Impersonations
Page 7
But Lord Peltrot’s words had gained momentum, and he talked right over her in a voice of tortured metal. The scent of his dying flesh came off him in a wave, and Sula’s stomach turned. “All was decided! There were no objections! You must sign the agreement as it stands, and with no conditions!”
“I need do nothing!” Sula shouted into the din. Lord Peltrot fell silent, the round empty eyes like the barrels of a shotgun.
“I am not required to do anything at all,” Sula said. “It is entirely up to me whether the agreement is signed or not, and right now, I am not inclined to sign it.”
Lord Peltrot’s words came out as a deep baritone overlaid with discordant harmonies. “It would be in your interest,” he said.
“I will judge my own interest, thank you,” Sula said. “I think this interview is at an end.”
Vibrating with anger, Sula put on her cap and marched out. She called Macnamara with her sleeve display and had to wait outside for no more than a few seconds before the car glided to a stop in front of the building. The door rolled up, and Sula stepped inside.
“Train station,” she said. And thought, What the hell just happened?
On the way to the station, she called Parku at the dockyard. “I need to find out everything there is to know about Lord Peltrot Convil and the Manado Company,” she said.
“My lady, I’ve sent you everything I’ve discovered.”
“Enlarge your inquiries. And set Koridun to work as well, and tell her to work it from the security and intelligence angle—and at this point, I’m past caring whether either of you are discreet.”
There was a pause somewhat longer than that required for a signal to bounce to the ring and back. “Very good, my lady,” said Parku.
Sula ended the transmission.
What was she now? Angry, baffled, and hip-deep in something she didn’t understand.
* * *
The train flew upward over arches that looked as tenuous as spiders’ webs as it raced into the Minahasa Highlands. The roadbed ran along the rims of volcanic craters, and Sula could look down to see blue lakes, small settlements, brilliant green rice fields, terraces, and steam rising from hot springs. Occasional whiffs of sulphur floated through the compartment as the train neared the outpourings of hot water.
The route took them curving along the Gulf of Tomini to the south, and in the distance Sula could see the receivers of the Sulawesi Rectenna Field spread like lily pads over the water, where they received microwave energy beamed down from the antimatter ring and converted to enough electricity to power the entire island. Below the surface, in the lightless shadow of the great receiver field, were the underwater command station and a hotel for underwater tourism. Sula couldn’t quite imagine what attracted people to depth and darkness and pressure, especially when the bright colors of the surface beckoned everywhere she looked.
Looking south, she saw an optical illusion—one moment, the brilliant equatorial sky was unmarked, the next, the vertical black line of the elevator cables appeared as if produced by a magician from behind a celestial cape. Sula could see the cables reach up into the sky, toward the silver arc of the antimatter ring, where they disappeared into the haze. Sula tried to work out the type of refraction that had made this possible—was it “looming?”—but before she could solve the problem, the arrival at Tambu was announced.
The elevator terminus was at, or rather above, the city of Tambu, on the eastern side of Sulawesi’s northern peninsula. As the train drifted into the station, Sula grinned as she saw it had been built in the Dhai-ro style, like the elevator terminus at Nairobi.
Sula acquired a Fleet car, traveled down the high ridge above the town, and checked into the Hotel Imperial—built in the more recent, geometric Devis mode—where in the evening she would be joined by Lady Ermina Vaswati, Caro’s cousin Goojie. That left the afternoon free, and Sula decided to implement her own version of Goojie’s proactive policy.
The retired warrant officer who staffed the Fleet recruiting office in Tambu was jolted into terror by the sight of a celebrated war hero, the victor of Zanshaa, stalking into his office in full dress, medals gleaming, green eyes glittering with purpose. The Lai-own leaped to her feet, her feathery hair flying, and as her old reflexes took over, she snapped to attention, braced, her throat bared in submission before the sickle-shaped knife Sula wore at her belt.
