“Excuse me—” Doctor Clave said, threading between the people.
Sharrow looked at her hands.
Miz came up to her, pulled her away. “Sharrow, are you all right? Sharrow?”
The guests continued to rush in from every side, packing and swirling round the huddle of people as though caught in a vortex.
“What?” she said. “What?”
“What happened? Are you all right?” His face swam in front of her, open and concerned.
“I’m…I’m…”
There were gasps from the crowd of people. She saw some of them glance at her and look away. Miz pulled her further back. Dloan appeared suddenly between her and the crowd. Zefla was at her other side, putting an arm round her.
She saw one person work their way out of the knot of people pressing round the center of the dance floor and walk toward her. It was Cenuij; he seemed to be writing in a small notebook.
He came up to where she stood flanked by Zefla and Miz. He made a final emphatic dot in the notebook, clipped the pen back in, snapped it shut and put it in his robe. He glanced back at the crowd and shrugged. “Dead,” he told them. He pulled a cheroot from his robe and lit it. “Told us what we needed to know, though.” He looked past Zefla. “Hmm.” He nodded. “Look; the bar’s free.” He walked away.
2
THE SIGNALS OF DECAY, THE WEAPONRY OF DECEIT
9
Reunions
The viewing-gallery was built like a steeply raked auditorium. Scattered throughout its thousand or so seats were only a few dozen people, most of them asleep. She sat alone.
Her field of view was almost filled by the giant screen; the giant screen was almost filled by Golter. The great shown globe turned with a smooth and stately inevitability, a silent thunder implicit in the monumental graduation of the changing, revolving face it presented to the darkness, and something of its immense scale apparent in the linearity of that vast unhurriedness.
It shone; a gigantic disc of blue and white and ochre and green, god-fabulous in extent and more beautiful than love.
She sat looking at it. She was muscularly slim and of about average height, perhaps a little more. She was quite bald; beneath her blond eyebrows her blue eyes were held in tear-drop shapes by small folds in the outside corners; her nose was broad and her nostrils flared. She wore dark overalls and clutched a small satchel to her chest as she sat watching the planet on the huge screen.
* * *
The local police chief had been very understanding. He had known Mister Dornay personally, and only an urgent professional engagement had prevented him from attending the party himself. It must have been a terrible experience for her; he quite understood. An inquest would be held at a later date, but a simple recorded statement from her would almost certainly be quite sufficient. Doctor Clave had already determined the cause of death to be a massive brain hemorrhage; unusual, these days, but not unknown. She must not blame herself. Of course she was free to go; he perfectly comprehended her desire not to stay any longer than she had to in a place that now held such tragic memories for her. Anyway, he had no desire to detain her when she was the officially sanctioned quarry of the legally authorized but surely woefully misguided and arguably rather inhumane sect pursuing her; it would give him no pleasure whatsoever to have this horrible event occur within his jurisdiction. He was sure she understood.
Dornay’s private secretary was next to be interviewed; she left the police chief in Bencil Dornay’s study and joined the others in the house library, where Cenuij was making excited noises over a desk-screen.
“Okay?” Miz said, coming to meet her.
“Nothing to worry about,” she said, “but I’ve been told to get out of town.” She nodded to Zefla and Dloan, who stood by Cenuij’s shoulder.
“That’s it!” Cenuij said, pressing a button to take a copy of the display. He tapped the screen with a finger. The glyphs shown there were all roughly the same; variations on an elaborate, whorled, crisscrossed shape formed from a single line. On the desk beside Cenuij sat the notebook he’d been drawing in just after Dornay had died; its small screen displayed a shape similar to those on the desk-screen. “That’s the one,” he said excitedly. He tapped the notebook and one of the glyphs in turn. “Miykenns Capital, in Cevese script, Ladyr dynasty.”
Sharrow stared at the pattern drawn on the notebook-screen, seeing the single line leading into the complex glyph, its spiraled structure, and its central, tightening coil ending in a dot.
“That was what we…traced?” she said.
Zefla heard the catch in Sharrow’s voice, and put her arm round her.
