Read Online Nova Swing by M. John Harrison - Free Book Online

port. It was gone next time he looked. It could have been a figure climbing in or climbing out. “Go on,” he said. “Nothing is there.” He had no faith in the tourist port fences. “Or any fence for that matter,” he told his assistant. The ports attracted outlaws and psychic cripples, but that wasn’t why he disliked them. They were just another connection with the undependable, the random, the exterior. The Cadillac turned ponderously north, then down towards the sea, where ragmop palms bent compliantly, showing the napes of their necks to the offshore wind. The rain had stopped. Aschemann was silent for some time. The assistant glanced sideways at him and eventually, as if he was answering something she had said, he murmured:
    “Vic Serotonin’s no threat to anyone but himself. But perhaps it’s time we had a proper talk with Paulie.”
    Serotonin stood in the rain after they had gone. A rickshaw shushed past, trailing softly coloured butterflies. Two doors down from The World of Today, light poured out of the display window of an Uncle Zip franchise, exciting everything it fell on with the promise of immanence and instant transformation. He spent a minute or two on the sidewalk, staring at its open catalogues—emblems, brands and smart tattoos, loss-leader holograms offering to mod you with the qualities of the great men and women of the past: the genius of Michael Jackson, the looks of Albert Einstein, the nourishing spiritual intelligence of Paul Coelho—wondering if now was the time to make some changes to his self-presentation then leave for another planet. He didn’t want Paulie DeRaad in his life. He didn’t want Aschemann and the Saudade artefact police there either. Possession of an item from the event site would net him ten to life: he couldn’t at that moment recall what he’d get for selling it on through a Shadow Boy.
    As if to keep the event site at arm’s length in this, the latter part of his life, Emil Bonaventure had retired hurt to the third floor of a small house in Globe Town, a triangle of quiet, narrow, picturesque streets gentrified by their proximity to the port. There, in the shadow of the big interstellar ships, he was looked after by a woman who called herself his daughter. She mopped up after the deep fevers, the days of hallucinations, the wasting fits and other legacies of Bonaventure’s time in the Saudade site. Her loyalty was fierce, if indistinct. Otherwise she kept herself to herself, in rooms of her own on the ground floor; and her behaviour was such that, for all anyone knew, he might really have been her father.
    “I did a stupid thing, Emil,” Vic was forced to admit, after the woman let him in and he climbed the stairs to the third floor. He described what had happened; also Paulie DeRaad’s part in it, and Paulie DeRaad’s operator’s part. Meanwhile, he added, Lens Aschemann was on to some other scam of Paulie’s, right the other side of Saudade at some bar no one had ever heard of; and he had Vic in the frame for that too.
    “You’re in a worse condition than me,” Bonaventure said, “if this is the way you’re going now.”
    “Tell me something I don’t know,” Vic said.
    He offered Bonaventure the bottle, which he had sneaked upstairs hidden under his jacket. Bonaventure took it and stared greedily at the label. Sometimes his vision was as bad as his memory: it wasn’t a physiological problem. “Is this Black Heart?” he said.
    “I overpaid if it isn’t,” Vic said.
    “Want some advice?”
    “No.”
    Bonaventure shrugged and let himself fall back against his pillows, holding the bottle in a defeated way as if it was too heavy to drink from. He was in his sixtieth year, but he looked older, a long, disjointed man with white hair like a crest which in profile accentuated the weight and hook of his nose. Eventually he got the bottle to his mouth and left it there for some time. While this was going on, Vic looked round the room at the bare