He looked at me oddly. “Ado’s thin because she wants to be thin. How she goes about it is her business, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged. “Sure. I’m just curious. I figured you guys would have got bored with self-infection by now.”

“Ah, but you never liked it in the first place, did you? I remember last time you were here, when Mari tried to sell you on that batch of HHF we had. You always were a little puritanical on the subject.”

“I just never saw the point of making myself ill for fun. Thought as a trained medic, you’d be at least that smart too.”

“I’ll remind you of that next time we’re sharing a bad tetrameth comedown. Or a single-malt hangover.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re right.” He nodded sagely. “That chemical shit is Stone-Age stuff. I ran Hun Home flu against a spec-inhibited immune system for ten years and all I got was buzz and some really cool delirium dreams. Real waveclimbers. No headaches, no major organ damage, not even a runny nose once the inhibitors and the virus meshed. Tell me one drug you could do that with.”

“Is that what you’re running these days? HHF?”

He shook his head. “Not for a long time. Virginia got us some Adoracion custom a while back. Engineered spinal-fever complex. Man, you should see my dreams now. Sometimes I wake up screaming.”

“I’m happy for you.”

For a while, we both watched the figures in the water. A couple of times Brasil grunted and pointed out something in the way one of the surfers moved. None of it meant very much to me. Once he applauded softly as someone wiped out, but when I glanced at him, there was no apparent mockery in his face.

A little later he asked me again, gesturing at the pegged board.

“You sure you don’t want to try out? Take my plank? Man, that mothballed shit you’re wearing looks practically made for it. Odd for military custom, come to think of it. Kind of light.” He prodded idly at my shoulder with a couple of fingers. “In fact I’d say that’s near-perfect sports sleeve trim you’re carrying. What’s the label?”

“Ah, some defunct bunch, never heard of them before. Eishundo.”

“Eishundo?”

I glanced at him, surprised. “Yeah, Eishundo Organics. You know them?”

“Fuck, yeah.” He scooted back in the sand and stared at me. “Tak, that’s a design classic you’re wearing. They only ever built the one series, and it was a century ahead of its time at least. Stuff no one had ever tried before. Gekko grip, recabled muscle structure, autonomic survival systems like you wouldn’t believe.”

“No, I would.”

He wasn’t listening. “Flexibility and endurance through the roof, reflex wiring you don’t start to see again until Harkany got started back in the early three hundreds. Man, they just don’t build them like that any more.”

“They certainly don’t. They went bust, didn’t they?”

He shook his head vehemently. “Nah, that was politics. Eishundo was a Drava co-operative, set up in the eighties, typical Quiet Quellist types except I don’t think they ever made any big secret of the fact. Would have been shut down probably, but everyone knew they made the best sport sleeves on the planet and they ended up supplying half the brats in the First Families.”

“Handy for them.”

“Yeah, well. Like I said, there was nothing to touch them.” The enthusiasm leached from his face. “Then, with the Unsettlement, they declared for the Quellists. Harlan family never forgave them for that. When it was over they blacklisted everyone who’d ever worked for Eishundo, even executed a few of the senior biotech guys as traitors and terrorists. Providing arms to the enemy, all that tired line of shit. Plus, with the way things turned out at Drava, they were pretty fucked anyway. Man, I can’t believe you’re sitting there wearing that thing. It’s a fucking piece of history, Tak.”

“Well, that’s good to know.”

“You sure you don’t want to—”

“Sell it to you? Thanks, no, I’ll—.”

“Surf, man. You sure you don’t want to surf? Take the plank out and get wet? Find out what you can do in that thing?”

I shook my head. “I’ll just live with the suspense.”

He looked at me curiously for a while. Then he nodded and went back to watching the sea. You could feel the way just watching it did something for him. Balanced out the fever he’d set raging inside himself. I tried, a little grimly, not to feel envy.

“So maybe some other time,” he said quietly. “When you’re not carrying so much.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” It wasn’t any other time I could usefully imagine, unless he was talking about the past, and I couldn’t see any way to get back there.

He seemed to want to talk.

“You never did this stuff at all, did you? Even back in Newpest?”

I shrugged. “I know how to fall off a plank, if that’s what you mean. Did the local beaches for a couple of summers when I was a kid. Then I started hanging out with a crew and they were strictly subaqua. You know how it goes.”

He nodded, maybe remembering his own Newpest youth. Maybe remembering the last time we’d had this conversation, but I wouldn’t count on it. The last time we’d talked about it was fifty-odd years ago, and if you don’t have Envoy recall, that’s a long time and a lot of conversations past.

“Fucking stupid,” he muttered. “Who’d you run with?”

“Reef Warriors. Hirata chapter, mostly. Dive Free, Die Free. Leave the Scum on the Surface. We would have cut up guys like you as soon as look at you back then. What about you?”

“The? Oh, I thought I was a real fucking free spirit. Stormriders, Standing Wave, Vchira Dawn Chorus. Some others, I don’t remember them all now.” He shook his head. ”So fucking stupid.”

We watched the waves.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked him.

He stretched and tipped his head back towards the sun, eyes clenched shut. A sound like a cat purring made its way up out of his chest, broke finally into a chuckle.

“Here on Vchira? I don’t know, I don’t keep track. Got to be close to a century by now, I guess. On and off.”

“And Virginia says the Bugs folded two decades back.”

“Yeah, near enough. Like I said, Sierra still gets out and about occasionally. But most of the rest of us haven’t been in worse than a beach brawl for ten, twelve years.”

“Let’s hope you haven’t got rusty then.”

He flipped another grin at me. “You take a lot for granted.”

I shook my head. “No, I just listen carefully. This will affect us all, one way or the other? You got that right. You’re going to go with this, whatever the others do. You think it’s for real.”

“Oh yeah?” Brasil lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes. “Well, here’s something you might want to think about then. Something you probably don’t know. Back when the Quellists were fighting the First Families for continental dominance of New Hokkaido, there was a lot of talk about government death squads targeting Quell and the other Contingency Committee names. Sort of counterblow to the Black Brigades. So you know what they did?”

“Yeah, I know.”

He squinted an eye open. “You do?”

“No. But I don’t like rhetorical questions. You’re going to tell me something, get on and tell me.”

He closed his eyes again. I thought something like pain passed over his face.

“Alright. Do you know what data shrapnel is?”

“Sure.” It was an old term, almost outmoded. “Cheap virals. Stone-Age IF stuff. Bits of cannibalised standard code in a broadcast matrix. You lob them into enemy systems and they try to carry out whatever looped functions they were for originally. Clogs up the operating code with inconsistent commands. That’s the theory, anyway. I hear it doesn’t work all that well.”

In fact, I knew the limitations of the weapon pretty well at first hand.

Final resistance on Adoracion a hundred and fifty years ago had broadcast data shrapnel to slow down the Envoy advance across the Manzana Basin, because it was all they had left. It hadn’t slowed us down all that much.