I nodded slowly. “Thanks. That’s good to know.”
“Yeah, sorry if it’s going to fuck up some spectacular assassination attempt for you. You didn’t ask, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’d hate for you to go all that way up there and find nothing to kill.”
Ado smiled thinly.
“That’s not what we’re here for,” I said quickly. “But thanks anyway. Listen Isa, you don’t remember a couple of weeks back, some other Harlan small-fry got himself killed in the wharf district?”
“Yep. Marek Harlan-Tsuchiya. Methed out of his head, fell off Karlovy Dock, banged his head and drowned. Heartbreaking.”
Ado made an impatient gesture. I held up a hand to forestall her.
“Any chance our boy Marek was helped over the edge, do you think?”
Isa pulled a face. “Could be, I guess. Karlovy’s not the safest of places after dark. But they’ll have re-sleeved him by now, and there’s been nothing in the air about it being a murder. Then again—”
“Why should they let the general public in on it. Right.” I could feel the Envoy intuition twitching, but it was too faint to make anything of. “Okay, Isa. Thanks for the newsflash. It doesn’t affect anything at our end, but keep your ears tuned anyway, huh?”
“Always do, sam.”
We paid the tab and left her there, red-veined eyes and harlequin mask and the coil of light weaving at her elbow like some domesticated demon familiar. She waved as I looked back, and I felt a brief stab of affection for her that lasted me all the way out into the street.
“Stupid little bitch,” said Mari Ado as we headed down towards the waterfront. “I hate that fucking fake underclass thing.”
I shrugged. “Well, rebellion takes a lot of different forms.”
“Yeah, and that back there was none of them.”
We took a real-keel ferry across the Reach to the platform suburb they’re calling East Akan, apparently in the hope that people who can’t afford the slopes of the Akan district itself will settle there instead. Ado went off to find some tea, and I stayed by the rail, watching the water traffic and the changing perspectives as the ferry sailed. There’s a magic to Millsport that’s easy to forget while you’re away, but get out on the waters of the Reach and the city seems to open to you. Wind in your face and the belaweed tang of the sea combine to scrub away the urban grimness, and you discover in its place a broad, seafarer’s optimism that can sometimes stay with you for hours after you step back on land.
Trying not to let it go to my head, I squinted south to the horizon.
There, shrouded to fading in seamist thrown up by the maelstrom, Rila Crags brooded in stacked isolation. Not quite the furthest southerly outcrop of the archipelago, but near enough, twenty klicks of open water back north to the nearest other settled piece of land—the tail end of New Kanagawa—and at least half that to the nearest piece of rock you could even stand on. Most of the First Families had staked out high ground in Millsport early on, but Harlan had trumped them all. Rila, beautiful in glistening black volcanic stone, was a fortress in all but name. An elegant and powerful reminder to the whole city of who was in charge here. An eyrie to supplant those built by our Martian predecessors.
We docked at East Akan with a soft bump that was like waking up. I found Mari Ado again, down by the debarkation ramp, and we threaded our way through the rectilinear streets as rapidly as was conducive to checking we weren’t being followed. Ten minutes later, Virginia Vidaura was letting us into the as yet unfitted loft apartment space that Brasil had chosen as our base of operations. Her eyes passed across us like a clinical wipe.
“Go okay?”
“Yeah. Man here didn’t make any new friends, but what can you do?”
Ado grunted and shouldered past me, then disappeared off into the interior of the warehouse. Vidaura closed the door and secured it while I told her about Natsume.
“Jack’ll be disappointed,” she said.
“Yeah, not what I expected either. So much for legends, eh? You want to come across to Whaleback with me?” I raised my eyebrows clownishly.
“Virtual environment.”
“I think that’s probably not a good idea.”
I sighed. “No, probably not.”
TWENTY-NINE
The monastery on Whaleback and Ninth was a grim, blank-faced place.
Whaleback islet, along with about a dozen other similar fragments of land and reclaimed reef, served as a commuting-distance settlement for workers in the docks and marine industries of New Kanagawa. Causeways and suspension spans provided ready access across the short expanse of water to Kanagawa itself, but the limited space on these satellite isles meant cramped, barracks-style apartments for the workforce. The Renouncers had simply acquired a hundred-metre frontage and nailed all the windows shut.
“For security,” the monk who let us in explained. “We run a skeleton crew here and there’s a lot of valuable equipment. You’ll have to hand over those weapons before we go any further.”
Beneath the simple grey coveralls of the order, he was sleeved in a basic, low-end Fabrikon synth that presumably ran built-in scanning gear.
The voice was like a bad phone connection amplified and the silicoflesh face was set in a detached expression which may or may not have reflected how he felt about us—small muscle groups are never that great on the cheaper models. On the other hand, even cheap synths usually run machine levels of reflex and strength, and you could probably burn a blaster hole right through this one without doing much more than piss its wearer off.
“Seems fair,” I told him.
I dug out the GS Rapsodia and handed it over butt-first. Beside me, Sierra Tres did the same with a blunt-looking blaster. Brasil spread his arms agreeably and the synth nodded.
“Good. I’ll return these when you leave.”
He led us through a gloomy evercrete entry hall whose obligatory statue of Konrad Harlan had been unflatteringly masked in plastic, then into what must once have been a ground-floor apartment. Two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs, as basic as the attendant’s sleeve, were gathered facing a desk and a heavy steel door beyond. A second attendant was waiting for us behind the desk. Like her colleague, she was synth sleeved and coveralled in grey, but her facial features seemed fractionally more animated. Maybe she was trying harder, working at full acceptance under the new unisex induction decrees.
“How many of you are requesting audience?” she asked, pleasantly enough given the limitations of her Fabrikon voice.
Jack Soul Brasil and I raised our hands, Sierra Tres stood pointedly to one side. The female attendant gestured to us to follow her and punched out a code on the steel door. It opened with an antique metallic grinding and we stepped into a grey-walled chamber fitted with a half dozen sagging couches and a virtual transfer system that looked like it might still run on silicon.
“Please make yourselves comfortable in one of the couches and attach electrodes and hypnophones as in the instruction holo you will see at your right side.”
Make yourselves comfortable was an ambitious request—the couches were not automould and didn’t seem to have been made with comfort in mind. I was still trying to find a good posture when the attendant stepped across to the transfer control suite and powered us up. A sonocode murmured through the hypnophones.
“Please turn your head to the right and watch the holoform until you lose consciousness.”
Transition, oddly enough, was a lot smoother than I’d expected from the surroundings. At the heart of the holosphere, an oscillating figure eight formed and began cycling through the colour spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the lightshow expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping towards the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shrivelled to white and the blending roar of the stream in my ears. There was a tilting of everything under me, a sense of the whole world being turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and suddenly I was deposited upright on a worn stone platform behind a waterfall in full flood. The remains of the oscillating spectrum showed up briefly as an edge of refracted light in faint mist, then faded like a dying note. Abruptly there were puddles around my feet, and cold, damp air on my face.