Nova Swing

"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 Aschema

"Drive me home," Aschema

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 ru

"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?"

Aschema

"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, Aschema

"And so?"

"Stop here," Aschema

A notorious cholesterol venue halfway down Neutrino, Pellici's offered Deco walls and Cafe electrique. More important, Aschema

"Our so-important Vic," Aschema

"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."

Aschema

"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.

Aschema

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.