Fin Whirl's management obviously recognized the benefits of keeping people glued to the floor, rather than allowing such a crowd to ramble wildly in three dimensions. Best to put limits on pandemonium; best to keep chaos at bay.
An abrupt fury overwhelmed Gillian, and he began shoving his way through the crowd, pushing people out of his path, ramming passersby with his elbows, deeply hoping that someone would take offense, challenge his arrogance, push back.
Buff grabbed his arm. “Jesus, Gillian! Calm down. We're here to see Faquod, remember?"
He drew deep breaths, forced his body to adopt the soothing rhythms of composure, forced placidity to wash over the rage. In the innermost reaches of consciousness, he had the feeling that Empedocles was laughing at him, perhaps amused by his constant struggle.
How many times had the fury come over him in these weeks since he and Buff had parted with Nick and the Lion? How many fights had he initiated?
First, there had been those days hiding out with some of Buff's clanspeople, the Cerniglias, and their daily visits to that exercise cone, attached to the small Costeau cylinder by oneway umbilicals. The 2G-plus power workouts had given Gillian the opportunity to meet many other Costeaus who enjoyed the rigors of hand-to-hand combat in an ecosphere where everyone weighed twice as much as normal. Gillian had relished those days, those intense confrontations in the ring, punishing his body and the bodies of his opponents, beating all comers, fighting until he was so tired that he simply fell asleep on the mats, fighting until even Empedocles's endless scrutinizing was circumvented, until his monarch's omnipresence dissolved into the barest ghost of a dream.
And then, in the alley, with Impleton and his men. A short fight but satisfying in that it had temporarily purged Gillian of his pain and fury, temporarily neutralized his monarch.
I need to engage in eternal combat. As insane as that idea sounded, it seemed the only real solution for his existence, the only logical method of maintaining himself as a discrete consciousness. The only way to keep chaos at a distance.
His hands began to shake, and he balled them into fists, crushed them against his sides, willed himself not to lash out at some innocent passerby. He followed Buff across the packed floor, toward the tunnels leading to the arena. They jostled for position, spearing their way through the mad crush of humanity that funneled toward the ramps leading to Fin Whirl's inner sanctum.
Wave upon wave of people: pro-gamblers, silkies, and smugglers; addicts of scud and ree-fee, chemfreaks and demortified coke drinkers. There were Costeaus, both mainstreamed and freestyle, the latter filling the air with the stench from numerous odorant bags, a mélange of foul smells representing dozens of clans. There were marked criminals, with bright red libbers attached to their foreheads, the implanted electrodes not only signaling their whereabouts to parole officers but pulsing their brains when synaptically monitored antisocial urges reached danger levels. And there were outsiders galore: tourists and thrill-seekers and wide-eyed weekenders who came for excitement, an alteration in their routines, a panacea for their boredom, any state of mind that might amplify or enhance the inherent dullness of their structured existences.
Like Rio, thought Gillian. Like Tokyo. The crowd in Fin Whirl reminded him of those places, and the other great lost cities of the Earth, where humans mixed in seemingly senseless arrangements; where those who understood the nature of their environments walked amid those whose comprehension remained dim, limited. In practical terms, Fin Whirl was a place where scam artists and hustlers of all manner and description flowed in the same stream as the uninitiated. Fin Whirl was a place where the not-so-honest could diligently soak the not-so-poor. It was a true gambler's heaven.
Gillian sensed something else: the particular mixture of the streetwise and the ignorant in Fin Whirl mimicked the ratios found on Earth during the final days. And Fin Whirl was, in fact, probably a fair microcosm of intercolonial society. It seemed to Gillian as if more and more intercolonial citizens seemed unable to interpret correctly and fathom the symbols underlying their very environments. Like the inhabitants of late twenty-first-century Earth, the colonists of Irrya increasingly walked in the shadows, living at the mercy of those who fully understood the distinctions between darkness and light.
At the mercy of the Paratwa. At the mercy of the Ash Ock.
