“Exactly. It fits his psych profile. So we join a group of seekers, traveling across the wastes, and planning to enter the sacred city. We’ll have trouble at this point—there are weapon scans. Bloodeagle and I will depend on the underground which supported Gorgon’s operations in the past—”
“I was told that those channels were corrupt.”
“They probably are—but we don’t have a lot of choice.”
Aubry considered. “My weaponry has been built into me,” he said quietly. “The bones in my forearms and lower legs are hollow. They are shielded, and shadow-imaged. Ultrasound or X ray will show nothing.”
“Jesus,” Jenna said quietly. She laid her hand on Aubry’s shoulder, and looked deeply into his eyes. “Aubry—are you sure?”
“I don’t have any choice,” he said. “Promise and Leslie are the only family I have. I have to take the chance. Any chance.”
Bloodeagle rubbed his chin. He held a finger to his lips. Then he took a piece of paper and wrote down the following: If they applied such invasive procedures, and you agreed to a hit operation, there may be more inside you than they told you.
Aubry was about to protest. Hafid had said that the room was shielded. But what if he was wrong?
He took the pen from Miles’s hand, and wrote in turn. More? Like what?
Explosives, Miles wrote. If you are captured, and Swarna interviews you personally, they will detonate the charge.
“Jesus.”
Aubry looked at both of them. “Why did you come?” he asked.
There wasn’t any answer from Bloodeagle. Jenna just leaned forward and kissed Aubry’s cheek. Bloodeagle looked a little drawn, a little thinner. He smelled of old perspiration and diesel fuel. “You just don’t understand, do you? Even after all this time. You have family.”
8
Night had fallen over the city, and except for far-off traffic sounds, and a distant call to prayer, Ma’habre was quiet. They sat on a terraced balcony on Hafid’s second story, and listened to Bloodeagle.
“Four years ago, we became aware of an attempt to embarrass the neutral government of Zimbabwe. Swarna’s people kidnapped several Energy executives, had them locked in a limo, and pinned on a bridge. They would be killed at the first sign of trouble.”
“Did Swarna actually take responsibility for kidnapping a head of state?”
“Well, no—not officially, but it was his people. It wasn’t hard to trace the trail back. We went in, and stopped it. I was in-country for maybe four days, and I can tell you—even in that short a period of time, the image that I got of Swarna was a hell of a lot different than the one we get in the media at home.”
“Man of Mystery? Tough negotiator?”
“We know that he displaced families in his efforts to create the Republic, but there was more. Europeans were resented enough in Africa. But there was a simmering discontent about the Japanese.”
“The Japanese?”
“Absolutely. You think that they were seen as the great liberators? The Educators? As far as the locals were concerned, they were Swarna’s instrument of enslavement. After all—New Nippon is right in the heart of PanAfrica, and it’s Swarna’s private preserve. His bastion, and that’s what has made it so damned hard to remove the man. Every European or African who enters New Nippon is registered. Every Asian has to be tied in to specific business, and is watched even more carefully. Somewhere in the middle is Swarna’s stronghold. Ten thousand acres of land, and in the middle is his private game preserve. The inner moat is his damned dinosaur preserve. Get through that, and you have the fortress itself. His private guard is on the premises at all times—and they have a hell of a rep. Their equivalent of the Airborne Rangers is maybe fifteen minutes away by skimmer or helicopter. Hard target.”
“But this festival, at Swarnaville Spaceport …”
“It’s a guess, but it’s a damned good one.”
They looked out over the balcony. A jeep roared by. In it were four soldiers, very black, roaring a drunken song in Japanese. Aubry smiled thinly.
“Disorienting, isn’t it?” Bloodeagle nursed his drink.
Aubry grunted. “The worst part is the way the switch in my head keeps flipping back and forth. Some combination of a microprocessor and deep hypnosis. The information is running back and forth so fast … on one level it feels like a stream of insects—that’s the kinesthetics. On another, like a flow of light beads. But the weirdness is that I can actually talk it. We did a lot of work on that, on the actual phonetics.”
“Phonetics?” Jenna grinned. “There’s a word I wouldn’t have expected from you.”
Aubry’s dark face creased amiably. “Well—would you have expected to see me on the ass side of the world, in the first place?”
Hafid, nursing an iced coffee, shook his head slowly. “You are all mad, but less mad than your countrymen. I have had many of you come through my house. And I have had … many houses. I have to move from time to time, to keep my head upon my shoulders. But I mostly get hard, cold men. Smuggling, spying. They do not laugh very much, and when they do, it is about women they have left behind. Men they killed, and the expressions upon their faces.”
“I don’t want to kill anymore,” Aubry whispered.
Bloodeagle turned to look at him. “Yes, my brother?”
“I can see them. They tried to kill me, most of them. But I can’t …” Aubry lowered his voice, bent forward until his face was in shadow. The rest bent over until they were in a conspiratorial huddle.
“Until I had Leslie, it never really hit me. I used to watch Leslie sleep, and he looked so innocent, beyond the cares of this world. And then I realized that Leslie is, pound for pound, the most lethal human being who has ever walked this planet. A killing machine. And I became enraged that someone would corrupt my child like that.
