Nova Swing

9 Black and White

Liv Hula's room had a blush-pink princess washbasin on the wall opposite the door.

You walked in, and on the right was the white-painted iron bed with its clean oatmeal-coloured throw and its plain wood blanket chest at the foot. Facing that was the window, which had a view over sloping ground, across wet rooftops, lines of narrow streets, pokey yards, to factories and a narrow segment of the event site.

In front of you would be the washbasin mirror, about eighteen inches square, chipped halfway down one bevelled edge; and below that the washbasin itself, shaped and fluted like a clamshell, with its piece of lavender soap and single coldwater tap. In the basin beneath the tap a permanent limescale stain had been artfully added at the point of manufacture, tadpole-shaped, but the crusty greyish-yellow colour of the sole of a foot. Liv owned plenty of other things, but if she asked you up there with her, that was the item you noticed, and it was so ugly you wouldn't understand why she chose it. When she arrived in Saudade, the room had been her bulwark against all the Liv Hulas she had already been. She would shut the door and look in the washbasin mirror and smile, while the cheap repro tap ran cold water on any previous idea of herself.

Liv stayed out in the street long after Vic Serotonin and his client had disappeared. Every so often she stood on her toes and craned her neck because she thought she had seen them again in the distance. It was as if the two of them were still moving away from her in a straight line, so all she needed to do was to resolve them, detach their image somehow from the background with which it had merged. After perhaps an hour, the sun came out. The traffic increased on Straint. Then a thick white plume of smoke began to rise from somewhere in the aureole a point or two to the north, and Liv's uncertainty gave way to dullness.

I can't stay here forever, she thought. I can't stand in the street like this. But she didn't want to be in the bar either. It was too early to have a drink. If she stayed in the bar, she would only clean the counter and count the bottles. So she went up to her room instead, and tried to wrench the washbasin off the wall.

Dust sifted down. The basin made a cracking noise and pulled away a little. But the pipework held it in place; so, even though what her muscles needed was to feel it tear loose by their unaided effort, she went to look for something to help her break it up. About then she heard the long sonic boom of an ascending K-ship, thunder which seemed to roll all the way round the world and meet itself coming the other way. She glimpsed the ship through the window. It was gone so quickly! A line of light across everything, then only the afterimage downshifting from violet to purple then black, flickering up again, bright sharp neon-green as she blinked, then dimming away for good. Liv Hula's eyes followed it thoughtfully. She strode over to her bed and stripped the bedclothes. She opened the window and tossed them out into the air, where a breeze caught them so that they ballooned and folded and sideslipped as they fell. Then she went back to the sink and wrenched and wrenched at it. Nothing, except she could see herself in the mirror, red face, shoulders pumped.

Under the bed she kept a heavy tin box, enamelled black, with gypsy-looking red and yellow hand-painted roses. This she hauled out, and used it to bang at the washbasin until the washbasin shattered into three large pieces, two of which fell off the wall. Only then did she go and sit on the bed and look around her angrily. The box stayed where it had fallen. For the moment she couldn't remember where she had put the key to it. She sat there until the morning was over.

Vic Serotonin arrived at the abandoned checkpoint on the edge of the Lots. He'd heard Aschemann's Cadillac start up behind him, then stop again. He knew he was safe. Whatever happened to him next, he could forget all that. He followed the fence a hundred yards north to where houses had collapsed across it from inside the site, leaving a steep shingle of bricks and broken tile thinly grown with local weeds. The interface mist closed round him, damp and absorbent. He stood still. Just the other side of things, he could hear water drip; further off, the rhythmic banging of a door in the wind. He smiled, closed his eyes and pushed his face forward as if to receive air kisses. Gentle pressure on cheekbones and lips, as if they were stretching some membrane; it felt cool like the mist.

Perception of a state is not the state.

The phenomenology of the site, Emil Bonaventure had often reminded him, as if Vic needed reminding, was this: what could be observed from the outside, you rarely encountered inside; inside or out, what could be seen or smelled or tasted bore no relationship to physics data collected by EMC's many expensive orbital assets. As a consequence-for Vic as for Emil and all those earlier Saudade entradistas with their particle guns, their scars and their easy air of knowing something no one else knew-the moment of transition was the moment of maximum uncertainty, maximum payback. That was the rush for him, Vic was ever willing to admit: but it was not a simple one, and you could not write it off entirely to body chemicals or temperament (although on any given day both might be involved). Neither was it the kind of rush people experience from contemplating possible injury, madness, death or sudden personal disfigurement (although a proportion of those things might easily happen to you inside); because, this being 2444, consequences always seemed negotiable-in fact reusable to a degree.

So what kind of rush was it?

"How can I explain?" Vic would have to ask in the end. "You should go in there one day and get it."

When the membrane broke, there was a smell like a pile of woollen coats and a taste in his mouth like a bad avocado, and he knew he was inside. Vic opened his eyes. The slope was where he expected. It was as barren and dusty as if the houses had just fallen down. No mist. The air was cold. Halfway up he could see the cherry tree in blossom. White petals flushing to pink, bathed in light. An organ sound.

Wind chimes would be acceptable. Wind chimes were within the margin of error, but if ever the petals seemed to emit a soft light of their own, you went some other way; or you left things where they were and went back to Liv Hula's bar. Otherwise something bad would happen. Your options would close out. Vic struggled up the slope, which fell away from his feet at every step in loose musical cascades of broken tile. Luck was an issue at this point. But if you entered from the Lots, closed your eyes as you passed beneath the cherry tree, turned round three times then opened them again, you would be likely to find next that the slope had turned into a short flight of internal stairs.

Water ran down its yellowed left-hand wall, under intermittent flashes of light. Between one step and the next, day changed to night and back again; while in the room at the top of the flight, it was always afternoon, with unreal warm-coloured light streaming in through the open window. There was always the question of what you might see in there, and the day of the week seemed to have bearing on that: for instance, Vic had noticed early in his career that if you left the Lots on a Wednesday, the room would be empty, but there would always be a cigarette burned halfway down in an ashtray on the windowsill. It was hard not to feel someone had just left, in which case you could only suspect they'd passed you on the stairs.

