Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

old man’s notebook.
    “I thought I hid that again,” she said unconcernedly.
    “There’s nothing written in it.”
    “Isn’t there? It mustn’t be the right one, then.”
    “You already knew it wasn’t,” Vic said.
    She acknowledged this with a smile “Even the ones he’s written in aren’t necessarily the right one,” she said. “Emil wrote a lot of stuff in his time. Do you want a drink?”
    Serotonin dropped the notebook on the floor and yawned. “I ought to go,” he said. She brought him the drink anyway, and stood in front of him while he swallowed it. “What is that?” he said.
    “You finished the good stuff,” she reminded him.
    Serotonin wiped his mouth. He looked round the room, with its shelves full of little-girl memorabilia; he couldn’t resolve into one image the Edith he knew and the Edith who kept those things. He set down his glass and pulled her in close until she was compelled to sit on his knee. “Does he need money?” he asked her. Edith looked away and smiled. She pulled Vic’s head down and made him kiss the nape of her neck.
    “We always need money,” she said. “Mm. That’s nice.”
    After he had gone, she lay on the sofa thinking about him. Serotonin reminded her of all the men she met on her way across the Halo. Everyone she encountered in those days was trying to live out some dream already irretrievable when they were sixteen.
    If she was fair she had to include herself in that. On Pumal Verde, for instance, she got bagged on Dr Thirsty’s, hallucinating for eleven hours straight a huge white bird flapping slowly and ecstatically through vacuum. Her boyfriend of the time said, “Edith, that bird is your life, and you’d be wise to follow where it leads.” He didn’t do much with his own life, only joined EMC like the rest, and was made pilot of some kind of fighter craft which necessitated him being rebuilt by the military tailor so that wires came out his mouth and into the controls. They were supposed to have damped out the gag reflex, but sometimes he felt the wires in there like a mass of sinewy fibrous stuff he couldn’t swallow. If he panicked, or let his concentration slip, he heard his mother’s voice in the cockpit, calm and firm, telling him to do things. It was hard to disobey. She said not to be frightened. Not to be angry. She said, concentrate now and get this part right. Then everyone will be saved. That was mostly the end of him as far as Edith was concerned.
    Towards dawn she went back upstairs to see to the old man.
    He was still awake, staring ahead of himself as if he was spectating at some event no one else could see; but he must have known she was there, because he took her hand and said, “The worst things we ever brought out of there, we called them ‘daughters.’ Bring out a daughter and you had nothing but trouble. A daughter would change shape on you. It wasn’t alive, it wasn’t technology either: no one knew what it did, no one knew what it was for.”
    Edith squeezed his hand.
    “You told me that already,” she said.
    He chuckled. “It was me who started calling them that. Whatever you brought out, it had better not be a daughter.”
    “You told me that a hundred times before.”
    He chuckled again, and she squeezed his hand again, and after a while he went to sleep.
    She stayed with him. Every so often she looked round the room, at the painted wainscoting a warm cream colour under the low-wattage lights, the old bed piled up with coloured pillows, bits of mismatched cloth she liked, or thought the old man might like. We saw worse places than this, she thought. There was a flare from the rocket field, then another; they lighted her strong profile and cast its shadow on the wall.
     
4
At the Club Semiramide
    Liv Hula opened her bar in the late mornings. However she caned it the previous night she could never sleep more than two or three hours, but after that would wake suddenly from dreams of being sucked down, listen in a