As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil.
The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again.
The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.
“It’s this way, I think.” I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.
We followed the steps round a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.
It rose among gentry rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.
“Well you can see why they went virtual,” I said, mostly to myself. “It beats Whaleback and Ninth.”
Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have got over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.
We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.
“May I help you?” he asked gently.
Brasil nodded. “We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.”
“Natsume.” The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again.
“He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.”
The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.
“Nik?” Brasil moved forward to meet him. “Is that you?”
“Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.” Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw.
“Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.”
He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I reassured him.
“Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.”
Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.
“Jack Soul Brasil?”
“Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?”
A brief smile. “Learning.”
“What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.”
“Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?”
Brasil shifted awkwardly. “Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—”
“Oh, time here is.” The smile again. “Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.”
We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation, and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him any more.
Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amidst the cobwebby grey scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimetres high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view, I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside of fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.
“Very nice,” said Brasil.
I nodded. “Yes. You must be very pleased with those.”
“Only moderately.” Natsume circled his shred-petalled charges with a critical eye. “In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.”
He looked expectantly up at us.
I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there..
“Are they a bit short?” I asked finally.
Natsume shook his head and chuckled. “No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And—I’m so sorry—I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanour. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.”
He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself.
He gestured out at the plants.
“They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matt. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.”
“Nik …”
He looked at Brasil. “Yes.”
“Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.”
I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.
“Some stuff?” Natsume nodded. “What stuff would that be, then?”
“We.” I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. “I need your help, Nik.”
“Yes, clearly. But in what?”
“It’s.”
Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.
“Jack,” he said. “This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?”
Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.
“You’ve changed, Nik.”
“Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?” For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. “That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody rev
olution.”
“That’s not—”
“Of course I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?”
Brasil came down a step towards him, abruptly. “Oh, you think this is better?”
He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.
“You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow flowers instead of living, and you’re going to accuse me of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.”
“What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?”
“I was standing on a ten-metre wall four days ago.” Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. “That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.”
“Is it?” Natsume shrugged. “If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?”
“That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—”
“I don’t hate—”
“Out there, actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.”
“Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.”
“My point?” Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly. “None of this is fucking real, Nik.”
I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them, quite literally hovering.
His feet were a clear thirty centimetres off the uneven paving.
“Norikae-san?” asked the other.
I shifted stance minutely, wondering idly if they were real inhabitants of the monastery or not, and if not what operating parameters they might have in circumstances like these. If the Renouncers ran internal security systems, our chances in a fight were zero. You don’t wander into someone else’s virtuality and brawl successfully unless they want you to.
“It’s nothing, Katana-san.” Natsume made a hurried and complicated motion with both hands. “A difference of perspective between friends.”
“My apologies, then, for the intrusion.” Katana bowed over fists gathered one into the other and the two newcomers withdrew into the arched tunnel. I didn’t see whether they walked away in real time or not.
“Perhaps,” began Natsume quietly, then stopped.
“I’m sorry, Nik.”
“No, you are right of course. None of this is real in the way we both used to understand it. But in here, I am more real than I ever was before. I define how I exist, and there is no harder challenge than that, believe me.”
Brasil said something inaudible. Natsume resumed his seat on the wooden steps. He looked back at Brasil, and after a moment the surfer seated himself a couple of steps higher up. Natsume nodded and stared at his garden.
“There is a beach to the east,” he said absently. “Mountains to the south. If I wish, they can be made to meet. I can climb any time I wish, swim any time I wish. Even surf, though I haven’t so far.
“And in all of these things, I have choices to make. Choices of consequence. Bottlebacks in the ocean or not? Coral to scrape myself on and bleed, or not? Blood to bleed with, come to that? These are all matters requiring prior meditation. Full-effect gravity in the mountains? If I fall, will I allow it to kill me? And what will I allow that to mean?” He looked at his hands as if they too were a choice of some sort. “If I break or tear something, will I allow it to hurt? If so, for how long? How long will I wait to heal? Will I allow myself to remember the pain properly afterwards? And then, from these questions, the secondary—some would say the primary—issues raise their heads from the swamp. Why am I really doing this? Do I want the pain? Why would that be? Do I want to fall? Why would that be? Does it matter to me to reach the top or simply to suffer on the way up? Who am I doing these things for? Who was I ever doing them for? Myself? My father? Lara, perhaps?”
He smiled out at the filigree poppies. “What do you think, Jack? Is it because of Lara?”
