Nova Swing

"I don't understand why you're insisting on this," she said.

"Now you think you're the only driver in the world?"

"No!"

"Everyone drives. We all like to drive."

"This is because of yesterday."

"I won't dignify that with an answer. Sometimes we have to drive, sometimes we have to ride. Don't spoil a beautiful day."

Aschema

Aschema

"Welcome to the aureole," he said.

"This is about yesterday," she accused him.

He leaned over and patted her shoulder. "After all, can we ever say we know where we are?"

There was more orbital traffic than usual that morning: military traffic, alien traffic, surveillance traffic. If you just knew how to look, you found EMC up there in numbers. High-end assets in hair-trigger orbits, calculated to keep an eye on some dubious investment of middle management's. She had her own investment in play. She followed the data as it bled endlessly down her arm, pausing only to say:

"Please keep both hands on the wheel."

Along with the agency, its goodwill, and his South End walk-up, Vic Serotonin had inherited from Emil Bonaventure the use of a bolt-hole on the top floor of the old Baltic Exchange building, which faced the event site across a bare expanse of concrete called "the Lots." This comprised a room twelve feet by fifteen, once an office with frosted glass dividers. Over time Vic had been obliged to defend it against other travel agents: in reprisal, two or three of them, led by a woman born Je

"Did you ever want children?"

The view frightened her. She had averted her head as soon as he brought her in and, careful to keep facing the hole in the floor, inched her way round the walls to the corner in which she now squatted, her arms wrapped round her knees. When Vic spoke, she smiled at him confidingly, as if he'd caught her in some even less dignified position. What little oblique, dirty light fell on the side of her face served to occlude rather than disclose. Close to the site something was always wrong with the light anyway; it struck as if refracted through heavy but volatile liquids, aromatics on the edge of evaporation.

"I had children," she said, "but I left them."

She laughed at his expression. "To be honest, they were more grown up than me from the start. They were often impatient." She fidgeted. Looked down at her hands. "I left them," she said, "because I saw they'd be all right." Vic didn't know what to make of this, so he didn't reply. After a moment, she asked:

"When do we go?"

"Soon." A certain amount of waiting was required. The wise thing was always to remember the client and not be too hard on her in that way: but, as everyone remarked, Vic stayed well through the exercise of caution. Some adjective from the complex vocabulary of the place, a change in the light or the density of the sounds you could hear, would sooner or later reassure him. He wasn't anxious, because he wouldn't commit until he had that reassurance. It was the professional course. "It's not like waiting for a door to open," Emil Bonaventure had once advised him. More something you could interpret as permission.

"Come and look," he invited Elizabeth Kielar.

"I don't know," she said.

Vic shrugged as if it didn't matter. Then he said, framing the experience for her in the voice he reserved for clients:

"This is what you came to see. This is it."

After a moment she stepped primly round the hole in the floor and joined him, and they stared across at the event site. You were never sure what you were looking at. Beyond the wire, beyond the remains of the original wall, with its fallen observation towers, prismatic light struck off the edges of things. There was a constant sense of upheaval. Loud tolling noises, as of enormous girders falling, or the screech of overdriven machinery, competed with the sudden hum of an ordinary wasp, amplified a million times. It was like a parody of the original function of the place. But also there were snatches of popular songs, ru

Vic Serotonin felt nothing but relief each time he arrived at the Lots. At this point you weren't committed, you could always turn around and go home. But it was another chance to engage, and as a result a kind of peace went through you. You felt stabilised again. You felt both excited and relaxed.

"It's quiet today," he said.

Elizabeth smiled uncertainly. "This is awful," she whispered. "I can't bear this."

"Will you be able to do it this time?"

"I can't bear not to."

"Well then," he said, "we should start."