A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.
“You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.”
The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.
“And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.
“But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman, and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.”
For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display.
Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.
“So Quell turned to the crowd and asked who among you have not sinned with a whore at one time or another, and the crowd grew quieter and would not meet her eyes. But one of the priests rebuked her angrily for her interference in a matter of holy law, and so she asked him directly have you never been with a whore and many in the crowd who knew him laughed so that he had to admit that he had. But this is different, he said, for lama man.
Then, said Quell, you are a hypocrite, and from her long grey coat she took a heavy-calibre revolver and she shot the priest in both kneecaps. And he collapsed to the ground screaming?
Two tiny bangs and small, shrill shrieks from the holodisplay. The storyteller nodded and cleared his throat
“Someone take him away, Quell commanded, and at this two of the crowd lifted the priest up and carried him off, still screaming. And I would guess that they were glad of the chance to leave because now these people were quiet and afraid when they saw the weapon in Quell’s hand. And as the screaming died away in the distance, there was a silence broken only by the moaning of the seawind along the wharf, and the whimpering of the comely whore at Quell’s feet. And Quell turned herself to the second priest and pointed the heavy-calibre revolver at him. Now you, she said. Will you tell me that you have never been with a whore? And the priest drew himself up and looked her back in the eye, and he said I am a priest, and I have been with no woman in my life for I would not soil the sacredness of my flesh.”
The storyteller struck a dramatic pose and waited.
“He’s pushing his luck with this stuff,” I murmured to Sylvie. “Citadel’s only up the hill.”
But she was oblivious, staring down at the little globe of the holodisplay.
As I watched, she swayed a little.
Oh shit.
I grabbed at her arm and she shook me off irritably.
“Well, Quell looked back at this black-clad man and as she stared into his hot jet eyes she knew that he spoke the truth, that he was a man of his word. So she looked at the revolver in her hand and then back at the man. And she said then you are a fanatic and cannot learn, and she shot him in the face.”
Another report, and the holodisplay splattered vivid red. Close-up on the ruined face of the priest. Applause and whoops among the crowd. The storyteller waited it out with a modest smile. At my side, Sylvie stirred like someone waking up. The storyteller grinned.
“Well now my friends, as you can probably imagine, this comely young whore was most grateful to her rescuer. And when the crowd had carried the second priest’s body away, she invited Quell to her home where she—” The storyteller set down his controls once more and wrapped his arms around himself. He gave a performance shudder and rubbed both hands on his upper arms. ”But it really is too cold to continue, I fear. I could not—”
Amidst a new chorus of protest, I took Sylvie by the arm again and led her away. She said nothing for the first few paces, then vaguely she looked back at the storyteller and then at me.
“I’ve never been to Sharya,” she said in a puzzled voice.
“No, and I’m willing to bet nor has he.” I looked her carefully in the eyes. “And Quell certainly never got to go there either. But it makes a good story, right?”
FIFTEEN
I bought a pack of disposable phones from an alcove dealer on the waterfront and used one of them to call Lazlo. His voice came through wavery with the squabble of antique jamming and counterjamming that floated over New Hok like smog from some early millennium city on Earth. The wharfside noises around me didn’t help much. I pinned the phone hard against my ear.
“You’ll have to speak up,” I told him.
“…said she’s still not well enough to use the net, then?”
“She says not. But she’s holding up okay. Listen, I’ve set the traces. You can expect a very pissed-off Kurumaya to come battering down your door later today. Better start practising your alibis.”
“Who, me?”
I grinned despite myself. “Any sign of this Kovacs then?”
His reply was inaudible behind a sudden thicket of static and flutter.
“Say again?”
“…in this morning, said he saw the Skull Gang up near Sopron yesterday with some faces he didn’t know, looked li—… south at speed. Probably get in some time tonight.”
“Alright. When Kovacs does show up, you watch yourselves. The man is a dangerous piece of shit. You keep it tight. Scan up.”
“Will do.” A long, static-laced pause. “Hey, Micky, you’re taking good care of her, right?”
I snorted. “No, I’m about to scalp her and sell off the spare capacity to a data brokerage. What do you think?”
“I know you ca—” Another wave of distortion squelched his voice. “… f not, then get her to someone who can help.”
“Yeah, we’re working on that.”
“…Millsport?”
I guessed at content. “I don’t know. Not yet, at any rate.”
“If that’s what it takes, man.” His voice was fading out now, faint with distance and wrenched with the jamming. “Whatever it takes.”
“Las, I’m losing you. I’ve got to go.”
“…an up, Micky.”
“Yeah, you too. I’ll be in touch.”
I cut the connection, took the phone away from my ear and weighed it in my hand. I stared out to sea for a long time. Then I dug out a fresh phone and dialled another number from decades-old memory.
Like a lot of the towns on Harlan’s World, Tekitomura clung to the skirts of a mountain range up to its waist in the ocean. Available space for building on was scarce. Back around the time that Earth was gearing up for the Pleistocene ice age, it seems that Harlan’s World suffered a rapid climatic change in the opposite direction. The poles melted to ragged remnants and the oceans rose to drown all but two of the little planet’s continents. Mass extinctions followed, among them a rather promising race of tusked shore-dwellers who, there’s some evidence to suggest, had developed rudimentary stone tools, fire and a religion based on the complicated gravitational dance of Harlan’s World’s three moons.