For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display.
Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.
“So Quell turned to the crowd and asked who among you have not sinned with a whore at one time or another, and the crowd grew quieter and would not meet her eyes. But one of the priests rebuked her angrily for her interference in a matter of holy law, and so she asked him directly have you never been with a whore and many in the crowd who knew him laughed so that he had to admit that he had. But this is different, he said, for lama man.
Then, said Quell, you are a hypocrite, and from her long grey coat she took a heavy-calibre revolver and she shot the priest in both kneecaps. And he collapsed to the ground screaming?
Two tiny bangs and small, shrill shrieks from the holodisplay. The storyteller nodded and cleared his throat
“Someone take him away, Quell commanded, and at this two of the crowd lifted the priest up and carried him off, still screaming. And I would guess that they were glad of the chance to leave because now these people were quiet and afraid when they saw the weapon in Quell’s hand. And as the screaming died away in the distance, there was a silence broken only by the moaning of the seawind along the wharf, and the whimpering of the comely whore at Quell’s feet. And Quell turned herself to the second priest and pointed the heavy-calibre revolver at him. Now you, she said. Will you tell me that you have never been with a whore? And the priest drew himself up and looked her back in the eye, and he said I am a priest, and I have been with no woman in my life for I would not soil the sacredness of my flesh.”
The storyteller struck a dramatic pose and waited.
“He’s pushing his luck with this stuff,” I murmured to Sylvie. “Citadel’s only up the hill.”
But she was oblivious, staring down at the little globe of the holodisplay.
As I watched, she swayed a little.
Oh shit.
I grabbed at her arm and she shook me off irritably.
“Well, Quell looked back at this black-clad man and as she stared into his hot jet eyes she knew that he spoke the truth, that he was a man of his word. So she looked at the revolver in her hand and then back at the man. And she said then you are a fanatic and cannot learn, and she shot him in the face.”
Another report, and the holodisplay splattered vivid red. Close-up on the ruined face of the priest. Applause and whoops among the crowd. The storyteller waited it out with a modest smile. At my side, Sylvie stirred like someone waking up. The storyteller grinned.
“Well now my friends, as you can probably imagine, this comely young whore was most grateful to her rescuer. And when the crowd had carried the second priest’s body away, she invited Quell to her home where she—” The storyteller set down his controls once more and wrapped his arms around himself. He gave a performance shudder and rubbed both hands on his upper arms. ”But it really is too cold to continue, I fear. I could not—”
Amidst a new chorus of protest, I took Sylvie by the arm again and led her away. She said nothing for the first few paces, then vaguely she looked back at the storyteller and then at me.
“I’ve never been to Sharya,” she said in a puzzled voice.
“No, and I’m willing to bet nor has he.” I looked her carefully in the eyes. “And Quell certainly never got to go there either. But it makes a good story, right?”
FIFTEEN
I bought a pack of disposable phones from an alcove dealer on the waterfront and used one of them to call Lazlo. His voice came through wavery with the squabble of antique jamming and counterjamming that floated over New Hok like smog from some early millennium city on Earth. The wharfside noises around me didn’t help much. I pinned the phone hard against my ear.
“You’ll have to speak up,” I told him.
“…said she’s still not well enough to use the net, then?”
“She says not. But she’s holding up okay. Listen, I’ve set the traces. You can expect a very pissed-off Kurumaya to come battering down your door later today. Better start practising your alibis.”
“Who, me?”
I grinned despite myself. “Any sign of this Kovacs then?”
His reply was inaudible behind a sudden thicket of static and flutter.
“Say again?”
“…in this morning, said he saw the Skull Gang up near Sopron yesterday with some faces he didn’t know, looked li—… south at speed. Probably get in some time tonight.”
“Alright. When Kovacs does show up, you watch yourselves. The man is a dangerous piece of shit. You keep it tight. Scan up.”
“Will do.” A long, static-laced pause. “Hey, Micky, you’re taking good care of her, right?”
I snorted. “No, I’m about to scalp her and sell off the spare capacity to a data brokerage. What do you think?”
“I know you ca—” Another wave of distortion squelched his voice. “… f not, then get her to someone who can help.”
“Yeah, we’re working on that.”
“…Millsport?”
I guessed at content. “I don’t know. Not yet, at any rate.”
“If that’s what it takes, man.” His voice was fading out now, faint with distance and wrenched with the jamming. “Whatever it takes.”
“Las, I’m losing you. I’ve got to go.”
“…an up, Micky.”
“Yeah, you too. I’ll be in touch.”
I cut the connection, took the phone away from my ear and weighed it in my hand. I stared out to sea for a long time. Then I dug out a fresh phone and dialled another number from decades-old memory.
Like a lot of the towns on Harlan’s World, Tekitomura clung to the skirts of a mountain range up to its waist in the ocean. Available space for building on was scarce. Back around the time that Earth was gearing up for the Pleistocene ice age, it seems that Harlan’s World suffered a rapid climatic change in the opposite direction. The poles melted to ragged remnants and the oceans rose to drown all but two of the little planet’s continents. Mass extinctions followed, among them a rather promising race of tusked shore-dwellers who, there’s some evidence to suggest, had developed rudimentary stone tools, fire and a religion based on the complicated gravitational dance of Harlan’s World’s three moons.
