A tight smile creased his narrow visage. “I’ll take that as an official medical pronouncement.”
She started to reply and instead found herself trying to throw up again. The resulting muscular confusion generated one of the more remarkable facial expressions he’d ever seen on a Natural. Once her body relaxed, she swallowed and tried again.
“I feel like I did though. Die, that is. What happened?” Raising her head slightly she looked around. “Where’s the water?”
“Where it belongs, in the canyon. The level’s going down almost as fast as it came up. Speaking of coming up, I doubt there’s much of anything left in your stomach, so you should be all right now.” He smiled. “Just my street medical opinion.”
Looking down at herself she pressed the fingertips of both hands lightly against her torso in the vicinity of her navel. Her expression turned queasy but she did not heave. “Doesn’t feel all right. I really thought I was dead.” Sudden realization made her look at him sharply as she sat all the way up. “How did I get out?”
“I came after you. Swam, pulled you out. Saved your life. Sorry, but I don’t believe in false modesty. If I hadn’t risked mine you wouldn’t now have yours.”
She pondered this for a long moment. “Why did you do it, Whispr?”
He looked away from her and toward the ravine. Moments ago it had been filled to the brim with a roaring torrent. Now it gurgled merrily, like a retired professional athlete toying with outmatched neighborhood opponents.
“I dunno. Congenital stupidity, maybe.” When she started to say something he jumped in ahead of her. “Speaking of congenital stupidity why the hell didn’t you swim toward me when you saw me coming after you? I know you saw me—our eyes met. It would’ve made things a lot easier. You wouldn’t have sunk so close to the edge.” His anger helped to shove thoughts of the near mouth-to-mouth experience out of his mind.
She looked away. “Whispr—I can’t swim.”
That was not one of the responses he had been expecting. “What the fark do you mean you can’t swim? Everyone in the Greater Savannah region can swim. They have to learn. Too much of the place is underwater. What idiots never taught you to swim?”
Her voice strengthened a little. “My idiot parents, who raised me in Topeka, overlooked passing along that particular skill. Not a critical need for it in Topeka.”
“I suppose not,” he acknowledged. “Uh, where’s Topeka?”
She told him. “Dry country. High country. Safe country. I learned a lot, but not how to swim. I was always too busy with academics. Didn’t even get to the local soche very often to mix with the other kids.” Noting his expression she added, “I know it doesn’t make any sense. There are several exercise pools in my tower, salt water as well as fresh, and I’ve never done more than wade in any of them. I love the beach, I even love the water. I just can’t swim.” She swallowed hard and her voice dropped. “If you hadn’t come after me, Whispr, I’d have drowned.”
Before he realized it, he spoke more harshly than he intended. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He was stunned and confused by what happened next.
Dr. Ingrid Seastrom started to cry.
Despite everything they had been through, despite all they had endured since leaving Savannah, she had always maintained her composure throughout. She had not cried when Napun Molé had held them at gunpoint in the Everglades, nor when their fleeing 4×4 had crashed into the river in Sanbona. She had not cried when Josini Jay-Joh Umfolozi had stuck a gun in her face in the cab of his nephew’s commercial transporter and threatened to blow her brains out.
Whispr knew how to deal with an attack on the street. He knew how to disarm aggravated police with flattering words and outmaneuver muscle-bound lods with practiced side steps. He knew the best way to wrangle “donations” from kindhearted tourists and riffle unaware business folk. But he did not have the slightest notion what to do now. So he fell back on his tried and true method for minimizing mistakes: he did nothing.
“I can’t … I don’t know, Whispr,” she coughed between sobs. “I’m not … I wasn’t made for this. I should be in my office back home treating the sick and injured, not being the sick and injured. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ” She started to laugh but was too weak to do more than gasp a few desultory chuckles. “This is all a bad dream. You, assassins, SICK, the thread; all of it. We’re going to die here and it’s my fault. My stubborn, stupid, single-minded fault! A bad dream. Bad karma.”
