It was early morning. Prospero had just cut a notch in the cloud plain surrounding Mt. Beanstalk. Another long drawnout day had begun. This far into the Twilight Belt, it was always dawn or dusk. Ariel kept the same face turned toward her primary, Prospero. Orbital libration produced a slow mode version of day and night; long cool mornings alternating with shady twilights. Prospero never climbed too high in the sky, nor sank too low below the horizon.
A Transgalactic Liner was in on Pair-a-Dice. Tourists jammed the slidewalk, wearing tinsel wigs and chrome yellow pompoms—laughing, joking, and generally embarrassing themselves. Toni was not in the mood to be amused by rich fools with nothing to do. And he could have done something about it. At the moment he was three meters tall, standing head and shoulders above the crowd on duraluminum legs. His metal arms—all four of them—could have scythed through the throng, braining the lot of them without so much as raising a sweat. Plasti-metal does not perspire.
But he had better things to do. Better as in paid. Otherwise, he would have deleted Freeport completely, and gone straight to Verona. He flipped off the infrared filters. The last time he had inhabited the cyborg body had been for a Nightside hunt. Here, he did not need them.
Ali, Harpo, and Doc came striding up. They too were three meters tall, with plasti-metal bodies. Except for Ali, who was a head shorter, nonchalantly carrying his cyborg cranium tucked under his arm. The helmeted head, with its radar dome, sonar receptors, and binocular lenses, looked up at Toni. “Draw if you be men,” the head dared him. Its speakbox exactly mimicked the Noble Dog's accent.
Toni glared at the talking head.
“Or we'll make worm's meat of you,” Harpo added.
“Shut up with the Shakespeare,” Toni growled. In Verona, he could have had the three of them flayed.
The cyborgs laughed. In Ali's case, the chuckle came from under his arm. He hefted the head and screwed it—still laughing—onto his shoulders. “We had to come for you.”
“But not just then. I was this close.” Toni lifted his upper left hand, holding two heavy gauntleted fingers a micron apart.
“Gives you a reason to go back.” Harpo's attempt at a grin looked like the front end of a ground car. As if Toni needed a reason. As if any of them did. They all had their private Veronas. They enjoyed jerking him out merely because misery loves company. He would get them back.
A soft subsonic buzz warned that their Pair-a-Dice capsule had arrived. The pressure door at the base of the Beanstalk began to disgorge luggage. Hand-tooled leather flight bags. Fancy holographic camcorders. Field shelters. Night glasses and freeze-dried gourmet rations. An autobar and a silver tea-service. Along with sufficient ancillary equipment to start a small colony.
Port workers in mint-green candy-striped coveralls attacked the mountain of belongings, loading them onto gravity sleds, working briskly, but without enthusiasm. They wore electronic shackles and shock collars. Most were government employees—addicts, vagrants, debtors, and moral degenerates, working off their debt to society.
Then came the hunting party. First the Client, flanked by a pair of SuperChimp bodyguards, looking sure of himself and overly successful. He had a squat bald head, cropped ears, beady eyes, pink jowls, several chins, and no noticeable neck. His lace-trimmed purple doublet and parti-colored hose merely made him look more grotesque, like Quasimodo in a clown suit. Anyone who could easily afford biosculpt, but still looked that ugly, obviously did not give a damn what an age of artificial beauty thought. People had to take him as he was, or not at all. His walk matched his looks, brusque and self-absorbed. Oblivious to underlings scurrying around him, he talked through an open comlink to someone in orbit. Toni told Proteus to put a name to the face.
Proteus obeyed—(Alexander Gracchus, CEO of Transgalactic for the Deneb Kaitos, offices in Mt. Zion in Mt. Zion system, on Aesir III and Vanir II in the Twin Systems, and on Pair-a-Dice in Prospero System. Personal residences: Baldar, main moon of Aesir VII, Sylvan Hall on Vanir II, and a lodge in the Quartz Peaks Hunt Preserve on Aesir III. Three wives, five children, 2s. 3d.)
