It was a hot day; the sun was bright in the clear sky. The terminus of the Trans-Continental Monorail stood just beyond the flower-beds Keteo was staring at so intently. Sharrow looked around the square, where traffic-mostly buses-moved, and people-almost all totally nude-walked.
“Oh shit,” Sharrow said. “Just my luck to arrive in Nudist Week.”
Roa, who had been looking strangely tense until that point, relaxed and smiled. “Nudist Week,” he said, sounding relieved. “Yes; they really are, aren’t they? Of course.”
Sharrow looked around the square again, wondering if Miz and the Francks were here yet.
“Well,” Roa said to her. “Here we are. I have no idea whether I shall need you in the future, but I trust I imagine you well, if we do meet again.” He fell silent and stared at his finger nails.
She looked from him to the other two Solipsists; the man beside Roa was sitting with his eyes tightly closed. Keteo the driver was gunning the engine and muttering something as he glared at the distant flower-bed. Roa looked away and closed his eyes. He made a humming noise and started to roll his head.
She got down out of the half-track and stood on the road. Buses grumbled past; people-mostly naked, many carrying briefcases-walked past.
Elson Roa opened his eyes. He looked briefly delighted, then saw her standing on the road surface and started. He frowned down at her.
“Oh,” he said. “Politeness.” He reached down with one hand. She shook it. “Good-bye,” he said.
“Good-bye,” she replied, and turned and walked away.
When she looked back, Roa and the other back-seat Solipsist were arguing vehemently with the driver and gesticulating alternately at the flower-beds and the boulevard.
She walked self-consciously to the monorail station. As she walked up the steps, the Solipsist half-track roared out of the square, just missing the flower-beds and sending mostly naked pedestrians scattering in all directions as it bounced down the boulevard back towards the port.
She felt more and more awkward walking amongst the naked people in the station concourse, so she stopped to take her clothes off in a phone booth and was promptly arrested for stripping in public, an offence against common decency.
7 Operating Difficulties
The K’lel desert was a few million square kilometres of karst; eroded limestone devoid of topsoil. Karst forms when carbon dioxide dissolved in rain reacts with porous limestone as the moisture permeates it on its way to an underlying layer of impervious rock. Golter had had not one but several ages when there had been widespread and rather crude industrialisation, and each time one of the major centres had been downwind of K’lel, a lushly but shallowly forested area already vulnerable to the scouring effect of the Belt winds; the succession of increased carbon dioxide levels and heavy acid rainfall in the past had gradually destroyed the forests and eroded the rock while the Belt winds had produced a dust-bowl from the remaining soil, creating a change in the climate that only accelerated the desertification.
Eventually only the rock had been left, frayed and sculpted into spears and pinnacles of knife-sharp karst; a forest of pitted stone blades stretching from horizon to horizon, baked to the heat of the equatorial sun and dotted with collapsed caves where a few parched plants clung on in dark, sunken oases, and striated by tattered ribbons of seemingly level ground where the karst’s brittle corrugations were on a scale of centimetres rather than kilometres.
There were always plans to revivify the dead heart of the continent, but they never came to anything; even the seemingly promising scheme to replace the main space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere, Ikueshleng, with a new complex in the desert had failed. Apart from some ruins, a sprinkling of old waste silos, a few vast, automated solar energy farms, and the Traps-Continental Monorail-also sun-powered-the K’lel was empty.
She squatted on her haunches in the shadow of the monorail support, holding her rifle butt down on the dusty ripples of stone, clenching the gun between her knees while she adjusted the scarf round her head, tucking one end into the collar of her light jacket.
It was mid-morning; the high cirrus clouds were poised like feathery arches over the warming expanse of karst, and the still air sucked sweat from exposed skin with an enthusiasm bordering on kleptomania. She slipped the mask up over her mouth and nose and reseated the dark visor over her eyes, then sat back, holding the gun, her fingers tapping on the barrel. She took a drink from her water bottle and glanced at her watch. She looked over at Dloan, crouching at the other leg of the monorail, rifle slung over his back, wires from his head-scarf leading into an opened junction box in the support leg. He looked up at her and shook his head.
Sharrow leant back against the already uncomfortably warm support leg. She shifted her satchel so that it was between her back and the hot metal of the monorail support. She looked at the time again. She hated waiting.
They met up again in the Continental Hotel in Aïs, after Sharrow had bailed herself out of Aïs’s Vice Squad pound and bribed the desk sergeant to lose the record of her arrest.
She finally arrived at the hotel-clothed again, and veiled, even if it did attract attention-but there was nobody there registered as Kuma or any other name she could imagine the others might be using.
She stood, tapping her fingers on the cool surface of the reception desk while the smiling and quite naked clerk scratched delicately under one armpit with a pen. She wondered whether to ask if there were any messages for her; she was starting to worry about giving her location away to the Huhsz. She’d think about it. She bought a newssheet to see if the Huhsz had their Passports yet and headed for the bar.
The first person she saw was a fully clothed Cenuij Mu.
“My watch says the damn thing should be visible by now,” Miz said, tight-beaming from the top of the monorail line, two kilometres away round the shallow curve the twinned tracks took to avoid a region of collapsed caves.
“Mine too,” Sharrow said into the mask. She squinted into the distance, trying to make out the tiny dot that was Miz, sitting on the baking top-surface of the monorail; the last time she’d looked she’d been able to see him and the lump on the ground beneath him, which was the camouflaged-netted All-Terrain, but the heat had increased sufficiently in just the last ten minutes for it to be impossible to see either now; with the naked eye the white line of the rail writhed and shimmered, smearing any detail. She tried adjusting the magnification and the polarisation of the visor, but gave up after a while.
“Nothing on the phones?” she asked.
“Just expansion noises,” Miz replied.
She looked at her watch again.
“So what changed your mind?” she asked Cenuij, in the elevator to the floor where the others were waiting.
He sighed and pulled back the left sleeve of his shirt.
She bent forward, looking. “Nasty. Laser?”
“I believe so,” he said, pulling down his sleeve again. “There were three this time. They wrecked my apartment. Last I heard-before I had to run away-my insurance company was refusing to pay out.” Cenuij made a sniffing noise and leant back against the wall of the lift, arms crossed. “When all this is over I shall ask you to cover that loss.”
“I promise,” Sharrow said, holding up one hand.
“Hmm,” Cenuij said as the elevator slowed. “Meanwhile, Miz appears to think there’s some point in staging…” Cenuij looked round the elevator, then shrugged, “a train robbery.”
Sharrow raised her eyebrows. The elevator stopped.
“For… artifacts,” Cenuij said, as the doors opened and they left, “that are indestructible, can’t be hidden and it would be suicide to hold on to.” He shook his head as they walked down the wide corridor. “Does the Log-Jam turn everybody’s brains to mush?”