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

floorboards and clean linen; then he said, “Jesus, Emil. That was for both of us.”
    “I can’t seem to get enough to drink,” Bonaventure said. “Don’t ever pick up anything in there, Vic,” he begged suddenly, as if he had brought the subject up himself. He gazed at Vic sidelong, the whites of his eyes yellowing in the lamplight. “Promise me you won’t?”
    Vic smiled. “It’s a little late for that, Emil. Besides, you brought stuff out by the truckload.”
    “Things were different then,” Bonaventure said, looking away.
    He was so frail you could see the drink on its way into him, percolating from vein to vein. His hair was the colour of cigarette ash, and the white stubble in the lines of his face never seemed to get any longer. He didn’t leave the house now. He rarely left the bed. On a good day his eyes were a bright blue, still amused, but on a day like this they looked boiled. All his energy went into a Parkinsonian shake, a buzz of low-grade fever, a kind of continuous electrical discharge under his skin which gave it the colour of heavy metal poisoning. On a day like this even his bedclothes seemed to be infected. He looked like a bag of rags. He tried to say something more, but in the end could only repeat:
    “Things were different.”
    “I wanted to talk to you about that,” Vic said carefully. “Something’s happening in there.”
    The old man shrugged. “Something’s always happening in there,” he said. Then, with a logic typical of his generation: “That’s how you know you aren’t out here.” He gave Vic a moment to process this. “Take my advice,” he went on, “don’t be like the kids who think they have it all mapped out.”
    “Which kids are those, Emil?”
    Bonaventure chose to ignore him. “They never heard of contingency,” he said, “that’s the fact of it.” He stared at the label of the Black Heart bottle as if he was trying to remember how to read. “These kids,” he asked himself, “what are they? Entradista Lite. They think there’s a career structure in that business! They’ve got a map they bought from Uncle Zip, and a Chambers pistol they’ll never shoot. Good thing, because that gun’s a particle jockey’s nightmare.”
    “Hey, Emil,” Vic said. “Give me the bottle.”
    “They dress for the tourist trade. They talk like bad poets. They never say anything about themselves but at the same time they can’t bear you not to know who they are.”
    “Who are you talking about, Emil?”
    “They never get lost in there, Vic: they never risk anything.”
    “Are you talking about me?” Vic Serotonin said.
    He tried to describe what had happened to him in the aureole the last time he was there, but it already seemed like some event in another world, and maybe that was what it was. It was a clear but meaningless event from some other world, already folded over itself, and—worse—over other memories of his. The client ran away from him across a pile of partly overgrown rubble, her fur coat open to the spitting rain. At the same time the artefact he had sold to Paulie DeRaad was zigzagging down the slope towards him like an animal whose curiosity had got the better of it. It was a deer or a pony, or perhaps a large dog—lurching but graceful, a hairless animal with cartoon human eyes. Then he was back in Liv Hula’s bar and threatening to shoot Antoyne the fat man for having a history. “The site’s expanding,” he tried to explain to Emil Bonaventure: “We’re in for some movement there, Emil, and none of us knows what to do.” By that Vic meant himself, because who else did he know? No one stupid enough to go in there on a daily basis. That was why he needed Bonaventure’s view of it, but to ask directly would feel like giving something away.
    “It’s on the move again,” he said, “for the first time since your day.” The boundaries were newly elastic; at the same time, something was changing deep inside, and everything that