Today the room was slow with the tick of a mechanical clock. Every flat surface-the gate-leg table with its green chenille cloth, the huge brown furniture, the mantelpiece, the shelves, everything but the floor-was covered with black and white cats.

You smelled their sour cat smell in here the way you never would in Saudade; it was as heavy and thick as talcum powder. They sat motionless, pressed together too tightly to move. Wherever Vic went in the room, they were facing away from him. Even Emil Bonaventure agreed: if you entered between dawn and dusk, from the Lots, these cats would be filling the outer regions of the site. Accounts varied, as they always did: but you would, in Vic's experience, always have some cats in your life; and in places they would come to resemble a thick fur on everything, a kind of deposit. They were always motionless, turned away from you, sitting on their haunches with their faces pressed into the walls, the corners, the cobwebs, each other. It was as if they were ignoring you. But it was also as if they had no choice-wherever your gaze fell, they had to face away from it. Emil believed that this was evidence which, though anecdotal, might one day be correlated with science from outside the site.

Vic Serotonin had no theory about the cats.

He stood in the middle of the room.

A street ran left to right just below his eyeline. There was a real sense of bustle down there. Laughter. Women's heels tapping back and forth. Rickshaws rang their bells. Deep summer lunchtime, and the old New Nuevo Tango issued from every open door. There were the smells of Cafe electrique, Calpol, and other exotic stimulants from the history of Ancient Earth. There was hammering and banging, the scrape of spades through wet cement, trowels through mortar, the rattle of construction machinery. Everyone down there was busy, or they were having a working lunch, pears in brine with a really interesting small salad of alien leaves. It was always like that until you went to the window and looked out. Then the noises cut off instantly and you saw that something was wrong with the street. It was a representation. Curving sharply away in both directions to identical early sunsets, the offices and shops, the sidewalk cafes and street lamps, were drawn on, in unrealistic sunshine tones, thick poster yellows cut with blues and reds, strong blacks to make the outlines.

It was empty. It was silent. Vic stared out.

After a minute or two, an accordion started up, then, half a bar into Hernando's Hideaway, stopped again; and he saw, as he had hoped he would, Elizabeth Kielar struggling away from him down the middle of the street. Time doesn't pass the same way in there, and sometimes luck will help you with that, and sometimes it won't.

"Elizabeth!" he called, "Elizabeth!"

When she turned, her face was rubbed-out white, the features gone, and he wondered for a moment if it was her after all. By then he was in the street and Elizabeth was twenty yards away, walking fast, as if she wanted to get away from him, as if Vic was part of the place, just another weird thing you couldn't depend on and didn't want to engage. Nothing was the same down there, but Vic had expected that. The street looked real again, but it looked older and dirtier too. Ripped awnings over the shop windows. Brick with a hard finish, a metallic, clinkered look. When you passed an open doorway, smells of old carpet, leather chairs, furniture polish, some insistently medical smell you couldn't name. Elizabeth stopped suddenly and waited for him to catch up.

"I'm frightened. How did I get here?"

"I thought I'd lost you," Vic said. When he tried to embrace her, she backed away.

"No," she said. "Look, I was on a beach. And now it's this." She stared around her with a bruised expression. "I didn't pay for this. Where have you been?" She put her hands in the pockets of her coat. "Where have / been?" she asked herself.

"Perhaps you could tell me what was it like," Vic said.

"I don't remember."

"Do you remember anything at all after you left the Baltic Exchange?" He meant, I warned you. He meant, It's dangerous to come here looking for any part of yourself.

"I was on a beach," she said. "A man was exercising two dogs." She had watched him walk his dogs backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, over the same two hundred yards, even though he had miles of beach available. His reflection kept pace with the reflections of the dogs along the wet sand. Every so often, she said, he seemed to stop and, cupping his hand, splash their undersides with seawater. "They were so patient and accepting!" They stared ahead in whatever position they had come to rest, and eventually one of them curved itself into a taut, elegant hoop and tried to defecate. After that, all three of them trudged away up a steep shingle bank, the rain dissolving them into a single wobbling cipher.

"You followed them. It was evening, you saw lights."

"No."

"You found yourself here," Vic said.

"They were as fastidious as schoolgirls, those dogs," she said. "I had to laugh." She said, "I felt like a little girl again."

"It wasn't a beach. They weren't dogs."

She turned her back on him and began to walk away. "I'm going in, whatever you say."

"Elizabeth, you're already in."

"Do you know anything, any of you? Anything at all?"

He couldn't answer that.

Smoke was still rising from the Lots half an hour after Vic Serotonin had made himself scarce. Bodies lay in extreme positions where they fell. One of the surviving gun-kiddies had died. The other had stopped crawling and begun to make a peculiar thin keening noise; it had suffered significant head injuries. Site Crime was arriving in numbers, mainly local uniforms in their huge patrol vehicles, responding to the original conflagration: but also specialist teams from Hygiene, Quarantine and Surveillance; teams whose job it was to co-ordinate with EMC; and teams whose job it was to co-ordinate teams. They held informal meetings on the Lots to discuss protocol, collars raised against the rain; or stared up at the roof of the Baltic Exchange, which had collapsed shortly after the departure of the Poule de Luxe. A group of them gathered round the punk, some taking bets, some repeating in loud voices, "Can you hear us?" and, "Can you tell us who did this to you?" then advising each other tiredly:

"Forget it guys, this one's fucked."

They avoided Aschemann's car, although they sometimes tried to catch the eye of his assistant, whose reputation had reached them via one Bureau pipe or another. On her part, she had nothing to say. She leaned against the rear quarter of the Cadillac, radiating heat from her ramped-up metabolism-which, like most contemporary Preter Coeur product, had a stage by which it burned forty per cent of its own cellular waste-and treating everything but her datableed with contempt. She hadn't spoken since Vic got away.

"I'm feeling very shaken up," Aschemann told her.

He put his hand on her arm. "Thank you for everything you did; perhaps next time you could kill a few less people."