The rest of the party looked tiny compared to Gracchus and his hulking bodyguards. Two of them were women. Proteus identified them as Gracchus's younger wives—Selene and Pandora. Selene, older and senior, had blond hair and fair skin dusted with silver. She wore a feathered, flaring gown better suited to a ballet than a Wyvyrn hunt. Pandora, the junior wife, was more sensibly dressed, wearing thigh-length boots and a leopard-skin leotard. Alert and self-reliant, she had a friendly, curious face framed by untidy lacquered hair trimmed to ten-centimeter spikes. Like the stevedores, she wore an electronic slave collar—only diamond-studded.
Pandora immediately took charge of the baggage, helping to stow it aboard a big aerial barge docked by the Beanstalk. Working briskly and cheerfully in her spiked hair and leotards, she encouraged the convict labor by passing out stim tabs from a pillbox on her wrist. Toni lumbered over to lend his four mechanical hands. If he could not be in Verona, he meant to be doing something.
The baggage pile vanished into the barge, and Pandora (whose name meant “All-giving”) emptied the contents of her pillbox, passing out extra tabs as rewards. A guard wearing a purple skin-suit with broad white vertical stripes strolled over, one hand resting on a holstered riot pistol. He signed for her to stop. Without saying a word, Pandora whipped a miniature chrome holocam off her wrist. Smiling, she handed the holocam to the guard, who pocketed it, turning his back on the proceedings.
One port worker refused the pills. An older woman with graying hair, she glared at Pandora, saying that she did not need “hoppers.” Whatever crime the woman had to work off probably didn't come close to passing out drugs to convicts. Or bribing a trustee.
Pandora deftly handed her tabs to the next guy. Reaching up, she removed two sapphire chip earrings, putting them in the older woman's palm. “No one should work for nothing.”
The woman gaped at the tiny blue stones, then swiftly closed her hand before the guard could see.
Pandora smiled ruefully up at Toni. What could you give a three-meter-tall cyborg? “Maybe later,” she said, and shrugged. Toni did not answer—totally uninterested in whatever she had to offer.
The hunting party trooped aboard the barge and lifted off into dawn light. Freeport and Pair-a-Dice Beanstalk fell behind them. The barge was big, resting on huge rounded helium tanks, with a wide observation deck forward, and a jet-powered hover car sitting on the fantail. Toni stood on the foredeck, staring out across tens of thousands of square klicks of dazzling white cloud plain, wishing he were in Verona. Beneath him, below the cloud plain, lay Ariel's surface, a pressure-cooked caldron of searing hot winds and greenhouse gases. Partial terraforming had given the planet a rudimentary biosphere based on mountaintops and high plateaus. Incompletely habitable, Ariel was very much a work in progress.
Telescopic vision let Toni make out their destination, the ringwall of Elysium poking through the sea of clouds. A massive volcanic caldera rearing up into the biosphere, Elysium formed a huge natural amphitheater more than a hundred klicks across, a great green bowl of misty jungle, surrounded by stadium-like walls.
Seeing Elysium ringwall reminded Toni of the Arena in Verona—the ancient Roman amphitheater that the Lady-in-Gold had vanished into. Seized by the image, his mind immediately tried to catapult back to Verona. Toni fought the impulse. Such spontaneous flashbacks terrified him. They were symptoms of acute mental feedback, severe glitches in his neural circuitry. A hazard Toni would rather not think about—and one he had to hide from his employers at all cost. If Dragon Hunt suspected him of having cybernetic seizures, they would yank his program—stranding him in real time.
The jolt of landing helped jerk Toni back to reality. The landing zone sat on a cleared semicircle blasted out of the crater rim, big enough for the barge and a base camp. A trail sloped downward, choked with cycad fronds and tall bamboo. Vines and creepers kept Toni from seeing more than a couple of meters into th
e tangle.
Happy to be back in control of his augmented psyche, Toni helped with the unloading, piling safari supplies about the landing site. Turning up his hypersensitive hearing, he tried to tell if the Hunt Guide had noticed his lapse.
“…but with the brain shot the angle of entry varies too much to rely on surface features. Don't count on aiming between the eye cells. Or above the mandibles.” The Guide was giving a short lecture on the best way to scramble a Wyvyrn's neuroanatomy.
“What should I aim for?” Gracchus asked. His weapon hung loosely from one huge hand—a long gray 30mm recoilless minicannon, with a padded shoulder rest and a broad ugly snout.