“Yup,” Cenuij said, tearing the print from the desk-screen slot and grinning at it. “Shaky brush-work; a Cevese script scholar would have a fit—”
“Oh, Cenny, for goodness’ sake…” Zefla said.
“—but that’s it,” Cenuij said, smacking the print-out with the backs of his fingers. “Could contain a mistake of course, in the circumstances, but at the very least it’s Miykenns Darkside, almost certainly Miykenns Capital, and if these epicycles are right—,” he pointed at two small circles on one spiral, “—it’s in the time of the Ladyr dynasty.”
“So, Malishu?” Miz said.
Cenuij shook his head. “Doubt it, not then. Next, we have to look back to see where the capital was during the Ladyr dynasty.” His lip curled slightly. “Could be anywhere. Knowing the Ladyrs, they sold it to the highest bidder.” He turned back to the desk-screen. “Library: Miykenns; history; Ladyr dynasty. Display; the capital of Miykenns.”
The screen halved into text and a multi-layered holo map.
Miz peered. “Pharpech?” he said. “Never heard of it.”
“I have,” Zefla said.
“Congratulations,” Cenuij told her, zooming the bewilderingly structured map then swooping the view back again. “You probably form part of a small and very exclusive club.”
“Yeah,” Zefla said, staring at the ceiling with a look of intense concentration on her face. “One of my lecturers used it as an example of a degenerated…something or other.”
“Well,” Cenuij said. “It was supposedly capital of Miykenns under the Ladyrs, eight hundred years ago.” He scanned the text. “And hasn’t looked forward since. Last entry in the encyclopedia is—ye gods—twenty years ago; the coronation of King Tard the seventeenth. Prophet’s blood!” Cenuij sat back in surprise. “ ‘No pictures available.’ ”
“A king?” Miz laughed.
“Retro suburb,” Zefla breathed.
“The latest of the…” Cenuij scrolled the screen, then laughed. “Useless Kings,” he said. “Well, how disarmingly honest.”
“How far is this place from Malishu?” Sharrow asked.
Cenuij checked. “About as far away as you can get. Nearest rail line is…ha! I don’t believe it; it says two days’ march away!” He looked round the others. “This sounds like the place they invented the phrase ‘ time-warp’ to cover.”
Zefla nudged Sharrow with her hip. “Nice and far from the Huhsz.”
“Hmm,” Sharrow said, unconvinced. “Does it say what their religion is?”
Cenuij scrolled the text. “Basically homegrown; monarch-worship and theophobia.”
“Theophobia?” Miz said.
“They hate gods,” Zefla said.
“Fair enough,” Miz said, nodding. “If I lived somewhere not even within hailing distance of the outskirts of the back-end-of-nowhere, I’d want somebody in authority to blame, too.”
Miz booked tickets for them all, to Miykenns. A series of cross-routed phone calls ensured that a trusted exec in one of Miz’s holding companies in The Meg had his sister’s best friend book another ticket, in the name of Ysul Demri, for the water-world of Trontsephori.
Zefla shaved Sharrow’s hair off and spread a thin film of depilatory oil over her scalp. Miz sat on the bed behind them and pretended to cry. Sharrow inserted the contacts, used dabs of skinweld to alter the sha
pe of her eyes, spray-bleached her eyebrows and inserted small plugs into her nostrils, lifting them and flaring them.
She looked at her ears in the dressing-table mirror. “My ears stick out,” she said, frowning. She looked up at Zefla, standing behind her. “Do you think my ears stick out?”
Zefla shrugged. Miz shook his head. Sharrow decided her ears stuck out, and used skinweld on them too.
Dloan sat on the bed beside Miz with Sharrow’s satchel turned inside out on his lap. He unpicked the stitching, then reached in and withdrew her new identity papers, handing them to her. She looked at her holo in her ID while Zefla carefully removed the depilatory film.
