No less subject to flux were the inhabitants themselves. There were population cycles in lazy motion all the way along the Strip—some of them geared to the turn of Harlan’s World’s five seasons, some to the complicated rhythm of the trilunar tides, and some to the longer, languid pulse of a functional surfer sleeve’s lifetime. People came and went and came back. Sometimes their locational loyalties to a part of the beach endured from cycle to cycle, lifetime to lifetime; sometimes they shifted. And sometimes, that loyalty was never there to begin with.
Finding someone on the Strip was never going to be easy. In a lot of cases, that was the reason people came here.
“Kem Point coming up.” Petkovski’s voice again, against a backdrop of downwinding turbines. She sounded tired. “This good for you?”
“Yeah, as good as anywhere. Thanks.” I peered out at the approaching evercrete platforms and the low-rise tangle of buildings they held up over the waters of the Expanse, the untidy sprawl of structure marching up the hill beyond. There were a handful of figures sitting in view on balconies or jetties, but for the most part the little settlement looked emptied of life. I had no idea if this was the right end of Sourcetown or not, but you’ve got to start somewhere. I grabbed a handstrap and hauled myself to my feet as the skimmer banked left. Glanced across the cabin at my silent companion. “Nice talking to you, Mikhail.”
He ignored me, gaze pinned to the window. He’d said nothing the whole time we’d shared the cabin space, just stared morosely out at the vast lack of scenery around us. A couple of times, he’d caught me watching as he scrubbed at his jack sockets, and stopped abruptly with a tightening look on his face. But even then, he said nothing.
I shrugged, was about to swing out onto the railed decking, then thought better of it. I crossed the cabin and propped myself against the glass, interrupting Mikhail Petkovski’s field of vision. He blinked up at me, momentarily surprised out of his self-absorption.
“You know,” I said cheerfully. “You got lucky in the mother stakes. But out there, it’s all guys like me. And we don’t give a flying fuck whether you live or die. You don’t get off your ass and start taking an interest, no one else is going to.”
He snorted. “The fuck’s it got to do with—”
Someone more street would have read my eyes, but this one was too washed out with the wirewant, too puffed up with maternal life support. I reached easily for his throat, dug in, and hauled him out of the seat.
“See what I mean? Who’s going to stop me crushing your larynx now?”
He croaked. “Ma—”
“She can’t hear you. She’s busy up there, earning a living for you both.” I gathered him in. “Mikhail, you are infinitely less important in the scheme of things than her efforts have led you to believe.”
He reached up and tried to unpin my fingers. I ignored the feeble prisings and dug in deeper. He started to look genuinely frightened.
“The way you’re headed,” I told him in conversational tones, “you’re going to end up on a spare-parts tray under low lighting. That’s the only use you are to men like me, and no one else is going to get in our way when we come for you, because you’ve given no one a reason to care. Is that what you want to be? Spare parts and a two-minute rinse and flush?”
He jerked and flapped, face turning purple. Shook his head in violent denial. I held him a couple of moments longer, then loosened my grip and dumped him back in the chair. He gagged and coughed, eyes wide on me and flooded with tears. One hand crept up to massage his throat where I’d marked it. I nodded.
“All this, Mikhail? Going on all around you? This is life.” I leaned closer over him and he flinched. “Take an interest. While you still can.”
The skimmer bumped gently against something. I straightened up and went out onto the side deck into sudden heat and brightness. We were floating amid a crosswork of weathered mirrorwood jetties secured at strategic intervals by heavy evercrete mooring buttresses. The skimmer’s motors kept up a low mutter and gentle pressure against the nearest landing stage. Late-afternoon sun glinted hard off the mirrorwood. Suzi Petkovski was standing up in the cockpit and squinting against the reflected light.
“That’ll be double,” she reminded me.
I handed over a chip and waited while she ran it. Mikhail chose not to emerge from the cabin. Maybe he was thinking things over. His mother handed me back the chip, shaded her eyes, and pointed.