He’d had enough. “Bad drama, you mean.” Reaching down, he slipped his arms under hers and lifted her to her feet. In her expression, confusion and despair made room for shock. “Get a hold of yourself, doc! First of all, the ‘we’re all gonna die’ mantra is mine. I claim it by right of origination. So you can forget about blubbering that one again. You want to bawl? Fine, go ahead and tearwork your lady ducts until they’re as dry as the ground where we’re standing. But we are here and we are going to go on and we are going to get into the facility at Nerens and learn what that thread is all about. Then maybe we’ll end up dead, but not before. Because I’m damned if I’ve wasted all this time and trouble and energy and effort just to indulge some spoiled bitchwitch of a doctor who thinks she’s on some tiptoliday and can just up and quit and call a cab to go home because she’s decided to go all boredass on me!”
She stood gaping at him wide-eyed until he finally ran down. At first he thought she was going to break out crying again. Then what he hoped would happen began to take place before his eyes. She started to get mad. Serious mad. When she swung at him he dodged. When she aimed a furious frustrated kick at his crotch he slipped easily to one side. The fact that he was smiling at her all the while only squared her fury.
“You bastard! You miserable bumscum, you filthy …!”
“That’s it, doc.” As he avoided her futile, untutored blows and kicks he did his best to egg her on. “Get it all out. All the aggravation, all the anger; leave it here on the sand and rock. Mix it with your vomit. Whoa!” Her next blow nearly connected with his face. “I can’t argue about one thing, though,” he concluded as he continued to dance around her. “You got me all wet again.”
Still livid but too exhausted by her near death swim to keep swinging, she paused and blinked at him. Then she started to laugh again, only this time it was more than a couple of transitory chuckles. She laughed until she cried, and then she was crying again, and then laughing. Holding at a safe distance and watching her he was reminded of why, as a friend had once told him while sharing a particularly potent stim in Eastwood Park in the north of the city, women were not just another gender but another species.
He let her face flood until he feared she might sprain something. “Okay, doc. That’s enough. I think you got everything out now. Food, flood water, emotions. You look drained, anyway.” Approaching warily, he gripped her right shoulder and squeezed reassuringly.
Her eyes tilted up to meet his own and for a moment, for an instant, there was something in her expression that …
He imagined she was going to embrace him. He welcomed it and he feared it. As it turned out, the emotional energy he devoted to both possibilities was wasted because she held off, held back, and instead of moving toward him, knelt to fumble with her pack. Within his shriveled soul a small spark winked out as swiftly as it had unexpectedly sprung to life. Wordlessly, he bent to help her.
Her communicator was gone, swept away by the force of the flood that had ripped open the pockets of her pants. That left them with only his own device and, in a dire emergency, a simple mechanical compass. Using only those instruments they would have to make it the rest of the way to Nerens. The antique compass with its magnetic needle and flat unilluminated face had been an afterthought, pressed on them by the shopkeeper in Orangemund who had outfitted them with their trekking supplies. It was one piece of gear that did not need batteries.
Leaving her to finish going through her battered pack he left to make an inventory of his own supplie
s. Thanks to the unbreakable pack straps both of them still had their sleeping blankets, waterpaks, and most of their food concentrates. For one terrible moment he thought that the tubes containing his vital nutrient supplements had been swept away. He finally found the package, still dry and intact, where it had become wrapped up in a shirt. All they had surrendered to the rampaging flash flood was some food, some time, and some unreasonable assumptions.
“You can do this, doc.” He stood nearby as she finished repacking her gear. “We can do this. Sure we’ll end up dead eventually, but we can do this.”
She had tied the bottom of her shirt up in a knot beneath her breasts, exposing her belly. Not that the sight of the few creamy centimeters of exposed flesh were all that he could have wished for, but he would take what he could get. They constituted a wondrous diversion from the desiccated terrain around them.
