House of the Sun

by Nigel Findley

  He sipped beer to give himself a moment to think. "Pretty dark, brah," he said at last. "When the sun's bright, the shadows can get pretty fragging dark."

  "Big shadow community?"

  He shrugged. "Depends on how you define it, I guess. There's a fair bit of biz to be done, that's what I hear at least." He grinned crookedly. "Comes from having such a big megacorp presence, that's the way I read it.

  "But the core group, the real players?"

  He shrugged again. "Not too many of them, I guess. Probably fewer than where you're from. And fewer wannabes, too."

  "Why's that?"

  The ork smile turned predatory for a moment. "Nature of the islands, hoa, that's all. It's a small community here. You frag up, and there's no space to run. The way I hear it, you're good ... or you're dead."

  I nodded slowly. That made a disturbing kind of sense. As a kind of mental exercise, I ran through a few contingency plans for getting off the islands if things went screwy in a hurry . . . and quickly realized how few options there really were. Disturbing. I always liked to have running room. "How much actual biz goes down here?" I asked after a moment.

  Scott raised his eyebrows. "Hey, you're asking the wrong wikanikanaka, brah," he protested mildly, "I'm just a chauffeur, here."

  My expression communicated just what I thought of that disclaimer. "Get actual, chummer," I told him. "You're connected. Somebody like you has got to be. Right?"

  I watched his eyes as he debated standing pat with his bluff, and eventually decided against it. He smiled a little self-consciously. "Yeah, okay, I got my ear to the ground. I hear things." He paused. "Some biz goes down here, and in other places like this. But the shadows are different here than they are elsewhere—that's the way I hear it, at least. On the mainland, if you got a good brag-sheet, you get biz. Fixers deal with you on the basis of your street rep, doesn't matter whether they know you or not. Right?"

  "Sometimes," I allowed.

  "That's not the way it happens here, hoa," he said firmly. "Not the way I hear it, at least .. . and keep in mind this is all secondhand; I'm a driver, not a runner, okay?" He paused, ordering his thoughts. "The way I hear it, in the islands it's personal relationships that matter more than a brag-sheet, even more than a street rep. People deal with people they know personally, people they've come to trust. Some malihini newcomer to the islands rolls up with a brag-sheet as long as your fragging leg—'I shaved Fuchi ice, I blew away a division of Azzie hard-men, I took Dunkelzahn in a con game'—and nobody's going to touch him, 'cause he's an unknown quantity, see? The kalepa—the fixers—they're going to go with the runners they know, the ones they've dealt with personally before . . . even if it means going with some hawawa who's not as good as the newcomer. At least the kalepa knows exactly what to expect."

  I nodded slowly. That made a certain amount of sense in a tight community with limited running room. You're less likely to bet on an unknown quantity, because if the drek drops into the pot you might find you don't have anyplace to run.

  A tight knot of people—lots of black synthleather and studs—jandered in and cruised over to the bar. I could almost feel the attitude from where I sat. Beside me, Scott looked up and grinned. "Somebody you might want to meet, hoa," he told me. Then he raised his voice. "Te Purewa. Hele mai."

  One of the black-clad arrivals turned and looked our way. I felt his eyes on me like lasers, burning out of a face that could well have been chiseled from black lava rock. Hawk nose, thick brows, short black hair. And tattoos all over his fragging face: swirls and geometricals and curlicues around his eyes until he looked like a paisley necktie. He smiled—the kind of expression I associated with thoughts of ripping out someone's liver—and he strode over toward our table. He was one big son of a slitch, I saw as he loomed up over us. Big and broad; the bulges of his muscles had bulges on them. "Howzit, Scotty?" he rumbled.

  Scott shrugged. "Li' dat." He gestured my way. "Want you to meet somebody, Te Purewa. Bruddah from the mainland, Dirk Tozer."

  Te Purewa—was that his name, or some Hawai'ian phrase I hadn't caught yet?—turned those burning dark eyes on me. "Kia ora!" he barked at me. And then he bugged out his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

  My natural response was to laugh; and when I saw the anger flare in those eyes I knew I'd made a mistake. The big guy scowled, and his tattoos seemed to writhe. Then, without another word, he turned his back on us and strode away.

  I turned to Scott. "Oops," I said quietly.

