Dloan had shaken his head when Elson Roa admitted he had thrown away whatever fabulous weapon had brought down two planes and their already-launched ordnance in one discharge. The Solipsist leader had attempted to use the weapon against the ground troops on the other side of the valley, and determined when it didn’t work that the weapon had had only a limited number of shots in it to start with, and he had used them all up.
Dloan bit his tongue on the subject of ancient weaponry occasionally being more intelligent than the people who came to use it. Cenuij, Dloan thought, would not have been so tactful, and the realisation was more painful than the trifling wound in his leg.
Zefla couldn’t stop shivering, though it was not cold inside the big ACV. There were only about twenty Solipsists left on board. Nobody else had made it back to the Solo from the attack on the Land Car, though some of the others were believed to have been captured rather than killed. Zefla could not understand how Roa could be so phlegmatic, either about the loss of most of his force and the inevitable loss of the Solo too, or the fact that-by using the embargoed anti-aircraft weapon as well as attacking the Court-protected Land Car-he had done not one but two things for either of which the World Court would pursue him to the ends of the system, and imprison him for life, at least.
Miz sat in the ACV’s medic cabin, watching Sharrow treat the wound in his hand. The bullet had gone right through the muscle at the base of his thumb; he still had about fifty per cent of its use, and it would be a hundred per cent in a month or so. It was the sort of million-Thrial wound conscripts in unpopular wars dreamt about. He tried to joke with Sharrow about it, but later in the heads he found some blood in his hair that was probably Cenuij’s and promptly threw up.
Sharrow felt Cenuij fall against her and watched his body tumble from the door and bounce on the hovercraft’s skirt a hundred times that night, as the big ACV rumbled down the Yallam.
Disaster came at Eph, where the river flowed past and round the city in a narrow gorge. Heavy rains upstream a few days earlier meant the river had risen a couple of metres since the Solipsists had come upstream, and the Solo lost all four of its propellers under the first railway bridge.
They drifted downriver, engines still roaring as Roa’s helmsman tried to use the stumps of the shattered propeller blades to keep some way on the craft. It didn’t work; the Solo bumped into barges, bridge-supports and wharves all the way round the city, watched by townspeople and tracked by a small flotilla of brightly lit pleasure craft held back by a couple of police boats.
“Why?” Sharrow asked Roa when he came staggering down the steps into the ACV’s echoing garage space.
“Why what?” he shouted above the noise of the screaming engines, looking tired and confused.
“Why did you attack the Land Car?” she yelled, steadying herself against the bulkhead as the hovercraft lurched. “What was the point?”
“We were hired to,” Roa shouted, frowning, as though it should have been obvious.
“By whom?”
“I don’t know,” Roa said quietly, so that she saw rather than heard the words. The Solipsist leader closed his eyes and started to hum. The ACV lurched again and he was thrown against the bulkhead. Roa braced himself with one arm, then said, “Excuse me,” and disappeared back up the stairs to the flight deck.
Roa didn’t object when they proposed buying one of a couple of assault inflatables they’d found in the hovercraft’s garage.
He took a cheque.
They took to the waves as they were passing the lagoon of the Stramph-Veddick Circus Lands and made it into the enclave despite a black-bodied, almost silent and armed-looking heli-drone coming down to take a long, hard look at them as they bounced over the chopping dark waters towards the fabulous lights of the Circus.
The Solo sailed forlornly on into the night. The Solipsists had switched its lights back on and the last they saw of it the old hovercraft was scraping under some trees on its way downriver, losing what remained of its propellers against the overhanging branches in a distant, explosive clattering.
Miz had business contacts in the Circus; he talked them out of some money and the team onto a tourist charter flight out of the theme-park that morning. He picked up money from one of his office managers when they landed in BoChen in southern Jonolrey and hired an auto car. They slept fitfully most of the way to Vembyr, and when Zefla woke it was with the opinion that having slept on it, with the exception of Sharrow, probably the best thing they could do was go to Yadayeypon voluntarily and answer their indictments after all.
Miz had taken a few days to be convinced.
“I am sorry you lost your friend,” Feril said.
“Friend,” she repeated, frowning a little. “I’m not sure Cenuij was ever a friend,” she said. “But-” she gave a strange, small laugh “- we were very close.”
She stood on an old tarpaulin spattered with tiny flecks of dried plaster. A single, naked electric-bulb burned brightly in the middle of the room, shedding a fierce yellow-white light throughout the room and casting a deep shadow across the floor behind her. She was thinking about going for a walk. There was something inexplicably soothing about watching the android work, but there was also something about the harshness of the light that made her uncomfortable.
The tall, wide windows looked out onto darkness.
“Have you many happy memories of him?” Feril asked. The android was perched on a step-ladder holding a small bucket in one hand and a trowel in the other.
“Not many,” she said, trying to remember. “Well, yes; some.” She sounded exasperated as she said, “We argued a lot… but I’ve never objected to a good argument.”
“You said he was your team classicist. Will you have to get another?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh,” Fenril said. It scooped a glistening lump of plaster from the bucket onto the trowel-blade, then set the bucket down on the top step of the ladder.
“May I ask a favour of you?” she said.
“Yes,” Feril said. An ornate plaster frieze shaped like a long, flower-filled trellis filled the angle between the wall and the ceiling of half the room, starting in the corner by the door and ending where the android stood on the ladder. It carefully applied the plaster to the end of the frieze.
“I’d like to find out if there have been any androids who’ve suddenly left Vembyr and disappeared recently; especially pairs of androids. Androids who could pass for human at very close range.”
The android was silent for a couple of seconds, patiently using the trowel to keep the drooping lump of plaster in place. Then it said, “No, none have been reported leaving the city for the last nine years.”
“Hmm. Before that?”
The machine paused only briefly. “The city records go back five millennia,” the machine said, sounding regretful. “During that time the android population of Vembyr has remained roughly static at twenty-three thousand, with perhaps a tenth of that number at large in the rest of the system. Only a few hundred androids have ever been constructed who might pass for human. None live in the city, and some-about forty or so-are officially missing, untraced. Indeed the majority of missing androids are human simulacra. They are believed to have been taken unwillingly, probably by rich individuals, and used for… a variety of acts, all of which are illegal when perpetrated against humans.”
“I’ll bet,” she said. She put one hand under her armpit and the other to her mouth, tapping her teeth with her fingers. “Does anyone still make androids?”
“Oh, no,” the machine said, turning to look at her. “That has been prohibited for the last twelve hundred years. Even we may only repair existing examples, though we believe the World Court will grant us permission to manufacture a hundred or so androids from currently available spare parts sometime before the end of the next century.”