Nova Swing

Several expressions passed across Edith's face, complex, but with contempt as their keynote feature.

"You would know all about that," she accused.

She took Aschema

"I was hoping he would help me."

"How can he? He gave up long ago. You and Vic are all he has, but when he sees you, you make it worse-" Edith stopped suddenly. She stared up at the musical instruments in their presentation cases, like someone confronting all over again the boundary conditions of her life. Then she said tiredly, "I won't give Vic up, forget it."

Aschema

"Let's go and see Emil," he suggested, as if it was a new idea.

Bonaventure slept half upright against the head of the bed. The pillows had slipped out from behind him so that his emaciated trunk made a slumped S shape against the whitewashed wall. He was staring vaguely into the furthest corner of the room. At the left side of his mouth the upper lip had drawn back off his teeth, but this expression seemed to have little to do with anything he might be thinking. When he saw Aschema

"Hi, Vic!" he said.

"I'm not Vic," Aschema

The animation faded from Emil's face. "So arrest me," he said faintly. After that he appeared to fall asleep.

"Is this something new?" Aschema

"No," she said shortly. "It's just the same old thing, Lens: your friend's dying." He had cancers they couldn't describe, let alone cure. Everything ran wild inside of him, as if his body was trying to be something else but had no plan: his organs switched on and off at random, his bones didn't make platelets anymore. The latest thing, Edith told Aschema

"I don't like to see him like this," Aschema

He sat on the hard chair by the bed for a while, but nothing happened. "I need to talk to you, Emil," he said. "There's a problem with the site." Then, "You could help me with this, it doesn't matter we're on opposite sides. I worked out something none of us knew." Bonaventure moved restlessly in his sleep. "Don't bring it near me," he said, and the detective leaned in close; but it was only one or other of the fevers talking. Emil's breath smelled as if he was already dead, as if all those nightmares he couldn't have were hanging round him like a gas. "I'm sorry, Emil," Aschema

Downstairs, Edith was sitting on the floor, sorting intently through a box of notebooks in all sizes, full of deranged handwriting and diagrams in different inks, their covers faded and water-stained. They had an air of being handled harshly, folded into pockets, dropped and trodden on, bled into, lost and found, over the years. She would take one out, open it in two or three places at random, riffle through all the pages in one movement as if she was hoping something would fall out, then put it back in the box. There was a smell of real dust in the air. When Aschema

"Do you want that other drink?"

"No. But this is for you."

Edith gave him a vicious look. "It's not money we need," she said. She put herself between Aschema

Aschema

"I'll call a rickshaw," he said.

She shrugged and stood out of his way.

"Another thing," she called after him, "I don't like you going after Vic the way you do. He's a moron but he never hurt anyone." After a pause she was forced to concede, "Not deliberately anyway," but by then the detective had gone.

Aschema

As for artefacts, they were scooping them up off the ground in open contravention of common sense. They were digging them out of earth as ripe as cheese, fetching them down on the run with a variety of anaesthetic darts and lite particle beams. As a result they died in numbers, of odd diseases or inexplicable accidents inside and outside the site, leaving wills too exuberant to understand and last testaments tattooed on their buttocks. These treasure maps, whose psychic north pegged itself to equally unreliable features of the Kefahuchi Tract in the night sky above, always proved worthless.

"But, hey," Emil Bonaventure would say, in the tone of voice of a survivor about to bring forth the sum of his and others' experience-then, after a longish pause, shrug perplexedly because he had forgotten what he was talking about.

Aschema

"I'm puzzled that you would come here," he said, "without asking me."

The assistant felt ambushed. She felt slow and confused. She had spent her night off in a C-Street tank farm. There, a hundred per cent immersed in the role of housewife in the moderne world of 1956AD, she had mopped a floor; gone for a spin on a fairground ride called the Meteorite; then, in an inexplicable third episode, discovered herself posing in front of a wardrobe mirror dressed only in loose transparent satin briefs. Her breasts were heavy, with big brown aureoles; the rest of her body, by the standards of her own day, soft and ru