by John Meaney
In one of the semicircular rest areas, she sat down on bright red and yellow cushions, and watched people walking up and down beside the water.
She ordered daistral from a table; she had to use her cred-ring first, before it would allow her to choose a flavour. When it came, though, the apple-and-cream daistral tasted fine.
No one appeared interested in her. But how could she tell?
She wondered if it mattered. A deep background check on Tetsuo would have revealed the family's links to the Pilots’ research programme. Historic links: she had done nothing for them for a long time.
If Jana could provide any assistance, though, it would be best kept secret.
Yoshiko recalled her microsleep-dream of bugs. If you were the kind of person or agency who could break into a secure house system, how would you track someone you wanted to keep an eye on?
It must be Rafael.
Rafael, with help?
She put her unfinished daistral down carefully, and stood. This was her problem to deal with. First, she was going to have to find the less salubrious parts of Lowtown.
Walking briskly now, not wanting to be late for her meeting, she took a disk down three levels, finding herself in a dark cavernous hall. Summoning up her memory of the map as best she could, Yoshiko took a narrow exit tunnel, which opened out onto a long deserted street.
A few holos advertised clubs, but most of the establishments were closed, waiting for the night. Farther down the street, Yoshiko could see the figures of women in a few floating globes, hovering near the ground.
This was the kind of area she needed.
Her skin seemed to grow greasy and itchy, as she walked the shabby street. At night, bright holos would hide the tawdry reality, no doubt.
Two tough-looking young women, black bats flitting across white orbs where their eyes should have been, watched Yoshiko from a doorway.
Yoshiko walked on, betraying no reaction, though her head began to ache with fatigue.
A large man offered her illegal drugs, smartviruses, anything she wanted. Behind him, femtovirus graffiti—coded subtly enough so the self-cleaning building failed to recognize the intrusion—defaced the wall, urging her to abuse a Luculentus today.
She carried on, past surgery shops and greasy cafés, looking down alleyways, until she saw an establishment with a discreet sign: FRIENDLY EYES.
Feeling uneasy, she walked up to the blank membrane of its entrance, and stepped through.
“Yeah? Can I help you?”
The shaven-headed woman behind the counter, chewing something fluorescent which played tinny music in time to the rhythm of her jaws, watched Yoshiko distrustfully.
“I need a clean-up,” said Yoshiko. “Isn't that what you call it?”
“Maybe.” Her jaws worked faster, and the music raised tempo.
Yoshiko held up her credit-ring, and the woman touched her bracelet, checking Yoshiko's balance.
“Good enough. Stand over there.” She indicated a kind of archway, covered in black cloth.
Unsure that she was doing the right thing, Yoshiko took the indicated position. She wondered if this was a scam. How could she know if there was any debug apparatus in the archway at all?
If I were a smartatom bug, where would I be?
Answer: in Yoshiko's clothes, her hair, or under her skin. Anywhere at all.
“Guess you're dirty. Infested with the buggers.” Beside the woman, a pale blue holo grew: an array of fuzzy spherical clouds, a smartatom lattice. “Scanning—Shit!”
The lattice broke apart.
Silence, as the woman forgot to chew.
“Am I clean now?” Yoshiko stepped out from under the archway.
“Oh, yeah.” Faint notes from the gum, as she talked. “You're clean, honey.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“But—”
“Forget it. I didn't do nothing.” Discordant accompaniment. The woman turned and spat the gum out, and it landed on the floor with a whine. “Time you went, honey.”
“You said I'm clean.”
“Self-destruct, alright? Soon as I scanned.” The woman reached below the counter, and came up with a small black cylinder, and pointed the transmission end at Yoshiko. “And I want you out of my shop, right now. Got it?”
Yoshiko left, without a word.
Thoughts swirling, Yoshiko headed back along the street, aiming for the better areas. Perhaps another cup of daistral, at one of the nicer establishments, would straighten her out. She couldn't go to her meeting like this: shaky and trembling, her wits scattered.