It wasn’t enough to save them, apparently.
The colonising Martians, when they arrived, didn’t seem to have a problem with the limited terrain. They built intricate, towering eyries directly into the rock of the steepest mountain slopes and largely ignored the small nubs and ledges of land available at sea level. Half a million years later, the Martians were gone but the ruins of their eyries endured for the new wave of human colonisers to gawp at and leave mostly alone. Astrogation charts unearthed in abandoned cities on Mars had brought us this far, but once we arrived we were on our own. Unwinged, and denied much of our usual sky-going technology by the orbitals, humanity settled for conventional cities on two continents, a sprawling multi-islanded metropolis at the heart of the Millsport Archipelago, and small, strategically located ports elsewhere to provide linkage. Tekitomura was a ten-kilometre strip of densely-built waterfront, backed up as far as the brooding mountains behind would allow and thereafter thinning out to nothing. On a rocky foothill, the citadel glowered over the skyline, perhaps aspiring in its elevation towards the semi-mystical status of a Martian ruin. Further back, the narrow mountain tracks blasted by human archaeologue teams threaded their way up to the real thing.
There were no archaeologues working the Tekitomura sites any more. Grants for anything not related to cracking the military potential of the orbitals had been cut to the bone, and those Guild Masters not absorbed by the military contracting had long since shipped out to the Latimer system on the hypercast. Pockets of stubborn and largely self-funding wild tal
ent held out at a few promising sites near Millsport and points south, but on the mountainside above Tekitomura, the dig encampments sat forlorn and empty, as abandoned as the skeletal Martian towers they had been built next to.
“Sounds too good to be true,” I said as we bought provisions in a waterfront straight-to-street. “You’re sure we’re not going to be sharing this place with a bunch of teenage lovebirds and wirehead derelicts?”
For answer, she gave me a significant look and tugged at a single lock of her hair that had escaped from the cling of the headscarf. I shrugged.
“Alright then.” I hefted a sealpack of amphetamine cola. “Cherry flavoured okay?”
“No. It tastes like shit. Get the plain.”
We bought packs to carry the provisions, picked an upward-sloping street out of the wharf district, more or less at random, and walked. In under an hour, the noise and buildings began to fade out behind us and the incline grew steeper. I kept glancing across at Sylvie as our pace slacked off and our steps became more deliberate, but she showed no sign of wavering.
If anything, the crisp air and cold sunlight seemed to be doing her good. The tense frown that had flitted on and off her face all morning ironed out and she even smiled once or twice. As we climbed higher, the sun glinted off exposed mineral traces in the surrounding rocks, and the view became worth stopping for. We rested a couple of times to drink water and gaze out over the shoreline sprawl of Tekitomura and the sea beyond.
“Must have been cool to be a Martian,” she said at one point.
“I suppose.”
The first eyrie crept into view on the other side of a vast rock buttress.
It towered the best part of a kilometre straight up, all twists and swellings that were hard to look at comfortably. Landing flanges rolled out like tongues with slices cut out of them, spires sported wide, vented roofing hung with roost-bars and other less identifiable projections. Entrances gaped, an anarchic variety of oval-derived openings from long, slim, vaginal to plumped-up heart shape and everything between. Cabling dangled everywhere. You got the fleeting but repeating impression that the whole structure would sing in a high wind, and maybe somehow revolve like a gargantuan windchime.
On the approach track, the human structures huddled small and solid, like ugly puppies at the feet of a fairytale princess. Five cabins in a style not much more recent than the relics on New Hok, all showing the faint blue interior light of damped-down automated systems. We stopped at the first one we came to and dumped our packs. I squinted back and forth at angles of fire, tagging potential cover for any attackers and thinking about delivery solutions that would beat it. It was a more or less automatic process, the Envoy conditioning killing time the way some people whistle through their teeth.
Sylvie ripped off her headscarf and shook her hair free with obvious relief.
“Be a minute,” she said.
I considered my semi-instinctive assessment of the dig site’s defensibility.
On any planet where you could go up in the air easily, we’d be a sitting target. But on Harlan’s World, the normal rules don’t apply. Top mass limit on flying machines is a six-seat helicopter running an antique rotor-motor lift, no smart systems and no mounted beam weaponry. Anything else gets turned into mid-air ash. Likewise individual flyers in antigrav harnesses or nanocopters. The angelfire restrictions are, it appears, as much about a level of technology as physical mass. Add to that a height limit of about four hundred metres, which we were already well above, and it was safe to assume that the only way anyone would be approaching us was on foot up the path. Or climbing the sheer drop alongside, which they were very welcome to do.
Behind me, Sylvie grunted in satisfaction and I turned to see the cabin door flex itself open. She gestured ironically.
“After you, professor.”
