“We’re doing well. And we’re doing it silently. Nothing new on the Millsport PD net, and nothing from any of the private security outfits the First Families like to use. They don’t know you’re here.”
I nodded. Gratifying though the news was, it made sense. We’d hit Millsport across the earlier part of the week, split into half a dozen separate groups, arrivals coordinated days apart. Fake ID at Little Blue Bug standards of impenetrability and a variety of different transport options ranging from cheap speed freighters to a Saffron Line luxury cruiser. With people streaming into Millsport from all over the planet for the Harlan’s Day festivities, it would have been either very bad luck or very bad operational management if any of us had been picked up.
But it was still good to know.
“What about security up at the Crags?”
Isa shook her head. “Less noise out of there than a priest’s wife coming. If they knew what you had planned, there’d be a whole new protocol layer, and there isn’t.”
“Or you haven’t spotted it,” said Mari.
Isa fixed her with another cool stare. “My dear, do you know anything at all about dataflow?”
“I know what levels of encryption we’re dealing with.”
“Yes, so do I. Tell me, how do you think I pay for my studies?”
Mari Ado examined her nails. “With petty crime, I assume.”
“Charming.” Isa shuttled her gaze in my direction. “Where did you get her, Tak? Madame Mi’s?”
“Behave, Isa.”
She gusted a long-suffering teenage sigh. “All right, Tak. For you. For you, I won’t rip this mouthy bitch’s hair out. And Mari, for your information, I am gainfully employed nights, under a pseudident, as a freelance security software scribe for more corporate names than you’ve probably given back-street blowjobs.”
She waited, tensed. Ado looked back at her with glittery eyes for a moment, then smiled and leaned forward slightly. Her voice rose no higher than a corrosive murmur.
“Listen, you stupid little virgin, if you think you’re going to get a catfight out of me, you’re badly mistaken. And lucky, too. In the unlikely event that you could push my buttons sufficient to piss me off that far, you wouldn’t even see me coming. Now, why don’t we discuss the business at hand, and then you can go back to playing at datacrime with your study partners and pretending you know something about the world.”
“You fucking whor—”
“Isa!” I put a snap into my voice and a hand in front of her as she started to rise. “That’s enough. She’s right, she could kill you with her bare hands and not even break a sweat. Now behave, or I’m not going to pay you.”
Isa shot me a look of betrayal and sat back down. Under the harlequin face paint, it was hard to tell, but I thought she was flushing furiously. Maybe the crack about virginity had touched a nerve. Mari Ado had the good grace not to look pleased.
“I didn’t have to help you,” Isa said in a small voice. “I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.”
“We won’t,” I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. “Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?”
• • •
What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matte-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to-date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week. Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool. Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.
But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?
I certainly didn’t at her age.
If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—
Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it’s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.
Isa covered it well enough to deserve applause. Whatever misgivings she had, by the time we’d finished the handover, her ruffled feathers had smoothed and she had her laconic Millsport drawl back in place.
“Did you find Natsume?” I asked her.
“Yeah, as it happens I did. But I’m not convinced you’ll want to talk to him.”
“Why not?”
She grinned. “Because he got religion, Kovacs. Lives in a monastery now, over on Whaleback and Ninth.”
“Whaleback? That the Renouncer place?”
“Sure is.” She struck an absurdly solemn, prayerful pose that didn’t match her hair and face. “Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware. Renounce henceforth all flesh, and the world.”
I felt my mouth twitch. Beside me, Mari Ado sat humorless as a ripwing.
“I got no problem with those guys, Isa. They’re harmless. Way I see it, they’re stupid enough to shun female company, that’s their loss. But I’m surprised someone like Natsume’d buy into something like that.”
“Ah, but you’ve been away. They take women, too, these days.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, started way back, nearly a decade ago. What I heard, they found a couple of covert females in their midst. Been there for years. Figures, right? Anyone who’s resleeved could lie about their sex.” Isa’s voice picked up a beat as she hit her home turf running. “No one outside government’s got the money to run datachecks on stuff like that. If you’ve lived in a male sleeve for long enough, even psychosurgery has a hard time telling the difference. So anyway, back at the Brotherhood, it was either go the NewRev single-sleeve-and-you’re-out route, or come over all modern and desegregate. Lo and behold, the word from on high spake suddenly of change.”
“Don’t suppose they changed the name, too, did they?”
“Don’t suppose they did. Still the Brotherhood. Brother embraces sister, apparently.” A teenage shrug. “Not sure how the sisters feel about all that embracing, but that’s entry-level dues for you.”
“Speaking of which,” said Mari Ado. “Are we permitted entry?”
“Yeah, they take visitors. You may have to wait for Natsume, but not so’s you’d notice. That’s the great thing about Renouncing the flesh, isn’t it.” Isa grinned again. “No inconvenient things like Time and Space to worry about.”
“Good work, Issy.”
She blew me a kiss.
But as we were getting up to leave, she frowned slightly and evidently came to a decision. She raised a hand and cupped her fingers to get us back closer.
“Listen, guys. I don’t know exactly what you’re after up at Rila, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this for nothing. Old Harlan won’t be coming out of the pod this time around.”
“No?” On his birthday, that was unusual.
“That’s right. Bit of semi-covert court gossip I dipped yesterday. They lost another heirling down at Amami Sands. Hacked to death with a baling tine, apparently. They’re not making it public, but the MPD are a bit sloppy with their encryption these days. I was cruising for Harlan-related stuff so, like that. Picked it out of the flow. Anyway, with that and old Seichi getting toasted in his skimmer last week, they’re not taking any chances. They’ve called off half the family appearances altogether, and looks like even Mitzi Harlan’s getting a doubled secret-service detachment. And Old Man Harlan stays unsleeved. That’s for definite. Think they’
re planning to let him watch the celebrations through a virtual linkup.”
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 resleeved 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 toward 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; 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 southernmost 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. Mari 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.”
CHAPTER 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-meter 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 farther.”
Beneath the simple gray 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 that 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 gray, 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 gray-walled chamber fitted with half a 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 automold 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 color spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the light show expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping toward the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shriveled 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 tur
ned 180 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.
As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil. The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again. The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.
“It’s this way, I think,” I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.
We followed the steps around a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside, and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.
It rose among gently rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.
“Well, you can see why they went virtual,” I said, mostly to myself. “It beats Whaleback and Ninth.”
Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have gotten over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.
We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately colored tapestries, and as we moved into the center of the hall a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward, and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.