She eyed me keenly. “Is that an oblique criticism?”
“No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.”
She matched my shrug. “Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.”
I drew a hard breath.
“Assume what you want. I’m going out.”
• • •
Down at the commercial end of the harbor, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl of fish ramen, carried it to a window seat, and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-age local wandered across to my table with his tray.
“Mind if I sit here. It’s kind of crowded.”
I glanced around the ’fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.
“Suit yourself.”
“Thanks.” He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box, and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence; then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.
“Not from around here then?”
I felt a light tautening across my nerves. “Makes you say that?”
“Ah, see.” He grinned again. “If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.”
“Good for you.”
“Not off that rayhunter, though, are you?”
I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. “What are you, a detective?”
“No!” He laughed delightedly. “What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green-painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t anymore.”
“So why’d you stay?”
“Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.”
The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.
I made my voice work. “Really?”
“Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.” He pulled a wry face. “Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.”
“What about your parents? See much of them?”
“No, they’re dead.” His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.
I sat and watched him carefully.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally.
He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.
“Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.” He drew breath as if it hurt him. “It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.”
“Did they get the guy?”
“No.” Another painfully hitched breath. “No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.”
I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbor complex. I thought about giving him his chance.
“No money for resleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?”
He gave me a hard look. “You know we don’t do that.”
“Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.”
“Yeah, but.” He hesitated. Glanced around the ’fab, then back to me. His voice lowered. “Look, I came up with the Revelation. I don’t hold with everything the priests say, especially these days. But it’s a faith, it’s a way of life. Gives you something to hold on to, something to bring up your kids with.”
“You got sons or daughters?”
“Two daughters, three sons.” He sighed. “Yeah, I know. All that shit. You know, down past the point we’ve got a bathing beach. Most of the villages have them, I remember when I was a kid we used to spend the whole summer in the water, all of us together. Parents would come down after work sometimes. Now, since things got serious, they’ve built a wall right into the sea there. If you go for the day, they’ve got officiators watching the whole time, and the women have to go in on the other side of the wall. So I can’t even enjoy a swim with my own wife and daughters. It’s fucking stupid, I know. Too extreme. But what are you going to do? We don’t have the money to move to Millsport, and I wouldn’t want my kids running around the streets down there anyway. I saw what it was like when I studied there. It’s a city full of fucking degenerates. No heart left in it, just mindless filth. At least the people around here still believe in something more than gratifying every animal desire whenever they feel like it. You know what, I wouldn’t want to live another life in another body if that was all I was going to do with it.”
“Well, lucky you don’t have the money for a resleeve then. It’d be a shame to get tempted, wouldn’t it.”
Shame to see your parents again, I didn’t add.
“That’s right,” he said, apparently oblivious to the irony. “That’s the point. Once you understand you’ve only got the one life, you try so much harder to do things right. You forget about all that material stuff, all that decadence. You worry about this life, not what you might be able to do in your next body. You focus on what matters. Family. Community. Friendship.”
“And, of course, Observance.” The mildness in my voice was oddly unfaked. We needed to keep a low profile for the next few hours, but it wasn’t that. I reached curiously inside me and I found I’d lost my grip on the customary contempt I summoned into situations like this. I looked across the table at him, and all I felt was tired. He hadn’t let Sarah and her daughter die for good; he maybe hadn’t even been born when it happened. Maybe, given the same situation, he’d take the same bleating-sheep option his parents had, but right now I couldn’t make that matter. I couldn’t hate him enough to take him into that alley, tell him the truth about who I was, and give him his chance.
“That’s right, Observance.” His face lit up. “That’s the key, that’s what underwrites all the rest. See, science has betrayed us here, it’s gotten out of hand, gotten so we don’t control it anymore. It’s made things too easy. Not aging naturally, not having to die and account for ourselves before our Maker, that’s blinded us to the real values. We spend our whole lives scraping away trying to find the money for resleeving, and we waste the real time we have to live this life right. If people would only—”
“Hey, Mikulas.” I glanced up. Another man about the same age as my new companion was striding toward us, behind the cheerful yell. “You finished bending that poor guy’s ear or what? We’ve got hull to scrape, man.”
“Yeah, just coming.”
“Ignore him,” said the newcomer with a wide grin. “Likes to think he knows everyone, and if your face doesn’t fit the list, he has to damned well find out who you are. Bet he’s done that already, right?”
I smiled. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Knew it. I’m Toyo.” A thick, extended hand. “Welcome to Kuraminato. Maybe see you around town if you’re staying long.”
“Yeah, thanks. That’d be good.”
“Meantime, we’ve got to go. Nice talking to you.”
“Yeah,” agreed Mikulas, getting to his feet. “Nice talking to you.
You should think about what I was saying.”
“Maybe I will.” A final twist of caution made me stop him as he was turning away. “Tell me something. How come you knew I wasn’t off the rayhunter?”