“Once again, Whispr,” she observed dryly, “I find myself having to rely on your unreserved enthusiasm to motivate me.” She took a deep breath, which did wonders for his own motivation. “I promise you this: if we make it to Nerens and I can get us inside, you won’t be killed.”
“How can you make a promise like that?” He hastened to parallel her as she struck off northward, following the edge of the ravine that had tried to kill them.
“In the full knowledge that if I’m wrong I won’t have to listen to you harangue me about it.”
He snorted. “Ah, see—now you’re the one who’s smiling.”
Periodically pausing to check their progress against the maps contained in his communicator, they followed the ravine northward until it turned east toward the mountains that had spawned the flash flood. There followed another broad stretch of hard ground that save for scattered gravel was as smooth and flat and lifeless as the paved floor of a building supply warehouse. As they advanced, Whispr kept glancing nervously at the sky. Out on such open terrain they would be as visible to a searcher drone or passing hi-rez satellite as the Eiffel Tower in a cornfield.
But nothing materialized to question their progress. Even the ubiquitous black and white crows had temporarily foresworn the travelers’ company, there being nothing for them to scavenge in such a dead, barren place. Occasionally they would stop at pools of fresh rainwater to slake their thirst, grateful for these smaller and less violent echoes of the recent atypical downpour and the chance to hydrate without having to dig into their supplies.
Both were relieved when the flat pan gave way to low hills cut by smaller gullies than the one from which they had recently escaped. True to form, Ouspel’s course followed one of these northward. Whispr especially was thankful for the opportunity to once again advance under cover. It took some urging on his part to persuade Ingrid to descend once more into a winding fissure in the rocks. The memory of having nearly drowned in another was still far too fresh for comfort.
“We have to stay in the ravines,” he reminded her firmly. “They’re the only cover we have from Sperrgebeit patrols. Also, in the sun it makes for cooler walking.”
“I know, I know. It’s only … I know it isn’t reasonable, Whispr. But most psychological blocks aren’t. It’s not that I’ve turned suddenly hydrophobic. It’s just that the close call I had, that we had, is so recent.” She nodded toward the gully’s shadowy depths. “Why can’t we follow it by walking along the edge?”
“I just told you why. Because a searcher drone would be able to spot us from a distance. That’s why Ouspel’s instructions insist we go down into them. This is the kind of terrain that let him get away clean from the facility.” He marshaled more of his argument. “It would be hell to have made it all this way only to get picked up by SICK security because you can’t handle walking in a gulch that’s four meters deep.”
She stood contemplating the silent fissure in the earth for another few minutes. He said nothing more, waiting patiently. Finally she nodded and started down the slope before them, sliding and slipping her way to the sandy bottom. That it was covered with a centimeter or so of pooled rainfall did nothing to improve her mood. Feeling as though she were standing with her feet sunk halfway into a mirror and that if she took one wrong step she would sink out of sight into it forever, she looked over at him.
“If we’re caught in another flash flood you’ll save me again, won’t you?”
He smiled. “Sure. Why not? If I drown out here chances are it’ll be quicker than what’s waiting for us in Nerens.”
She made a face and allowed her pack to reposition itself against her shoulders and spine. The integrated pressure pads expanded downward to compensate for the shift.
“I’ll try my best not to inhibit your demise, since the speed with which it will occur seems to be of paramount importance to you.”
“You bet your ass it is, doc.” As he walked beside her his narrow feet kicked up rainwater. The drops hung briefly in the desert air like glass marbles. “Maybe if I die first you can time it.”
4
The House of Nasty. An admirably straightforward description, Molé mused. Also an in-your-face acknowledgment of what lay within.
As he stood contemplating the floating glowing sign that hovered above and just in front of the dubious establishment, the pedestrians shuffling and hurrying around him ignored the unremarkable old man in their midst. It was no different here than in Tokyo, or Newnew York, or London or Hio Janeiro or Sagramanda. He was a nonentity. Even more, he was an elderly nonentity. Clearly no threat to anyone, too plainly dressed to be worth riffling, a cipherous bit of perambulating protoplasm that posed no evident threat to man, Meld, beast, or any combination thereof.
