He looked back at me, pupils blasted wide with the mix of whiff and mushrooms, pipe forgotten and trailing faint fumes from the cupped bowl of his hand. Like it was all too much to take in. Like I was a piece of take hallucination that refused to morph into something more pleasant or just go away.
I shook my head. Tried to get Sylvie’s Slipins out of it.
“So like I said, Plex, I need to know. I really need to know. Oshima, Aiura, and Kovacs. Where do I find these people?”
He shook his head. “It’s no good, Tak. I mean, I’ll tell you. You really want to know, I’ll tell you. But it isn’t going to help. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no way you can—”
“Why don’t you just tell me, Plex. Get it off your chest. Let me worry about the logistics.”
So he told me. And I did the logistics, and worried at it.
All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reefdive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.
PART THREE
THAT WAS A WHILE AGO
That Quell, sure, man, she got something going on,
something you gotta think about. Thing is, some things last,
some things don’t, but sometimes you got something don’t
last won’t be because it’s gone, be because it’s waiting for its
time to come again, maybe waiting on a change. Music’s like
that, and so is life, man, so is life.
DIZZY CSANGO
from an interview for New Sky Blue magazine
CHAPTER TWENTY
There were storm warnings all the way south.
On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout. Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8 G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems, and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.
This one had been building for a while—I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava—and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbors among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the Gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.
The skipper of the Haiduci’s Daughter took it philosophically.
“Seen worse,” he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge. “Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.”
I grunted noncommittally. He squinted away from the display at me.
“You were away then, right?”
“Yeah, offworld.”
He laughed raspingly. “Yeah, that’s right. All that exotic travel you been doing. So when do I get to see your pretty face on KossuthNet, then? Got a one-to-one lined up with Maggie Sugita when we get in?”
“Give me time, man.”
“More time? Haven’t you had enough time yet?”
It was the line of banter we’d maintained all the way down from Tekitomura. Like quite a few freight skippers I’d met, Ari Japaridze was a shrewd but relatively unimaginative man. He knew next to nothing about me, which, he told me, was the way he liked things to stay with his passengers, but he was nobody’s fool. And it didn’t take an archaeologue to work out that if a man comes aboard your raddled old freighter an hour before it leaves and offers as much for a cramped crewroom berth as you’d pay for a Saffron Line cabin—well, that man probably isn’t on friendly terms with law enforcement. For Japaridze, the holes he’d turned up in my knowledge of the last couple of decades on Harlan’s World had a very simple explanation. I’d been away, in the time-honored criminal sense of the word. I countered this assumption with the simple truth about my absence and got the rasping laugh every time.
Which suited me fine. People will believe what they want to believe—look at the fucking Beards—and I got the distinct impression that there was some storage time in Japaridze’s past. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but I got an invite up to the bridge on our second evening out of Tekitomura, and by the time we left Erkezes on the southernmost tip of the Saffron Archipelago we were swapping notes on preferred Newpest drinking holes and how best to barbecue bottleback steaks.
I tried not to let the time chafe at me.
Tried not to think about the Millsport Archipelago and the long westward arc we were cutting away from it.
Sleep was hard.
The nighttime bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter provided a viable alternative. I sat with Japaridze and drank cheap Millsport blended whiskey, watching as the freighter plowed her way south into warmer seas and air that was fragrant with the scent of belaweed. I talked, as automatic as the machines that kept the vessel on her curving course, stock tales of sex and travel, memories of Newpest and the Kossuth hinterlands. I massaged the muscles of my left arm where they still ached and throbbed. I flexed my left hand against the pain it gave me. Beneath it all, I thought about ways to kill Aiura and myself.
By day, I prowled the decks and mingled with the other passengers as little as possible. They were an unappealing bunch anyway, three burned-out and bitter-talking deComs heading south, maybe for home, maybe just for the sun; a hard-eyed webjelly entrepreneur and his bodyguard, accompanying an oil shipment to Newpest; a young New Revelation priest and his carefully wrapped wife, who joined ship at Erkezes. Another half a dozen less memorable men and women who kept to themselves even more than I did and looked away whenever they were spoken to.
