." With his black hair and sad hard eyes, he looked like the New Nuevo Tango itself, she had to allow. But he had no idea about other people, and less than no idea about himself. She couldn't express it any other way. A man who walked around a lot on his own and despite that knew himself less well than others knew him. She put her hand over Fat Antoyne's.

"Vic Serotonin," she said, "will learn too late about the realness of the world, and how none of us is put here in it long."

Fat Antoyne shrugged. "We don't need to think about him."

This was his signal they should return to the conversation they were having before Vic interrupted them. It was the same conversation they had every night since Joe Leone died, the mythodology of which was: they would soon leave Saudade and travel the Halo again, but this time together. Which was surely, as Irene pointed out, the simplest and most direct of gestures, since travel had by definition brought them both here and together in the first place. "I've washed so many planets out of my hair, why not this one?" she said. "Joe would want it for me," she said. "I know he would!" Her eyes were reckless and bright. "Oh Antoyne, wouldn't it be so nice?" Antoyne, less certain, was anyway pleased she said it. Each time they had this talk, he felt bound to warn Irene she could find more rewarding travel companions than himself-and better men, though he had had his day, that was certain. In response, he would always hear her say:

"Never talk yourself down, Antoyne!"

If he talked himself down, she warned him, a man wasn't for her. She counted herself fortunate, she said, to meet Antoyne the awful night Joe died. She was known for her belief that life was follow your heart and never talk yourself down. The future was bright for both of them now, and sad men like Vic would never find that out.

Unaware of these harsh judgments, Vic Serotonin made his way down through Moneytown to the Corniche. Half an hour's walk brought him to the shadows underneath an abandoned pier, where he stood looking out across the sand. The tide was neither in nor out. The sea had a light in it, as if something was happening just over the horizon. Where it fizzed and fumed at the perimeter of the event site, the surf was a violet colour, and gave off faint odours of oxidants and aftershave like an empty dance hall.

Vic had a familiarity with venues of this kind. He had instincts of his own about any place caught halfway between the event site and the city. But this one told him nothing, except he would not try to run anything across the line here. It didn't strike Vic as a good way in. It didn't strike him as a good way out. He smoked a cigarette. He looked and listened. Behind him, rickshaw girls stamped and panted in the crushed oystershell parking lot of the Cafe Surf, wasting their breath on the cool night air. Customers hurried towards the bar, laughing and batting out at the ads which fluttered in their hair. Every time someone opened the door, music spilled out. It wasn't Vic's kind of music, but he went inside anyway.

When he left an hour later, he was none the wiser. Fake Sandra Shen decor. Standing room only. Overflowing ashtrays, tables littered with screwed-up napkins, half-empty plates and Giraffe beer bottles. The smell of steam from the kitchen. And under the red neon sign, Live Music Nightly, a cheap two-piece to grind out endless bebop remixes of last year's sentimental tunes. You couldn't even get near the toilet for the stream of people coming out. Vic leaned on the bar, listening to the band and shaking his head; then he turned on his heel suddenly and pushed his way to the door. If something was happening there, he didn't know what it was.

He took a rickshaw back into the city and made the girl stop outside the uptown police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe, where Lens Aschemann maintained an office. Past midnight, and damp winds chased wastepaper across the deserted pavement. A single second-floor window remained illuminated. Broken silhouettes came and went against the blind. It wasn't hard to picture Aschemann up there, drinking rum while he methodically pasted Vic into the frame for some scheme Vic didn't even know about. What had Site Crime stumbled over at the Cafe Surf? Paulie DeRaad's EMC connexions, maybe, running an artefact-related operation of their own. But then why put Vic Serotonin in the frame for Paulie's lack of discrimination?

"Hey," the rickshaw girl reminded him, "you pay a horse to run."

"So run," Vic told her.

"You know I got to towel down if I stand around too long. People just don't get that."

"I'm sorry," said Vic.

"Life's too short to be sorry, hon."

