Nova Swing is a
lament. A Greek tragedy. A choir comes, holds the Gods as its witnesses and
tells the sorrows and misfortunes which befell the hero. No heroic deed, no
fatal clench from destiny, no suspense or tension is necessary. Only this
joined presence of a choir, a hero, a place.
The place is Saudade, the sorrow, the nostalgia, the longing
for something gone. Ask a Portuguese to translate Saudade and he will baulk.
There is something holy in this word, something so deeply rooted into the
Portuguese mind that to translate it is to desecrate it. Saudade is a wound of
the soul. Its only cure is lament, then silence.
And so for Nova Swing.
As Colona is to Oedipus, Saudade is the place where the hero comes to die. This
small town lost in North America is the theatre of extraordinary phenomena. Extraordinary,
at least to the human race. They negate all the physical laws which ruled Earth
for the first 4.5 billion years of its existence. But they have become common to
anyone who has spent some time on the Beach of the Kefahuchi Tract. They are
well known to the reader of Light, Nova Swing’s prequel. The Event, this
fragment of the Tract fallen on our planet, generates an area very similar to
the Zone found in Roadside Picnic,
the Strugatsky’s masterpiece often described as Nova Swing’s model. In the Zone, the physical space had been affected
by an alien artefact. The usual laws were not applying, or rather were
following some logic unknown to human scientists. In Harrison’s Event though, physical
laws, whether existing or not, whether possible or not, all apply at the same
time – “or not”. The Event is this area where nothing is predictable any more:
where you are going, where you come from, who is with you, how long you have
been here, whether you are moving or standing still, what you see, what you hear,
what you touch, what you taste, what you feel, what you think, who you are.
People come here and die. People do not come here TO die.
Some come to find something they have lost. Elisabeth Kielar – the closest
Harrison will give us to a femme fatale – has lost part of her soul and she
laments. She sings her Saudade to Vic Serotonin – the closest Harrison offers
to the hard-boiled detective – . Will Vic Serotonin, who makes a living out of
wandering inside the Event with whoever is crazy enough to pay him, will
Serotonin take her in there, as far as she can – as far as HE can? She pays
good money for it, good enough for Vic to say yes.
Vic himself has lost his soul, years ago. He has seen too
much of the Event. Once looking for adventure, the spectacular of the unknown,
the thrill of the unexpected, he aspires to nothing more nowadays than drink
himself to death. This is his own Saudade, the loss of adventure, of thrill, of
hope. He never found any of it in the Event. He still looks up at his role
model, Emil Bonaventure, now an old man dying of weariness and of whatever one
catches from wandering too often too far in the Event. Vic Serotonin
interrogates Bonaventure, steals his diaries, in search for what he might have
missed. Vic Serotonin searches for what he might have lost and the women who
love him lament.
At times it feels that every woman in Saudade is in love
with this big loser Vic Serotonin. Edith Bonaventure, the old adventurer’s
daughter, sleeps with him whenever he comes visit her father. Liv Hula, whom we
knew to be the assistant pilot of this other hero Ed Chianese and now is the
poor owner of the Black Cat White Cat,
a shady bar on Saudade main street, worries for this coward Serotonin, even
when he runs in trouble for abandoning his customers. Elisabeth Kielan, the
abandoned customer, wants to have sex with him as if her life depended on it.
Strong women lamenting a weak man, a man addicted to a youthful dream, who
cannot let go of who he thinks he could have been and who one day, they all
know it, will go into the Event in search of his never happening future, to
never return.
The place is Saudade – but who is the hero? Serotonin is too
weak a man, too whingey, too much of a mop for the title. Could it be Aschemann,
the old cop? But what do we know of Aschemann? That he resembles Einstein very
very much. Disturbingly much. Aschemann bought his face from Uncle Zip, a
company selling cheap gene selections. Aschemann bears his resemblance to
Einstein like a mask. Aschemann has lost his wife. She died resenting him. This
is his lament. He too searches her in the Event. Aschemann wears the mask of
the hero. But no one is here to lament him. No one speaks for him, not the
prostitutes with whom he sleeps, not his assistant rendered mad by uncontrolled
gene changes. Aschemann is a hero without a choir.
For the choir, when not busy with Serotonin, is busy
lamenting itself. In Saudade everybody has lost something, including the
weepers. Edith is in search of the young circus artist she once was. Liv
wonders what happened to the promising pilot who used to fly with Ed Chianese.
They lament the heroes then, when all heroes have died, they pick themselves
up. Taking off the weepers’ habit they become someone else. They decide to
leave it all behind. But is it even possible? Are we not, in spite of our best
efforts, always someone different and always the same person?
“None of us is anyone any more” Liv Hula says.” We all lost
who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be happy to fly this
rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name
I’ve ever heard”.
Something else. In a universe with a Kefahuchi Tract humans
cannot be individuals any more. The heroes are dead. The remaining humans are
mere replica of ancient models: Einstein the genius, Mona the intriguing
prostitute from Light, copies of dead
cultures, artefacts of our imagination, things. The Event may make everything
possible, it is still powerless to change a single life. Those who come to
Saudade in the hope of enlightenment and stay around, stick around, get
entangled in its everyday life, those will die waiting. “You weren’t the person
you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you got
trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t
someone entirely different either.”
Nova Swing: the
name of a cheap spacecraft. Of a poor adventure. Of a hop to the next place,
hoping to become someone happier. But the nova towards which we swing proves to
be the same old yellow star. Nova Swing
is the story, never ending, always repeated, of our memories and our hopes.