  "You got that, bruddah." The ork shook his head. "Shoulda warned you, I guess. Te Purewa—"

  "That's his name?"

  "Yeah, it's Maori, from Aotearoa—used to be called New Zealand." Scott sighed. "Every time I see him, he's more Maori. Good guy, at heart, but sometimes he takes things too far, y'know? All this heritage kanike ... Last year it was the tats"—he traced imaginary lines on his face—"then a coupla months back he got himself a linguasoft so he could speak Maori. And now he's doing the traditional greeting crap as well. That whole tongue stuff? He says Maoris look fierce at you as a sign of respect." He shrugged. "Sounds like kanike to me."

  "So now he hates me forever?"

  Scott chuckled. "Honestly? Te Purewa doesn't have the attention span for holding long grudges, hoa. Next time you see him, snarl at him and say 'Kia ora!', and he'll treat you like a long lost bruddah." He paused, and his smile faded. "Thought you might like to meet him 'cause he's the closest thing I know to a real shadowrunner. Te Purewa's SINless, he hangs with some of the fringe kalepa, the fixers on the edge of the action. Don't know what kind of biz he does for them—don't really want to know, is it—but he's the closest thing to real street action I know around here."

  He glanced at his watch. "Another beer?"

  I thought about it, then shook my head. "What's the next stop on the tour?"

  * * *

  The cultural/historical part of the tour was next, it turned out. Scott tooled the big Phaeton back through the financial heart of downtown Honolulu, then continued east into the government sector of the city. First stop was a relatively undistinguished two-story building that looked as though it was made of dressed lava rock. Despite the fact that the place was nothing special, it looked vaguely familiar, as if I'd seen it before. It took me a few seconds to tag the memory. That was it—an old two-D TV show I'd seen at some retrospective festival up in Seattle, something about cops in Hawai'i; that's where I'd seen the place before.

  I mentioned this to Scott, but he just shrugged. "Don't know about that, brah, but it's possible, I guess. That's the Iolani Palace. Oid place, century and a half old."

  "But what is it?" I asked.

  The ork looked at me like I'd just misplaced a couple of dozen points of IQ. "It's the palace, hoa. The capitol, where the Ali'i lives and holds court with his kahuna."

  "His shaman?"

  Scott shook his head. "No. Well, maybe, but ... You'll find words in Hawai'ian can have a drek-load of meanings. Take aloha—'hello,' right? Also means 'love,' 'mercy,' 'compassion', 'pity,' maybe half a dozen others.

  "And kahuna? Shaman, sure. Priest. But it also means 'advisor,' particularly when you're talking about the Ali'i and his kahuna." Scott chuckled. "Also means someone who's nui good at something, okay? Remember that guy we saw on the surfboard? He's one big kahuna when it comes to surfing."

  He paused and shrugged. "Where was I? Oh yeah. The lolani Palace, it's the 'working' capitol. On some big, nui important ritual days, the Ali'i and his court fly over to the old capitol on the Big Island. But most of the time, this is where King Kam does his stuff."

  "This is King Kamehameha V, right?"

  "That's it, brah." The ork pointed across the street. "You want to see King Kam I, Kamehameha the Great? There he is."

  I looked where he was pointing and saw the large statue he meant. It showed a perfectly proportioned man with mahogany skin and noble features, holding a spear. He wore a yellow cape and a weird kind of curving headdress, both apparently
made of feathers. "Quite the outfit," I noted.

  "The traditional dress of the Ali'i," Scott agreed. "King Kam wears the same stuff for official business." He paused. "From what I've heard, that statue's life-size, by the way. Kam the Great was one big boy."

  I glanced back at the statue. At a guess, I'd have said it was at least 2.2 meters tall—7'3" for the metrically challenged—and that didn't include the headdress. "Big boy, all right," I agreed. "Any troll blood in the king's lineage?" Scott chuckled at that as he pulled ahead.

  Our last stop was maybe a block from the palace, the other side of the government business. Scott pointed to a big ferrocrete building whose vertical lines evoked images of both classical columns and waterfalls. Over a set of large double doors hung a massive disk of metal—bronze, probably, judging by its color—bearing a crest. "That's the Haieaka'aupuni," Scott announced. "I guess you could translate that as 'Government House.' The legislature sits here, and this is where the administrators and the datapushers do their thing."

