Nova Swing

5 Ninety Per Cent Neon

"Ah," Aschemann said.

"I can't report to you when you disconnect."

"I suppose not."

"You disconnect and wander about on your own," she complained. When it became clear he wasn't going to answer that, she said, "We got a little coverage. Would you like to see it now?"

Aschemann said he would.

The house lurched, then vanished from around him. He was looking down a nanocam feed, at jumpy visuals of people in some crowded space. His assistant's voice came in across the top of that, its hollow, reverberant qualities an artefact of the transmission process. She seemed closer, but not quite in the room with him. "Is this all right?" she said. "Only they're routing it down some kind of low priority EMC pipe. Ours are all down."

"The pipe's fine. The material itself is poor."

"They had some technical problems with that too."

It wasn't anything like being there. The image stream wavered, held, dropped suddenly into greyscale while slow bars of black rolled queasily down Aschemann's field of view. You could be the most experienced user, you would still throw up in the end. But there, quite visible, was Vic Serotonin, perhaps eight feet away from Aschemann, propping up the Long Bar at the Cafe Surf with his gabardine jacket open and his hat pushed to the back of his head, while the people around him conversed jerkily or ran fast-forward as if they lived in another world. "It looks as if he was waiting for someone," Aschemann said, shaking his head irritably as if to dislodge something, while his eyes focused and refocused on a spot in the empty room. People often sought to clarify an incoming image this way. You would catch them squinting or banging their temple above one eye, it was a common reaction, which never worked.

"Do you have the same view as me?" the assistant said in an excited voice. "From about waist height? And there's a woman in a red dress to the right of the bar?"

"That's the view I have."

"There he is. Do you see him? He said he never heard of the Cafe Surf, but there he is! This is exactly what we need!"

Aschemann wasn't so sure. He asked her to close the pipe, and when his vision had returned to normal said, "All I see is a man having a drink in a bar. If that was illegal we would all be in the orbital correction facility. Where did Vic go after he left?"

"They don't know."

"That's helpful."

"If you watch the whole thing, the fault gets out of hand about two hundred and eighty seconds in, and they disconnect everything to fix it."

Aschemann thanked her for the pictures. "Go home now," he recommended. "Get some sleep. We have a lot to think about here." He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room his wife had died in. He would be there until morning, sprawled in a stained yellow armchair and surrounded by her things. He would hear her voice, asking him what day it was, offering him a drink. He spent more time in that house than he would admit to his assistant; and missed his wife more than he would admit to himself.

Something in the Cafe Surf footage had caught Aschemann's attention, but he couldn't say what it was. Then, the evening of the next day, as he sat at the Long Bar listening to the two-piece, a young woman took the stool next to his and ordered a cocktail called "Ninety Per Cent Neon." She was a Mona, so he thought at first, a Monroe look-alike in a red wrap-bodice evening dress and matching stilt-heel shoes.

"I've seen you here," Aschemann said.

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminium frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He'd seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Serotonin. More importantly, perhaps, he'd seen it fourteen days ago, when she stumbled out of the toilet at the Cafe Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she was new in the world. She still had an unformed, labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

"I'm here a lot," she said. "I like the band. Do you like them?"

He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little rum. "They're as guilty as ever," he said.

"Guilty?"

"Under his dexterity, this pianist hides neither intellect nor heart, only compulsion. If no one else is available he will play against himself; and then against the self thus created, and then against the self after that, until all fixed notion of self has leaked away into the slippage and he can relax for a second in the sharp light and cigarette smoke like someone caught fleetingly in an ancient black and white photograph. Do you see?"

"It's only music, though," she said.

"Perhaps," Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself. He offered to buy her another cocktail, but all she did was look at him vaguely as if she hadn't heard, so he went on:

"The older man has come to a different understanding of things, one which to his friend would seem bland and self-evident. He believes that it is only because no music is possible that any music at all is possible." Here, Aschemann smiled briefly at his own cleverness. "As a result," he finished, "the universe now remakes itself for him continually, out of two or three invariable rules and an obsolete musical instrument called the saxophone."

"But guilty? Is that enough to make them guilty?"

The detective shrugged. "Complicit, then. It's only a way of putting it. Myself, I prefer the New Nuevo Tango. There's more heart."

She stared at him, got down off the stool, laughed in a nervous way which revealed the flecks of lipstick on her white teeth. He caught briefly the smell of her, strong, warm, a little unwashed, a little cheap; in some way reassuring.

"Goodbye," she said. "Maybe I'll see you again."

