Nova Swing (24 page)

Of late, Paulie’s tailoring package had been preoccupied. Its dialogue with the daughter-code wasn’t going well. Nanopatches bolted on to Paulie’s adaptive immune system, back in the
El Rayo X
glory days, had not held up. Now the daughter was chewing its way through the system itself (slowed only by the discovery that in Paulie’s case the military Zip had used, in place of the usual immunoglobins, proteins with leucine-rich repeats generated from lamprey DNA). Nevertheless the package overall had been excellent in its day, and despite these difficulties remained aware enough of the world outside Paulie to misinterpret Aschemann’s motives. Nerve impulse propagation speeds ramped up by factors of four; simple instructions were issued to the rags of Paulie’s central nervous system. The conscious mind processes at forty bits a second, the CNS at millions. Disorder is infinitely deep. Before he even knew he what he was doing, Paulie DeRaad had kicked the detective twice in the upper torso and once each in the throat and left ear. He looked down. He looked surprised. He shrugged and said, “Fuck you, Lens.”

Then he said, “Hey, I honestly didn’t mean to do that. Sorry.”

Across the concrete, the policewoman woke up in a startled way and looked around her just in time to see Aschemann stumble backwards and fall over. She took a generous millisecond to assess the situation, then disappeared into the weather and reappeared quite suddenly in front of Alice Nylon.

“Uh oh,” Alice said.

The assistant smiled and let her tailoring take over. After it had finished with Alice, it blurred its way over to Paulie DeRaad and put him down too. Then somehow she was back on Vic’s side of things again, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with him, so close he could feel her skin on his, staring in the same direction as him—her body quivering, the air around her soupy with waste heat from her mitochondrial add-ons and exotic ATP transport upgrades—as if she wanted to see exactly what Vic was seeing. She smelled as sharp and sour as an animal cage. She had a look on her face he couldn’t interpret. She was smiling. “Come on, Vic Testosterone,” she whispered. “Try me out. Show me your special move.” Vic shivered. He kept as still as he could. The minutes passed. He closed his eyes until he felt her chops shut down and she laughed and ran one finger lightly across the pulse in his neck and said, “Hey, Vic, you’re safe now,” and moved away. Next time he saw her she had dragged Aschemann into the back of the Cadillac, where she could work on him out of the weather. Except for the datableed running its perpetual Chinese Chequers down her forearm, she seemed so ordinary. She was some Sport Crime tailor’s experiment or joke, laid like an ambush for people like Vic. She was something new.

Vic had a struggle to get to his feet.

He felt cold and stiff from sitting in the rain.

Alice Nylon lay in a shallow puddle, one arm flung out, her blue slicker ballooning up intermittently in the wind to reveal pink pedal-pushers. Her hat had fallen off. A single line of blood ran from the left corner of her mouth. Alice had bitten her tongue when she fell, but the damage was elsewhere. Vic found guarding in the muscles of the abdomen and lower back—she was as hard as a pear down there. The whites of her eyes were yellow. His diagnosis, the spleen had let go; there were ruptures to other organs too. Not a mark on her, but everything was puréed inside. Her eyes looked tired, her teeth were rotten from speed use, her spoiled, peaky, unlined little face looked very old.

“Shit, Alice,” he said.

Her eyes opened. “I lost my gun, Vic,” she whispered.

“Paulie will buy you a new one.”

“You know what?” she said.

“What, Alice?”

“Me and Map Boy did it. We had a fuck, Vic!”

She chuckled. A small convulsion went through her.

“I’m that bit younger than him,” she said, “so I wasn’t so interested. But he’s nice enough, and at least I got to do it before I died. Vic, you ever meet Map Boy?”

“I never did, no.”

“He’s cute. Vic?”

“What?”

No answer.

“Alice?”

Paulie DeRaad was kneeling on the concrete, muttering into a dial-up. Vic went up to him and said:

“Alice is dead, and to an extent, Paulie, I blame you.”

During his encounter with Aschemann’s assistant, both of Paulie’s shoulder joints had been popped. His arms didn’t work, which, if nothing else, gave him some trouble maintaining position—each time his body threatened to fall forward, he left it to the last moment then writhed his torso in a curiously graceful motion to stay upright—but despite this he didn’t seem upset or even interested. He let them dangle, like the sleeves of a coat. His face was grey, though patches of high colour sprang up where the old radiation burns had thinned the skin.