A certain degree of social interaction was unavoidable. Haiduci’s Daughter was a small vessel, in essence not much more than a tug welded onto the nose of four duplex freight pods and a powerful hoverload driver. Access gantries ran at two levels from the forward decks between and alongside the pods and back to a narrow observation bubble bolted onto the rear. What living space there was felt crowded. There were a few squabbles early on, including one over stolen food that Japaridze had to break up with threats of putting people off at Erkezes, but by the time we left the Saffron Archipelago behind, everybody had pretty much settled down. I had a couple of forced conversations with the deComs over meals, trying to show interest in their hard-luck stories and life-in-the-Uncleared bravado. From the webjelly oil merchant I got repetitive lectures on the economic benefits that would emerge from the Mecsek regime’s austerity program. The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterward.
We made good time from Erkezes to the Gulf, and there was no sign of a storm when we got there. I found myself crowded out of my usual brooding spots as the other passengers came out to enjoy the novelty of warm weather and sun strong enough to tan. You couldn’t blame them—the sky was a solid blue from horizon to horizon, Daikoku and Hotei both showing clear and high up. A strong breeze out of the northea
st kept the heat pleasant and lifted spray from the ruffled surface of the sea. Westward, waves broke white and just audible on the great curving reefs that heralded the eventual rise of the Kossuth Gulf coastline farther south.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said a quiet voice beside me at the rail.
I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realized, several months pregnant.
I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.
Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.
“I’ve never traveled this far south before,” she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. “Have you?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it always this hot?”
I looked at her again, bleakly. “It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.”
“Ah.” She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. “You do not approve?”
I shrugged. “It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.”
“Mecsek.” She made a small spitting sound. “He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.”
“Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonoring him.”
She flinched.
“You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—”
“Four.” I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. “I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.”
I saw color rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.
“The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,” she murmured. “Many of us—”
“Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your gynocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.”
Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.
“You misjudge me.” She touched the scarf she wore. “I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.”
“Then you’re more stupid than you look.”
An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.
“So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—”
“Look,” I said coldly. “Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.”
“See,” she said, voice turned slightly shrill. “You lust after her like all the others. You give in to her cheap sensual tricks and—”
“Oh please. For my money, Mitzi Harlan’s a stupid, superficial little trollop, but you know what? At least she lives her life as if it belongs to her. Instead of abasing herself at the feet of any fucking baboon who can grow a beard and some external genitalia.”
“Are you calling my husband a—”
“No.” I swung on her. It seemed I didn’t have it cranked down after all. My hands shot out and grasped her by the shoulders. “No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.”
Then there was a hand on my arm.
“Hey, man.” It was one of the deComs, backed up by the entrepreneur’s bodyguard. He looked scared but determined. “That’s enough. Leave her alone.”
I looked at his fingers, where they hung on my elbow. I wondered briefly about breaking them, locking out the arm behind them and—
A memory flared to life inside me. My father shaking my mother by the shoulders like a belaweed rack that wouldn’t come loose of its mooring, screaming abuse and whiskey fumes into her face. Seven years old, I’d gone for his arm and tried to tug it away.
He’d clouted me almost absently that time, across the room and into a corner. Gone back to her.
I unlocked my hands from the woman’s shoulders. Shook off the deCom’s grip. Mentally shook myself by the throat.
“Now back off, man.”
“Sure,” I said it quietly. “Like I said, sister. ’S a free world. Got nothing to do with me.”
• • •
The storm clipped us around the ear a couple of hours later. A long trailing scarf of bad weather that darkened the sky outside my porthole and caught the Haiduci’s Daughter broadside-on. I was flat on my back in my bunk at the time, staring at the metal-gray ceiling and giving myself a furious lecture on undesirable involvement. I heard the engine thrum kick up a notch and guessed Japaridze was pulling more buoyancy from the grav system. A couple of minutes later the narrow cabin space seemed to lurch sideways; on the table opposite a glass slid a couple of centimeters before the antispill surface gripped it in place. The water it held slopped alarmingly and splashed over the edge. I sighed and got off the bunk, bracing myself across the cabin and leaning down to peer out the porthole. Sudden rain slapped the glass.