Aschemann watched her leave, then finished his drink and shadowed her unhurriedly into the warm air and black heart of the city. He could smell the guilt and excitement that came up out of the street gratings to meet her. He could smell her excitement at being alive there, in Saudade among the sights. Did she know he was behind her? He wasn't sure how she saw the world, but she hadn't forgotten him. He was certain of that, but he wasn't certain how dangerous she might be. He followed her to a coldwater walk-up behind the bottled-milk dairy at Tiger Shore, running up the last few metal risers of the outside staircase to catch her and lay his hand on her warm shoulder. His footsteps rang and scraped, she fumbled with the door. Dropped the key. Picked it up.

"Wait," he ordered. "Police. Don't go in without me."

She stared at him in despair; then over his shoulder, less as if there was someone there than at the city itself. "Please!" she said. "I don't know what I've done wrong."

"Neither do I."

Whatever happened next, he wanted to make sure he was there.

It was bare: grey board floor, bare bulb, a single bentwood chair. On the wall opposite the window, the shadow of the slatted blind fell across a poster with the logo SurfNoir. "Hey," she said. "I know: why don't you sit here-?" When she bent forward from the waist to undo his raincoat, the red dress presented her breasts to him in a flickering light. She knelt, and he could hear her breathing. It was placid, rather catarrhal. Later she lifted the hem of the dress and positioned herself astride him. So close, he saw that her gait, the shadows round her eyes, the foundation caked in the downy hairs by the corners of her mouth, had conspired beneath the Cafe Surf neon to make her seem older than she was. She whispered when he came, "There. There now." She had been a month in the same dress. She was a victim, but of what? He wasn't sure. He had no idea what she was. How had he smelled her excitement yet failed to smell his own? He felt weakened by it.

"Where do you sleep?" he said puzzledly. "There's no bed in here."

This idea let in a moment of confusion. It was very brief. But when he shook his head to clear it and turned to pay her, she was standing in the corner motionless with panic, facing the angle between the walls. She had learned enough to know what the city wanted but no more. New clothes were scattered across the floor, clean but disordered, as if she had tried to wear them but wasn't sure how. She had collected objects too, some coloured feathers on a stick, an unopened bottle of "Ninety Per Cent Neon." She started to fade as he watched, but he was out on the iron stairway long before the process was complete. He returned to the Long Bar, where he drank until he stopped shaking. Resting in the music and light he thought: does it matter who she was, when every night here the world is somehow touched? Guilt made him report to his assistant:

"I think I begin to see what's happening."

Two days later, hands in pockets at the end of an afternoon spent with his friend the bottle, Vic Serotonin lounged in the doorway of Liv Hula's bar watching the cats flow back into the event site. He had been waiting there five minutes and Straint was still thick with them.

"Pay that tab any time," Liv Hula reminded him from behind the zinc counter.

"Sure," Vic said.

He stood there a minute or two more without saying anything then turned up his collar and left.

Liv Hula rubbed at a stain on the counter. She threw the rag into the sink. "Always good to see you, Vic," she said quietly to herself. "Come again soon." She went upstairs and turned on Radio Retro, but they were just then announcing the evening's fights, and that only made her think of Joe Leone.

Outside it was Saudade.

At one end you got the tall black and gold business towers and tourist hotels, with the lights coming on in them in angular cyphers; at the other, the pastels of the Corniche dimming in a sunset of impure hot pinks and greens. Between them the sea; and the horizon somewhere past the tremendous roll of the surf, like a crease in a piece of paper the colour of doves. Onshore winds, persistent as a hand on your arm, came up the streets from the front, picking up in transit the rich smells of seafood and low-end mixed drinks. The hotels were emptying, the bars were filling up, surf noir basslines were bumping out of every open door.

Vic Serotonin passed all this, his shoulders in a permanent shrug.

Vic was puzzled. He had a leather-bound diary in one pocket and a Chambers gun in the other.

He walked down Straint to its intersection with the top end of Neutrino, where two rickshaw girls and their clients were already in a traffic altercation, then turned left on to Cahuenga which brought him eventually to Hot Walls. After that, he was five minutes finding the right door. It was one of those tall narrow town-houses, six floors split into apartments. Vic rang the bell. There was a long wait, during which he rang the bell a couple of times more. Then an uncertain voice said:

"Who's there?"

"Remember me?" Vic said. "You want to see me. You want me to help you."

"Come in, Mr Serotonin."

He ran up the stairs two at a time.

Her diary had unsettled Vic, but he was unable to stop reading it. "I fear the unknown," she had written, "but the fear of the known is so much worse."

