7

Space Noir

Vic took Mrs Kielar to Hot Walls in a rickshaw. On his way home the next morning he was arrested. The arrest was quick and deft: a Cadillac convertible, travelling quietly against the grain of the traffic, pulled up alongside the kerb, its front passenger door swinging open just far enough ahead of him for Vic to walk into it. "Hey!" he said. By that time Aschemann's assistant was out on the sidewalk with him, grinning right in his face and saying, "Get in the car, Vic." It was already a nice day, with a light but lively onshore breeze. The sunshine glittered off a wing mirror, slicked along the Cadillac's perfect finish and into Vic's eyes. He must have had an unpredictable look about him that morning, because the assistant's smile broadened and he saw her tailoring cut in, a ripple of nanomotion, subcutaneous and subliminal. Her eyes blanked over. Data poured down her arm, full of excitements of its own.

"Vic Testosterone!" she said. "Vic, you can try me out, or I can call down a fire-team-" here she glanced meaningfully skywards "-or, how would this be, you could just come with me and no one would be killed at all. What do you say?"

Vic shrugged and got in the Cadillac.

She stared down at him expressionlessly for a moment, then shook her head and shut the door.

"Use the seatbelt," she advised.

Vic expected to be taken to a holding cell. He expected to be processed. Instead, she drove him around in the light traffic for perhaps five minutes, enough to make him wonder what was happening, then said suddenly:

"You must have known Lens a long time."

"Who?" Vic said.

"Did you ever meet his wife?"

"Ask your arm," Vic suggested. "Maybe it can tell you." He didn't know what she was talking about. Even if he had known, he wouldn't have wanted to go any further into it. "Or does it just get the fight results?"

"He's here," the woman said into her dial-up.

"This is a nice car," said Vic, as if there was a third person in the Cadillac with them, perhaps in the back, "and I enjoy the smell of the real leather bench seats." He turned a chrome knob on the dashboard, music came out. Station WDIA, Radio Retro, airwaves to the planet. Aschemann's assistant, still talking into her dial-up, reached across and switched it off again.

"No," she said, looking emptily at Vic then back at the street, "he isn't a problem."

Vic was left alone for about ten minutes in an office on the second floor of the police bureau at the intersection of Uniment and Poe. It had been sprayed recently to smell of authentic furniture wax; the blinds were down, though enough narrow strips of sunlight fell through them to make visible the used, uneven but shiny surfaces of everything, the brown leather chair, the knocked-about steel desk and filing cabinets, the polished floor of green linoleum. One or two shadow operators emerged from the corners as Vic sat down, looking worn and under-used at the same time. "He isn't here yet, dear," they apologised. "Would you like a cup of tea?" Vic started to go through the desk drawers. He found some packets of letters written on flimsy pale blue paper which folded cleverly to make its own envelope. They were brittle with age. One of them began, "My dearest Lens," but he had no time to read it, only stuff it back in and close the drawer, because Aschemann walked in the room.

"Vic, don't get up," the detective insisted. "It's good to see you so relaxed. If these operators bother you, just say."

"What am I arrested for?"

"I'll hang my coat up here on this hook," Aschemann said, "to get it out of our way. Vic, you aren't arrested yet."

Serotonin got up and went to the door.

"It was nice to see you again," he said.

"You aren't arrested yet, but this is Site Crime, not a bar on Straint Street. Sit down, talk, is that so hard?"

Vic sat down again, taking the good leather chair behind the desk, which left Aschemann the hard one in front. If he felt any irritation at this reversal of protocol, the detective didn't show it, only hitched the trousers of his light brown suit-the worn cuffs of which fell back to reveal short black socks, white calves with the beginnings of varicose ulcers-to save their knees, and asked, "Vic, what's it like inside the site?"

"You're kidding me."

The detective nodded to himself, as if this was an answer he had expected; as if it was one of several possible answers, all worth consideration, all, perhaps, in the end, of a similar weight. It hadn't, after all, been a fair question. "I'll sit here and smoke my pipe, if you don't mind," he said, "while you think about things."

Poor quality black-and-white footage of Vic now began playing across one wall. It was like a show without sound, Vic Serotonin walks down a street in Hot Walls, Vic Serotonin plays the fights with a plump woman on his arm, Vic Serotonin buys a hat. Vic walks down his own street, the hat tipped back on his head. His life is comprehensively represented: in one shot he threads his way through the VIP crowd at Paulie DeRaad's Semiramide Club, stopping to exchange a word with Paulie's best girl; the image vanishes abruptly at the door of Paulie's back room and now Vic's all the way over town at the Long Bar, where you can see, through the fog and scratch of irresolvable bad data, the Cafe Surf two-piece playing a tune of their own, a little thing of their own they've called Decoda. This visual record had intelligence, it had narrative, it had edit. It followed Vic into the toilets, passing over chipped paint and chequered linoleum, and then out again, where it caught up with him staring, puzzled, across the damp sand behind the bar, past the line of demarcation into the site. Aschemann watched Vic watch himself. He smoked his pipe. After a few minutes he froze the footage.

"So," he said. "Next is what happens most nights at this venue. Vic, you aren't in this footage, but perhaps you could pay attention to it as if you were?"

Up on the wall figures lurched about in half dark, their movements uninterpretable; a doorway at one angle, the neon sign Live Music Nightly at another; another doorway, and then the sea. Nanocameras swarmed in the seafront light like milt. Vic saw what looked like brand new people moving hesitantly away from the Cafe Surf, unformed, emergent, puzzled but as yet un-wounded, full of expectation.

"Maybe it happens in the day too, maybe we don't watch closely enough."

Two boys in dress shirts. A girl who dances inexpertly on the sand. They link elbows, ascend Maricachel Hill towards the centre of the city. They try to talk, but it's better they lean together and sing snatches of tunes learned twenty minutes ago in the Cafe Surf. After that, they find what they're looking for, one by one: and vanish. They stare thoughtfully at the neon signs, they regard the street junctions with soft and meditative smiles, then slip into the ink joints and porn parlours. One minute they are in camera-in a million cameras-then the city has absorbed them. The cameras all have blinked.

Aschemann switched the wall off abruptly.

"Are they artefacts?" he asked, "or people? Maybe you can help, Vic, our equipment can't make the distinction. Whatever they are, they don't have any practise at life, literally, they're without praxis. They don't have a grip on reality." He paused for a moment. Then he leaned forward, put his pipe on the desk next to the ashtray and said, "My wife was a little like that."

Vic stared at him. "What?"

"There's a fierce attrition rate, Vic, most of them worn to nothing inside an hour. But the ones that survive!" Aschemann shook his head. "How can I describe that? They learn how to eat, Vic, how to dress. They learn what the city wants from them. They get a room-"

He shook his head in admiration.