She shrugged.

"Are you angry?" he said.

"This was never an investigation. It was a mess."

Her eyes went out of focus; she said something flatly into her dial-up. She had called down another fire-team; but it was too late to catch Vic, and Paulie had never been her responsibility. When Aschemann reminded her of that, she levered herself angrily away from the Cadillac and stood off a few paces, looking in any direction but his. She knelt next to Alice Nylon and tidied the hair out of the peaky, dead little face. "I don't understand why any of this had to happen!" she said to Aschemann. "I don't understand why you have to pretend to be old, and get driven around in a car from the historical times. No one in this culture has to be old any more." She lifted Alice by the shoulders, shook her lightly-as if Alice had gone to sleep on some secret which if she had shared it would have changed both their lives-then allowed her to drop back again. "An escape is involved here," she reminded Aschemann. "I don't understand why you can't investigate the way everyone else does."

"I'm sorry," Aschemann said.

This response caused her to return to the car, look in at him in a thoughtful way and say, "What's your name?"

"Pardon?"

"What's your name?"

"You shouldn't have to ask," he said. "Aschemann."

"And that's how your wife spoke to you, is it? Aschemann, pass the hummus, Aschemann, slide the chair over to me so I can stand on it and fetch down this bottle of dark rum. Aschemann, we're old and will die one day."

Aschemann felt hurt at this.

"It's Lens," he said.

"Well then, Lens, it's been nice. You never once asked me my name, but at least now I asked yours. I resign."

"I don't-"

"I'm in for a transfer as soon as this disaster winds itself up."

He didn't seem to hear.

"When I left Utzie," he said, "she would dial me up and say, 'People think it's a failure to live alone, but it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else.'" He chuckled. "Two days later it would be, 'Cooped up with yourself twenty-four hours a day, that's life, without remission. Lens, the worst thing in the world is to be inside yourself, you don't even want to be rescued. Yet to be as happy as we were-to be so open to someone else-invites the failure of everything.'" One minute she would be phoning to tell him her plans, she was going to have a garden behind the bungalow-wallflowers, poppies, an iris modified to smell of chocolate-the next her brother had died of bowel cancer. Who died of bowel cancer since the twenty-first century? It was a choice. That whole family had disaster as a lifestyle.

"No one has to lose anyone now," Aschemann said to his assistant. "Perhaps I wanted to know what that was like. Utzie-"

"I know all about Utzie," the assistant interrupted.

Aschemann stared at her. "Who made you responsible for me?"

"You make everyone responsible for you."

He watched her walk away and get into conversation with the uniforms. They were all clustered round the dying child now, he couldn't see why. "You were a good assistant," he called after her. "What are you afraid of, that you might learn something? How could you, when you know everything already?" Then he slid behind the wheel and started the car. He was happy enough with the way things had gone. He had lost Vic, but he still had Emil Bonaventure's notebook. He thought he would drive with the roof down, it was a nice enough day. He picked up first then second gear, nice considerate changes with the unhurried old engine well below its red line. Despite that, he was soon up to fifty or sixty miles an hour. He dabbed the horn at knots of uniforms. People were beginning to shout into their dial-ups. All across the Lots, they watched with mounting puzzlement as the roadster plunged across the concrete and into the interface mist. The assistant- who, if she were honest with herself, had all along expected something like it-loaded her tailoring to its operational limits in an attempt to cut him off; but it was already too late.

Perhaps ten minutes after Vic caught up with her, Elizabeth Kielar discovered abandoned in the road a plaster mannequin meant to represent a child of five or six years old.

It was naked, bald, a greyish-fawn colour, with a sweet, strange expression, the sort of demonstration piece you saw in the window of any Uncle Zip, outfitted with a black uniform beret from some recently-glamorised interstellar war, torso crawling with colourful live pins, the proteins for which had been derived from phyllobate DNA. Its arms were jointed at the shoulders to allow movement, but otherwise its body was moulded in one seamless piece. To the best of Vic's knowledge it had been lying there for a year and a half. He had to persuade her not to pick it up. She looked mutinous, then smiled and said:

"How sad he must be that he has no genitals!"

The shadow of an unseen bird flickered across a window at the end of the street.

"Vic, let's go that way!"

"Do you know why you're here?"

She wouldn't say. It was a contest of wills. "It's safer," he tried to explain, "if you keep your expectations low." But Elizabeth was already working them in deeper by the minute, her expedient simple: if he disagreed with her she simply walked away. The further off the beaten path Vic got, the more nervous he became and the easier it was to persuade him to take another wrong turn. It was what he had always feared.

The landscape continued to change, one moment residential and deserted (though you saw women waiting expectantly at a corner in their best clothes, they were gone as soon as you reached them); the next industrial and derelict. Flares rose from something like a coking plant in the distance, but everything close at hand was fallen down and overgrown. Old separation tanks became shallow lakes, with mudbanks streaked a dark chemical maroon. Something huge passed across the sky: you winced away from its shadow, then saw it was a toy duck looking down-looking in-at you from above with its intelligent bright-blue painted eyes. It was a hypermarket of the meaningless, in which the only mistake-as far as Vic could discern-was to have shopping goals. The idea that you might map things in there in terms of your needs was what had so entrapped and confused Emil Bonaventure's generation. It was safer to learn how things worked, then assemble the portfolio of habits, behavioural tics just this side of the psychotic regime, that stood in for having a clear frame of reference and kept the travel agent from harm.

"Everything smells of sulphur," Elizabeth said. "Does it smell of sulphur to you?" She said, "Do you ever go into a building while you're here? Vic, let's go in one of these buildings! We could fuck in a building, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't you be excited by that?" He explained to her why it was a bad idea. Soon after, her mood deteriorated. She was silent for long periods, then said bitter things in a tired, desolate voice, as if she was in conversation with some ex-lover. "Don't you see," she said, "that I can't talk now? Here?" Vic hadn't asked her to talk. "The life I'm living now," she said, "the life I've been living: I wasn't like this, but now I am." She said:

"It never gets any further away."