There were pages of this kind of thing. You got a list of expenses-a rickshaw downtown, meals at upscale venues like Els and Encientum, underwear from Uoest, clever books from Parker amp; Bright. Then a description of the fights-naphtha flares casting a kind of anti-illumination over the arena, burnt cinnamon smells, the cultivars strutting about, all tusks and tattoos, their erect cocks the size of horses', the sudden flash of an eight-inch spur then something slick and ropey levered out and steaming in the shadows. "There's a moral dimension here no one seems aware of," was her conclusion about the fights. That was fine. It barely scratched the surface, but it was more than understandable. It was the travelogue you'd expect. But then she was off again:

"The known is slicked on to everything like a kind of grease. You would do anything to avoid the things you already know."

It made her hard to place. She seemed like someone who had spent time in Saudade; then like someone who hadn't. But if she belonged somewhere else, no clues were left where that might be. You got the impression of a woman who'd depended on privilege one planet past what she could handle, and who had inevitably become lost in space. Other than eat and shop and take rides around town, she stayed home and got tense. She loved her apartment, she said, but her relationship with the city was partial, unconstructive. Despite that, she didn't just catch a ship out of there, which is what any tourist would have done.

"Am I meant to live this way?" she asked herself. "Is it the same for all these other creatures? Is that how they see things here?" Speaking as one of those creatures, Vic would like to know too.

But answers weren't forthcoming, and the diary's language was empty because its true object-her own anxiety-would always remain both present and unstated: so that every observation suggested more than it could ever contain. As a result even the physical object sometimes seemed packed and decodable. Pressed to the nose, its pages gave out the scents of midtown: coffee, perfume, polished wood. Then, very faintly, human sex. Vic couldn't imagine that. The words rose from among these smells as if they were sensations too: "I dream entirely in tiny mad paintings. A man seems to be spewing up a snake. Someone else is helping him. The roof of their house is on fire. They recoil from one another yet seem entwined, bent in the shapes of a body language which no longer has any meaning.

"Is this what will happen to me inside the site? Am I dreaming what it is like? I don't want to go in but I must." There being no attempt to explain this combination of need and paralysis, Vic was forced back repeatedly on to the entry which had first caught his eye. "Am I confused when I remember, or try to, the time before I was born?" Then, as if this weren't enough:

"The vast craneflies, libellulinae and locusts which somehow filled my life then were emblematic. They were alien species, icons of difference; as tentative and fearful as they were frightening. They were usually trying to speak, through the woman I knew as The Girl Beneath the Dragonfly. She was ^translating for them, caught up, electrified, pushed out of herself, taken over, by their need. She had no life of her own. She was a radio, a retro radio. She lay on the sodden black ash. She was myself. They stood over her, trembling. They were trying to explain through her how badly things had gone wrong. How they had been blown here by circumstances they could not control. How they didn't mean to be here. In a sense they were my parents, but they had never been meant to be here, in the world as we knew it then.

"Insect," she concluded, "is an anagram of incest."

Even for a childhood on another planet it seemed extreme.

At least he had learned her name, written repeatedly across the first two or three pages in a hand which, formless at first, soon became practised and fluent. It was Kielar. "Mrs Elizabeth Kielar," she had written again and again, like a girl trying out future identities from the safety of some expensive New Venusberg school. "Elizabeth Kielar. Mrs Kielar." Vic would never use it, but it was a name. She stood looking at him uncertainly from her doorway. The fur coat Irene had so admired was loosely slung over an oyster satin slip, which encouraged the hallway light to pool up blue shadows behind her thin collarbones.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I-"

"In the end," Vic said, "sorry's never enough."

He pushed past her and into the apartment. It was seven or eight rooms one after the other, the connecting doors open so you could see the length of it. A bank of identical windows ran all the way down on the left, lighting it like a single artfully divided space, a restaurant or a gallery. Vic could feel her standing behind him, pulling the coat closed across her breasts, watching him with that continuous bland puzzlement of hers. She smelled of Anai's Anai's, and also some expensive flowered soap.

"You knew that," he insisted, without looking back, "but until now you've never had to acknowledge it." He held up the diary. "Why give this to me?"

She shut the door quietly behind her.

"You're angry," she said. "I don't know why you're so angry."

"I can't work with uncertainties on this side."

"Would you like to have a drink?" This idea seemed to restore her. "I was asleep when you knocked," she said. "Please come in and have a drink."

"I want to know what you think I can give you," Vic said.