“They got a place you can hire bugs cheap about three streets over. By that transmission mast you can see. The one with the dragon flags.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. Hope you find what you’re looking for here.”
• • •
I skipped the bug hire, at least initially, and wandered up through the little town, soaking up my surroundings. Up to the crest of the hill, I could have been in any Expanse-side suburb of Newpest. The same utilitarian architecture predominated, the same frontage mix of waterware mech- and soft-shops mingling with eating houses and bars. The same stained and worn fused-glass streets, and the same basic smells. But from the top of the rise looking down, the resemblance ended like waking from a dream.
Below me, the other half of the settlement fell away downward in haphazard structures built out of every material you could readily bring to mind. Bubblefabs rubbed shoulders with wood-frame houses, driftwood shacks, and, toward the bottom, actual canvas tents. The fused-paving thoroughfares gave way to poorly laid evercrete slabs, then to sand, then finally to the broad, pale sweep of the beach itself. Here there was more movement on the streets than on the Expanse side, most of it semi-clad and drifting toward the shoreline in the late sun. Every third figure had a board slung under one arm. The sea itself was burnished a dirty gold in the low-angle light and flecked with activity, surfers floating astride their boards or upright and cutting casual slices across the gently flexing surface of the water. The sun and distance turned them all to anonymous black tin cutouts.
“Some fucking view, eh, sam?”
It was a high, child’s voice, at odds with the words it uttered. I glanced around and saw a boy of about ten watching me from a doorway. Body rib-thin and bronzed in a pair of surfslacks, eyes a sun-faded blue. Hair a tangled mess from the sea. He was leaned in the door, arms folded nonchalantly across his bared chest. Behind him in the shop, I saw racked boards. Shifting screen displays for aquatech software.
“I’ve seen worse,” I admitted.
“First time at Vchira?”
“No.”
Disappointment notched his voice. “Not looking for lessons then?”
“No.” I paused a moment, measuring advisability. “You been long on the Strip yourself?”
He grinned. “All my lives. Why?”
“I’m looking for some friends. Thought you might know them.”
“Yeah? You a cop? Enforcer?”
“Not recently.”
It seemed to be the right answer. His grin came back.
“They got names, these friends?”
“They did last time I was here. Brasil. Ado, Tres.” I hesitated. “Vidaura, maybe.”
His lips twisted and pursed and he sucked his teeth. It was all gesture learned in another, much older body.
“Jack Soul Brasil?” he asked warily.
I nodded.
“You a Bug?”
“Not recently.”
“Multiflores crew?”
I drew breath. “No.”
“BaKroom Boy?”
“Do you have a name?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Sure. Milan. Around here they call me Gungetter.”
“Well, Milan,” I told him evenly. “You’re beginning to irritate the fuck out of me. Now, are you going to be able to help me or not? You know where Brasil is, or are you just getting off on the rep vapor he trailed through here thirty years back?”
“Hey.” The pale blue eyes narrowed. His arms unfolded, fists tensed to small hammers at his sides. “You know, I fucking belon
g here, sam. I surf. Been shooting curls at Vchira since before you were a fucking splatter up your mother’s tube.”
“I doubt that, but let’s not quibble. I’m looking for Jack Soul Brasil. I’ll find him with or without you, but you can maybe save me some time. Question is, are you going to?”
He stared back at me, still angry, stance still aggressive. In the ten-year-old sleeve, it was less than impressive.
“Question is, sam, what’s it worth to help you?”
“Ah.”