  I remembered some of the material I'd scanned on the flight in. "Is the king still scrapping it out with the legislature?" I asked.

  The ork shot me a speculative look. "You're not as out-of-touch as I thought, brah," he said with a hint of respect. "Yeah, King Kam's still butting heads with the Na Kama'aina hotheads in the legislature." We turned a corner, cruising down another side of Government House, and Scott pointed ahead. "There's some of the hotheads' constituents now."

  I looked.

  It wasn't large as demonstrations go—I've seen larger mobs protesting a hike in monorail fares in Seattle—but there was something about it, something I couldn't quite put my finger on, that made me think it was well-organized. There were maybe a hundred people massed before the steps of Government House. Not many, in the grand scheme of things, but every time the news photographer who was standing at the top of the steps panned his vidcam over them, they all packed in tighter in the area he was scanning. To make the crowd look denser, and hence much bigger, when the footage aired on the news tonight, I realized. That was too much media awareness for a "spontaneous gathering." I could well be looking at the Hawai'ian version of something an old Lone Star colleague had once called "rent-a-mob"—professional agitators, or at least a group led by professional agitators.

  All the protesters seemed to be Polynesian, I noticed. Lots of orks and trolls, with only a few humans and dwarfs tossed in for spice. (No elves, though, I noted, or none that I spotted. Interesting, that . ..) Lots of bronze or mahogany skin, lots of black hair. Most wore more or less the same as Scott—the same as me, for that matter—but some were dressed in traditional aboriginal costumes of one kind or another. Lots of straw, and grass, and feathers. Most of the placards were too small for me to read from this distance, but I could make out one. "E make loa, haole?" I sounded out to Scott.

  He frowned, then snorted in disgust, but didn't translate.

  "What's it mean?" I pressed.

  "It means, 'Die, Anglo,' " he admitted after a moment. "Like I said, hotheads."

  I gestured toward the crowd. "Are these people ALOHA?"

  Scott laughed. "Are you lolo, bruddah? You stupid? You think I'd get this close to a pack of ALOHA goons with a fragging haole in the car?" He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was more serious. "ALOHA doesn't go for this kind of kanike, Mr. Dirk. Peaceful demonstrations? Not their style. They blow drek up, that's how they get their ideas across."

  "Na Kama'aina, then?"

  He shrugged. "The leaders, sure—one or two of them, the slags who arranged for the newsvid boys to be here. The rest? They're just twinkies come along 'cause they've got nothing better to do with their time."

  A couple of the demonstrators at the back of the pack had turned to watch the limo as we rolled by. One of them had the same kind of facial tattoos as the Maori in the bar. Instead of black leather, though, she wore only a loincloth and a kind of skirt made from dried reeds or some drek. "I can't complain about the costume choice," I remarked, and Scott chortled appreciatively,

  "Some people get an idea in their heads, and they just run with it," he said. "The costumes. Trying to speak the old languages ... or what they think are the old languages—some died out, but that doesn't stop the hotheads from pretending." He snorted again. "Look at them. Refugees from the luau shows put on for the tourists . . . except these ule don't know the show's over."

  I blinked in mild surprise at the vehemence in his voice. "Is that what you think of what's-his-name?" I asked quietly after a moment.

  "Te Purewa?" He paused. Then, "More or less," he admitted. "I don't think he's taken to waving placards at the government yet, but . . ." He shrugged.

  "Te Purewa's not his real name, is it?" I guessed.

  Scott gave a bark of laughter. "You got that," he agreed. "Mark Harrop, that's his real name, can you beat that? Mark fragging Harrop. Couple years back he decided he had Maori blood in his veins—like, a couple drops, maybe—and picked the name out of some book."

  I was silent for almost a minute as Scott swung the limo around a corner and headed back toward Waikiki and Diamond Head. At last I asked gently, "What about you. Scott? You don't have any sympathy for Na Kama'aina? You're Polynesian by descent, aren't you?"

  He didn't answer right away, and I wondered if I'd offended him. Then he smiled, a little shamefacedly. "I'm a kama'aina," he agreed. "I'm a 'land child'—quarter-blood, but I get it from both sides of my family. My mother, she was a Nene kahuna."

  "Nay-nay?" I asked.