“That wasn’t your fault, Nik.”
The smile went away. “In here, I study the only thing that scares me any more. Myself. And in that process, I harm no one else.”
“And help no one else,” I pointed out.
“Yes. Axiomatic.” He looked round at me. ”Are you a revolutionary too, then? One of the neoQuellist faithful?”
“Not as such.”
“But you have little sympathy with Renouncing?”
I shrugged. “It’s harmless. As you say. And no one has to play who doesn’t want to. But you kind of assume the rest of us are going to provide the powered infrastructure for your way of life. Seems to me that’s a basic failure in Renouncing, all on its own.”
I got the smile back for that. “Yes, that is something of a test of faith for many of us. Of course, ultimately we believe all of humanity will follow us into virtual. We are merely preparing the way. Learning the path, you might say.”
“Yeah,” snapped Brasil. “And meanwhile, outside the world falls apart on the rest of us.”
“It was always falling apart, Jack. Do you really think what I used to do out there, the little thefts and defiances, do you really think all that made any difference?”
“We’re taking a team into Rila,” said Brasil abruptly, decided. “That’s the difference we’re going to make, Nik. Right there.”
I cleared my throat. “With your help.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, we need the route, Nik.” Brasil got up and wandered off into a corner of the quadrangle, raising his voice as if, now the secret was out, he wanted even the volume of conversation to reflect his decision. “You feel like giving it to us? Say, for old times’ sake?”
Natsume got up and regarded me quizzically.
“Have you climbed a sea cliff before?”
“Not really. But the sleeve I’m wearing knows how to do it.”
For a moment he held my eye. It was as if he was processing what I’d just said and it wouldn’t load. Then, suddenly, he barked a laugh that didn’t belong inside the man we’d been talking to.
“Your sleeve knows how?” The laughter shook out to a more governed chuckling and then a hard-eyed gravity. “You’ll need more than that. You do know there are ripwing colonies on the top third of Rila Crags? Probably more now than there ever were when I went up. You do know there’s an overhanging flange that runs all the way round the lower battlements, and the Buddha alone knows how much updated anti-intrusion tech they’ve built into it since I climbed it. You do know the currents at the base of Rila will carry your broken body halfway up the Reach before they drop you anywhere.”
“Well,” I shrugged. “At least if I fall, I won’t get picked up for interrogation.”
Natsume glanced across at Brasil.
“How old is he?”
“Leave him alone, Nik. He’s wearing Eishundo custom, which he found, he tells me, whilst wandering around New Hokkaido killing mimints for a living. You do know what a mimint is, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Natsume was still looking at me. “We’ve heard the news about Mecsek in here.”
“It’s not exactly news these days, Nik.” Brasil told him, with evident glee.
“You’re really wearing Eishundo?”
I nodded.
“You know what that’s worth?”
“I’ve had it demonstrated to me a couple of times, yeah.”
Brasil shifted impatiently on the stonework of the quadrangle. “Look, Nik, are you going to give us this route or not? Or are you just worried we’re going to beat your record?”
“You’re going to get yourselves killed, stack
s irretrievable, both of you. Why should I help you to do that?”
“Hey, Nik—you’ve renounced the world and the flesh, remember. Why should how we end up in the real world bother you in here?”
“It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.”
Brasil grinned, maybe at the obscenity he’d finally managed to elicit from his former hero. “Yeah, but at least we’re still in the game. And you know we’re going to do this anyway, with or without your help. So—”
“Alright.” Natsume held up his hands. “Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be real enough for you.”
Brasil just shrugged and grinned again.
“What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?”
Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail—the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.
“But the bad news cuts both ways,” he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. “That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.”
I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know—that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.
“Over in New Kanagawa,” I said instead, “I heard they’re wiring ripwings with microcam systems. Training them too. Any truth in that?”
He snorted.
“Yeah, they were saying the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago. It was paranoid crabshit then, and I guess it still is now. What’s the point of a microcam in a ripwing? They never go near human habitation if they can avoid it. And from what I recall of the studies done, they don’t domesticate or train easily. Plus more than likely the orbitals would spot the wiring and shoot them down on the wing.” He gave me an unpleasant grin, not one from the Renouncer monk serenity suite. “Believe me, you’ve got quite enough to worry about climbing through a colony of wild ripwings, never mind some sort of domesticated cyborg variety.”
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