“Oh, that. Well, you were watching them like you were interested in what they were doing. No one watches their own ship in dock that closely. I was right, huh?”
“Yeah. Good call.” The tiny increment of relief soaked through me. “Maybe you should be a detective after all. New line of work for you. Doing the right thing. Catching bad guys.”
“Hey, it’s a thought.”
“Nah, he’d be way too nice to them once he’d caught them. Soft as shit, he is. Can’t even discipline his own wife.”
General laughter as they left. I joined in. Let it fade slowly out to a smile, and then nothing but the small relief inside.
I really wouldn’t have to follow him and kill him.
• • •
I gave it half an hour, then wandered out of the ’fab and onto the wharf. There were still figures on the decks and superstructure of the rayhunter. I stood and watched for a few minutes, and finally a crew member came down the forward gangplank toward me. His face wasn’t friendly.
“Something I can do for you?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Sing the hymn of dreams gone down from Alabardos’s sky. I’m Kovacs. The others are at the hotel. Tell your skipper. We’ll move as soon as it’s dark.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The rayhunter Angelfire Flirt, like most vessels of its type, cut a mean and rakish figure at sea. Part warship, part oversize racing skiff, combining a razor-sharp real-keel center of gravity and ludicrous quantities of grav lift in twin outrigger pods, it was built above all for reckless speed and piracy. Elephant rays and their smaller relatives are swift in the water, but more importantly their flesh tends to spoil if left untreated for any length of time. Freeze the bodies and you can sell the meat well enough, but get it back fast enough to the big fresh-catch auctions in centers of affluence like Millsport, and you can make a real killing. For that you need a fast boat. Shipyards all over Harlan’s World understand this and build accordingly. Tacitly understood in the same yards is the fact that some of the best elephant ray stock lives and breeds in waters set aside for the exclusive use of the First Families. Poaching there is a serious offense, and if you’re going to get away with it your fast boat also needs to present a low, hard-to-spot profile both visually and on radar.
If you’re going to run from Harlan’s World law enforcement, there are worse ways to do it than aboard a rayhunter.
On the second day out, secure in the knowledge we were so far from the Millsport Archipelago that no aircraft had the range to overfly us, I went up on deck and stood on the left-hand outrigger gantry, watching the ocean rip past underneath me. Spray on the wind, and the sense of events rushing toward me too fast to assimilate. The past and its cargo of dead, falling behind in our wake, taking with them options and solutions it was too late to try.
Envoys are supposed to be good at this shit.
Out of nowhere, I saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin new face. But this time there was no voice in my head, no instilled trainer confidence. I wasn’t getting any more help from that particular ghost, it seemed.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
It was called out over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, toward the center deck, and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver-gray hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.
Another fucking ghost.
“Sure. Why not?”
She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips, and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream. Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.
“You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?”
Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d gotten wrecked on take with a virtual whore in a—failed—attempt to break the system’s desire fulfillment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d gotten equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.
“Don’t read anything into it,” I told her. “I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”
She hesitated. “I’m remembering a lot of detail.”
I watched the sea. Said nothing.
“We fucked, didn’t we?”
The ocean, pouring past beneath me. “Yeah. A couple of times.”
“I remember—” Another hovering pause. She looked away from me. “You held me. While I was sleeping.”
“Yes.” I made an impatient gesture. “This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?”
“It’s. Difficult.” She shivered. “There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.”
Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing, I felt like saying. It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.
“Do you remember someone called Plex?” I asked her instead.
“Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.”
“What do you remember about him?”
The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.
“That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.”
“Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court-level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.”
“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”
I shrugged. “Just putting you straight on the facts.”
“Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.”
I looked sideways at her. “You been talking to the others?”
“They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.”
I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. “I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction Four.”
“Yes, they said.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalization. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”
“I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?”
“Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.”
“You talk as if I had a choice.”
I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. “You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you? What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?”
The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. “Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I
think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?”
“Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.”
“Yes, well, right now that’s not possible,” she snapped. “Is it?”
I stared back at her. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.” She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. “I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic. She’s the one who sent me back up when you came for us.”
“Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come on!”
“No. She is grieving.”
That stopped me.
“Grieving what?”
“What do you think? The fact that every member of her team died in Drava.”
“That’s crabshit. She wasn’t in contact with them when they died. The net was down.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” The woman in front of me drew a deep breath. Her voice lowered and paced out to explanatory calm. “The net was down, she couldn’t access it. She has told me this. But the receiving system stored every moment of their dying, and if she opens the wrong doors down there, it all comes screaming out. She’s in shock from the exposure to it. She knows that, and as long as it lasts she’s staying where it’s safe.”
“She told you that?”
We were eye-to-eye, a scant half a meter of seawind between us. “Yes, she told me that.”
“I don’t fucking believe you.”
She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged. “What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change, isn’t it?”
“Oh, fuck off! You’re going to hand me that tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?”
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