Vic paid her off on the edge of a weed-grown lot a few streets away from his rooms in South End, then took the roundabout route home. No one followed him, yet when he got into the hall of his building he couldn't convince himself he was alone. A package had been left for him. When he opened it, he found a small leather-bound book, on the cover of which was a line-drawing of a hand holding some flowers. Though the flowers were all on the same stem, and the same shape, they were of different colours. For a moment, he thought that Edith Bonaventure had found her father's diary and brought it to him. But the handwriting wasn't Emil's, and the first sentence Vic read began, "Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before my childhood?" Serotonin stared at this in exasperation, then ran upstairs to his room, where, instead of putting on the light, he stood by the window in the dark and looked down into the street. Ten or twenty yards away on the opposite side, someone looked back at him. It was the woman from Liv Hula's bar, her face blanched by the vapour lamps, framed by the collar of her fur coat. By the time he had forced the window up and shouted, she was gone.

Some hours later, across the city, the man who resembled Einstein let himself into his dead wife's bungalow by the sea.

The front door, swollen with salt moisture, must be lifted as you opened it; sometimes it stuck anyway. Sand feathered across the linoleum in the hall. Rather than switch on the lights, Aschemann paused and allowed his eyes to adjust to the faint sea-glimmer limning every surface. He made his way carefully to the kitchen, where he wiped the window and regarded the ocean. "How are you?" his wife's voice said to him. "You see that ship out there?" It was the kitchen of an empty house, empty cupboards, empty shelves, dust and sand in a thin gritty layer on everything. Aschemann ran warm water from the faucet, catching it in his cupped hands to splash his face. Then he went back down the hall and took off his raincoat.

While he was doing that his wife's voice said, "Can you see the same ship as me, those lights to the right of the Point?"

In life she had constantly asked him similar questions, whether he was standing next to her or lying in bed with some other woman halfway across the city. She had, somehow, never trusted her own eyes.

"I see the ship," he reassured her. "It's only a ship. Go to bed now."

Comforted by this fragment of an exchange the rest of which lay at some inaccessible level of memory, he sat down in the lounge, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and dialled up his assistant, to whom he said, "I hope you have something good for me. Because we aren't doing so well since the other day." He knew this was ambiguous. Let it stand, he thought.

After the raid on the Semiramide Club, they had argued in the car. "I don't like to have shots fired," he had informed her. "Now I'll have to apologise to Paulie."

"Paulie is a violent creep."

"Still. Shots fired is not my way. Find nothing and set light to a wall, is that a day's work? Threaten some children! The problem with DeRaad will always be the same. He's never quite intelligent enough for his own good, and never quite stupid enough for ours. That's Paulie." He touched her arm. "And drive slower," he said. "I don't want to lose this nice car. I don't want to hurt someone." She stared ahead, and, if anything, accelerated a little. Moneytown was all round them with rickshaws and pedestrians, the Cadillac embedded in early evening traffic one minute, prised free the next. Stop, start, stop, start: it made Aschemann feel ill.

"They aren't children," she said.

"You're angry, I can understand that."

The Semiramide raid had left him none the wiser. He had expected nothing less-who, after all, would store a proscribed artefact in the back room of a dance club? Not even Paulie DeRaad. Since then, without quite knowing why, Aschemann had returned repeatedly to the Cafe Surf, telling himself, Everything proceeds from there. To watch is best when you have no theory. He tracked his bebop golems into the night, observed their lateral slide and vanishment into the hustle of things in central Saudade. It was like a card trick. One in ten lasted a little longer, going as far, perhaps, as to negotiate for a room. "That must mean something," he told his assistant now. "Ten per cent of them are more than ordinarily restless. They want something. Are they even artefacts as we know them?"

All this, she responded, served only to confirm what he already knew. Aschemann shrugged. "So it's three in the morning," he said, "and I don't understand why you waste your time talking to an old man like me."

"Vic Serotonin walked into the Cafe Surf tonight, half an hour after you walked out. I've been trying to reach you since."