"What?"

"That factory. You know, Vic, we walk towards it but it never gets any further away."

"You'll find that in here," he said, just to contribute.

Eventually they were driven off the streets by the rain and the approaching dark. Vic wasn't keen to enter any space he didn't know-they could so quickly become the arena of your worst expectations. But it was night as Saudade knew it, and Elizabeth was cold. She looked up into the rain, which seemed to fall towards her through layers of unsourced light, then down at her clothes. "I'm shivering, Vic," she said in a surprised voice. "Take me home now." Somehow it was the least human thing she had said all day.

Everywhere they tried was full of cats, facing into the corners, lined up along the walls, balancing on the arms of chairs, pressed together too tightly to move. Vic was relieved to find them at such densities. "It means we aren't too far in yet." The ground floor of the building he chose had no internal walls, although you could see the stub brickwork where they had been. A recent flood had left it banked with dirt, which had a packed and crusty look until you touched it, when it fell in on itself in soft wafery structures marbled with colour. There was some kind of expansion chamber fifteen or twenty feet below, through which they could hear volumes of water rushing at intervals. Otherwise it was empty but for echoes. Elizabeth listened for a moment, then nodded as if acknowledging the inevitable. "I remember snow falling very slowly," she said, "the size of coins. Into the long garden in the dark. I remember trodden snow on the pavement outside. Then I remember a street market, a dead cat in the gutter." Vic thought she was describing a process, a sequence, not the memories themselves. He put his coat, then his arm, around her shoulders. They huddled against one of the walls, as far away from the sound of water as they could get. She held his face and began kissing him, then opened her legs and guided his hand down there.

Later, when he asked, "Where were you born?" she answered, as he had expected she would, "Vic, I don't know."

A little over a month after they gave up Vic Serotonin to Site Crime, Fat Antoyne and Irene the Mona sat at the Long Bar in the Cafe Surf. Antoyne had on a new suit-yellow double-breasted drape with hologram buttons of Irene laughing and saying how Antoyne would always be a star to her-and they were drinking Boiru Black with chasers of something local Irene had never tried before, which she called "dickweed," although Antoyne thought he could have misheard that. It was early evening after a day of sunshine and showers along the Corniche, both heartbreaking and heartwarming; a day, as Irene said, which allowed you to see the true, beautiful balance of things, with both positives and negatives of your mood reflected back to you in the weather.

"It's good," she told him now, "that we take part in the great see-saw of life, but never forget, Antoyne, that the balance for this girl must always be on the positive side."

It was a slow night under the Live Music Nightly sign. Twenty minutes ago, its equipment assembled, its gin rickey appreciatively swallowed, the two-piece had begun chasing down a groove via the twenty minute interrogation of a tune of their own they called Adipose Annie. But Annie wasn't disclosing herself to them or anyone else tonight. Offered a solo, the saxophone shrugged no. They took fours briefly, restated the theme and left town on the first rocket out, while the paying clientele shook their heads judiciously and dug into their reserves of goodwill. Band and audience saving themselves for later on: a recipe for mutual misunderstanding.

Antoyne and Irene clapped desultorily, along with the rest, and Antoyne ordered more drinks.

"I am blue," he said. "I admit that."

"And I know why, Antoyne," the Mona said, resting her hand on his forearm. "Don't think I don't. At least," she said, "it's good to get an evening away."

When Paulie DeRaad's connexions came down to Saudade two days after Vic and Paulie disappeared, the first thing they did was take over Paulie's club. The Semiramide was less fun after that. As Irene said, the work was there but you missed Paulie, who always had something to say to a girl. All these EMC guys wanted was to track down Paulie's bolt-holes, which no one could tell them much about; also his habits after he got ill. They stayed in the back office all day; they had filled it with FTL routers, also they were going through Paulie's shadow operators with heavy-duty professional software, looking for something, they wouldn't say what, perhaps they didn't even know. All this would be fine, Irene said, but they didn't do much business themselves, whereas until his illness Paulie was always interested that way.

"That man was as unsparing with his money as he was with himself," she concluded. "He had the knack of making you feel wanted."

Antoyne looked into his drink.

"He'll be missed," was all he could think of to say.

"Antoyne," the Mona told him, "you lost the art of enjoying yourself since all this. How are we going to get that back?"

Antoyne shook his head and looked away.

The bar now made its long day's journey into night. In addition to her signature dish, chocolate lasagna, the chef offered Emmenthal amp; capers in choux pastry followed by a cappuccino of chickpeas; as if in response, keyboard and saxophone discovered their missing groove hidden in a chamame remix of the popular standard Barking Frog Buzz. Smells, music, kitchen heat: a seachange could now take place in the room, shy and emergent at first, in little pockets all around, then catastrophic, irreversible, global. Noise levels rose. The regular clientele, settling into the irradiated zone under the Live Music sign, began volume consumption of Ninety Per Cent Neon and Giraffe beer. Soon it was like any other night at the Surf. Deep into the first set, figures began squeezing themselves out of the space between the band and the bar. They were tentative-unsure what was required of them or what they required for themselves-yet young, pliant, labile, willing to dance. Their faces were as yet unwritten-to, their eyes only reflections of the lights in the bar, lights flickering off glass and bottle, reflections of reflections which though warm had no expression you could read. At first it was as if they were meant to be viewed only under this kind of illumination-and only for a moment, before your eyes took in something else. They had appetites, but didn't yet know what they were. They blinked in the neon, they drank thirstily at the bar, they struck up the quick friendships of children or animals and, arms linked suddenly, adventured out into the night.

Looking, Irene wondered, for what?

She thought love. She thought fulfilment. "Don't you think that too, Antoyne?"

Antoyne said he had no opinion.

"But don't you hope that's what it is?"

