The coffee was grim.
“See,” said Segesvar, setting his aside with an exaggerated scowl. “I should have your legs broken just for making me drink that.”
“You could try.”
For a moment, our eyes locked. He shrugged.
“It was a joke, Tak. You’re losing your sense of humor.”
“Yeah, I’m putting a thirty percent surcharge on it.” I sipped at my own coffee, expressionless. “Used to be my friends could get it for nothing, but times change.”
He let that lie for a moment, then cocked his head and looked me in the eye again.
“You think I’m treating you unfairly?”
“I think you’re conveniently forgetful of the real meaning behind the words you saved my ass back there, man.”
Segesvar nodded as if he’d expected no less. He looked down at the table between us.
“That is an old debt,” he said quietly. “And a questionable one.”
“You didn’t think so at the time.”
It was too far back to summon easily to mind. Back before the Envoy conditioning went in, back where things get blurred with the passing decades. Most of all, I remembered the stink in the alley. Alkaline precipitates from the belaweed-processing plant and dumped oil from the hydraulic systems on the compression tanks. The meth dealer’s curses and the glint of the long bottleback gaff as he slashed it through the damp air toward me. The others were gone, their youthful thug enthusiasm for the robbery evaporating in swift terror as that honed steel hook came out and ripped open Radul Segesvar’s leg from kneecap to thigh. Gone yelling and sprinting away into the night like exorcised sprites, leaving Radul dragging himself one yelping meter at a time along the alley after them, leaving me, sixteen years old, facing the steel with empty hands.
Come ’ere, you little fuck. The dealer was grinning at me in the gloom, almost crooning as he advanced, blocking my escape. Try to tumble me on my own patch, will you. I’m going to open you up and feed you your own fucking guts, my lad.
And for the first time in my life, I realized with a sensation like cold hands on my young neck that I was looking at a man who was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him.
Not batter me like my father, not cut me up like one of the inept gang thugs we squabbled with daily on the streets of Newpest. Kill me. Kill me, and then probably rip out my stack and toss it into the scummed-up waters of the harbor where it would stay for longer than the life of anyone I knew or cared about. It was that image, that terror of being sunk and lost in poisoned water, that drove me forward, made me count the swing of the sharpened steel and hit him as he came off balance on the end of the downstroke.
Then we both went over in the muck and debris and ammoniac stink of the processing plant’s leavings, and I fought him there for the gaff.
Took it from him.
Lashed out and, more by luck than judgment, ripped open his belly with it.
The fight went out of him like water down a sink. He made a loud gurgling, eyes wide and glued to mine. I stared back, rage and fear still punching through the veins in my temples, every chemical switch in my body thrown. I was barely aware of what I’d just done. Then he sank backward away from me and into the pile of muck. He sat down there as if it were an armchair he liked. I struggled off my knees, dripping alkaline slime from face and hair, still caught in his gaze, still gripping the handle of the gaff. His mouth made flapping motions, his throat gave up wet, desperate sounds. I looked down and I saw his innards still looped over the hook in my hand.
Shock caught me up. My hand spasmed open involuntarily and the hook fell out of it. I staggered away, spraying vomit. The weak, pleading sounds he made damped out beneath the hoarse rasp in my throat as my stomach emptied itself. The hot, urgent reek of fresh sick joined the general stench in the alley. I convulsed with the force of my heaving, and fell over in the mess.
I think he was still alive when I got back to my feet and went to help Segesvar. The sounds he was making followed me all the way out of the alley, and news reports the next day said he’d finally bled to death sometime close to dawn. Then again, the same sounds followed me around for weeks afterward, whenever I went anywhere quiet enough to hear myself think. For the best part of the next year, I woke up with them clotted in my ears as often as not.
I looked away from it. The glass panels of the terminal slid back into focus. Across the table, Segesvar was watching me intently. Maybe he was remembering, too. He grimaced.
“So you don’t think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappear for nine weeks without a word, leave me holding your shit and looking like a fool in front of the other haiduci. Now you want to reschedule the finance? You know what I’d do to anyone else who pulled this shit?”
I nodded. Recalled with wry humor my own fury at Plex a couple of months back as I stood seeping synthetic body fluids in Tekitomura.
We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak.
I’d wanted to kill him, just for saying it like that.
“You think thirty percent is unjust?”
I sighed.
“Rad, you’re a gangster and I’m.” I gestured. “No better. I don’t think either of us knows much about what’s just and unjust. You do what you like. I’ll find you the money.”
“All right.” He was still staring at me. “Twenty percent. That fit your sense of commercial propriety?”
I shook my head, said nothing. I dug in my pocket for the cortical stacks, kept my fist closed as I leaned across with them. “Here. This is what you came for. Four fish. Do what you want with them.”
He pushed my arm aside and jabbed an angry finger in my face.
“No, my friend. I do what you want with them. This is a service I’m providing you, and don’t you fucking forget that. Now, I said twenty percent. Is that fair?”
The decision crystallized out of nowhere, so fast it was like a slap across the back of the head. Picking it apart later, I couldn’t decide what triggered it, only that it felt like listening again to that tiny voice out of the darkness, telling me to hurry. It felt like a sudden prickle of sweat across my palms and the terror that I was going to be too late for something that mattered.