Somewhere in the freighter, an alarm went off.
I frowned. It seemed an extreme response to what wasn’t much more than some choppy water. I shouldered my way into a light jacket I’d bought from one of the freighter’s crew members, stowed Tebbit knife and Rapsodia beneath it, and slipped out into the corridor.
Getting involved again, are we?
Hardly. If this tub is going to sink, I want advance warning.
I followed the alarms up to main deck level and out into the rain. A member of the crew passed me, hefting a clumsy long-barrel blaster.
“ ’S going on?” I asked her.
“Search me, sam.” She spared me a grim look, jerked her head aft. “Main board’s showing a breach in cargo. Maybe a ripwing trying to get in out of the storm. Maybe not.”
“You want a hand?”
She hesitated, suspicion swimming momentarily on her face, then made a decision. Maybe Japaridze had said something to her about me, maybe she just liked my recently acquired face. Or maybe she was just scared and could use the company.
“Sure. Thanks.”
We worked our way back toward the cargo pods and along one of the gantries, bracing ourselves each time the freighter rolled. Rain whipped in at odd, wind-driven angles. The alarm shrilled querulously over the weather. Ahead, in the sudden, sullen gloom of the squall, a row of red lights pulsed on and off along one section of the left-hand freight pod. Below the flashing alert signals, pale light showed from the edge of a cracked hatch. The crew-woman hissed and gestured with the blaster barrel.
“That’s it.” She started forward. “Someone’s in there.”
I shot her a glance. “Or something. Ripwings, right?”
“Yeah, but it takes a pretty sharp ripwing to figure out the buttons. Usually they’l
l just short the system with a beakbutt and hope it lets them in. And I don’t smell anything burning.”
“Me neither.” I calibrated the gantry space, the rise of the cargo pods over us. Drew the Rapsodia and dialed it to maximum dispersal. “Okay, so let’s do this sensibly. Let me go in there first.”
“I’m supposed—”
“Yeah, I’m sure you are. But I used to do this for a living. So how about you have this one on me. Stay here, shoot anything that comes out of that hatch unless you hear me call it first.”
I moved to the hatch as carefully as I could on the unstable footing and examined the locking mechanism. There didn’t appear to be any damage. The hatch hung outward a couple of centimeters, maybe tipped that way by the pitch of the freighter in the squall.
After whichever pirate ninja opened it had cracked the lock, that is.
Thanks for that.
I tuned out the squall and the alarm. Listened for motion on the other side, cranked the neurachem tight enough to pick up heavy breathing.
Nothing. No one there.
Or someone with stealth combat training.
Will you shut up.
I fitted one foot against the edge of the hatch and gave it a cautious shove. The hinges were balanced to a hair—the whole thing swung weightily outward. Without giving myself time to think, I twisted into the gap, Rapsodia tracking for a target.
Nothing.
Waist-high steel barrels stood in shiny ranks across the cargo space. The gaps between were too thin to hide a child, let alone a ninja. I crossed to the nearest and read the label. FINEST SAFFRON SEAS LUMINESCENT XENOMEDUSAL EXTRACT, COLD PRESS FILTERED. Webjelly oil, designer-branded for added value. Courtesy of our entrepreneurial expert on austerity.
I laughed and felt the tension puddle back out of me.
Nothing but—
I sniffed.
There was a scent, fleeting on the metallic air in the cargo pod.
And gone.
The New Hok sleeve’s senses were just acute enough to know it was there, but with the knowledge and the conscious effort, it vanished. Out of nowhere, I had a sudden flash recollection of childhood, an uncharacteristically happy image of warmth and laughter that I couldn’t place. Whatever the smell was, it was something I knew intimately.