He could only reiterate what he already said, Antoyne told her. Then he stood up so suddenly he knocked over his stool. "Jesus," he whispered to himself. He tipped back his drink, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and, without a word to Irene, pushed his way through the Long Bar crowd until he could stand trembling on the Corniche looking down at the beach where, a month before, he had sold Vic Serotonin to Site Crime. The tide was high. Two women and a man were trying to have sex on the thin strip of sand under the Corniche lamps. Laughter rose in the cold air. "Here! No, here!" Someone sang two or three bars of tango music. The man's face was a white smear of pleasure under swept-back black hair. Antoyne wanted to call out but could not. He felt as if he was frozen in some other kind of time. As he watched, they came up from the beach adjusting their clothing and, arms linked, wandered off into the lamplight.

Irene found him standing there, staring along the Corniche towards Saudade. Tears ran down his face.

"Antoyne, honey," she said, "what is it?"

"It was Vic. I saw him."

"Honey, you didn't. Vic is gone now and he won't return. He was too inner a man to know another way. Don't do this to yourself any more! Vic Serotonin had no heart, but Antoyne, you have all the heart in the world! Come back inside. Please come back in." Antoyne shook his head, no, but allowed her to lead him back to the Long Bar. The two-piece played, the people were squeezed out into the room. He watched them leave.

"Life always goes on, Antoyne. It always goes on."

That was the crisis for Antoyne Messner. It got easier for him after that, and he was increasingly able to learn the gifts of happiness and self-belief.

Momentum ran the Cadillac halfway up a long bank of broken earthenware tiles before it slowed suddenly, slid a little way back, then rolled on to its driver side in a cloud of dust. For a minute or two, as the slope restabilised itself through the medium of small random avalanches decreasing in force and frequency, the man who looked like Einstein did nothing. He was content to rest, hanging awkwardly against the seatbelt with his chin pushed into his clavicle.

A bluish, sourceless light lay over everything. Everything seemed mixed together. Just as fluids trickled out of the car, all sorts of thoughts and images trickled out of his mind. "This was never an investigation," he heard his assistant complain. His wife said, "Aschemann, you would give the world the whole of yourself-if only you could find it." Meeting her for the first time, he had thought the same of her. That was on the Corniche, late one summer afternoon, with the light on the sea like mild steel. She was sitting outside a cafe, in a yellow silk frock and glasses so dark that she had to raise them to see him, eating an ice. Her air was one of disorientation, her eyes looked as bruised as if their life together had already occurred. An hour later she was sitting on his lap in the back of a rickshaw, with the silk frock up round her waist.

Aschemann smiled at this memory.

He extracted himself from the seatbelt, and then the Cadillac.

He turned over the broken tiles with the toe of his shoe. "So now you're inside," he thought, "whatever happens can't be good." Then, opening a page of Emil Bonaventure's journal at random, he attempted to compare it with the landscape, as if Emil's memories could be used as a guide to his own relationship with the world.

"Vehicle broke down immediately," Bonaventure had written. "We slept in the old outfall pipe. G woke often, heard rats in the night. His ulcers no better. Four litres of water remain." This was accompanied by something between a map and a drawing, in which dotted lines connected various roughly sketched features in an arrangement without perspective, height on the page replacing distance from the viewpoint. "The expansion chamber flooded repeatedly, amp; we were forced to retrace our steps. Lupercu records 'parliament of insects' here, but I saw only woods on high ground, and an [illegible]."

"Emil, Emil," Aschemann chided, as if the old entradista was at his side. "None of us do anything for the right reasons."

He threw the book away and walked off in the direction he was facing, which happened to be upslope. After that, he seemed to wander about for some weeks. He didn't get hungry or thirsty, although he was cold at night, and his clothes fell apart rapidly. What he took to be devastation stretched away under what he took to be moonlight. Waves of difference passed through the landscape, but it remained obstinately coated with buildings. Though many of these remained intact, their doors and windows had been stripped out, and they had been emptied of anything domestic, or even human. You could see down into basements filled with tight flattened clusters of large bone-white lice, or an ionised slurry of broken smart ads like ectoplasm. To begin with, black and white cats lined the gutters, all facing away from him. There was always a note in the window; a rickshaw disappearing round a corner; a laugh but no one there. There was a smell over everything like rendered fat, which made him recall a conversation with Vic Serotonin, that corrupt tour-operator of the soul.

"Only the simple ever claim it's simple down there," Vic had said. "And what do they bring back? Fuck all. You couldn't pay for a motel room with sheets that used. The air's like lard. It's the smell of code. You see something, you break the rules, ptoof: death. Worse than death. Never pick anything up. Never let anything pick you up." As if to confirm this, or at least to gloss it, the dying advertisements detached themselves from their basement slurry to make him half-remembered promises, offers no one could ever accept or fulfil:

We carry all sex medds at bargin price

99% approval rate to take advantage of this Limited Time opportunity do not reply They were the tidal dogs, the unremembered memories, of a place never the same place twice. The most determined of them followed him for days, taking the form of small coloured lanterns or, less often, drawings of small coloured lanterns, which bobbed in the air slightly behind his left shoulder. The attrition rate was fierce. Soon only one was left. Such eloquent timepieces, it tirelessly informed him, are supposed to be owned by gorgeous females. And: You can get your deploma today. Did this count as being picked up? The detective couldn't tell. He had lost his assistant. He had lost his car. He had lost his purchase on the ordinary. In return, the site awarded him this wispy companion, lacking in stamina yet full of persistence. He wasn't sure yet what it would require of him in return. When he lay all night half-asleep in some shallow stream, he drew comfort from the ad's simple tune and soft mothy flicker; he came to feel an equally simple affection towards it.

What is a daughter?

Late one evening eight weeks after Vic Serotonin and Lens Aschemann disappeared, Edith Bonaventure squeezed into the costume she had worn at seventeen years of age and took herself to the gates of the Saudade corporate port. There, she opened an accordion case on the cement sidewalk, strapped on the instrument it contained and began to play. Cruise ships from all the major lines were in, towering above her like a mobile downtown, their abraded, seared-looking hulls curving gently into the low cloud-base. That time of night it was both raining and mist. The port halogens shone out blurry white globes, the pavement was black, slick, cut with transitory patterns of rickshaw wheels. Edith's costume, stiff faux-satin a fierce maroon colour, still fitted; though it made her look a little stocky. Unaccustomed excitement reddened her cheeks and bare thighs. For once, Edith had left her father to his own devices. He could choose to fall out of bed or he could choose to stay there: this evening, she had informed him, that was up to him. It was everyone's right to choose.