"It didn't work because you were so angry. I was more afraid of you than that place."

"Maybe that's how it seems to you now," Vic said.

In the end, though, what could he do but shrug? He followed her down the curious linear apartment, accepted a drink, sat at one end of a sofa with a green chenille cover thrown over it and watched while she arranged herself at the other, in the corner as far away from him as she could get. She drew up her knees. She allowed the fur coat to fall loosely around her, and watched Vic in return. Vic made a pantomime of placing her diary carefully on a small table, which was perhaps his way of saying that was over now, he'd just leave that alone. There was a single narrow glass vase on the same table. In the mornings the light would fall harshly across it, tangle the transparent shadow of the vase in the shadows of the window frame. "Is that the drink you like?" she asked him. "Is that the way you prefer it?"

After a moment he said:

"When you walked into Liv Hula's bar, I thought you were a tourist. That was a mistake. It put both of us in danger."

"Mr Serotonin, I-"

"Look at me," Vic urged. "Listen. I'm telling you this. In there, the most unreliable people are the ones looking for something. Their lives were too difficult to solve. Now they hope something good will happen to them, but they've been hoping for too long and that's what makes them dangerous. You never know what will happen to them in there. They thought they wanted to find something-it would have been easier to stay this side of things." It was his standard speech to women like that. He usually gave it in a corner of Liv Hula's bar, or a suite at one of the tourist hotels.

He swallowed his drink. He leaned forward.

"Do you understand?" he said.

She shivered and pulled the coat back round her suddenly. "You're angry because you're afraid of everything," she said.

Vic shrugged and smiled.

"It's good we can agree," he said politely.

At this, she pursed her lips and turned her head away from him so that the long tendons of her neck stood out. Vic could see the tension in them. Her skin was a little darker than he remembered. "This morning," she said quietly, "I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I'm waiting for something to happen, and I don't even know what part of my life it will approach from." She turned back to him suddenly and asked, "Have you ever lost your way?" Her eyes, a curious colour between green and brown, were so wide and direct he couldn't look into them for fear of disappointing her in some obscure fashion.

"Would I know?" he said.

"People lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again."

She got up from the sofa and stood in front of him smiling. "Come and look," she said. "Come over here with me and look out of the window." When he didn't respond, she walked over to stare out anyway. "I won't wait for you," she said. Then:

"Look!"

Outside it was Saudade, rooftops and streets stretching away in the soft rain and dark. Lines of lights. Cabs and pedestrians flickering under the neon, adstreams like migrations of pastel moths. Distant cries came up; laughter. Past all that, past the tourist port and the military pits, out at the limits of vision, you could see something-a whitish, roiling strip like surf, the boundary of the event site, a stationary vapour of uncertain physics. Beautiful but very strange. Above it, the Kefahuchi Tract had stretched itself across the yielding black sky like the generative principle of some old cosmology. Vic Serotonin stood next to Mrs Kielar. He frowned briefly as if he had seen something out there he wanted to be certain of. Finally, he looked down at her.

"It's quiet tonight," he said.

She smiled to herself. "Is it?" she said. "Why did you come here?"

"I don't know."

"Tell yourself that if you like. It won't help."

The fur coat had fallen open again. City light splashed behind the narrow collarbones, and where the edge of the satin slip lay across it, her skin was the colour of balsamic cream. An unexpected warmth came up from her. The moment he became aware of that, she knew. She gave a low laugh and moved a step or two away from him. "You never had to see me again. What do you care about some tourist? It wasn't the diary. It was me." By then Vic had her by the shoulders, which were small and rounded.

"What's this?" he said, "what's happening?" and began kissing her.

His mouth safely on hers, she backed towards the sofa and pulled him down. Vic worked the coat off and tugged the slip up round her waist, felt the heat of her on his face; caught broken glimpses, through his own excitement, of the light on her skin. She was one of those women who writhe and push a lot. Some internal struggle with themselves-as urgent as their own narrow bones, skin over muscle-causes them to sweat immediately they touch your clothes. Everything is in their way. You don't know if they want you or not, but something won't stop in them. She bit Vic's arm. One foot pushed and kicked impatiently at the coat as she placed herself, then she had him in her.

"Christ," Vic said.

"You like this," she said. "You like it." She made a small agitated noise, as if she liked it too. She smiled at the ceiling for a moment, then drew up her legs and began to say yes, in a determined yet meditative voice, in time to Vic's thrusts: "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes," until he came.

"How you wanted to do that!" she said.