“As you were,” Sula said, amused. The recruiter wasn’t required to brace: she’d retired from the military and technically was a civilian employee of the Fleet, and thus someone who was not obliged to offer her life to an officer at every possible opportunity.
The recruitment office was small, most of it taken up by cubicles for administering tests to aspiring recruits. The Fleet was desirable employment for the average Terran, and hundreds of thousands applied every year for the smallish number of places available.
It took all of ten minutes for Sula to ask her questions and conclude her inspection, during which time the ex-warrant officer calmed down and, in the end, asked for a picture with Sula so that she could put it on the wall and impress the recruits. Sula obliged, trying to look martial, and then she complimented her employee on her operation and left. She proclaimed the proactive policy a success.
Afterward, she wandered around Tambu and found it a typical port town, with a population drawn from every race, world, and class in the empire. There were at least as many Naxids as humans, and again they made her nervous. Bustling commerce was everywhere, but there was nothing in the shops she couldn’t find in any other major city. The equatorial heat and humidity gave her a headache, and she had Macnamara drive her back to the hotel.
Later, she was back in the car to pick up Goojie. The terminal was a vast structure built on the hill, with a swooping portico. Standing in the arrival lounge, Sula looked up through a transparent ceiling to watch the big car drop down the great cable to a lodging in its bay, then went into the arrival lounge to await processing. She had time for a cup of tea before Goojie arrived. For a moment, Goojie seemed like a strange distortion in a mirror, Sula’s pale face and pale gold hair atop someone else’s body, implausibly dressed in a casual tropical gown streaked artfully with several shades of pale blue, followed by two uniformed porters supervising a vast array of baggage, and a female valet with long pipestem legs and dark hair cut severely short, whose downcast eyes were focused firmly on her sleeve display, which she was jabbing with some urgency.
“Caro!” Goojie waved extravagantly and rushed on golden glittering platform shoes to clasp Sula in a warm familial embrace scented with chypre. Sula politely reciprocated the embrace, then disengaged and tugged her disarrayed undress tunic back into position.
“Caroline,” she said. “I’m really not Caro anymore.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
Sula and Goojie returned to the car, where Macnamara and the various porters eventually gave up trying to fit all Goojie’s bags into the luggage compartment and had to summon a taxi to bring the bags, along with the valet, to the hotel.
“Did you really need so much luggage?” Sula asked.
“I’ve got to represent my family and the company in any conceivable social situation and in any possible climate.”
“Ah. That’s where uniforms come in handy.”
Goojie eyed Sula’s uniform. “That dark green color suits you well enough, but don’t you think uniforms lack joy and self-expression?”
“For me,” Sula said, “a uniform is self-expression.”
“Well,” said Goojie, “we’ll fix that.”
Sula considered this. The uniforms had suited her well when she was a weapon, when they had fitted her like a scabbard. But now that she was a weapon no longer, perhaps the simplicity of the uniform was no longer desirable.
“I brought a lot more clothes and other gear with me,” Goojie went on, “but that’s going to my office and quarters in Quito along with the rest of my servants.”
Goojie, Sula decided, was s
urrounded by clouds: a cloud of chypre, a cloud of servants, a cloud of possessions. Sula had remained fairly cloud-free, but she’d ended up in the same place as Goojie anyway, a useless job on a dead-end world.
Except Goojie, at least, had expectations of something better.
Conversation over dinner, and on the Kan-fra aircraft the next day, was pleasant and trouble-free. Goojie talked about the teachers at her and Caro’s old school—who, being much the same as teachers everywhere, seemed familiar even though Sula had never met them. Goojie chatted of former schoolmates who Sula professed not to remember, and discussed policies and personalities at the Kan-fra company.
On the flight over the Pacific, sipping tea with the sound of atmosphere hissing along the hull, Sula found herself talking about her time at the academy, and mentioned some of her less toxic war experiences. Goojie had been untouched by the war, safe on Preowyn, though a cousin of hers had been a prisoner taken at Magaria, released when the system had been retaken. He had undergone hardship, apparently. Whole days without bathing, Sula assumed, and a lousy climate, too.