The world, Aristotle had once proclaimed, is made up of those who understand their own depths and those who do not. And the balance between those two ever-changing factions determines the state of the culture, determines whether there is war or peace, whether there is freedom or slavery, whether a civilization reaches for the stars or descends into the polygenetic barbarity of its own past.
A faint shudder raced up Gillian's spine. The Colonies of Irrya are doomed. They've become victims, waiting to be vanquished. There is no real hope left.
And with that shudder came the living icon that was Empedocles. And Gillian, for a brief moment, was able to perceive the mental pollution that was brought on by his monarch, the poison that Empedocles leaked into Gillian's mind, overwhelming his thoughts with a toxic blend of defeat and failure, slowly eroding Gillian's will, pushing him toward acceptance of the inevitable: the whelm.
Bring us together, urged Empedocles. Unite our souls. Now—before it is too late.
"No!” snapped Gillian, gritting his teeth.
Buff took off her cap, exposing her shaved skull with its photoluminescent streaks, the blue and red lines, the Costeau symbols of mourning and vengeance. “Talking to him again?"
"Yes."
"Who dressed you this morning?"
Gillian smiled; grim thoughts trickled back into the depths. “Don't worry, I'm still in charge of clothing decisions. Besides, I don't think Empedocles would have picked the garb of an ICN banker.” He reached down and fingered the four ends of his double tie. “This is far too stylish for my monarch. He was never much of a dresser. He could never decide if he liked the male or the female look."
"Yeah, I know some boys and girls who have that problem.” Gillian realized something else. His clothing should have marked him as a tourist, an outsider, a potential victim for the shadow walkers here in Fin Whirl. But the hustlers seemed to ignore him, and he sensed that it was more than just Buff's presence that spared him as a potential mark.
They look at me, and they know that I'm one of them.
He thought about the palm-reading giant at the entrance. What had motivated the giant to challenge them? What did it matter what entrance a person used to enter Fin Whirl? Did the giant ascribe it as a personal mission of some sort? Did his odd method of selectivity provide a sense of satisfaction? Did the giant come across others who possessed the hands of chaos?
Buff leaned over and whispered, “I think we've got company."
Gillian instantly nestled his body against hers; a natural combat instinct to prevent their separation during a sudden onslaught of violence. In this kind of crowd, tight back-to-back fighting techniques would be demanded.
His lust for confrontation returned—full-body hard-on, as strong as ever. Muscles twitched, hungry for the nourishment of action. He wiggled his right wrist, felt the lump of the Cohe wand nestled safely in the slip wrist holster beneath his wide-sleeved jacket. The shadow of Empedocles crept back into awareness.
"Now don't get your cock up,” warned Buff. “I don't think anything's going to happen here. But I'm pretty sure we're being watched and followed."
"By whom?"
"I'm not sure—not exactly. There're two of them, I think. Maybe three. Trailing us at a distance. I spotted them when we got off the vator. I don't think they're intercolonial—certainly not E-Tech Security. Probably not local patrollers, either. The good folks who run Fin Whirl pay extremely large fees—taxes, they are called—to the Sirak-Brath authorities to make sure that this place is not overrun by police. Of course, they could be patrollers, working on a special investigation."
"Looking for us,” said Gillian.
"
Yeah, maybe. We are getting a bit popular lately, what with you and your nasty black beam terrorizing poor innocent smugglers."
Gillian grunted.
"But if these guys are official,” continued the Costeau, “I think there'd be more of them—a half dozen, probably. When patrollers do come to Fin Whirl, they usually come in force."
"Faquod's people?” wondered Gillian. “By now, he must have gotten the word that we're looking for him."
"Yeah,” agreed Buff. “And you did sort of dropkick Impleton and company. For all we know, that gang could have been Faquod's best friends."
"I doubt it."
They reached the nearest tunnel and were almost crushed as hundreds of bodies tried to plunge through the constricting portal at the same time. The shaft gently angled upward for a short distance, and then the pressure of the crowd abruptly relented and they were plopped out into the main grandstands encircling Fin Whirl's Upside arena, into a fusillade of noise and light. The high-tech gravitational bias seemed to increase; Gillian experienced the odd sensation that, below the knees, he was walking through a lG environment, while the test of his body remained weightless.