Vic, as puzzled as he'd ever been in his life, tried to roll away from her and sit up. She only wrapped her legs round him and held him by the shoulders until he couldn't avoid her eyes.

"Will you take me into the site, Mr Serotonin?"

He stared at her, shook his head. Pulled himself away. "It's Vic," he said thickly-then, sitting on the edge of the sofa staring at the window and talking to himself as much as her, "I'm Vic." He felt used. He didn't know what he felt. He sat there for half an hour with his back to her in a defensive curve. Neither of them said anything, then he turned round and had her again. Facing away to present herself, she whispered, "You have no idea who you are."

When Vic woke it was still night, and he was alone.

He toured the long apartment looking for her. White wainscoting and layers of ethnic rugs gave way to shoulder-height marble tiling over large black and white linoleum squares; then green silk wallpaper and dark wooden floorboards worn unevenly but polished to a high shine. Objects were everywhere-feathers from a dead alien, musical instruments casting angular shadows, three sketches of someone else's ancestors in thin, black-japanned frames. Ceramics from some culture no one knew the name of, a thousand lights down the Beach, a million years down the drain. Everything changed, room to room, except the row of windows, and through these the city light fell cleanly, downshifting colours, accentuating the museum values of the space, emptying everything out. He felt glad of the slight chill on his skin. It reminded him he was alive.

"Mrs Kielar?" he called. There she was, crouched on a window seat naked, legs drawn up, twisted from the waist so she could look out. Her sharp, vulnerable elbows on the windowsill supported her upper body; her hands were clasped in front of her face. She rocked a little, to and fro. Vic touched her.

"Mrs Kielar?" No response. It was the body language of someone waiting for the worst to happen. "I ache," she had said to him, "I ache."

"I'll take you in there," he offered. "Soon."

Across the city, the man who looked like Einstein sucked with satisfaction on his empty pipe and nodded to himself. "For once this technology worked," he told his assistant. "We have him now."

He nodded to himself again. "We have Vic now," he said.

"I don't see why," his assistant said.

It was nearly dawn, and she was hungry. They had been sitting in Aschemann's office for ten hours while a pick-up detail from surveillance mothered the obsolete nanocams Vic Serotonin had brought unwittingly into Mrs Kielar's apartment to join the house dust, the aerosols of perspiration and warm breath, the tiny drifting flakes of Elizabeth Kielar's delicate cream-coloured skin which already floated there. In the end the usual series of transmission faults had corrupted the image stream, freezing it on Mrs Kielar in her strained attitude by the window while the travel agent, naked, bent over her solicitously, his mouth open to repeat something, a curiously inappropriate point of reflected light in one eye making him look like an untrustworthy dog.

"Drive me home," Aschemann said, "and perhaps I'll tell you."

Once they were in the car, though, he changed his mind and started to talk about his wife instead. Why, the assistant couldn't tell. He insisted they have the top down while they drove. He looked tired, cheerful, a little frailer than usual, his white hair disarranged by the rush of cold morning air into the Cadillac. When she suggested they find a place to eat breakfast, he made an irritable gesture.

"My wife," he said, "was an agoraphobe. You didn't know that."

When the assistant failed to respond, instead running through her repertoire of calm practical actions-glancing into the driving mirror, changing gear, slowing to allow a group of cultivars to stagger across the road in front of the Cadillac, drunk, bagged, bleeding out happily from their injuries in the ring-he said, "This will be useful for you to know. You should listen to this if you want to understand the meaning of the Neon Heart murders."

"I can listen and drive," she pointed out.

"So you say."

There was a silence. Then he went on:

"There are kinds of agoraphobes to whom even a knock on the door is too much of the outside world. Someone else must answer it for them. Yet as soon as you step into their houses they become monsters."

In his wife's rooms, he said, every inch of floor and furniture space had been filled up with objects, so that you didn't quite know how to get from the door to the sofa. "Once you had got there you couldn't move about, except with extreme caution. All quick movement was damped by this labyrinth-" here, he laughed "-where there was even a code, three or four quick pulls on the cord, to get the lavatory light to go on. It's less, you see, that they are uncomfortable in public than that they only feel in control on their own ground."

He seemed to expect a response to this, but she couldn't think of one. Eventually, she said, "Poor woman. Where would you like to eat?"

Aschemann folded his arms and stared ahead.

"Is that all you can say? 'Poor woman'? Problems like hers are so easy to cure, no one should have them. Is that what you believe?"

"I thought you might want to eat."

