If it was cats on Straint, it was dogs across the city at Suicide Point: Lens-Aris Aschemann woke just before dawn, with the confused impression that he had heard them barking as they lolloped through the surf. A trip down the hall and into the kitchen, which had the best seaward view, showed him the tide was on the turn under fast grey clouds; while rain blew suddenly this way and that across an empty beach. He stood for a minute or two listening for the loose sound of the swash; he could still hear the dogs, but they were moving away. It occurred to him that he wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. This idea made him smile faintly and dial up his assistant.

“Do you hear dogs ?” he asked her.

“What ?”

Sand, blown in under the kitchen door during the night, had stuck to the soles of Aschemann’s bare feet. He brushed at them ineffectually, first one then the other, with the palm of his hand. “Every part of the year,” he told her, “is filled with unacknowledged acts of memory, cued by the smell of the air, the seasonal fall of the light. Do you follow ?” Silence in the pipe. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t. “There are dogs in everything. They aren’t real, but neither are they only a metaphor. We’re dogged by the things we’ve forgotten.”

“I’m not sure I--”

“Do you see what I’m saying ? The investigator must always allow for this. The older we grow, the louder their voices, the more inarticulate they are.”

Nova Swing, copyright M John Harrison 2006