In an ornate arcade, right at the cusp where the dingy street met glistening gallerias, she stopped in a doorway, leaned against the window, and closed her eyes.
Pain beat insistently above her left eye.
Tired and depressed, she used her thumb on the pressure point in her hand, but for once it had no effect.
A smell of Terran coffee drifted out of the store.
Almost sobbing with gratitude, Yoshiko pushed open the old-fashioned door and went inside. On a counter just inside the doorway, a jug of coffee and a plate of jantrasta-coated beans lay temptingly beneath a sign which said they were free.
Yoshiko took a mug and filled it, sat on a stool, and drank hungrily, wincing as it burned her mouth.
God, it felt good.
She drank some more, then turned her stool around, to see what kind of store she was in.
It was an Aladdin's-cave of wonders: small carved wooden birds with ruby eyes which squawked when you looked at them, delicate crystalline life-forms from Altracon Three which spun their clear mysterious strings of glass and sang heart-rending songs.
How wonderful.
Already, her headache was receding.
At the back of the store, a slender man with sparkling intelligent eyes was tending shop, running a hand over his balding pate as he listened to a woman and her husband, local store-owners themselves by the sound of it, expounding their woes.
Three other people, a couple and a woman on her own, were browsing quietly through the shop, delighted wonder dancing in their eyes.
Mug in hand, Yoshiko got off her stool, to examine a display shelf. Nestling on it—occasionally fluttering into flight, but always coming back to rest—were tiny butterflies whose wings were the pages of books—Aesop and Shakespeare and Goethe and Baudelaire—which you could read through a magnifying field if you touched the butterfly's head gently.
On the shelf below were yodelling bears and a flamenco-dancing flamingo and, along one wall, a series of intricate flat sand-paintings which took Yoshiko's breath away.
“Thanks, Roger.” At the back of the store, the woman was taking her leave of the storekeeper, holding her husband's arm. “We always feel better for talking to you.”
The storekeeper ducked his head almost shyly, and waved at them as they left the shop. An old-fashioned bell tinkled as they left.
“Can I help you?” he asked Yoshiko. “Or would you just like to look around?”
“I could stay here all day.” Yoshiko put her now-empty coffee mug down on the counter. “But I have to go somewhere. I'll take one of the butterflies, though, if I may.”
She pointed out the one she wanted.
“Ah, Les Fleurs du Mal,” he said. “One of my favourites.”
“Moi aussi,” murmured Yoshiko.
He enclosed the butterfly in a crystal case, then wrapped it in patterned paper—his slender fingers moving surely and fluidly—and folded it so intricately that it needed no sealing or fastening, though it was not a smart material of any kind. Yoshiko had not seen such elegant origami since she had sat at her grandmother's knee in Vancouver. He slipped the package into a small bag.
“Thank you,” she said, picking up the bag. “Merci bien.”
“Enjoy. Bonne chance.”
As she was turning to leave, the storekeeper added, “May I give you some advice? Back this way—” He poi
nted. “Isn't the best of areas. Circle around, if you have to go that way.”
“I'm going to the Pilots’ Sanctuary.” Yoshiko was surprised at her own openness.
“Oh. Who's there at the moment? Is it Jana?”
“Why, yes,” said Yoshiko, astounded.
“Small universe.” The man chuckled. “Can you wait a moment?”
“Yes, of course.”
Hunched on a stool behind his counter, looking like a wise and energetic gnome, he rapidly folded a sheet of grey paper into the shape of a bird, which he held out on his palm to Yoshiko.
“Could you give that to Jana, please? With my compliments.”
“I'd be delighted.”
She placed the small bird carefully in her bag. She waved as she left the shop. When she looked back, the storekeeper was sucking an ancient pipe into life, and poring over one of his books.
Yoshiko smiled, and turned away.