"Emil, you can watch the tour ships lift off, or maybe enjoy throwing up on yourself. Me, I am off to The World of Today to pick up a man."

"If it's convenient, the two of you can bring me back a bottle-"

"You wish."

"-then do what you do quietly for a change." Emil seemed well, perhaps he was getting over Vic's defection. Why she told him such a lie, she didn't know. All she was sure of, she wanted this other thing, she wanted to play. She had picked an accordion to match the outfit, maroon metalflake blends under a thick lacquer finish, with stamped chrome emblems of rockets and comets which caught the spaceport light like mirrors. Sometimes, as a child, Edith had less wanted to own an instrument like this than to be one, to find herself curled up inside one, like a tiny extra dimension of the music itself. Edith played Abandonada. She played Tango Zen. She played that old New Nuevo standard, A Anibal Lectur. She was quick to merge with the night, to become part of its possibility for the paying customer. Rickshaw ads fluttered round her the colours of fuchsia. The rickshaw girls called out requests as they passed; or stood a moment listening despite themselves, puzzled to be still for once, their tame breath issuing into the wet air. While up and down the rickshaw queues, the off-world women shivered-as the sad passionate tango songs made, in cheap but endlessly inventive language, their self-fulfilling prophecies of the entangledness and absurdity and febrile shortness of life-and pulled their furs around them. It was the briefest mal de debarquement. Saudade! Its very name was like a bell, tolling them back to their true, enjoyably complex selves! They laughed to wake up so far from where they started, so momentarily at a loss in the face of night and a new planet, yet so in control of the brand new experiences awaiting them there. In search of a gesture that could contain, acknowledge and celebrate this inconsistency, they threw money into the salmon pink silk interior of the fat, odd little busker's open accordion case. Sometimes the banknotes they threw floated around Edith herself like confetti at the marriage of earth and air, while she played I Am You, Motel Milongueros, and an up-tempo version of Wendy del Muerte she learned in a pilot's bar on Pumal Verde. She had no idea, really, why she had come to the gates. She was forty-two years old. She was a black-haired woman with wide, blunt hips who couldn't afford to be anyone but the self she had chosen at eleven and who, consequently, blushed up quickly under her olive skin. She was a woman of focus, a woman of whom men said to each other:

"You can't blame Edith. Edith understands her own needs."

When the stream of rickshaws had abated and she felt she had had enough, she gathered up the money, packed the instrument in its case and shuddered suddenly, struggling into her old maroon wool coat. "The winds of memory," she misquoted to herself, "approach this corner of my abandonment." At least it wasn't far along the side streets to the bar they called The World of Today, by then, a little like herself, just a lighted yellow window from which all custom had fled. Edith pulled up a stool and counted her cash. It was more than she hoped, less than she imagined when she saw those fur coats, the cosmetics by Harvard and Picosecond, the Nicky Rivera luggage custom-stitched from alien leathers.

"Give me a bottle of Black Heart to go," she suggested to the barkeep; then, "in fact, why don't I drink it here."

"It's your party," the barkeep said.

Later she asked him if he thought she was too old to get a smart tattoo. Still later, unable to remember his answer, she found herself on the sidewalk in front of an Uncle Zip outlet two doors down.

Uncle Zip the gene cutter had turned out to be his own most successful product. Years after his mysterious disappearance in the Radio RX-1 wormhole, you found an Uncle Zip franchise, maybe two or three of them, on every Halo planet. You found the man himself on a stool inside, sweating with his own energy, a fat clone with a sailor's mouth who'd tailor you by day then-well known to be the patron saint of the piano-accordion-play his music all night. His cuts were still fresh and new. He was cutting for EMC, he was cutting for the glitterati and the common man alike; he was cutting, they said, for alien beings. He was nationwide, all the way to the Core. If there was a religion of the Beach stars, Uncle Zip was its theologian, because he showed you how you could always change and move on, how you never needed to be an old-fashioned fixed entity, with all the gravitational penalties that might incur. Uncle Zip was tender to you, as he was tender to everyone, in that if you hurt you could stare in his window, the way Edith was staring now, and see liquid new possibilities for yourself in a thousand drifting holograms which looked as beautiful as boiled sweets, or ancient postage stamps glowing in the true colours of dragonfly and poison dart frog. You just had to have them! You could be Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and sit cute and hungover on Gregory Peck's lap wearing his pyjamas. You could be Princess Diana and sing like a Bronx nightingale at the fatal Kennedy fundraiser in your see-through Givenchy gown. You could go missing from your own life as someone no one ever heard of, by courtesy of DNA pulled at random from a prison hulk at Cor Caroli. You could go half alien, or, it was rumoured, whole hog. You could have the cheapest smart tattoo (known traditionally as a Fifteen Dollar Eagle); or you could get neural chops complex enough, and comprehensive enough, for a management position in the supply-side sex economy of Radio Bay. Whatever you chose, the almost spiritual light spilling out of Uncle Zip's window suggested, you would come out not just new. You would come out someone else and go far away.

Edith shrugged.

She stood there a moment, asking herself if she had truly worn her heart on her sleeve in this life. No answer came. "You had your turn at being new," she told herself. She felt good. She felt like going home and saying to Emil, "When you named the daughter-code after me, you were wrong. While a daughter is all of those things you implied, she's none. She is what comes out of you, why do you need to go in the site to look for her?" But when she found him waiting up for her like any father, in the blue darkness of his room, what she actually said was:

"It's raining again."