“I got a bad mouth ulcer, I know that,” he said. “You want to just pull down my lower lip and look?”

“Jesus, Paulie.”

“That police fucker won’t leave me alone. Everywhere I go, he’s there first. He’s asking questions, he’s taking names. You remember Cor Caroli, Vic? K-ships on fire across half the system? Wendy del Muerte tried to make planetfall in an Alcubiere ship with the drive still engaged? There won’t be anyone like Wendy again.”

“I wasn’t there,” Vic said.

“Yeah? I love it!” Paulie said, and laughed as if Vic had brought to the table some reminiscence of his own they could both enjoy. His eyes lit up, then almost immediately took on a perplexed cast. He had forgotten who he was. “I love all that stuff,” he said. He leaned over, vomited weakly, and fell on his side. Vic made sure he was alive, then left him there.

“I want you to know I’ve had it with you, Paulie,” he called back over his shoulder.

The job was fucked as far as Paulie was concerned; compared to him, Lens Aschemann, sprawled awkwardly across the rear seat of his car, head tipped back, mouth open, looked like a brand new morning. He was conscious, and dabbing at his ear with a wet cotton handkerchief. His eyes followed anything that crossed his field of vision, but his discomposure was as evident as his brown suit, and he seemed too tired to speak. Paulie’s kicks had burst one of his eardrums and bruised some ribs. “It’s good to see you, Vic,” he said, “and know you got through this. Don’t worry about me, I’m more shocked than anything. A little deaf perhaps. Vic, it’s good you didn’t run away.”

At this, the assistant gave a little smile. “Vic won’t be running away,” she said.

Eighteen miles above their heads, one of DeRaad’s connexions fired its
f
RAM engine for 7.02 milliseconds, flipped lazily onto its back and, with the first wisps of displaced atmosphere already flaring off its hull like an aurora, raced earthwards. That was how Paulie knew he was still a good investment. The sky opened. A flat concussion ripped the overcast apart. A single matt-grey wedge-shaped object, its outline broken up by intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the Lots at Mach 14 and halted inside its own length perhaps thirty feet above the Baltic Exchange. Parts of the roof blew off, but the structure held. The K-ship
Poule de Luxe,
on grey ops out of a base in Radio Bay, hung motionless for a moment, hull boiling with everything from gamma to microwaves, then pivoted neatly through 180 degrees to dip its snout attentively in the direction of Aschemann’s Cadillac.

Paulie was on his feet, dancing about on the concrete, shouting and yelling and trying to wave his arms.

“Oh
fuck,
” he shouted. “Just fucking
look
at this!”

With the care of a living thing, the K-ship lowered itself to earth in front of him. A cargo port opened. Paulie stumbled towards it, his arms swinging out haphazardly. “Hey, Vic,” he called, “what do you think of her? It’s the old
Warm Chicken
. Is she ugly, or what?” Tears ran down his face. He struggled up the cargo ramp, turned round at the top. “Can I tell you something, Vic?” he said. “Just before I go? Even the
paint
on this vehicle is toxic.” Someone pulled him inside suddenly and the hatch closed.

The K-ship raised itself a little and slid smoothly forward, nose down, until it hung just above the hood of the Cadillac. There was a frying sound—the air itself being cooked—as its armaments extended and retracted in response to a change of government fifty lights down the Beach. In the Cadillac, Aschemann and his assistant felt its heat and steady gaze upon them. Every time either of them exhaled, the K-captain, buffered and secure in its proteome tank at the heart of the machine, knew. It wanted them to know that it knew. A minute stretched to two, then three. While they sat there wondering what to do, it mapped every strand of their DNA; at the same time, its mathematics was counting Planck-level fluctuations in the vacuum just outside the photosphere of the local star, where the rest of the
de Luxe
pod remained concealed. It gave them a moment to appreciate how capable it was of these and other divergent styles of behaviour. Then it revolved lightly around its vertical axis, torched up and quit the gravity well at just under Mach 42, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas.

Lens Aschemann sighed. “Who’ll save us from the machines, Vic?” he asked.

No answer. The driver’s door swung open in the wind.

Paulie DeRaad’s rickshaw girl had watched all this from a couple of hundred yards away on the city side of the Lots.