“You released him,” Goojie said. “When you and the Fleet came in.”
“I didn’t do it personally.”
“There was a lot of wartime secrecy, but I made a point of following you as much as I could. Your squadron did very well, and there you were, right out front. Everyone else in the battle seemed to take a beating.”
Sula smiled and sipped her tea. This was what had so exercised the overbearing Danitz. She told Goojie of the encounter with the Democracy Club.
“So, what was your secret?” Goojie asked.
Sula smiled to herself. “I had the squadron fly along the convex hull of a chaotic dynamic system.”
Goojie’s wine glass paused halfway to her lips. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
“It was against orders—and worse, a success—and so here I am, on Earth, out of the way. It’s probably my last command, at least until Supreme Commander Tork dies, and he’s likely to go on forever.”
“I still don’t understand what you did.”
“I could explain it, but why bother?”
“Tell me. I want to know more than that Danitz person.” She waved at one of the aircraft’s stewards. “But I want to top up my wine first. Are you sure you won’t have any?”
“I’m sure,” Sula said. Goojie seemed unable to understand that she didn’t drink alcohol, which was understandable perhaps in anyone who knew Caro Sula.
“Oh, well,” Goojie said. “More tea, then?”
An hour later, the aircraft arrowed to a water landing in Canterbury Bight, a huge wall of foam rising up to curtain the hull, pale green seawater sluicing the windows, the lap belt biting Sula’s abdomen . . . and then, as the windows cleared, Sula saw the broad bulk of the Timaru volcano shouldering its way out of the waters, steam rising from a vent on its black, gleaming flank.
“Active geology,” she said. “I can’t seem to get away from it.”
* * *
Titanic figures of Earth’s great heroes loomed over the white marble roadway. Kong Fuzi, Shihuangdi, Elizabeth I, Rameses II, Cyrus, Augustus, Peter the Great, Ashoka, Justinian, Josef Stalin, Louis XIV, Mao Zedong.
“All established systems that prefigured the Praxis,” said their guide. “But all such Terran systems, lacking the perfect rigor of the eternal Praxis, failed over time.”
Lord and Lady Macedoin, partisans of Terran history, had constructed the Arch over eight hundred years before, a great blazing white bridge that leaped over the entrance to Akaroa harbor, making whole again the great circle of the extinct crater that formed the bay. The statues, plated in gleaming copper, were sixteen times life size and stood in niches inset on the arch’s façade. For the most part, they were in dynamic postures: gesturing, brandishing weapons, summoning, offering, or calling history to witness their great decisions. Their postures seemed unstable, and the guide went into detail concerning their internal structure and the ways in which they were anchored to the bridge.
“They’ve survived many earthquakes and the eruptions of the Timaru volcano. Twice in recent history, the roadway was buried in volcanic ash and had to be kept clean by machinery before the machinery itself was buried. Fortunately, Lord and Lady Macedoin built well.”
Goojie gestured at the Akaroa crater, craggy with deep shadowed folds, the brilliant blue water far below. The resort town of Akaroa below perched on the water’s rim, the inhabitants barely visible from this great height.
“There’s no chance of an eruption here?”
“No. It last erupted eight million years ago and is considered extinct.”
The speaker was a tiny white-haired Terran named Shirou Yoshimitsu, another colleague of Dr. Dho-ta conscripted into being a tour guide. Presumably, his multiple degrees in history and archaeology were not normally employed in guiding tourists, but nevertheless, he seemed to have all his facts in order.
“And the other volcano?” Goojie asked, pointing in the other direction at the great black brute rising from the ocean, the tortured island that had so dominated the horizon on their landing.
“Timaru?” Yoshimitsu clasped his tiny hands behind his back and walked to the roadway’s elaborately scrolled bronze rail. “Timaru volcano is more of a problem, my lady. It’s less than four hundred years old, it’s already buried the old city of Timaru on the mainland, and it’s in more or less continual eruption. The volcano has three craters and at least a dozen vents.”