Paid, Milan was forthcoming in grudging fragments designed to disguise and eke out the very limited nature of his knowledge. I bought him rum and coffee in a street café across from the shop he was tending—can’t just close it up, sam, be more than my job’s worth—and waited out the storytelling process. Most of what he told me was readily identifiable as well-worn beach legend, but from a couple of things he said I decided he really had met Brasil a few times, maybe even surfed with him. The last encounter seemed to have been a decade or so back. Side-by-side empty-handed combat heroism in confrontation with a gang of encroaching Harlan Loyalist surfers a few klicks south from Kem Point. Facedown and general battery, Milan acquits himself with modestly understated savagery, collects a few wounds—you should have seen the fucking scars on that sleeve, man, sometimes I still miss it—but the highest praise is reserved for Brasil. Like a fucking swamp panther, sam. Fuckers ripped him in the chest, he didn’t even notice. He tore them all down. Just, like, nothing left when he was done. Sent them back north in pieces. All followed by orgiastic celebration—bonfire glow and the cries of women in wild orgasm on a surf backdrop.
It was a standard picture, and I’d had it painted for me before by other Vchira enthusiasts in the past. Looking past the more obvious embellishments, I panned out a little useful detail. Brasil had money—all those years with the Little Blues, right. No way he has to scratch a living teaching wobblies, selling boards, and training up some fucking Millsport aristo’s spare flesh five years ahead of time—but the man still didn’t hold with clone reincarnation. He’d be wearing good surfer flesh, but I wouldn’t know his face. Look for them fucking scars on his chest, sam. Yes, he still wore his hair long. Current rumor had him holed up in a sleepy beach hamlet somewhere south. Apparently he was learning to play the saxophone. There was this jazzman, used to play with Csango junior, who’d told Milan . . .
I paid for the drinks and got up to go. The sun was gone and the dirty-gold sea all but tarnished through to base metal. Across the beach below us, lights were coming to firefly life. I wondered if I’d catch the bug-hire place before it shut.
“So this aristo,” I said idly. “You teach his body to surf for five years, hone the reflexes for him. What’s your end?”
Milan shrugged and sipped at what was left of his rum. He’d mellowed with the alcohol and the payment. “We trade sleeves. I get what he’s wearing in return for this, age sixteen. So my end’s a thirty-plus aristo sleeve, cosmetic alterations, and witnessed exchange, so I don’t try to pass myself off as him, otherwise catalog-intact. Top-of-the-range clone stock, all the peripherals fitted as standard. Sweet deal, huh?”
I nodded absently. “Yeah, if he looks after what he’s wearing, I guess. Aristo lifestyles I’ve seen can make for some pretty heavy wear and tear.”
“Nah, this guy’s in shape. Comes down here on and off to check on his investment, you know, swim and surf a bit. Would have been down this week but that Harlan limo thing put a lock on it. He’s running a little extra weight he could do without, can’t surf for shit of course. But that’ll sort out easy enough when I—”
“Harlan limo thing?” Envoy awareness slithered along my nerves.
“Yeah, you know. Seichi Harlan’s skimmer. This guy’s real close with that branch of the family, had to—”
“What happened to Seichi Harlan’s skimmer?”
“You didn’t hear about this?” Milan blinked and grinned. “Where you been, sam? Been all over the net since yesterday. Seichi Harlan, taking his sons and daughter-in-law across to Rila, the skimmer just wiped out there in the Reach.”
“Wiped out how?”
He shrugged. “They don’t know yet. Whole thing just exploded, footage they showed looks like from the inside. Sank in seconds, what was left of it. They’re still looking for the pieces.”
They’d be lucky. The maelstrom made itself felt a long way in at this time of year, and the currents in the Reach were lethally unpredictable. Sinking fragments of wreckage might get carried for kilometers before they settled. The broken remains of Seichi Harlan and his family could end up in any of a dozen resting places amid the scattered islets and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago. Stack recovery was going to be a nightmare.
My thoughts fled back to Belacotton Kohei and Plex’s take-soaked mutterings. I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. He’d said biological, but on his own admission his knowledge was incomplete. He’d been shut out by high-level yakuza rank and the Harlan family retainer, Aiura. Aiura, who ran damage limitation and cleanup for the Harlan family.
Another wisp of detail settled into place in my mind. Drava wrapped in snow. Waiting in Kurumaya’s antechamber, staring disinterestedly through the global news scrolldown. Accidental death of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district.