That was just how he liked it.
Should anyone happened to have glanced in the direction of the innocuous figure who was staring at the sign over the basement entrance they would never have guessed that beneath the elderly exterior surged an occasional and sometimes lethal volcanic eruption of aggravation. It was just as well that no one did. Molé was in no mood to suffer the inquisitive. Curiosity was intrusive, intrusion was invasion, and invaders were as likely to have their throats cut as their cheeks patted, depending on his frame of mind. At the moment the latter was as dark as the hour of night. The heavy cloud cover that had settled in over Cape Town like a thick wool blanket matched his mood.
He had lost the trail. Lost track of his quarry. The mildly deranged doctor and her nonentity stick-man Meld of a companion had vanished from the hunter’s ken, plucked literally from under his gaze by the operator of a counterfeit elephant. While Molé had looked on helplessly from atop a hill in the backcountry of the Sanbona Preserve, the quadrupedal mechanical transport had picked up his targets, turned, and strode off to the north. That did not mean its final destination lay to the north. Once out of his sight it could have gone in any direction, further complicating his interrupted pursuit of the two Namericans.
The machine itself was the only clue he had left. He still had no idea where the two mismatched thieves were going or what they intended to do with the thread. The fact that they had come here, to the heartland of his present employers, had been a sufficiently startling development in itself. Subsequent to their arrival everything they had done had been characteristic of the classic African tourist. They had done nothing to suggest that they were travelers in possession of extremely valuable stolen property.
Did they know that it was him who had nearly run them down in Sanbona? Not that it mattered. Having been alerted to the fact that their presence in southern Africa had been discovered they would be even more on their guard than ever. Which would make his job of locating them all over again harder than ever.
Despite his frustration he did not despair. Failure was not in his vocabulary. It was one reason why he was repeatedly hired for such difficult tasks. He had never failed to complete whatever assignment he had accepted. Nor would this be the first time. He certainly would not be bested by a pair of bumbling amateur know-nothings from Namerica who did not even understand the significance of what they had t
aken.
If the trail ahead disappears a good tracker knows to retrace his steps and search for overlooked clues on ground already trodden. Careful probing and questioning had led him here, tonight, to the least reputable section of Cape Town; a district so despised that the honorable citizens of the city could not wait for the planet’s slowly rising waters to overtake and consume it.
The House of Nasty, in fact, lay below sea level. The original brick walls of the basement in the old harbor warehouse had been reinforced and rendered watertight by being infused with a penetrating liquid epoxy. The result was the modern but far sturdier chemical equivalent of the Delft tiles the Dutch had once used to waterproof the lower floors of their own buildings. While not as attractive as the hand-painted seventeenth-century Dutch materials, the newer composites were considerably more hydrophilic.
Within the shimmering sign above the entrance a continuously scanning optical pickup concluded that the eyes of the small man standing in the street had been focused on the front of the building for the requisite predetermined length of time. Responding to its programming, the sign dispatched a targeted mobiad. Descending onto the street, this slowed to a halt at the psychologically predetermined optimum distance from the potential customer’s eyes. The glowing motile advertisement then proceeded to flash fire a series of three-dimensional vit images calculated to stimulate the more degenerate crevices and recesses of the singled-out viewer’s brain. For a modest fee, any and all of these advertised depravities could be had by simply strolling to the entrance of the named establishment, suitably identifying oneself at the door as an adult, and requesting admittance.
Molé irritably waved the mobiad aside, his hand brushing through the images. Casual obscenities were obliterated, outrageous smut interrupted. If the information he had accumulated over the previous several days was accurate, he would find the individual he sought partaking of the soiled delights within. The fiercely touted attractions did not inveigle him. He was quite capable of amusing himself without having to pay an unimaginative supplier.