Nova Swing

2

The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf

A couple of evenings after these events a man who resembled Albert Einstein walked into a different kind of bar, off at the money end of Saudade where the aureole, curving across the city like a shaded area on a map, met the sea.

Unlike Liv Hula's joint, the Cafe Surf had two rooms. These were known respectively as the Long and Short bars, the latter being notable for a strictly drink amp; run client-base. The man who looked like Einstein went straight through to the Long Bar, where he ordered a double Black Heart no ice and stared around with satisfaction at the high-end retro decor of marble pillars, designer blinds, cane tables and polished chrome bar taps. Ancient movie stars laughed out at him from brushed aluminium frames on the walls, exotic beers glittered from the shelves of the cooler: while under a red neon sign the Cafe Surf two-piece-keyboard and tenor saxophone-ambled its way through the evening's middle set.

All of this was copied faithfully from a minor hologram work, Live Music Nightly 1989, by the celebrated tableau artiste Sandra Shen. Like the Long Bar constituency itself-a mix of self-conscious young entertainment executives on release from the corporate enclaves just down the beach in Doko Gin and Kenworthy-this seemed to puzzle and amuse him in equal parts. He had the air, cultivated in middle age, of enjoying the things other people enjoy, so long as he didn't have to take part. He smiled to himself and lit his pipe. Most nights, for perhaps a month, he had sat in the same place. He would pull out a chair, sit down, get up again to put a match carefully into an ashtray on the corner of the bar; sit down again. He did all this with a kind of meticulous politeness, as if he was in someone's front room; or as if, at home, his wife required of him a continual formal acknowledgement of her efforts. He would stare at his pipe. He would begin a conversation with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter, getting out his wallet to show her-and her friend, who wore torn black net tights and industrial shoes-something which looked in the undependable Long Bar light like a business card, which they would admire.

In fact he was not as old as he looked; his wife was dead and whatever else he seemed to be doing, his attention never wavered from its object.

His name was Aschema

Halfway through his first evening there, Aschema

Though they emerged from the lavatory, that was-as Aschema

The next night he brought his assistant along.

"You see?" he asked her.

"I see," she said. "But what will you do about it?"

She was a neat, ambitious young woman on a one-month trial from the uniform branch, fluent in three Halo languages, wired for dial-up and with all the usual tailoring. You could tell that from her eyes, which were often unevenly focused, and from the discreet codeflows rippling up the inside of one forearm like smart tattoos. Her experience turned out to be in Sport Crime (the word "sport" to be interpreted here, Aschema

"Do you think they originate in the site?"

Aschema

"Whatever they are," he said, "we don't want them out here."

"I'll call down a team," his assistant said.

Code flickered along her forearm. Her strange eyes, the same colour as the surf, went out of focus as she dialled up. Her lips moved a little even though she wasn't actually speaking. Aschema

"I always like to watch a little," he explained, "before I do anything."

There was a note of apology in his voice. Aschema

So now he sat in the Long Bar, in what had become his favourite corner, wondering if he had watched enough.

Just as he decided that he had, something changed his feeling about the place and what might be happening there. The door opened and let in a man he recognised, Antoyne Messner, called by everyone who knew him Fat Antoyne. No one cared about Fat Antoyne. He had a history of low-per centage contraband operations a few lights away in Radio Bay. He had stayed ahead by moving only the lightest stuff-exotic isotopes, cultivars of embargoed local species, tailor packages for the kiddy trade-in a hullshot Dynaflow HS-SE or -SE2, its cheap navigation tools leaking the illegal daughter-code used to negotiatate the complex gravitational attractors and junk-matter flows of the Bay. His rule: make two trips maximum then throw the ship away. The code itself was the risk in that trade. Relax, and it would come down out of the mathematical space and into your head at night. As long as your hygiene was good, the code kept you one step ahead of EMC, but you still had to be a pilot. In consequence the stresses were high. Antoyne didn't do anything at all since he fetched up in Saudade except run errands for Vic Serotonin, and he was therefore widely assumed to be a burn-out.