Nova Swing

"What could I do?" he now asked his assistant.

"They were right not to allow you to investigate."

"Were they?" He shrugged, as if at this distance it didn't matter. "I told them, 'Do a good job.' I said, 'Bring me the details to my office later.' Then I had someone drive me up here, someone as bright and ambitious as you, who could speak just as many languages. I was a suspect, though I never worked Carmody or knew tattooing."

He looked around.

"It's nicer in the day. Nice light."

Nice light, a warm wind at the edge of the cliff, the whisper of the tide far below. A few eroded bristle-cone pines, a patch of red earth bared and compacted by tourists' feet. An extraordinary sense of freedom, which he had regretted every day since.

"Take me back," he told her. "We won't have breakfast after all."

On the drive back he was as preoccupied as he'd been when Vic Serotonin left his office the previous afternoon. At the bungalow he stood with his sodden raincoat over his arm and watched her K-turn the Cadillac so she could head back up Maricachel towards the centre of Saudade.

"You got this from my shadow operators," he accused, "that was clever. I hope it was what you wanted."

"I will never understand you."

"No one ever understands anyone," he said. "We should both get a little rest."

All her ambush had achieved was to drive him further back inside himself, a place the assistant now understood as a maze which made the one his wife had lived in look simple. Instead of going home, she made her way across town to C-Street and the tank farm. Against reason, she had begun to enjoy the flabby, rather slow-witted version of herself the tank had proposed. She cleaned 1950s house; chose 1950s clothes, especially silk knickers; and waited for 1950s man to come home, wondering what he'd say to her if he ever did. Mostly, she imagined his blunt, nicotine-stained fingers on her. The tank's flexible programming enabled her to do the shopping in Aschema

While she was telling herself that, Aschema

8

Boundary Waves

By the time the cats began to pour back into the event site, up Straint Street and past the yellow window of Liv Hula's Black Cat White Cat bar, it was raining again. Five in the morning. A few people would be out once the street had cleared, workers who used Straint as a short cut through to the ion works. A few shop assistants and clerks with rooms nearby, making their way down into the city proper; a few fighters making their way back from Preter Coeur. But generally Straint was unfrequented, and every morning at that time, the light seemed less to be coming back into things than leaving them for good. Liv Hula's window was the only lively thing in that part of Saudade. It illuminated the sidewalk. Seen from outside, two or three all-night drinkers, isolated by its rectangularity so that they seemed to have nothing to do with one another, could look like a warm crowd. They looked like people you might enjoy to know.

Liv, watching the cats go past and wondering why her life seemed like a lot of separate pieces of reasonable worth which hadn't yet added up to anything, would include herself in that picture: she was someone you thought you might like to know when you were walking up Straint, when the colour was bleached out of everything else, the kerbstones, the cats, the two-storey buildings with their chipped, greying storefronts. That was the sum of her.

"The cats never get wet," she said. "You notice that? Whatever the weather is, they never get wet."

Vic Serotonin, who had come in about ten minutes previously, now stood with his elbows on the zinc bar, staring hard at his hands as if it was an effort for him to remain alive. His client had walked in five minutes before him, and was sitting at a table on her own. Vic had a small bag with him, and he was wearing a dark-coloured watch cap. Mrs Kielar had on a short belted leatherette jacket over fitted black slacks; she looked tired. They were drinking coffee with rum and pretending, for the nanocameras, not to know each other. It wouldn't have fooled a dog.

When Vic didn't answer, Liv poured him more coffee, adding milk from the covered jug, and said, "You're in early, Vic. It a jump-off day? You're always in early on a jump-off day."

No answer to that either. She shrugged and went behind the counter, which she wiped carelessly with a rag. She looked over at Mrs Kielar and raised her voice. "Don't say anything, then, Vic," she said. "I don't want to hear what you say about yourself. I heard enough about that." She switched the lights off, then on again, then off. Without them, the air in the bar reverted to a sepia colour-although the objects it picked out often seemed without colour themselves and as if they were lighted in some way from inside. "Is that bright enough for you, Vic? Can you see well enough in this light?"

When Vic refused to take the bait, Liv moved away and stood in the shadows at the back of the bar.

The travel agent and his client continued to ignore one another in their obvious way. They were there about fifteen minutes more, then Mrs Kielar pushed her chair back, turned up the grey fur collar of her jacket and left, and Vic threw some money on the zinc counter and he left too. As soon as he'd gone, Liv Hula stepped out of the shadows and counted the money. Her hand went to her mouth. She rushed to the door and called, "Vic, it's your whole tab. There's no need to pay your whole tab!" But they were already too far up Straint to hear her, following the black and white cats into the aureole of the event site.

"Good luck, Vic!" Liv Hula called. "Good luck!" But neither of them looked back.

If it was cats on Straint, it was dogs across the city at Suicide Point: Lens Aschema

"Do you hear dogs?" he asked her.

"What?"

Sand, blown in under the kitchen door during the night, had stuck to the soles of Aschema