Distance hadn’t made the volcano any less menacing. Steam swirled from the vent on its side. Around the island, the sea sparkled in the bright sun, but the wind seemed to have blown all the way from Antarctica, and Sula was glad for the warmth of her undress tunic, far more suitable to New Zealand’s climate than that of Sulawesi. She buttoned up the collar and mashed the cap farther down on her head.
“Are we in danger?” Goojie asked.
“No, my lady. Seismologists can predict a large eruption in advance, so there would be warning.”
Goojie pulled up the collar of her jacket. Yoshimitsu, wearing a light jacket over his shirt, seemed alone in being immune to the cutting wind.
Yoshimitsu looked up at the statue of Shihuangdi that loomed overhead, a bulky, broad, bearded man who glowered at the Pacific from beneath the flat, rectangular structure that crowned his stovepipe hat. “To my mind,” he said, “the most interesting choices were the historical figures who were left out. Alexander the Great, one of Earth’s most interesting conquerors, isn’t on the memorial, because he failed to establish a theory of government that would survive his death. Presumably, conquerors like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane were ignored for similar reasons. And Adolf Hitler—he was a contemporary of Stalin and ultimately fell victim to him—established a rule based on irrational ethnic prejudices and the persecution of a religious minority. Whereas if he had persecuted all religions, as Stalin did, perhaps we’d be seeing his image here. . . .”
“I was under the impression that Genghis Khan formed a very efficient government,” Sula said.
She and Yoshimitsu discussed this for few moments while Goojie shivered in the cold. “Why is there only one female?” she asked, completely innocent of the complex, rather appalling answer that was then revealed to her.
“Well, I’m glad we’re civilized now,” she said. “I thank the Praxis for my implant.” She added, “Might we go somewhere warm?”
She was taken below the roadway to a glass-walled gallery from which the spectacular scenery could be viewed in something like warmth, and listened for a while as Sula and Yoshimitsu discussed various aspects of Terran history. Eventually, she took advantage of a silence to ask Yoshimitsu about a wedge-shaped green stone hung around his neck on a chain.
“It’s a Maori adze, my lady,” Yoshimitsu said. “The Maoris were the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands before the Europeans came.”
“I see,” Goojie asked. “But what’s a European, exactly?”
“You’re a Maori?” Sula asked.
“Yes. Would you like to hear a haka?” And then, without a pause, he began a guttural chanting accompanied by a variety of postures, most of them aggressive and threatening, along with a series of grimaces. Sula wasn’t quite sure how to respond. In time, he finished with a series of cries and then an outthrust tongue, then straightened from his low stance and grinned apologetically.
“Sometimes, I get a little enthusiastic,” he said. “It’s more impressive when there are a lot of us together—that’s a chant we do at football matches to intimidate the other side.”
“Well,” said Goojie, “if it’s football, everything is forgiven.”
Yoshimitsu smiled. “Very kind of your ladyship to say so.”
A discreet chime came from Sula’s sleeve display, and she stepped away while Goojie and Yoshimitsu discussed football. She triggered the video feature and saw the expressionless gray features of Lord Koz Parku, her executive officer in the dockyard. His melodious voice crooned apology.
“I hope I am not interrupting anything important, my lady,” Parku said.
“No, not at all.”
Parku’s voice shifted to a more businesslike tone. “My lady, I ran into a dead end with the Manado Company—there’s only a limited amount of information available, and we already have it—so I decided to contact people who had worked with them in the past. Did you know that the Manado Company also does marine shipping on Terra?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“So, I spoke with the Lord Captain of the Port of Oakland, and—”
“Where is Oakland, exactly?”
“Yerba Buena Bay, my lady. Upper California District, North America.”
“Very good. Go on.”
“Now, Lord Captain of the Port is a paramilitary office—they’re like the port’s police. They deal with search and rescue, criminal matters, and security.”