The grandstands were almost full, crammed with five or six thousand spectators/bettors, separated from the basketball-size playing field by a ring of twenty-five-foot-high transparent glass barriers, which looked like thinner versions of the massive cosmishield glass slabs that protected the Colonies’ sun sectors. On the field itself, six players were lining up for the next game.
Huge billboards, made up of thousands of genetically modified captive cockroaches, floated overhead. Using power processors, the billboards’ controllers stimulated the shells of certain roaches into intense states of multicolored photoluminescence, aligning the bugs into tiny channels on the surface of the billboard, effectively spelling out a variety of messages. The technology was familiar to Gillian. Adbug aesthetics had been inordinately popular during the mid to late-twenty-first century, despite vehement opposition by insect rights organizations.
The billboards provided gambling odds for the upcoming game as well as counted down the time remaining before betting ceased. Bettor booths ringed the cosmishield wall and each one had a line of at least twenty people. Most of the individuals were screaming and cursing at one another; those in the back of the line were the most vocal, desperate to place wagers in time for the upcoming round.
"C'mon,” urged Buff, leading Gillian up a steeper ramp between two of the grandstands, which were named Blake and Shelley. They reached the top, where the expensive private penthouse booths overhung the regular spectator sections. Each penthouse was rectangular, about thirty feet wide, and fronted with a solid sheet of mirrored glass. Booth BS-four was the third one on their left. They halted before it and gazed at their reflections.
"We're here to see Faquod,” announced Buff.
A corner panel seemed to quiver, and then a doorway appeared, exposing a short flight of stairs. Gillian followed Buff up into the booth, turning at the last minute to stare at the two men poised on the ramp thirty feet below them. The duo, seeing that they had been spotted, quickly turned around to face the playing field. Gillian smiled. It was an amateurish attempt to throw off suspicion. Maybe the pair were from the authorities after all.
But just as Gillian was about to turn back into the booth, he caught a glimpse of a third man, poised on a landing about a dozen steps below the other two. The man looked straight at Gillian, smiled warmly, and waved his hand in apparent recognition. Gillian had no idea who he was. The door closed before he could consider an appropriate response.
Faquod's domain was a study in luxury. Its height-adjustable sofas were pristine examples of art deco elegance, and the amusement grid and refreshment console, connected by a graceful curving arch, bore a fragility that seemed alien to Sirak-Brath. Twin lavatory doors, quaintly discriminatory, had wavy black and silver stripes. The diagonal pattern was disrupted only by the oversized handles: one shaped like a limp penis, the other like a sagging breast.
Faquod slouched alone on the massive central sofa, gazing out over the arena, where the burning of roach's shells indicated that less than a minute remained before the next game. In person, the smuggler did not look very threatening. Este Faquod was tall and skinny, with pale chocolate skin, curly gray hair, and eyes that expressed terminal boredom.
The other occupants of the booth were a pair of beautiful redheaded women, who looked to be in their early twenties. Twins, obviously, but for a moment, Gillian did not appreciate just how close they were. Then he spotted the plastic swatch of artificial skin connecting them, shoulder to shoulder. Siamese by design. The twins sat in front of the amusement grid, playing some sort of two-dimensional screen game featuring burial and revivification under severe arctic conditions.
Faquod laughed, a low unrestrained chuckle, which sent a faint chill through Gillian. Reemul the liege-killer had possessed a similar laugh.
"Attention getters, yes, my little redheads certainly are. Yes. They were born separate, but I told them that if they were willing to be surgically connected, and remain Siamese for one year, that I would give them one of my Pocono speed-slope teams and enough start-up money to make a serious run at next year's championship. Yes. They've two months to go."
"Crazy ladies,” muttered Buff.
Faquod rose. “Yes. Buff, I haven't seen you for a time. Word has come to me that you seek new toys. Things on the technological order of the salene. Yes?"