She didn’t know what to make of it. She wasn’t prepared to say it was the grossest or most interesting thing she’d ever seen, because here in 2444AD, everyone saw new things all the time. “And when you pull for a living,” she remarked to her fare, “you see it all.” In this case, “all” meant bodies were scattered over the Lots. White, thick, gritty smoke was still going up from the crashed vehicle. Two small figures—kiddies, you’d say—were helping each other crawl away. She wasn’t sure what happened to Paulie DeRaad, though he didn’t look well when she last saw him.

One thing: a breeze had got up for a change, so maybe they could look forward to better weather. Another: as the K-ship took off on its line of light like a crack right across the solidity of things, a figure in a black watch cap was sprinting away from the Cadillac. It was the guy Vic who she had talked to. “He can run, that guy,” she was forced to admit. “He has a nice action if he would train a little. Or, easier, he could get a package.” The rain turned to sleet as it moved away to the west, which briefly made visibility even poorer than before; but she could see he had his bag over his shoulder and his gun in his hand. After a minute or two, the Cadillac’s engine started and it rolled slowly over the concrete as if it would follow him. But they never got out of first gear and soon drifted to a halt. Shouting came from inside, some kind of disagreement was in progress. The driver’s door opened and a woman got out. Then she got back in again and slammed the door. Vic Serotonin put the Baltic Exchange between him and the Cadillac and disappeared into the event site. Don’t blame me, the rickshaw girl thought. I offered the guy a lift.

“Did you see that?” she said. “He went the wrong way.”

The fare, who had something wrong with his voice to add to his troubles, made a noise like three notes of music played at the same time. “Moths mated to foxes,” he said, “fluttering into their faces in the desert air.” He laughed. A few dim motes of light issued from under the rickshaw hood to join its shoal of sponsor ads. “The faces of the foxes are like flowers to them, they circle closer.” The Annie shrugged. Some fares wanted your input, some didn’t. That was another thing you learned.

“Hey, are we going to haul?” she wanted to know. “Because we got no business here.”

“Let’s haul,” said the three voices, one after another.

“It’s your ride, hon.”

She took one more look at the pink Cadillac and sighed. That sure was her favourite car. With its subtle paint blends and frenched tail lights, it had been the best part of her day so far. “I’d just once like to be that pretty,” she told herself. Then she turned the rickshaw around and trotted off towards Saudade at a steady pace. “Don’t you worry,” she reassured the Point kid. “I know where they kept you.”

“Let’s haul.”

Liv Hula’s room had
a blush-pink princess washbasin on the wall opposite the door.

You walked in, and on the right was the white-painted iron bed with its clean oatmeal-coloured throw and its plain wood blanket chest at the foot. Facing that was the window, which had a view over sloping ground, across wet rooftops, lines of narrow streets, pokey yards, to factories and a narrow segment of the event site.

In front of you would be the washbasin mirror, about eighteen inches square, chipped halfway down one bevelled edge; and below that the washbasin itself, shaped and fluted like a clamshell, with its piece of lavender soap and single coldwater tap. In the basin beneath the tap a permanent limescale stain had been artfully added at the point of manufacture, tadpole-shaped, but the crusty greyish-yellow colour of the sole of a foot. Liv owned plenty of other things, but if she asked you up there with her, that was the item you noticed, and it was so ugly you wouldn’t understand why she chose it. When she arrived in Saudade, the room had been her bulwark against all the Liv Hulas she had already been. She would shut the door and look in the washbasin mirror and smile, while the cheap repro tap ran cold water on any previous idea of herself.

Liv stayed out in the street long after Vic Serotonin and his client had disappeared. Every so often she stood on her toes and craned her neck because she thought she had seen them again in the distance. It was as if the two of them were still moving away from her in a straight line, so all she needed to do was to resolve them, detach their image somehow from the background with which it had merged. After perhaps an hour, the sun came out. The traffic increased on Straint. Then a thick white plume of smoke began to rise from somewhere in the aureole a point or two to the north, and Liv’s uncertainty gave way to dullness.

I can’t stay here forever, she thought. I can’t stand in the street like this. But she didn’t want to be in the bar either. It was too early to have a drink. If she stayed in the bar, she would only clean the counter and count the bottles. So she went up to her room instead, and tried to wrench the washbasin off the wall.