Across the bed lay scattered the remaining volumes of his journal. All of them were open, some flat and broken-spined, some with their yellowing pages fanned out stiffly in the streetlight. Smart diagrams in sharp bright reds and greens. Minute brooch-like maps which would speak when you knew the code for them. Directions to places that shifted and vanished twenty years-or twenty seconds-ago, if they could ever really have been said to be there at all. So much of it put together after the fact, which as everyone in this life knows is far too late. Emil's eyes were inflamed from trying to read his own history written this way, caked at the corners, deeper-set than when she left the house. Over the last two days, he had developed a small growth on one eyelid. It was fantastically delicate, convoluted and infolded like petals of flesh, and in some lights resembled a rose.

Edith sat down on the edge of the bed with her elbows on her knees. She felt tired now.

"So read me something you wrote," she said.

"You read. Half a lifetime is in there, I can't even understand my own handwriting. Here, you can read this."

"H. claimed to have made a drawing in Sector Three. Expected [illegible] but got more. A rolling, endless landscape of tall grass. In the foreground, lying in the grass in front of a bench, something that looked partly like a woman partly like a cat. Though it seemed immobile at first, H. said it was slowly changing from one shape to the other. H. said he was 'struck silent' by the potential of this. He was 'full of a tranquil sense of his own possibilities.' Cat a kind of ivory-white colour."

As she read, Emil's face became loose and unfocused, like a face seen at the bottom of a stream. Eventually she saw he was crying. She put down the book and, taking his hands in hers, brought them together so he would be in touch with himself for once. "Are you entradistas always as brave as this?" she said. Emil tried to smile, then something caught his attention, some flash of light on the walls too quick for Edith to see, and she knew he was back in there, with his plans falling apart before he had a chance to put them into practice. He said:

"I dreamed of Vic. I dreamed that Vic came back."

"You never dream, Emil."

Vic Serotonin and his client spent their third night site-side in an abandoned cafeteria. It was in a curious state. Loops of power cable had been dragged out of the walls by some event you could only describe as visceral, while at the same time the stainless steel ranges and glass-fronted food cabinets remained intact and spotlessly clean. Snow fell steadily from near the ceiling, below which, for a couple of hours around midnight, the body of a child about eight years old materialised, wrapped in a crocheted shawl so that only its face was visible. The snow never reached the floor. Elizabeth Kielar stared up at the child and would not look away. He was careful with her after that. In the morning, sun poured in through the knocked-out windows. Vic woke up and found her kneeling in the middle of the black and white tiled floor staring into a flat clear trickle of water. At first she seemed fine. "Look! Look!" she called excitedly. "Fish!" There were smudges of dirt on her face, but her smile was radiant. "Two tiny fish!" By the time Vic joined her, the sun had gone in, so all he saw in the water was his own reflection. It seemed tired, and under some strain, and its hair had turned grey. He looked away before anything else could happen to it.

"That's nice," he said.

"Do you think we can drink this?"

"If you're thirsty, drink the water I brought in. Nothing here is what it seems."

"After all, the fish drink it."

"The fish," Vic explained, "aren't fish."

"I used that water to wash myself. If you fuck often you have to stay clean." She shrugged. "When one fish turns the other turns with it. Did you know that everywhere in the universe shoaling is controlled by the same very simple algorithms?"

Vic stared at her, unsure what to say next.

It was a difficult morning. Though he tried to persuade her, she wouldn't eat anything. Before they could leave, the child was back, wrapped tightly in its shawl, spinning this way then that below the ceiling like a chrysalis in a hedge. Elizabeth crouched as far away as she could get from it, and when he tried to put his arm round her, bit his hand. It was behaviour he recognised from their previous trip. The sensible thing would be to leave her and try to make his way back to Saudade, but they were too far in, and he had broken too many of his own rules. Without personal goals, he was at the mercy of whatever had driven her into the site.

"You must be careful of me, Vic. I'm not really here."

Vic stood up, rubbing his hand. "Where are you, then?" he said.

"I don't know."

"Where did you come from?"

When she didn't reply, only staring up at him as if he ought to know the answer to that already, he shrugged and went outside and sat in the warm sunlight and cool air. The cafeteria, a single-storey white building that looked as if it had been built for some heavier duty, lay on the bank of a tidal inlet, held in a crook of hills and woods. Gulls, green weed, dappled sunshine on the hum-mocky ground between the trees. The tide was low, the light so f bright on the revealed mud he couldn't look at it. The trees tum* bling down the opposite shore of the inlet vanished into a dazzle of reflections in which stranded multi-hulled ships rested like insects tired after some long intense flight to mate. Beyond that, it was two or three kilometres of dried-up chemical ponds, then long rolling slopes of tall grass. Vic felt hollowed out-as if the site was about to present him, if he wasn't careful, with a self he didn't want. After an hour or two, he went back inside in the hope of persuading her to eat, or leave, at least make some decision he could take a position on. It was cold in there. Elizabeth had spent some time squeezing into the gap between two food cabinets. She was still staring up at the ceiling. Something happened to the light when it reached her. It was wrapping itself around her in a way that made her face smooth and eroded, less featured than you would expect. The rest of the room looked acceptable.

"Elizabeth?"

"Don't come near me, Vic."

He caught her hand, pulled her out; she broke away and huddled in a corner, watching him intently. All afternoon, white-faced but quick and deft, she kept the room between them, always moving off to the next corner if he got near her. Vic was cautious. He didn't think she would harm him, but he didn't want her to harm herself. He thought that eventually she would tire, although he had no idea what he would do then. Nothing he already knew about her seemed to apply. After an hour or two, she began to pull off her clothes, as awkwardly as if she had forgotten how clothes worked, or as if she had never known in the first place.

"I don't want these," she said. "Why should I want these?"

"Elizabeth," he said. "Please."

She laughed, then crouched down to urinate fiercely. "No," she said. "You don't know enough to stay safe, Vic."

"Elizabeth!"

"I got your sperm anyway."