Buff nodded. “We're willing to pay, Faquod. You set the terms.” She glanced at the bonded redheads. “In cash, of course."
"Cash. Yes.” The smuggler rose from the sofa. “Do you have money riding on the game?"
Gillian gazed through the transparent wall, down into the arena. A whistle blared and the six players, each attached to a circular skateboard, triggered their jetpaks and accelerated toward the center of the field.
Buff shook her head. “We're not here to bet."
Faquod turned to Gillian. “How about you, Cohe-wand man. Are you a bettor?"
Gillian tensed.
Faquod grinned at him, then ambled over to the edge of the window-wall. Down on the field, the first two players made contact, their shielded bodies clipping each other with tremendous force. The first player, a tall female in scarlet colors, ducked low, transferred the force of the collision into a change of direction, maintaining her balance and rocketing away from the crash. But the second player, in royal blue, had no such luck—or skill. He lost control, fell forward; the propulsion from his jetpak, which could not be turned off without forfeiting the game, changed direction, went from horizontal to vertical, launching his near-weightless body some thirty feet into the air. He flailed his arms, desperately trying to regain balance, but his random gesticulations only served to send him tumbling end over end. In slow motion, he crash-landed on the dirt at the edge of the field, sending a cloud of red dust swirling into the air. Shaken, the player scampered to his hands and knees and crawled to the sidelines. A roar of approval went up from the crowd, their overall delight tempered by booing from some quarters—bettors, no doubt, who had chosen the royal-blue whirler as their champion.
"Want to see what that looked like Downside?” asked Faquod, not waiting for an answer, but pointing his wiggling finger at an overhead com. A small section of the window faded into the contours of a video screen. The camera angle displayed a replay of the initial game contact, but from the perspective of Downside: the mirror-image near-identical stadium that lay beneath their feet.
Each player Upside had his Downside counterpart: a figure in similar attire and colors, yet without jetpaks. Downsiders were incapable of any independent mobility with respect to the playing field, although they could move their upper torsos and arms. Each Downsider's boots were attached to a skateboard just like his Upside double, but the Downsider's board remained aligned, via powerful induction beams, to the Upsider's board, essentially traveling at the same speed and in the same direction
. The Fin Whirl playing field was, in essence, a huge mirror: where the Upsider went, his Downsider “image” followed.
Gillian watched, fascinated, as the Downside version of the opening collision played itself out on Faquod's screen. The red player again kept her balance; the blue player hurtled high into the air, his trajectory mimicking the arc taken by his luckless Upside analogue.
"Yes,” said Faquod, looking pleased. “Sometimes, you know, the Downside counteraction is not identical. Sometimes the Downsider manages to slightly alter the nature of the game, perhaps leaning a few extra inches in one direction, perhaps slamming into another player—an event that occurs Upside as a near miss. And should the Downsider knock down a player, that player's Upside counterpart is automatically disqualified."
"Interesting,” said Gillian.
"Yes. Two types of bettors, you know. Those who play Upside, who prefer to match their purses to the skill and daring of the individual athlete. Then there are those who play Downside.” Faquod smiled. “Two different styles of personalities, actually: those who prefer a game based mostly on skill versus those whose taste runs to a game based primarily on chance."
Buff shrugged. “This is all very fascinating, Faquod, but we're here about weapons, and we sort of have the feeling that we shouldn't stay in one place for too long.” She pointed down to the two men who stood on the landing. The pair were pretending to follow the game, but they kept casting furtive glances up at Faquod's booth. “We have silent partners."
"Do you know who they are?” asked Faquod in a tone that suggested he did.
Buff shrugged.
"They are freelancers from FL-Sixteen,” announced the smuggler. “Their assignment is Fin Whirl. They must have recognized you."
Buff frowned. “I don't see how they could recognize us so easily. Both of us had facial alterations, done just last week—"
"Descriptions were provided to them earlier today. Impleton sold his tale of encounter with you and Cohe-wand man to the freelancers. Yes. Freelancers pay well for information. I'm told that Impleton made quite a profit on the deal.
The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga) Page 5