Nova Swing Read Online Free PDF

occur to him. He touched the fat man’s forearm suddenly to get his attention.
    “Antoyne, has Vic upset you in some way?”
    Antoyne shrugged.
    “I won’t give up Vic,” he said, and walked off.
    “Vic’s giving himself up,” the detective called after him mildly. “Not just to me. To whatever’s in there.”
    Antoyne did not reply, but instead pushed his way more energetically between the crowded tables to the door. In the end there was a kind of fat dignity to Antoyne, which remained intact despite his habit of always putting himself at a disadvantage, of appearing to disentitle himself in a society where anyone could be what they wanted. No one understood why Serotonin tolerated him, but maybe that was why. For a moment or two Aschemann considered this. Then he retreated to his favourite corner, where he tried to recoup the rhythm of the Café Surf, taking his time over another glass, drinking in little sips which coated his mouth with the warm rum taste of burnt sugar. He thought about Vic Serotonin, also Paulie DeRaad, who, of the two, he liked the least. He thought about the tourist trade, or at least the sector of it which was his professional concern.
    While he was thinking, the band squeezed out two or three thin boys in white singlets, earrings and studded leather belts. Aschemann watched closely their struggle through the toilet door and into the sticky prismatic light. They looked, he decided, surprised. They looked incomplete, and surprised to find themselves here. Then the music squeezed out an old woman in a hat and a blue print dress and for a moment all four of them swayed clumsily together as if in time to the music. There was a lacuna, a moment of awry—a moment like falling, which happened between them but spread itself out to everyone else in the bar; and then the Café Surf was itself again. The new customers bought drinks and headed out into the night.
    Aschemann stood at the door and watched them go. The next night he had some of them arrested.
    The way this came about was unforeseen. Three women and one man were picked up two miles from the Café Surf, in the back lot of another bar, where they were apparently trying to have sex with one another. There was some sense they didn’t know how to progress with this but were willing to learn. Aschemann, who got notice of the event from the uniform branch, contacted his assistant and had her go down there. “Take them to a holding cell,” he told her. “I can’t go myself.” He had other things to do—he was out on the edge of the noncorporate port investigating a long-running series of crimes against women—but it seemed pointless to waste the opportunity. “Don’t interrogate them,” he ordered. “Strictly, there is nothing wrong with trying to have sex in the back lot of a bar, otherwise we would all be in prison. Just settle them in and then you can go home. Oh, and one other thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Make sure no one hurts them.”
    She was back on to him perhaps an hour later. Things were fine, she said. It was like handling refugees. Though they were curiously pliable, they were slow to give names. They smelled a little. They didn’t seem to be from an alien species. They didn’t seem to be hungry. They were not chipped, she said, by any method the holding cell diagnostics understood, neither were any of the usual markers encoded into their DNA; she could therefore assign them no point of origin in the Halo.
    “What do they look like to you?” Aschemann asked her.
    “They look like idiots,” she said.
    When she last saw them, that was how they looked. It was perhaps two after midnight. They stood all night like that, puzzledly, in the centre of the cell, talking to one another infrequently in their slow, gluey voices; and in the morning they were gone.
    “There’s no explanation for it,” she said.
    Her skin ran with data. It was like a pore-bleed. Nervousness or anger was causing her to clench and unclench