Nova Swing Read Online Free PDF Page B

one fist, as if by pumping the forearm muscles she could pump the mathematics too. He wondered if she had been taught that, or if it was just a mannerism. “Look at the nanocamera record! We had saturating coverage. There was never a moment those people were specifically and exactly not there . In some lights there still seems to be a trace of them, even now. And even after the holding cell was empty, it turned out they had been seen in other parts of the station.” She stared at her arm as if it had let her down. “What can have happened? There was never a moment they weren’t there. They just seemed to evaporate.
    “There’s no explanation,” she concluded again.
    Aschemann scratched his head. “Higher up they might want one,” he decided. “But we don’t have to provide it right now.” And then, trying to help her, “This isn’t anything anyone could have predicted.”
    Next, she wanted them to raid the Café Surf.
    “Not yet,” he said. “But it’s a nice day. Let’s visit by all means.”
    She stared at him. “What?”
    “It would make a change for you to drive,” he told her, and gave his usual driver the day off. Twenty minutes later she was stuck with him. He sat in the front passenger seat with his arms folded, smiling around comfortably as the pink Cadillac convertible slipped down from his office, between the Moneytown palms and white designer duplexes of Maricachel Hill, to the Corniche. It had rained early, but midmorning sun was etching the last traces of humidity off the surface of the air. He loved to be driven, and he was proud of the car. After a few minutes he told her, “You see? You feel better already. Take your time.”
    She gave him a look from the side of her eye.
    “Oh ho,” Aschemann said. “Now I’m irritating you.”
    “I can’t believe you’re so undisturbed. I can’t believe you’re not angry.”
    “I’m angry,” he said, “but not with you.”
    He allowed her to absorb that; then, to change the subject, began telling her about the killings at the noncorporate port. Called to the scene of the original crime some years before, he had discovered two lines of a poem tattooed in the armpit of the victim: Send me a neon heart/Unarmed with a walk like a girl. “She was a Mona from five lights down the Beach. The usual juvenile in box-fresh urethane shoes. This tattoo was unique,” he said, “in that it was not smart. It was just ink, driven into the skin by some antique process. Forensic investigation later proved it to have been made after the heart stopped beating, in the style of an artist now dead but popular a year or two before.”
    “Is that possible?” his assistant wanted to know.
    Aschemann, who had been trying to light his pipe, threw another spent match out of the Cadillac. “Look around you,” he advised her. “In the middle of the city we’re less than two miles from the event aureole. No one is certain what happened in there. Anything is possible. What if crimes are motiveless now, whipped off the crest of events like spray, with no more cause than that?”
    “A surprisingly poetic idea,” she said. “But the murders?”
    The man who looked like Einstein smiled to himself. “Maybe I’ll tell you more later, when you learn to ask better questions.”
    “I think we’re here.”
    The Long Bar at the Café Surf was full of fractured sunlight and bright air. Sand blew across the floor from the open door; the staff were sleepy and vague. Someone’s toddler crawled about between the cane tables wearing only a T-shirt bearing the legend SURF NOIR. Meanings—all incongruous—splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a “world” implied in two words, dispelled in an instant; which is foam on the appalling multi-textual sea we drift on. “Which