The skimmer voyage was a loud, bumpy ride through an ochre dust-storm. Afterwards, things grew worse. Abandoning the skimmer on a valley floor, the party of seven, protected by clumsy environment suits and linked by smartrope, trudged through knee-deep dust and sand, leaning against the wind.
Kerrigan led them up a slope and into a system of caverns, where the storm was reduced to a distant howl.
While they shucked the env-suits, one of the Agrazzi bumped into Tetsuo.
“Watch it, Terran.” Hand going automatically to his belt.
“Save it, Avern.” Kerrigan's voice was level, accepting no argument.
Roped together again, they left the env-suits, and began the steady climb upwards through caverns and tunnels, sliding on scree slopes and struggling up underground waterfalls.
Tetsuo thought he was going to die.
Nothing had prepared him for this sort of physical effort. Thighs weak, lungs giving out. He was only vaguely aware that he was slowing down the others; the pace was still incredible.
Dhana encouraged him, whenever she was close.
At the base of a subterranean cliff, they split into three teams: Kerrigan and Brevan, Dhana and Avern and another Agrazzus, the last Agrazzus and Tetsuo.
Kerrigan and Brevan led the climb. When they were halfway up, Dhana's team ascended, reaching the midpoint just as Kerrigan and Brevan reached the distant top.
“I don't think I can do this.”
“You have to.”
The teams were linked by rope: both teams above helped to haul Tetsuo up, keeping him as much as possible in a chimneylike fracture where he could brace against both sides. His companion, like an agile spider, moved around him, helping him.
The weight of Tetsuo's small pack was like an invisible hand tugging his back, trying to pull him off the rock.
After a while, firmly anchoring himself in a sharp twist of the chimney, he gestured for another rest.
“Why—?” His breath was a gasp. “Why climb…without tech?” They had even run out of smartrope: most of the links between them were dumb fibre.
The Agrazzus with him leaned casually from a handhold. “No microwaves to be detected. And we're used to it. We weren't expecting you to—”
“Look out!” An urgent shout from above.
A dark shape dropped past them. A body.
“I can't hold him!” Dhana's voice, shrill with strain.
The rope from Dhana to the fallen man was a trembling line just centimetres from Tetsuo's face. Without thinking he grabbed it with both hands, wedged his feet more firmly into their holds, and held on.
The smartgel on his hands increased its friction coefficient. Then, hand over hand, finally with a use for his bulk and strength, Tetsuo hauled, while his companion unroped and climbed down to help the unconscious man's body up and over obstacles.
Once they were belayed, all the others descended, roped the fallen man up, and ascended in stages to the top.
Later, while they sipped daistral around a portable autofact, the injured man came unsteadily over to Tetsuo.
“Thanks, man.” His voice was awkward. “Heard what you did.”
“No problem.” Tetsuo kept the satisfaction from his voice, and clapped the man's shoulder. “Any time, Avern.”
It was the man from the fountain.
Yoshiko stepped into a doorway, then slowly looked out. Down the long arcade, with looping ceramic arches to one side, small groups of people walked with tourists’ lack of haste.
There, dressed in grey. She was sure it was him. He moved slowly, hands in pockets, turning every now and then to admire one of the little gargoyles which protruded from the walls: an unobtrusive way to keep checking behind him.
A smartatom miasma would be easier, but perhaps that would set off the stores’ own security systems.
She waited for him to turn away again, then left the cover of her doorway and ran with silent steps to an archway, jumped on an elevator disk, and felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as it descended too rapidly.
Sure he had not seen her. Yoshiko walked quickly nonetheless, heading through a stone-paved rest area, down a flight of iron steps that were purely for decoration, into a wide disused hall.
Water dripped from a moss-strewn colonnade onto dank black puddles, and a cold draught whipped a ragged sheet of dead smartfilm across broken paving-stones.
Which way?
Clutching her bright bag of gifts—suddenly incongruous, here—she strode rapidly across the hall, footsteps echoing sharply back, and took a short grimy tunnel. She stopped, heard no one following, and carried on.