“Imagine a line running between the bases of the primary antennae. The Wyvyrn's cerebrum is a barbell-shaped pair of ganglia midway along that line.”
Gracchus grunted. “Sounds tricky.”
“It is,” the Guide admitted, “unless you're close enough to tickle its tonsils. You might want to try for heart number one. It is located in the center of the second segment back from the head….”
Fine. The Guide was too busy bullshitting Gracchus to care what his cyborgs were up to. It surprised Toni that someone so obviously successful as Gracchus could fall for such a shuck. But the allure—and expense—of a real hunt, with real prey, was too much for folks with more money than sense.
Toni had a true 3V addict's contempt for “real” adventure. For a tiny fraction of the cost, Gracchus could be a 3V Beowulf, or Siegfried. He could kill Fafnir, battle sea serpents, and fuck Brunhilde, all without leaving home. But that would be too much like the plebs.
Toni looked about, seeing the impassive Chimp bodyguards. And Gracchus's two wives, now drenched in sweat. Selene's fairy gown was drooping, and smeared with silver dust. Pandora looked cooler in her leopard-spotted leotard. Neither dared to complain.
Why haul everyone through this? Dragging folks about in the flesh—just to show that Gracchus had the power and money to make it happen. The Guide's little bullshit lecture made no mention of collared Wyvyrn. Wyvyrn were flying megafauna from Beta Hydri IV. Huge hundred-meter, semi-intelligent, flying omnivores, with less reason to tangle with humans than lions had. Humans didn't taste good to them—and normally they had sense enough to stay out of their way. To get them to cooperate, Dragon Hunt went into Elysium ahead of time and collared a couple of prime specimens. Once collared, the Wyvyrn could be made to stick around. Even attack. Without control collars, Gracchus would be lucky to see a Wyvyrn, much less get off a “brain” shot.
It was all as phony as 3V. Only less comfortable, and a damned sight more expensive. Which, alas, was the point. So long as Toni was paid, he kept his complains to himself. Besides, who cared what a cyborg thought?
The Guide signaled with his hand, and they set out. Harpo went ahead, hacking out a path. Toni lifted a field shelter, ration case, and microstove, along with a hundred-odd kilos of baggage and ammunition, falling in behind Doc.
The first couple of klicks were dense brush, a claustrophobic pile of creepers and wrist-thick bamboo, crisscrossed with lianas and strangler vine. Toni kept station a dozen meters behind Doc, turning when he turned.
Without warning, the tangle suddenly opened overhead. Toni strode into a cool cathedral forest of kilometer-tall trees festooned with great red perfumed blossoms. Slanting Prospero light glittered off the wings of giant insects flitting from flower to flower. A forest imp flew by, a tiny pale humanoid with huge gold eyes, riding on the back of a two-meter dragonfly.
Toni kept his optical sensors aimed low, trying not to tread on the humans hidden by tall ferns and elephant grass. Ten more hours of slogging and he could go back to Verona.
“Myself was from Verona banished
For practicing to steal away a lady…”
—Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV
VIA VENEZIA
At first light, the morning after Carnival, the Noble Dog rode across the Ponte Romano, the ancient stone bridge over the Adige, leaving Verona. Green suburban hills rose up on the far bank, dotted with palaces, pleasure gardens, churches, and Roman ruins. After him came Proteus with the led horses.
Antonio now had a name to put behind the mask—a name, but not a face. His Lady-in-Gold was Silvia Lucetta Visconti, the daughter of Matteo Visconti, exiled Lord of Milan, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in northern Italy. Proteus had come up with this news, along with word that she had taken the road east toward Padua and Venice, Antonio's manservant was a wizard at ferreting out information—part Gypsy and part thief—never failing to turn up a useful fact. Always anticipating Antonio's wants, and seeing to his needs.
That he had still not seen Silvia made her all the more attractive. Every woman Antonio knew paled in comparison to how he pictured her—no flesh-and-blood female could hope to compete with his imagination.