"Agoraphobia is an aggressively territorial strategy: refusal to go out forces the outside to come in, to where it's manageable. On the agoraphobe's ground you walk through the agoraphobe's maze."

"I don't see," she said, "what this has to do with the murders."

"Well, you have no patience."

Other crimes had come and gone for him, Aschemann said, but the murders continued. "They continue to this day." He said this with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Each one published new lines of the verse, with nothing to connect the victims but their shaven armpit and Carmody-style tattoo. "And, of course," as Aschemann reminded her, "the investigation itself." He had long ago forbidden the detective branch to work the case. Track record as well as seniority had allowed him to do that, sheer weight of cases solved, paperwork successfully filed. Word went out that it was Aschemann's crime. He can keep it, was most people's opinion.

"And so?"

"Stop here," Aschemann ordered "We can have a nice breakfast here." They swept into the kerb outside E Pellici.

A notorious cholesterol venue halfway down Neutrino, Pellici's offered Deco walls and Cafe electrique. More important, Aschemann said, you could hear the food smoking in the animal fat. At that time of the morning Pellici's was full of rickshaw girls in pink and black lycra gorging themselves on simple carbs. They stood awkwardly up to the counter, unable to use the seating, ducking their heads needlessly, embarrassed to be among people of ordinary size. Aschemann smiled around at them, one or two smiled back. Once he was eating he seemed to forget both his wife and the murders. Grateful for this, the assistant brought up the subject of Vic Serotonin again.

"Our so-important Vic," Aschemann said, recovering his humour with his blood sugar. "Oh Vic," he chided, as if Serotonin were sitting across the table from him, "Vic, Vic, Vic." He made a dismissive gesture. "As well as rather ordinary sex, Vic has a conspiracy with this woman Kielar, we can prove it. So now there's a site crime. We can pick him up, have a talk with him."

"I don't see how that helps."

"We'll put it to him this way: why should Vic go about his business unconstrained when we don't get what we want?"

"You could have done this any time."

Aschemann shrugged. He gave her a smile which suggested that though she was right, she had missed an important point which he would illuminate for her out of pure generosity of heart.

"Vic was nothing," he said, "now he's something."

He lit his pipe and sat back. "Eat your food," he recommended, "before it gets cold." He watched her encouragingly for a moment, nodding his head and smiling at every forkful she put in her mouth, then said, "All this time, people like me have been wrong. We've been afraid of the site for the wrong reasons." The assistant wouldn't be tempted by this. She looked firmly down at her plate. "For sixty years we've tried to control what came out of there- new code, new kinds of artefacts we thought might get loose, all that alien stuff, we can't predict its behaviour, or even in many cases say what it is.

"We never considered it might be two-way traffic."

She stopped eating in surprise and looked at him.

"Nothing goes in," she said.

Aschemann smiled and nodded. "Very good answer," he said. "You're sure of that, are you?" He passed her a hot towel. "Use this to wipe your lips."

Next evening, Vic Serotonin went to the rights.

He wasn't keen on them himself. You can claim, and people do, that every fight is different: but it is a difference that works itself out within sameness, so that when you've seen one fight you've truly seen them all. That was Vic's view. But he felt so nervous about guiding Mrs Kielar into the site again that he thought he'd better have one more try at getting Emil Bonaventure's journal- his hope being that, against the odds, it might feature a more robust description, a more dependable map of the site than any Vic had concocted. His hope was it might give him an edge. So he dialled up Edith Bonaventure and invited her down to Preter Coeur with him.

"Because I know you love to go," he told her.

"I wish I could, Vic," Edith said. "But Emil, you know, he's bad. That man is so ill for all his sins! Also I was going to wash my hair. Goodbye now, and enjoy." And she closed the connection.

Vic sighed and re-established it. "You need a night out, Edith," he tried.

"Besides which," Edith said, as if the conversation between them had never broken off, "since Joe the Lion died I lost my previous intense interest." She laughed coarsely. "Name me a girl who didn't," she suggested in a low voice, as if she was talking to someone Vic couldn't see. Crammed into the cheap public pipe, her voice gained a sardonic echo. Behind it he could hear accordion music, New Nuevo Tango music deconstructing its own mannered precision to the raw absurdity of the tango life: Edith herself, Vic bet, recorded in her glory days. Thirteen years old and already a hologram in her own right.

"Hey, I'm sorry, Vic, but you know how it is."

This time it was Vic who broke the connection. "Fair enough," he acknowledged. "I guess you know what you want."

Edith got right back to him. "Maybe I'll come," she said.