She was in a cheerless grey quadrangle, flanked by a block of red-brick apartments, the walls ravaged by femtovirus graffiti. There was no one in sight.
Through a gap, high above, she could see a gold cupola above a white minaret. A landmark. If she kept going left and down, she should end up close to the Sanctuary.
This was hardly the route the storekeeper had recommended.
She plodded on, feeling a strange sense of dislocation: not quite lost, not quite knowing where she was going, sure only that she was in desperate need of rest.
It felt as though she had not slept for a week.
The path was tiled, and led along an underpass. To her left, a dark grey dome rose, scarred here and there with burn marks.
She followed the broken tiles. Overhead, beneath a canopy, a lone glowglobe buzzed, trying to escape upwards. Damaged somehow, desperate to obey the dawn's recall signal, unable to fly back to its eyrie for recharging. Eventually, depleted, it would drop.
Stopping by the grey dome, Yoshiko crouched a little, sighting between gaps. There. The minaret was more or less where she expected it to—
Toecap.
Dizziness overcame her. The toecap of a boot appeared to be protruding straight out of the wall. Impossible.
A hand grabbed her throat, and something hard smashed against the back of her knee and her leg buckled.
A section of wall disappeared: a holo illusion.
When attacked, the warrior steps forwards.
Dazed, down on one knee, she looked around her.
Burning, against her temple.
“Don't move, bitch.”
Lattice-blade. Her nostrils flared at the ozone smell.
There were three of them, and she had already lost the moment. Should have moved as soon as she saw the toecap.
The lattice-blade's cutting-field hummed and crackled.
Don't risk your life for a handful of credits. One streetwise instructor. Run if you can. Tackle a weapon only if they mean to kill you.
Another had said: Retaliate first.
Didn't matter.
Too late.
Just as with Vin. Always too late…
The stink of burning hair, but she kept her head still. The latticeblade field could blossom in nanoseconds, expanding a hundred times faster than a fighter's reflex-speed.
“Yo, bitch.” A tall narrow boy in front of her. Sleeveless jerkin, cut open to the waist, a graser bulging in its pocke
t. A glistening blue dragon-tattoo coiled around his pale hairless chest. The dragon turned its bulbous eyes on Yoshiko, and hissed.
The one behind her had not moved.
If the lattice-blade was configured for constant size, she could go for the wrist…but if the field was set to expand at her movement, it would slice through her head before she could turn.
This is not a training session.
“Let's do her.”
One of them tugged the bag from her grasp. She let it go.
A wave of violent shuddering passed through the third street-fighter—fast, muscles almost flickering—and then the fit dissipated, was gone.
Storm Crystal addict.
Leering, he reached for her tu-rings.
Don't move.
Should have reacted as soon as she saw the foot, before he primed the cutting-field…
A hand removed the bracelet—the wrist terminal from Xanthia—from her wrist.
“Bloody tight.”
The tu-rings—still glowing dull, useless orange—were what he wanted now.
“You can't get the rings off the fingers—” The third one waved his blade, and the air itself burned and crackled. “You take the fingers off the hand.”
The first ring came off, and Yoshiko closed her eyes.
Don't—
Half dead on her feet, quite at the end of her tether, and her spirit was gone.
Another ring. One left, plus her wedding-band.
The lattice-blade field could expand faster than she could blink.
Please don't take the wedding-band.
“Ain't worth nothin’, bitch.”
Had she spoken aloud?
“Damn tight. Won't come off.”
Not her wedding-band: the last tu-ring.
She was conscious of the splint around her left forearm.
“I say we do—”
“Shuddup.”
The crystal addict was beginning to tremble.
She could see the pulse in his carotid artery. A vulnerable point: but the lattice-blade had not moved from her temple.
Her strength was gone.
“Hey!” A distant shout.
The three thugs froze, and looked over Yoshiko's shoulder. The one with the graser raised it, as though to aim.
“Forget it, Braz.”