This obsession led to caustic words between Antonio and his uncle Cangrande, the Big Dog—sparking a family argument that rebounded off the romanesque arches of Cangrande's audience chamber, keeping servants and mistresses awake well after midnight. The Lord of Verona had an absurdly cherubic face, pierced by a pair of sharp compelling eyes. Dismissing Silvia Visconti out of hand, he reminded his nephew of the “bad blood in that family.” (The Vipers of Milan were infamous for savage despotism, murderous cruelty, and engaging in all manner of sexual manias—in addition to giving good government and encouraging the arts.) How could the daughter of an exiled enemy be a fit object for marriage?
“Who said I mean to marry her?” Antonio retorted. Being obsessed with a woman was a poor excuse to wed her.
The Big Dog was not mollified. “What if you get her in pup? The bitch could be bait. I do not want any half-Visconti bastards running about, hoping to be put up as heirs to Verona.”
Down-and-out though they were, it remained the Visconti dream to hold all the Piedmont, plus as much of Tuscany and the Veneto as they could grab. Even in exile, they were far too cozy with the Emperor—and would happily use Verona as a step to regain Milan. “Have no more to do with her,” Cangrande commanded, his habitual inane grin masking a ruthless will no sane nephew dared brook.
Bidding the Big Dog a stormy farewell, Antonio stalked off to do as he pleased. His obsession might be unhealthy—but by God it was his. If he wanted a horse or a dog, he got it. Women were at least as important. True, he did feel a little like that old fool Dante, who still mooned over some woman he had glimpsed in the market decades ago. But at least Antonio was going after his Silvia, not locking himself away in a borrowed room, wasting paper on some impossible terza rima epic to her.
On the east bank of the Adige, he passed the Teatro Romano, the ancient open-air theater, and the old cathedral of Santo Stefano with its great octagonal red-brick campanile. There he paused, treating himself to a last view of the city, wreathed in breakfast smoke and still recovering from Carnival. Then he was off, riding through the Porta Vescovo, with Proteus at his heels.
The Corso Venezia, the dusty via Venezia that led to Padua, Venice, and the sea, rolled through green pastures cut with stone fences. Antonio stopped only once near Soave to rest the horses, and put in a supply of light, dry white wine. On his left, vineyards came right down to the road. In the hazy distance he could see the Alps.
At the bridge over the Alpone, he caught up with her. Just past the fork that leads to Belfiore, Antonio spotted the woman a few hundred paces ahead, riding a pretty black mare. Even at a distance, there was no mistaking her. She wore the same lace mask, and her gold-link belt glittered in the sun. Besides, by now Antonio knew her style. There was not another young noblewoman in North Italy likely to be riding alone on the Venice road. She gave him a single over-the-shoulder glance, then, with a flick of her mare's tail, she made for the bridge.
Giving spur, Antonio set off at a gallop. Mounted on a blooded stallion with twice the strength of her little mare, he felt certain that he had her. As they neared the bridge, he cut her lead to two hundred paces. Then one hundred.
Then fifty. Then twenty. He could see the Visconti serpents on her horse cloth.
But by then they were into the bridge traffic, peddlers pushing handcarts, and a big hay wagon half-blocking the ramp. Peasants with their bundles leaped into the ditches rather than be trampled, but the carts could not be brushed aside. Antonio had to rein in. Weaving deftly between the obstacles, she beat him to the bridge, and, as soon as she was over it, she picked up speed, opening the gap.
Cursing like a condottiere, Antonio forced his way through the throng with the flat of his sword. On the far side of the bridge was the town of Villanova, where the road forked. The right fork ran south along the Alpone through the marshes to Arcola. The left fork kept on along the line of the Chiampo, headed for Venice and Padua.
Again, Antonio had to rein in. There was no telling which fork she had taken. But she was headstrong and willful, not likely to change direction just because a man was after her. So he put spurs to his stallion and took the left fork, keeping to the Via Venezia.
Beyond San Bonifacio, he caught sight of her. Giving a great hurrah, he redoubled his efforts. But by now, his horse was blown. Her mare must have been better rested—as well as carrying a lighter load. Getting her second wind, the filly easily kept her distance, daring his stallion to catch her. The chase slowed from a gallop, to a canter, then finally to a tired trot, with his winded mount unable to gain on her mare.
Antonio heard a hail behind him. Twisting in his saddle, he turned to see Proteus pounding up behind him with the led horses—just when he needed the man most.
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