“ ‘Ysul Demri,’ eh?” Zefla said, glancing at the name on Sharrow’s new ID as she crumpled the stubble-studded film and threw it into a bin. She squinted at the holo. “Totally convincing. Always fancied being a bald, did you?” She started to spread hair-preventing cream over Sharrow’s scalp.
Sharrow nodded. “They’re supposed to have more fun.”
Zefla’s hands glided over her soft skin, gently rubbing the cream in. Miz made sensuous grunting noises in the back-ground.
“Geis?”
“Sharrow. I hope you don’t mind me calling you…can’t we get vision on this?”
“No; I’m dressing at the moment.”
“I beg your pardon. Shall I call back?”
“No, it’s all right. It’s…good to hear from you, Geis, but do you mind me asking how you found me?”
“Not at all. I’ve had my comm people scanning all the public databases for your name; I thought I might be able to warn you if it looked like the Huhsz were closing in. I hope you don’t mind…”
“I suppose not. My life seems to be pretty public-domain these days.”
“I don’t want to alarm you; we’re pretty certain the Huhsz haven’t got access to this sort of hacking power. But there’s a report on the local contract police database that there was some sort of incident at a party at this guy’s house last night. Didn’t he work for the family, once?”
“That was his father. But, yes, there was an incident.”
“The police aren’t holding you, are they?”
“No. It’s been cleared up. I’ll be on my way soon.”
“I see. Anyway, Sharrow, I was calling for a couple of reasons. There are a lot of confused reports coming out of the Log-Jam at the moment, I won’t ask you about that…but I did hear about what happened to that monorail in the K’lel, and my satellite people tell me there’s a lot of Huhsz activity around an old nuclear-waste silo on the edge of the desert. I just wanted to say…Well, I’d better not say too much, even over this channel, though it is pretty secure…But I did want to say; congratulations. It took one of my best AIs seconds to come up with the same scheme, even after it was pointed in the right direction. It was brilliant.”
“Thanks. It was Miz’s idea, actually.”
“Oh. Still, it was good. But of course it won’t delay them for very long. I understand the holes in the Passports might continue to radiate for quite a while, but the Huhsz have placed orders for portable magnetic inclusion chambers with Continental Fusion Inc. and, well, it’ll make things difficult for them, I suppose, having to cart gear that size around with them, but I just wanted to say that my offer stands; I’ll do all I can—everything I can—to protect you, if you’ll just give me the chance.”
“And I still appreciate it, Geis, but I’ll try and dodge them for a while longer.”
“I think you’re very brave. Please remember; if you need any help at all, I am yours to command.”
“The last person who said that…”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. Yes, thanks. I’ll remember.”
She left the viewing-gallery, and in the double doors between the auditorium and the main corridor bumped into a man just on his way in. She started to apologize, then saw his bright smile, his bald head. He looked at her bald scalp and smiled even more broadly as the doors behind her opened and somebody else entered the narrow space between the two sets of doors and put what felt like a gun to the nape of her neck.
“Oh, Lady Sharrow,” the first young man said, sounding perfectly delighted and still gazing at her bald head. “You didn’t need to go to all that trouble just for us!”
They traveled separately to Ikueshleng, the space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere. The others had already gone when she got there. She paid cash for a stand-by to Stager. She watched some screen while she waited, feeling nervous but trying not to look it. Golter had had some bad experiences with crashing spacecraft over the millennia, and as a result one of the few things that was strictly controlled about the planet was space traffic; the vast majority of commercial ships were restricted to two ports serving a hemisphere each, and both the resulting bottlenecks, though Free Ports and so not closely bureaucratically controlled, were inevitably dangerous places for people on the run.
She survived unchallenged and caught a shuttle around noon; half an hour later she was in Stager, the kilometer-diameter, five-wheel space-station that was the traveler’s usual next port of call after Ikueshleng.
She found a midsystem discount ticket shop in wheel five and bought a high bounce-factor single to Phrastesis Habitats via Miykenns/ Malishu-station. She watched the clerk put her credit card into the reader, and tried not to look relieved when the transaction went through. She had to sign an insurance disclaimer, and scribbled something that might just have passed for Ysul Demri if you’d had a good imagination. She bought a disposable phone with a hundred thrials of credit embedded, a basic-model wrist-screen and a newssheet, ate a light lunch in a small, overpriced café, then she walked round the curve of the wheel’s outer rim to the viewing-gallery.