The blue standby light flickered and blinked up to white as we carried our packs inside, and from somewhere I heard the whisper of aircon kicking in. A datacoil spiralled awake on the table in one corner. The air reeked of antibacterials, but you could smell that it was shifting as the systems registered occupancy. I shoved my pack into a corner, peeled off my jacket and grabbed a chair.
“Kitchen facilities are in one of the others,” Sylvie said, wandering about and opening internal doors. “But most of this stuff we bought is self-heating anyway. And everything else we need, we’ve got. Bathroom there. Beds in there, there and there. No automould, sorry. Specs I ran into when I was doing the locks say it sleeps six. Data systems wired in, linked directly into the global net through the Millsport University stack.”
I nodded and passed my hand idly through the datacoil. Opposite me, a severely dressed young woman shimmered into sudden existence. She made a quaint formal bow.
“Professor Serendipity.”
I glanced at Sylvie. “Very funny.”
“I am Dig 301. How may I help you?”
I yawned and looked round the room. “Does this place run any defensive systems, Dig?”
“If you are referring to weapons,” said the construct delicately, “I am afraid not. Discharge of projectiles or ungoverned energy so close to a site of such xenological significance would be unpardonable. However, all site units do lock on a coding system that is extremely hard to break.”
I shot another glance at Sylvie. She grinned. I cleared my throat.
“Right. What about surveillance? How far down the mountain do your sensors reach?”
“My awareness range covers only the site and ancillary buildings. However, through the totality of the global datalink, I can access—”
“Yeah, thanks. That’ll be all.”
The construct winked out, leaving the room behind looking momentarily gloomy and still. Sylvie stepped across to the main door and thumbed it closed. She gestured around.
“Think we’ll be safe here?”
I shrugged, remembering Tanaseda’s threat. A global writ for your capture. “As safe as anywhere else I can think of right now. Personally, I’d be heading out for Millsport tonight, but that’s exactly why—”
I stopped. She looked at me curiously.
“Exactly why what?”
Exactly why we’re nicking with an idea you came up with and not me.
Because anything I come up with, there’s a good chance he’s going to come up with too.
“Exactly what they’ll expect us to do,” I amended. “If we’re lucky they’ll skip right past us on the fastest transport south they can arrange.”
She took the chair opposite me and straddled it.
“Yeah. Leaving us to do what meantime?”
“Is that a proposition?”
It was out before I realised I’d said it. Her eyes widened.
“You—”
“Sorry. I’m sorry, that was. A joke.”
As a lie, it would have got me thrown out of the Envoys to howls of derision. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura shaking her head in disbelief.
It wouldn’t have convinced a Loyko monk shot up with credence sacrament for Acceptance Fortnight. And it certainly didn’t convince Sylvie Oshima.
“Look, Micky,” she said slowly. “I know I owe you for that night with the Beards. And I like you. A lot. But—”
“Hey, seriously. It was a joke, okay. A bad joke.”
“I’m not saying I haven’t thought about it. I think I even dreamed about it a couple of nights ago.” She grinned and something happened in my stomach. “You believe that?”
I manufactured another shrug. “If you say so.”
“It’s just.” She shook her head. “I don’t know you, Micky. I don’t know you any better than I did six weeks ago, and that’s a little scary.”
“Yeah well; changed sleeves. That can—”
“No. That’s not it. You’re locked up, Micky. Tighter than anyone I’ve ever met, and believe me I’ve met some fucked-up cases in this business. You walked into that bar, Tokyo Crow, with nothing but that knife you carry and you killed them
all like it was a habit. And all the time, you had this little smile.” She touched her hair, awkwardly it seemed to me. “This stuff, I get pretty much total recall when I want it. I saw your face, I can still see it now. You were smiling, Micky.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t think I want to go to bed with someone like that. Well,” she smiled a little herself. “That’s a lie. Part of me does, part of me really wants to. But that’s a part I’ve learnt not to trust.”
“Probably very wise.”
“Yeah. Probably.” She shook hair back from her face and tried on a firmer smile. Her eyes hit mine again. “So you went up to the citadel and you took their cortical stacks. What for, Micky?”
I smiled back. Got up from the chair. “You know, Sylvie, part of me really wants to tell you. But—”
“Alright, alright—”
“—it’s a part of me I’ve learnt not to trust.”
“Very witty.”
“I try. Look, I’m going to go check a couple of things outside before it starts getting dark. Be back in a while. You think you still owe me for the Beards, do me a small favour while I’m gone. Try to forget I came on quite as crass as I did just now. I’d really appreciate that.”
She looked away, at the datacoil. Her voice was very quiet.
“Sure. No problem.”
No, there’s a problem. I bit back the words as I made my way to the door. There really fucking is. And I still have no idea what to do about it.
The second call picks up almost at once. A brusque male voice, not interested in talking to anyone.
“Yeah?”
“Yaroslav?”
“Yeah.” Impatiently. “Who’s this?” “A little blue bug.”
Silence opens like a knife wound behind the words. Not even static to cover it.
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