“But I grew past that. At Ephesus I realized that every child is born innocent, and then we twist them. We turn them. We condition them with cruelty or kindness. And so the killers who came after me were once children, as well. Maybe genetics determined what they were—in which case God rolled the dice, and they came up the losers. Or they were born into the wrong world, one in which being a predator made them the outcasts. I can understand that. Or they were blank slates, and we wrote on them. And what we wrote on those slates was a death sentence. Executed by me.
“There has to be another way,” Aubry whispered. “We can’t keep killing each other. I used to wonder why I had been allowed to live. Why someone … like me existed.”
Bloodeagle reached across and clasped Aubry’s hand. “We all have our place in the world,” he said patiently. “Every star in the heavens, every animal in the Earth, has its place in the natural order. You have been among buildings, on paved roads, all of your life. You have never had a chance to feel the natural order. And you have covered those feelings up. Now they begin to break free.”
Aubry looked at him. “You had your traditions. From the time you were a child.”
“Yes. Myths, stories … they make us, or break us. Stories of heroes have been with us from the very earliest days of mankind. Even though my people’s world was transformed by the Europeans, we still retained our languages, and our religions. The yellow men who came here had their languages and myths. But you, as a man of African heritage, had your language, your names, your religions, and your myths stripped away from you. You have no history except that of America—and yet that is denied you as well. You must find your own myths. You must grow into them.”
Aubry looked up at the stars. His thoughts seemed to stew far back in the recesses of his mind. “And you, Jenna?”
“My myths aren’t old,” she said. “They are only as old as the communes. It is true that women’s myths have been lost over time—but it is also true that if women breed, it changes their relationship with the world. Women who choose not to breed have options which nature gave them, and men took away. But women who have children …”
Her voice
lowered. “Men didn’t make us different. Nature did. It is nature who dictated that children grow inside women’s bodies. If men and women make … love, it is the woman who will bear the children. Nothing I can say, none of my anger can change that fact. And a pregnant woman is not a hunter, or a soldier. That one fact divides the human race into two halves: women, who bear children, and men, who do not. Layer upon that the exigencies of child rearing, and of survival, and you have many of the roles which men and women play with each other. Of course, many of those have been perverted.” She was silent for a time, her fingers woven tightly together. There was a storm brewing in Jenna’s eyes, but at length she smiled.
“You, Aubry—you showed me that a man could be strong, and gentle. You gave me hope.”
Aubry’s eyes were stinging, and he reached out and took her hand. At length, after a time, Bloodeagle reached out and placed his there as well, and they were quiet together.
When Aubry spoke again, he found that his voice was unsteady.
“I have always known myself as a fighter. Kevin Warrick, a man long dead now, tried to show me his version of what a warrior was. But … I am not that. I don’t know exactly what I am. I do know that I’ve become something I don’t have a label for. And I know that I am contented.” He smiled, almost bashfully. “It’s all right.”
There was silence on the balcony.
Bloodeagle was the first to break it. “Aubry, my brother,” he said. “All that I have is yours. My people are your people.” He drew a knife, long, thin, razor sharp, and cut the palm of his hand. And he looked at Jenna.
She smiled crookedly. “This is so much macho bullshit,” she sighed. But she shook her head, as much at her own folly as anything else, and drew her own blade. And she drew it across her palm. “Aubry—we don’t have a warrior ritual among my people—but I welcome you in my heart. Men and I … oh, to hell with it. I just love you. You are my brother, and would be even if you weren’t my sister’s husband. Let’s do it.”
Aubry hesitated for a moment. “Either of you have a Spider?”
Jenna smiled tenderly. “Fuck you.”
He cut himself. And the three palms formed a triangle, and their blood ran together, and mingled there, beneath the stars, in a foreign land, where, very soon, death would be in the air.
9
SEPTEMBER 7. CHINA SEA.
The slightest touch of her hands on the controls made the skimmer shudder in response. As they flew toward Hong Kong, Promise had the feeling that they were approaching the doors to another world, a world of brutality and awful potentials.
Anything at all might live behind those doors. She hoped that one of the possibilities was an answer to the riddle which was Aubry Knight.
The first challenge came at the 100-mile limit, when her computer was automatically scanned for identification, her flight plan cross-checked. She felt a moment of nervousness as her on-boards responded to the query, but she knew that the flight plans had all been filed with the central control, and her mercantile licenses were flawless.
The mainland came into view another minute later. With it came the second challenge. This was the moment of greatest danger, when there was a possibility that one of Hong Kong’s notorious air pirates would race in to intercept. If that happened, it was problematic whether Promise’s small skimmer could outrun them before their disruptors took control of the guidance mechanism and the inevitable boarding occurred.
But—and she was not completely mystified by this—a silver escort skimmer materialized out of a cloud bank. It matched her speed, beamed the proper codes to downgrade the alert status, and accompanied her into Kowloon port.