Fights were held all over, you could see one on any street corner after six; but the place they called Preter Coeur was Saudade's premier venue. Rank with pollutants and the native flora that throve on them, it spread, cavernous and vaulted, a waste of covered pits and roofed concrete expanses, across several acres backed up against the event aureole, at the end of a line extended from Cahuenga Boulevard. By day the rain blew between the support pillars of its many unwalled sections, through oblique bars of sunlight which fell upon bodies-the lost, the sleeping, the befuddled, the dead. It had been a military shipyard of some kind, before EMC moved to their present location. Now it sprang back to life at dusk every day, as big as a city quarter, in business for itself, self-governed, self-policed, self-made, a sprawl of food stalls, flop houses, flea markets, bookmakers, makeshift chopshops and tattoo booths around each ring, trawled by every kind of cultivar and fetch. The voices of the Radio Retro announcers, piped out the very air by sophisticated entrained-wave techniques, shouted the odds. Monas worked the rickshaw lines in giggling groups. Sexually aroused New Men staggered by, bagged on Night Train and looking for a quiet corner in which to jack off. All this under a mixed illumination of naphtha flame or blank interrogatory halogen glare, and everything in between. In Preter Coeur the shadow of a pillar fell on you with all the weight of the pillar itself; the next moment you were losing your sense of balance in the unpredictable jump and turn of smoky flickers like shoaling fish. Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being-their simple promise-catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.

Through this flow of light and smoke and people events, which you could describe every instant of, yet never predict its next state, the fighters moved with studied, looming, fuck-off grace, speech reduced by careful tuning of their inboard hormonal patches to the amused, confident, inarticulate growl of those who are invincible at what they do, and will never be less than what they are, and will always be more than you. The light fell on their strutting cockerel-legs, clawed and brazen-scaled. It showed you suddenly the weird articulations at knee and hip, the vast perpetually erect cock bursting from the leather britches, the second thumb a brass spur too, the spangles of live tattoo and treasure map like riding lights across the blackened torso ripe with scabs and scars. A day old, if that, and already mythological, already dead.

Tourists loved it. If you could look down at night from five or six hundred feet in the air, you'd see every rickshaw in Saudade converging there like T-cells rushing to the site of infection, to be drawn in under the sign Uncle Zip's Prefer Coeur.

Edith Bonaventure loved it too.

"Oh Vic," she said, "look at it all! Look at the lights!" Her customary tough manner was softened with delight, and every passing fighter captured her heart. "Look at the monster cock on that!"

"None of them is alive like us," Vic said. This surprised him as being true. "They're confections."

"Oh ho," laughed Edith. "Do I hear envy? Do I hear you jealous? Vic, I believe I do!" But Vic felt less envy than a sort of generous puzzlement. How would you chop carrots, with your dick always in the way? Get in and out the bath? It was true, he thought, that despite their vitality-which streamed out into the air like the life force you would expect of a horse or other large animal-the fighters were less than real, an in-the-end pointless looping of their personal dreams into parity with some sort of public idea of what a fighter ought to resemble. "Dreams" was anyway the wrong word to use here, Vic thought. Dreams were by-numbers. They were cheap. They had been Uncle Zipped, like everything else in the Halo. No one except a Mona would be seen dead in possession of a dream these days. Edith, however, broad of hip and wearing her best grown-up clothes, a lively one herself since age thirteen, wouldn't have this. They were out for an evening's entertainment, she ruled, not a political debate. She clung to his arm, her eyes bright, which made him feel good in a distant way.

"You're excited," he said.

This netted him a sidelong look, both mysterious and pragmatic.

"You can tell, can you?" said Edith. After which they were engulfed in a smell like cinnamon and adrenalin, a molecular ad-stream which, bypassing the neocortex and heading straight for the brainstem, caused her to scream in delight.

"I want to bet! I want to bet!"

It was a night of solid bouts, technically predictable but with plenty of live action drama. The smell of haemoglobin layered itself over the ring thick as country mist, laced with chemical signatures specific to each fighter and traditionally borrowed from the flavours of Ancient Earth alcopops-Two Dogs, JopaLume, Decoda, Yellow Fever and that great old standard made popular by Joe the Lion himself, Alcola. Edith was loving it. Her first two fighters had won, in three-and-a-half minutes and four; the third wasn't doing so well but she hadn't noticed yet. While her mood remained good, Vic said, "Have you seen any sign of that diary? Emil's old diary?"

Edith stared distractedly at him, naphtha light flaring across her small features. Then she said:

"Jesus, Vic, I don't know. What do you care?"

