Nova Swing

"I'm not sure I-"

"Do you see what I'm saying? The investigator must always allow for this. The older we grow, the louder their voices, the more inarticulate they are." She made no further attempt to reply, so he said, "At least I don't hear them in this datapipe, that's a blessing," and then asked her to run the nanosurveillance from Straint Street, which she seemed relieved to do. After a few minutes following the life of the bar, he shook his head.

"Is this all that happened overnight?"

"Three or four a.m., the system went down again. There's some footage but it's not informative."

"I can believe that," Aschema

"We should have put people in."

"Who would we use? This woman knows everyone who drinks at her bar. She's no fool, even if Vic is." Liv Hula stood motionless at the zinc counter; she leaned her elbows on the zinc counter. The footage jumped, and she leaned on the zinc counter again. She stared emptily ahead. She looked tired. "Switch this off, for God's sake."

Aschema

"Watch out for the dogs you hear."

Aschema

"How will we know we're in there?"

Vic Serotonin stopped to allow his client to catch up. "Sometimes you don't," he said carelessly.

The event-the fall to earth, whatever you described it as-had taken place a generation or more ago, in the city's old industrial quarter, the warren of factories, warehouses, docks and ship canals which at that time co

"I'll know," she said.

"Then why ask me?"

"I'll feel it."

"All that happened last time," he reminded her patiently, "is you lost your nerve." The only reply she offered was an angry look; as if he were the unpredictable one, the one both of them had to be careful not to trust.

Over the years, Vic had given the question more thought than his tone implied. You knew you had entered the aureole when the weather changed, that was his view. Turn a corner between two factory yards in winter: sunlight would be falling into the well of the street while insects described fast, wavering trajectories from the brassy light into the darkness of the buildings. If it was su

"When the Kefahuchi Tract first fell to earth, they tried to build permanent controls. Walls, ditches, concrete blocks. But that stuff would be absorbed overnight." Something went wrong with the air, and next morning your border post had gone and you were looking across a fifty-yard waste lot covered in cheat weed and cracked concrete, at what appeared to be a huge, motionless, empty fairground in the rain. "Now they have a more relaxed attitude. Take the wire up every so often, put it down somewhere else: they call it 'soft containment.' " Still trying to explain himself, and thinking of the complexities of his relationship with Emil Bonaventure too, Vic added, "Even in the aureole you need luck. I'm not one of those people who believe they'll have street light in there by next Wednesday."

"Do any of you understand anything at all?" she said angrily. "Why do you all act as if you know something when you don't?"

"This area's thick with police. So try to keep up."

Twenty minutes later it was full dawn, and the first patrol of the day had caught up with them. Vic hurried Elizabeth through the nearest door and into a derelict warehouse-puddles, ripped-up concrete and foul earth, holes that gaped down into cellars and sewers, everything of worth stripped out long ago-where he pushed her to the floor and put his hand across her mouth. Elizabeth stared up at him in a kind of puzzled supplication, as if she didn't understand why humiliation should be part of this search for her own nature, while matt-grey Site Crime vehicles forced themselves down the narrow accessway outside, repeatedly occluding the light then allowing it to splash in again rich with steam cooked out of the standing water by the waste heat of the nuclear engines. The air shuddered with the din of it; above that, you could hear the faint realtime shouts of the foot police coordinating their sweep through the buildings.

"They're not looking for us!" Vic shouted into Elizabeth Kielar's ear. Nevertheless he made her lie there, listening, until long after the engines and the shouts had passed. Then they left, Elizabeth brushing irritably at her clothes. After that it was more of the same, rusting tracks, flooded rocket-docks with vast discarded machinery visible just beneath the surface of water stinking of the sea but so glamorised by exotic radiochemicals it would glow faintly in the dark. They made good time, and Vic Serotonin was pleased by the professional way things were falling out for once. But as they passed, everything-each alley and abandoned wharf, each collapsed or melted gantry, even the Site Crime patrols-seemed to settle, shift and morph indiscernibly into something else. The aureole was all around, like a wave propagated through everything. Everything was up for grabs. Half an hour later, when rain caught them at the edge of the site itself-a shower which slanted in, mercurial against the direction of the light, to pass within minutes-you couldn't, as Vic said, be sure where it came from, or how. Though on the face of it things looked simple enough.

Independent of the patrols, Lens Aschema

Aschema