“I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your haiduci pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.”
He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from haiduci experia flicks like Friends of Ireni Cozma and Outlaw Voices. It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.
“All right, fuck it. Fifteen percent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen percent, right?”
I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. “All right, fifteen percent. Do you still want these?”
He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight of hand, and pocketed them.
“You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,” he growled. “Anybody ever tell you that?”
“That’s a compliment, right?”
He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.
“DeCom vet,” he mumbled. “Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—”
“No, I haven’t got any money,” said Segesvar impatiently. “Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.”
He caught my glance.
“What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?”
&nb
sp; • • •
Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small-scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied gray turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.
To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.
An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.
“Weed trade’s been bad, huh?” I shouted over the turbines.
Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.
“Say what?”
“The weed trade,” I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. “Been bad recently, right?”
She shrugged. “Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.”
It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics were some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.
I went back to watching the skyline.
After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing, and pressed it to my ear.
“Yeah, what?”
The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear
there isn’t much time left
“Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.”
can’t hold them back much longer . . .
“Yeah, I’m working on it.”
working now . . . It sounded like a question.
“Yeah, I said—”
there are wings out there . . . a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked . . .
It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again
cracked open from edge to edge . . . it’s beautiful, Micky . . .
And gone.
I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.
Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.
“Bad news?”
“Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?”
She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one-handed.
“Not safely, no.”
I nodded and thought back through the communiqué I’d just had.
“And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?”
“About double?”
“Fine. Do it.”
A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximized. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist. Get below and keep your hands off . . . something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.
She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.
“You, too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.”
“I can hang on.”
“Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.”
I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin. Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers. Cables and jacks. I thought back, too, to the kid’s demeanor and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.
“Sure,” I said. “Always good to have someone to talk to, right?”
She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rainbowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.
Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.
You start by noticing detail—the arched root system of a tepes thicket breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mud bank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.
You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go.
. . . hurry . . .
I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her, her, her, her . . .
Her. Sylvie, maned in silver gray. Her face—
Her face, subtly changed by the woman who had crept out and stolen it from her. Her voice, subtly modulated . . .
I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back.
Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.
She wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity.
She wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests.
Todor Murakami’s lean, attentive features on the ferry. Pipe smoke, whipped away in the wind.
So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organized crime. Why you going up north again?
It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.
The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.
Stop fucking calling me that.
And screams. And gaping holes cut in spines at neck height. And the weight of cortical stacks in my palm, still slick with clinging gore. And the hollow that would never be filled.
Sarah.
The job in hand.
I’m trying to fucking help.
. . . hurry . . .
I’m trusting you . . .
I’m trying to fucking . . .
. . . hurry . . .
I’m TRYING—
“Coastline.” Suzi Petkovski’s voice rinsed through the cabin speaker, laconic and firm enough to grab at. “Be hitting Sourcetown in fifteen.”
I dumped my brooding and looked left where the Kossuth coast wa
s slicing back toward us. It raised as a dark bumpy line on the otherwise featureless horizon, then seemed to leap in and resolve as a procession of low hills and the occasional flash of white dunes beyond and between. The backside of Vchira, the drowned nubs of an ancient mountain range worn down geological ages past to a seven-hundred-kilometer curve of marsh-fringed tidal barrier on one side and the same stretch of crystalline white sand on the other.
Someday, one of Sourcetown’s long-term inhabitants had informed me nearly half a century ago, the sea’s going to break through all along here. Break through and pour into the Weed Expanse like an invading army breaching a long-disputed frontier. Wear down the last remaining bastions and wreck the beach. Some Day, man, the Sourcetowner repeated slowly, and capitalized the phrase and grinned at me with what I’d already come to recognize as typical surfer detachment, Some Day, but Not Yet. And until Yet, you just got to keep looking out to sea, man. Just keep looking out there, don’t look behind you, don’t worry what’s keeping it all in place.
Some Day, but Not Yet. Just look out to sea.
You could call it a philosophy, I suppose. On Vchira Beach, it often passed for one. Limited maybe, but then I’ve seen far worse ways of relating to the universe deployed elsewhere.
The sky had cleared up as we reached the southern fringes of the Expanse, and I started to see signs of habitation in the sunlight. Sourcetown isn’t really a place, it’s an approximation, a loose term for a 170-kilometer coastal strip of surfer support services and their associated infrastructure. In its most tenuous form, it comes into being as scattered tents and bubblefabs along the beach, generational fire circles and barbecue sites, roughly woven belaweed shacks and bars. Settlement permanence increases and then decreases as the Strip approaches and then passes the places where the surf is not merely good but phenomenal. And then, in the Big Surf zones, habitation thickens to an almost municipal density. Actual streets appear on the hills behind the dunes, rooted street lighting along them and clusters of evercrete platforms and jetties sprouting backward off the spine of land and into the Weed Expanse. Last time I’d been here, there were five such accretions, each with its gang of enthusiasts who swore that the best surf on the continent was right fucking here, man. For all I knew, any one of them could have been correct. For all I knew, there’d be another five by now.