"I'm going into the site."

"Vic, you go into the site every week. It's your career."

In the ring her latest favourite had slipped on a coil of his own lower bowel, which was the end of him for that evening. He seemed delighted with his injuries. The crowd gave up a good-humoured jeer as his handler dragged him into the blue shadows the other side of the ring, upon which Edith shook her head as if clearing it and gave Vic an intent look. "Did you bring me here to get Emil's book? Is that why you asked me out?" She laughed. "Jesus, Vic, you didn't need to spend your money! I could have told you no at home, a quiet night in, just you and me until Emil fell out of bed or threw up, or choked in his sleep, which he does a lot now." She shook her head slowly in disbelief. "Vic," she said, "you're a loser."

"Look," Vic said, "I-"

"You lost a good fuck you could have had tonight."

"Edith-"

She walked quickly off into the crowd. He caught sight of her once more then she was gone. It was always hard to see in Preter Coeur. That change in the light at the corner of your eye, you never knew if it was a shadow or a Shadow Boy, some gangster algorithm with its sense of humour puckered in the kiss of profit. Vic Serotonin shrugged. He couldn't blame Edith. Edith was focused; she understood her own needs, perhaps to a degree no one else could. She would be back in her own time. Meanwhile he bought a fight card, from which he gathered that he knew one of the contestants in the next bout, a Straint Street boy whose chops originated a couple of doors down from Liv Hula's bar. On paper this boy was quick, and looked like a bet. Twenty minutes later, three fights behind in the attempt to salvage his dignity, Vic felt a tug on his sleeve, looked down: there was Paulie DeRaad's lieutenant, Alice Nylon, in her little plastic rainslicker and red Wellington boots.

"Hey, Alice," Vic said. "You here to change my luck?"

Alice had backed herself up with two or three of Paulie's soldiers, their faces contorted for Serotonin's benefit into expressions of juvenile threat. She craned her neck to see what was going on in the ring, winced. "So where's your money in this sad affair, Vic?" she wanted to know; and, when he told her, shook her head, indicating professional disbelief. "Looks like we got here too late to save you from yourself," she said. Vic, meanwhile, made a gun of his fingers and aimed it at the kiddies.

"Don't do anything stupid," he warned them.

Alice sighed. "Paulie says to come with us," she informed him not unsympathetically. "He ain't in such a good mood today."

Not too far away in the crowd, Irene the Mona watched these events with a certain amusement. Her eyes were intent. Her intuitions were sharp. In the undependable light of Prefer Coeur her face looked older, and anyone who knew the original Irene-style-refugee from a planet few ever thought to tour-would have recognised her, installed there like a tectonic structure beneath the more obvious curves and planes of the Mona package. It was that Irene, perhaps, who noted how Edith Bonaventure flounced off into the crowd, only to be replaced immediately by Alice Nylon, as if those two were the single bald choice in Vic's world, the splitting point on a lonely man's journey. It was that Irene, perhaps, who thought to herself, It's easier to get into that stream than out of it, my girl; while to Fat Antoyne Messner she observed:

"Things will always catch up with Vic Serotonin."

"I got to agree with that."

At Preter Coeur he would agree with most things Irene said. He was a man of sluggish temperament, she felt bound to admit: but the fights made him put his arm around her, and buy cheap things. The fights made him want to have sex. What she liked most about sex with Fat Antoyne was how unpractised and tentative he was- how unprofessional. She could press his head to her breast after he came and he was still sprawled there panting and saying, "I'm sorry," and reassure him, "Shush, shush, I like any kind of fucking. I'm made that way." Being with Antoyne in those circumstances caused her heart to swell up warm, so that she had dreams of being one of the alpha females of Ancient Earth.

She watched Alice Nylon lead Vic away, and clutching Fat Antoyne's arm, said:

"Hey, you know, maybe Vic would help us."

"I ain't asking Vic," said Fat Antoyne.

"Well then, we'll just have to find the money another way," she told him. "Maybe we could sell something?"

"I haven't got anything."

"Everyone's got something they can sell, pet. Oh Antoyne, we'll soon be so happy and successful! But real. Wherever we go we'll stay very real and good, and make all the best decisions out there in those million stars. / heart love! we'll say. / heart my life because it's so real up there on TV!" While she counselled herself quite rightly: We will have to get him Zipped first. He can buy a package makes him look razor and quick with those hands, but sensitive too; and underneath he'll still be the Antoyne I know and love. He will always be Antoyne to me, who comes too quick and doesn't understand I can forgive that because I seen it all.