She sat between them, in the very back row of the gallery. She stared at the screen. The one on her right did the talking.
“Three baldies in a row!” he sniggered. “What a laugh, eh?”
The one on her left sat watching the screen with a jacket over his lap. He held the gun underneath the jacket, pointed into her side just below her ribs. Guns tended not to be terribly popular baggage items with the people who ran space-stations—she had reluctantly abandoned her HandCannon to a left-luggage agency in Ikueshleng—and she was almost tempted to believe the gun poking into her ribs was a fake, but she thought the better of doing anything that would ensure she’d find out.
She looked at the profile of the silent man holding the gun. He was identical to the one on her right. She could see no sign that either of them was an android.
“I said, what a laugh, eh?” The one on her right poked her with one finger. Her right hand flicked out, grabbed his hand; she glared into his eyes. His mouth made an O. He looked amused. The gun under her left ribs prodded briefly.
She let go of his hand. It had been warm; it had felt like a human hand.
“My, we’re touchy,” the young man on her right said. “I almost wish we’d brought one of our mannequins along.” He pulled at the collar of his tight gray, business-like jacket, adjusting his cuffs. “I take it you had your little flashback two days ago, did you?”
She watched the planet for a moment, looking down on what must be noon on Issier (there; white fluffs of cloud in the center of Phirar, covering the archipelago) and nodded slowly.
“I believe I felt something, at one point,” she said.
“Just to let you know we haven’t forgotten you,” the young man said. “I hear you were seeing an old friend of the family; terrible shame about old Bencil Dornay. What a shock that must have been for you.”
She sought southern Caltasp under its own speckled cover of cloud, and identified the huge smooth curve of Farvel Bight, its northern limit hidden under the clouds that reputedly never broke above the Sea House.
“Our family likes its old servants to know we haven’t forgotten them,” she told the young man. “Or their children.”
“Indeed,” the young man said. “So now you’re on
your way to Miykenns, aren’t you, Lady Sharrow…?” He paused. “Except you missed the ship you were booked on, and which the rest of your team took.”
She looked up, tracing again the route she’d taken to the Franck’s home, then on to Lip City.
“Did I?” she said. “Damn. I hate it when that happens.”
“And instead you’re off to Trontsephori, isn’t that right?”
She looked down the long coast of Piphram, straining to make out the lagoons and the dot that was the Log-Jam.
“Am I?” she said.
“No, Ysul,” the young man said almost gently. “No, you’re not.” He sighed. “You’re Phrastesis bound, according to your ticket. But somehow I don’t think you’ll make it all the way there.”
She looked from the burning bright heart of Jonolrey’s K’lel desert into his eyes.
“You’re very well informed for a messenger boy,” she said. “You should be in the travel business.”
He smiled coldly at her. “Don’t be unpleasant, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He put out his hand and stroked her upper arm with one finger. “We can be so much more unpleasant to you than you can be to us.”
She looked down at the slowly stroking finger, then back to his eyes. He watched his finger too, as though it didn’t belong to him. “Not even,” he said quietly, “that greasy little over-achiever of a cousin of yours will be able to help you, if we decide to be really unpleasant to you…Lady Sharrow.”
She reached out to take hold of his stroking finger, but he took it away, folding his arms.
“You know,” she said. “I’m really getting a little fed up with you and all your attentions.” She frowned at him. “Just who are you? Why are you doing this? What sort of weird enjoyment do you get from it? Or do you just do whatever you’re told?”
He smiled tolerantly. “Let me give you a word of advice—”
“No,” she said. “Let me give you a word of advice.” She leaned toward him, away from the gun. “Stop doing this, or I’ll hurt you—if you can be hurt—or I’ll kill you; kill or destroy both of you—”
Against a Dark Background Page 19