Beside her, Leslie played with a coloring book, her perfect coordination leading the crayon between the lines effortlessly. She could have juggled grenades with her feet and done the same.
Promise switched on the guidance system, and the green markings appeared on the windscreen. She took the path marked out for her, following the silver escort vehicle.
That meant that her path was pre-cleared, that there would be no problem with customs, or immigration, or any of the ordinary agencies that most visitors to Hong Kong had to deal with.
It meant, in short, that a man named Wu had cleared the way for her. They slid through a forest of spires.
Thirty years before, the world feared that when Red China took over the city of Hong Kong, chaos would reign. What hadn’t been taken into account was China’s desperate need for the 398.5-square-mile economic pore that Hong Kong symbolized. Hong Kong meant access to computer skills and electronic equipment. Hong Kong meant access to a world market that both feared and coveted China’s emerging power.
Without foreign investors, Hong Kong was just another ghetto waiting to deteriorate, rather than the most expensive patch of real estate in the world.
The green-dot path led Promise toward a series of spires, and the second tallest of them was, she believed, the one that beckoned her.
She was within a mile now, and the automatic guidance system, tied in with the security network, had taken control of her on-boards, and she was able to relinquish the hand controls.
There were critical moments when human skill was really required—but this wasn’t one of them. On leaving dock in Oregon, she had to keep control of the skimmer and pilot it until it cleared the coast, when she could hook it into the Pacific Network. Once she was online, her flight registered in advance, it rarely took more than five minutes’ waiting while her flight documents were scanned and compared to those of the thousands of other vehicles making the trans-Pacific flight. Her vehicle batteries were automatically inspected, her on-board security lines were checked—in other words, the Pacific Network protected itself from her incompetence. After all, it just wouldn’t do to have her skimmer flop out of the air and smash into a passing trawler.
Then she was on her way. The federally controlled Pacific Network disengaged a hundred miles off the coast, in accordance with a battalion of treaties. A dozen different guidance systems vied for her traveling dollar. In one sense, a more genuine open market existed in the Orient than in the United States. It was much like choosing a primary vidphone carrier, with differing rates and services. But Promise didn’t need to worry about any of that. All she needed to worry about was what she was going to say to the man she had flown halfway around the world to see.
Smiling broadly, Leslie took her mother’s hand. “It’ll be all right.”
“How can you know that? How can you be so certain?”
“Because I’m with you, that’s why. And if I’m with you then there isn’t really anything that can go wrong, is there? I mean, if something was going to go wrong, you would have left me at home. After all, I’m just a kid.”
“When you say that, it all sounds so reasonable.” The communication beacon coaxed her skimmer toward the dock. Promise settled back and tried to relax. What would it be like to see this man again? Wu had once been their enemy, but had also cleared Aubry of rape and murder charges.
And now, with Aubry ensnared in a different sort of web, a deadlier web, one from which there might be no natural exit, Wu might be the only one who could create a doorway.
The car settled in, and a slender black African boy met them and eased the door up. He smiled, with perfect, brilliant teeth.
“Good evening.” He bobbed his head enthusiastically. “I am Jamal. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the house of Wu.”
Leslie stepped down with exaggerated formality, a calculated stiffness to conceal her natural, perfect fluidity of movement.
Promise noticed that Jamal moved well, also. A certain feline ease suggested a movement art. Dance? He was willowy enough.
She walked beside him to an escalator, humming a tune to herself. Jamal’s movement automatically entrained to the rhythm. Yes, a dancer.
“That’s nice,” he said, and his smile once again was astonishing in its clarity. “What was it?”
“A song of my people.”
“Once again, it is from my people. I come from a community of women in Oregon. Suzette Freleng, who established the commune, was a dance enthusiast. She felt that physical movement could be used as a tool for spiritual development.”
Jamal nodded sagely.
“She pulled elements of dance from a dozen different cultures. Not ballet.”
“Why?”
“Mother Freleng felt ballet was a movement against nature. It tries to create an illusion of weightlessness in the women, a separation from gravity. She felt that it bred an unhealthy contempt for the physical body. She saw too much smoking, too much drug use—amphetamines, cocaine. And too much anorexia. So she took very strict modern dance, and melded it with Indonesian and Polynesian dance, and created something. I began my practice of it as a child,”
“You move beautifully.”
There was something unaffected about his enjoyment of her, and Promise gave him a little treat. She allowed her control over the plastiskin to fade. It began to sparkle, to wash with color, visual poetry, an arc of rainbow stolen from a bright and rainy day.
Leslie squeezed her hand, laughing.
10
The escalator wound through the slanted side of the building, an enormous wall of glass opening out onto the nightlit menagerie which was Hong Kong.
Promise held her breath. Never in her life had she seen such a dense, immediate tangle of lights, and sounds, and shapes. Out there, in the highest population density on the face of the Earth, fifty million people lived and loved and fought and strove and died. And in the midst of all of this, there rose one of the greatest economic centers of the world, surpassed only by Tokyo, Berlin, and Monkoto, capital of the PanAfrican Republic.
“How is it for you here, Jamal?” she asked.
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