  "Nene, Hawai'ian goose," he explained. "Looks kind of like a Canada goose—except it's not extinct, it's got claws on its feet, and it likes volcanic rock. One of the local Totems.

  "Anyway," he went on, "you can be a Kama'aina, a local, without being part of Na Kama'aina, if you get my drift."

  "And you've got no desire to take a Hawai'ian name and run around in grass skirts?"

  "Grass makes me itch," He paused. "I've already got the Hawai'ian name," he added quietly after a moment, "I don't have to take one. My mother, she gave me one."

  I waited, but he didn't go on. "Well?" I pressed at last. He sighed. "My given name is Ka-wena-'ula-a-Hi'iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele-ka-wahine-'ai-ho-nua." The polysyllables rolled off his tongue like a smooth-flowing river.

  "Holy frag," I announced when I was sure he was done.

  "Yeah, quite the mouthful."

  "And it means?"

  " 'The red glow of the sky made by Hi'iaka in the bosom of Pele the earth-eating woman,' if you can believe that."

  "You must get writer's cramp signing your name."

  He laughed. "That's why my father called me Scott," he explained.

  7

  My body clock seemed to have finally adjusted to the time difference and everything. I slept when I went to bed, and I woke up when I wanted to, a couple of minutes before my alarm went off. I rolled out of bed feeling like a new man—or at least a creditable retread—drew open the drapes, and stared for a couple of minutes out the bedroom window. The sun glinted off the azure sea, and the few clouds only served to emphasize the depth and clarity of the sky. Another drekky day in paradise.

  As I dressed, I noticed for the first time the two holos on opposite walls of the bedroom. One showed Waikiki as I'd seen it the day before from a vantage point somewhere near the west end of the bay—a view of Diamond Head in the distance, people on the beach, a big auto-rigged trimaran anchored offshore. The other hologram had a sepia tone, like a holo taken of an old black-and-white flatphoto. A dark-skinned native was pushing a dug-out outrigger canoe up onto the beach out of the surf. Something looked familiar about the shot somehow. I compared the two mentally and realized that both holos were from exactly the same camera angle! The sepia one had to date from the nineteenth century. There was Diamond Head . .. with nothing but jungle all the way down to the beach and only a couple of tiny buildings around the curve of the bay. I turned back to the contemporary shot—yes, the holographer had matched the ca
mera angle and the composition exactly. Fascinating.

  It was oh-eight-thirty by the time I finished dressing, and my stomach reminded me not to skip breakfast. So down the elevator I went and breakfasted in the company of those little ring-necked doves on the outdoor patio.

  I was savoring my third cup of coffee and debating whether I had room for another waffle when I felt a presence beside me. Glancing up, I saw one of the self-effacing hotel functionaries holding a small cellular phone out to me. "Mr. Tozer?"

  I nodded to him, and he vanished from sight as I flipped the phone off standby. "Hello?"

  "Good morning, Mr. Dirk." It was Scott, of course. "I hope you're feeling up to a little business today."

  I almost asked him the details, but my natural caution—better yet, my paranoia—kicked in at the last moment. "When?" is all I said.

  * * *

  I was waiting outside the hotel when the Rolls pulled up thirty minutes later. Dressed in a finely tailored business suit today, Scott climbed out and held the rear passenger compartment door for me. (No slotting around with sitting up front today . . .) As I settled myself in the couch, he slid back into the driver's seat, buttoned the car up, and pulled away.

  "Okay, Scott," I said once we were out in traffic, "give. Who, what, where, when, and why."

  He glanced back at me. (At least he'd left the kevlarplex divider down.) "You've got an appointment with Mr. Ekei Tokudaiji," he told me flatly.

  "Who is?"

  The ork shrugged his broad shoulders. "An important man around these parts, that's all I can tell you."

  Well, frag, I could have maybe guessed that much. "Where are we going?"

  "Kaneohe Bay. Mr. Tokudaiji has a ... a place there."

  I frowned. The friendliness, the volubility, had vanished from Scott's manner. This was more than being businesslike, it was as if the big ork were under some kind of major stress. Was visiting this Tokudaiji so daunting, even for a fragging chauffeur? Just how important was this slag? "Why couldn't we have gotten this over with yesterday?" I asked.