It wasn’t a connection as such, but Envoy intuition doesn’t work that way. It just goes on piling up the data until you start to see the shape of something in the mass. Until the connections make themselves for you. I couldn’t see anything yet, but the fragments were singing to me like wind chimes in a storm.
That and the tiny insistent pulse of backbeat: hurry, hurry, there isn’t time.
I traded a badly remembered Vchira handshake with Milan and set off back up the hill, hurrying.
• • •
The bug-hire place was still lit, and staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with surfer physique. He woke up around the eyes for long enough to find out that I wasn’t a wave rider, aspiring or otherwise, and then settled into mechanical client service mode. Dayjob shielding around the briefly glimpsed inner core that kept him at Vchira, the heat of enthusiasm wrapped carefully back up again for when he could share it with someone who understood. But he set me up competently enough with a garishly colored single-seat speed bug and showed me the streetmap software with the return points I could use up and down the Strip. At request, he also provided me with a premolded polalloy crash suit and helmet, though you could see his already low opinion of me go through the floor when I asked for it. It seemed there were still a lot of people on Vchira Beach who couldn’t tell risk and idiocy apart.
Yeah, maybe including you, Tak. Done anything safe yourself recently?
Ten minutes later, I was suited up and powering out of Kem Point behind a cone of headlamp glow in the gathering gloom of evening.
Somewhere south, listening for a badly played saxophone.
I’d had better sets of clues to follow, but there was one thing massively in my favor. I knew Brasil, and I knew that if he heard someone was looking for him, he wasn’t likely to hide. He’d come out to deal with it the way you paddled up to a big wave. The way you faced down a spread of Harlan Loyalists.
Make enough noise, and I wouldn’t have to find him.
He’d find me.
• • •
Three hours later, I pulled off the highway and into the cold bluish wash of bug-swarmed Angier lamps around an all-night diner and machine shop. Looking back a little wearily, I judged I’d made enough noise. My supply of low-value credit chips was depleted, I was lightly fogged from too much shared drink and smoke up and down the Strip, and the knuckles of my right hand still ached slightly from a badly thrown punch in a beachside tavern where strangers asking after local legends weren’t well regarded.
Under the Angier lamps the night was pleasantly cool, and there were knots of surfers clowning about in the parking a
rea, bottles and pipes in hand. Laughter that seemed to bounce off the darkened distance around the lampglow, someone telling a broken-board story in a high, excited voice. One or two more serious groups gathered around the opened innards of vehicles undergoing repair. Laser cutters flickered on and off, showering weird green or purple sparks off exotic alloys.
I got a surprisingly good coffee at the counter and took it outside to watch the surfers. It wasn’t a culture I’d ever accessed during my youth in Newpest—gang protocols wouldn’t permit a serious commitment to both scuba and wave riding, and the diving found me first. I never switched allegiances. Something about the silent world beneath the surface drew me. There was a vast, slow-breathing calm down there, a respite from all the street craziness and my own even more jagged home life.
You could bury yourself down there.
I finished the coffee and went back inside the diner. Ramen soup smells wreathed the air and tugged at my guts. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t eaten since a late ship’s breakfast on the bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter with Japaridze. I climbed onto a counter stool and nodded at the same meth-eyed kid I’d bought my coffee from.
“Smells good. What have you got?”
He picked up a battered remote and thumbed it in the general direction of the autochef. Holodisplays sprang up over the various pans. I scanned them and chose a hard-to-spoil favorite.
“Give me the chilied ray. That’s frozen ray, right?”
He rolled his eyes. “You expecting fresh, maybe? Place like this? At that price?”
“I’ve been away.”
But it elicited no response in his meth-stunned face. He just set the autochef in motion and wandered away to the windows, staring out at the surfers as if they were some form of rare and beautiful sea life caught in an aquarium.
I was halfway through my bowl of ramen when the door opened behind me. No one said anything, but I knew already. I set down the bowl and turned slowly on the stool.