By dark, her skin had deep, ivory qualities, as if each layer had accreted over time then died, achieving a dull shine. She smelled of distress and unknown hormones. She lay panting from a heat Vic couldn't feel, watched him sidelong as she lapped up water from the black and white tiles. The light in the room frightened him. He was only a facilitator here. He thought again of leaving; but when he looked outside, the inlet had curled itself away like a missing dimension, and all he could see was a dune-like landscape with isolated patches of fog, protruding rocks, a litter of fluorescent white bone. There were flickers of what might be lightning, or rocket-exhaust on the horizon. She called him back. Her voice, always a pure contralto, had taken on harmonics, as if someone was speaking in unison with her but not quite loudly enough to hear. She positioned herself in the centre of the abandoned cafeteria in the loose darkness, adopting one desperate, open posture after another.

"Vic," she said, "people lose their way as an act of defence. Then they panic and decide they have to find it again."

She darted past him and out of the door, moving away quickly into the drifting chemical fogs, her gait already not quite human, her skin fluorescing in the dry fitful lightning glare.

"Elizabeth!"

All night she ran aimlessly back and forth across the faces of the dunes. It was hard to say at what point she became something else. This thing-pivoted sharply at the hips so that it could walk on all four limbs with the palms of its hands flat on the ground, its head too small and streamlined, somehow, to accommodate the great blue candid cartoon human eyes-called Vic's name until he put his hands over his ears and went inside. Next morning he set out to follow its tracks; but he lost them quite soon, where the dunes turned to rolling purple grass.

Over the dusty months and years of searching that were to follow, Vic Serotonin penetrated the site deeper than he, or anyone, had ever done before. He threw away his gun. He ate what he found. He lived a life in there. Every day he walked until he found somewhere safe to sleep, somewhere he liked, and at night he grew used to the sound of radios shifting randomly from station to station; girders tolling as they fell; the intrusive quack of the plastic duck. He heard the landscapes swing apart and grind themselves together again. The empty rooms no longer smelled foul to him. He never met anyone else, though he woke one morning in a deserted plaza to the sound of a woman's voice singing some passionate open-throat lament. Pigeons flew up; they flew up again. The cold air was perfectly still, but full of old shoes-old shoes cracked and wrinkled, soles hanging off, floating around one another as if they'd been lifted up on a strong wind-as if shoes were an organism, one which, given the correct conditions, could exhibit flocking behaviour. Vic knew then that Emil Bonaventure had been right about one thing; but he understood too that neither this location nor any other could be said to be the centre of anything. Vic aged. Wind and sun whitened and bleached him. His memories of Emil and Edith, his memories of caning it nightly at the Black Cat White Cat bar with his friends Liv and Antoyne, eventually even his memories of Vic Serotonin, faded. But he never forgot his client, and he searched for her until the day he died.

Aschemann the detective followed rising cindery ground for a week, only to find himself facing a three-hundred-metre vertical drop into what seemed to be a vast replica of the Long Bar at the Cafe Surf. This he took to be a metaphor.

He stood at the edge. His coat blew out behind him in a gale of music and light. He held on to his hat. He looked down thirstily at the Black Heart spirit optic, glittering in the warm barlight. Everything around him tottered on the edge of change, but when the wave came it was Aschemann who fell. He saw an architect's drawing. Pies. Polaroid snaps of dogs. A man's bracelet chronometer, very large. He saw playing cards. A wooden toy penguin with rubber feet. Then his old friend and sparring partner Emil Bonaventure, asleep on a mudbank in rising water. He saw bluebirds and chipmunks against a sunset. In response, a kind of seizure overcame him and when he recovered from it he was lying a few metres downslope, unable to move his legs. It was only what you expected in here, where plate tectonics held sway and one reality was always sliding beneath the next. It was night. He examined his legs: nothing seemed untoward, but he couldn't deny they felt peculiar, perhaps with all the walking.

"Something has happened to you," he acknowledged. "You can't do anything while you don't know what it is."

He was able to accept that. He lay there a long time. Night replaced day replaced night. Equally regular pulses of change propagated through the ground beneath him. From upslope, close and comforting, could always be heard the sounds of a lively evening at the Long Bar. He was content; but the smart ad, which had accompanied him thus far without demur, grew increasingly anxious. You can have the pe[nis] of yOur dre ams, it suggested, and: Call out Gouranga be happy. It roamed upslope and down, straying further and further away, fading to the ghostly blue and orange of burning alcohol; a marsh light as lost as its victim, an ignis fatuus in reverse.

Finally it gave up on him and drifted off.

"Send me a sign," Aschemann called. "Seek me inside." This made him chuckle. On balance he felt more sympathy for the ad than he did for himself. "Send me a neon heart."

This made him think about his crime. About his wife, expecting everyone to come to her in her minotaur's cave; about the Marilyn Monroe look-alike, going out along the high wire from her room to everyone. He thought about the damp sand at the back of the Cafe Surf, squeezed together daily by the implacable shaping forces of the Long Bar-improvisation, iconolatry and red light- to make new inhabitants for the city. What if he were part of that cycle too? Later he told himself in surprise: "Aschemann, I think you're dying!" He felt enlarged-swollen, but not exactly sick. Some time on the third, or perhaps the fourth day, he looked down at himself and saw the lower part of his legs dissolving into thousands of bright, energetic white sparks. He felt no pain. Despite that-and though no sound accompanied the process-he had a lively sense of himself as part of the entertainment. He was fizzing and crackling into the dark like a firework. He wondered what would happen when the fire reached his cock. The sparks blew away uphill on a light breeze, and out over the lip of the cliff, where they rained down, he could only suppose, on to the Cafe Surf two-piece under its sign Live Music Nightly. His legs had plenty in reserve. They went on pouring out the benefit in them as sparks and illuminated smoke. They were certainly good value for money. Then he saw his wife toiling up the slope towards him at last, waving and smiling across the wasteland. She was calling his name. She had on the yellow silk dress he remembered so well. No shoes.

"Aschemann, is that you?" she called. "Is that you? Aschemann, always something new! You'll never change!"

What if there was no new species, after all, only the same old one trapped in its same old circularity of reinvention? Would some fresher version of himself soon be staggering down the Corniche away from the Cafe Surf, singing, full of appetites, ready to be amazed? Or had that already happened?

What if we're all code?

"Utzie, hurry!" he called. "Hurry, or I'll be gone before you get here!"

He was glad to have been alive.