Black Steel

by Steve Perry

  “Show it to me,” Cierto commanded. Several had claimed to have discovered this before; thus far, none of the claims had proved valid. One man had come across a sword made here that had somehow become lost. Others were either outright fakes or similar, but not the true material. The reward for information was somewhat less than that for an actual example. Cierto wondered if perhaps this man had attempted to steal a weapon and had met resistance.

  Ells moved somewhat stiffly to the computer console and slotted the infoball.

  Cierto leaned back in his own form-chair, a custom orthopedia designed for him alone. The soft machineries hummed with soothing sonics as they molded the special fabric to his contours.

  The holoproj lit. The resolution was clean, the colors sharp, even though the camera had obviously been hidden upon Ells’s person and must have been quite small. The picture was only a little jerky, and Cierto, who knew something of such things, determined that the compensation system for the virtualcam work was less than the best available. Still, the image was adequate. There on a polished wooden stand was a Japanese-style sword, katana pattern. There was nothing obvious to give the uninitiated a scale, but from the size of the tsuba, Cierto guessed that the weapon was larger than a medium-sword, a wakizashi, or a short-sword, a tanto. A daito, then, over two shaku in length. An ancient measurement, a shaku was about thirty centimeters, if Cierto recalled it right. The ensheathed weapon wore a lacquered white scabbard, the guard was stainless or nickeled steel, and the handle appeared to be white ray hide in black silk diamond-turning pattern, with a butt cap to match the tsuba.

  The workmanship on the parts he could see appeared excellent, but one could tell little from a recording.

  The trust test of a sword was in how it felt in one’s hands.

  “Very nice,” Cierto said, “but the blade could be purple under the scabbard.”

  “Just a moment.”

  The picture fuzzed and refocused. Now there was a woman kneeling, the angle showing her back. She was dressed in split skirt and gi. The camera panned down to the woman’s left and zoomed, framing the sword lying on the mat next to the woman’s left hip. The woman picked up the sword and blurred into a kata, the sword flashing darkly into the dojo’s air. The camera operator widened the angle, trying to keep up, but missed the next move. By the time the recording caught her, the woman was whipping the sword furiously through a complex series of attacks and defenses, thrusts and feints and cuts. The blade ghosted through the moves like the prop of a copter, so fast it seemed like a dark sheet at times.

  Definitely black. And wielded with considerable skill, even though it was merely a kata.

  “Stop picture,” Cierto said.

  The computer obediently froze the image.

  “Reverse play, quarter speed.”

  The recording tracked backward. When the blurry sword slowed for a high block, Cierto said, “Freeze frame. Quarter screen, left upper, full enhance, true colors.”

  The comp augmented the image, moving in tight on the sword.

  Well, well.

  Handmade swords were never exactly alike; had this one been a duplicate of any from the House of Black Steel he would have known for certain that it was a fake. Cierto knew the whorls of the folded metal and the temper lines along the edges of the three dozen weapons produced here as well as he did the lines in the palms of his own hands. Even those that had belonged to the students who had failed would eventually be returned here, when enough stads found their way into the right pockets.

  This sword was not one of his.

  It was a katana, and save for one, the casa had never made the style. They were more cutters than piercers, and that lacked a certain finesse in Cierto’s mind. The single one such blade produced here was safe in the underground vault thirty meters below where Cierto sat-or it had been this morning.

  “Push in,” Cierto said to the computer.

  The sword grew larger. The tempering along the cutting edge was done by using special clays, and after heating and polishing, left a distinctive pattern of lighter metal where it was harder. The patterns had names, and this one was either a flame or perhaps a three-cedar; the computer could not make it clear enough to be certain. In any event, the temper line was not one of the more common ones. Would the maker of a fake blade bother with something so esoteric?

  Hmm. This might just be what Cierto had always feared. Someone else with the family secret; worse, someone who knew how to use it. He had to have this sword, to determine its age-and everything else possible about it.

  “And where is this place?” Cierto said to Ells.

  The man smiled, a thin, cagey expression. “There was a matter of a reward.”

  Cierto wanted to laugh, but held it. What a fool. He had no understanding of his position. “Of course.”

  Cierto waved his hands at the compute. “Give me your credit cube number and it will be transferred to your account.” The amount was nothing; he would have paid ten times as much if this sword was what he felt certain it was.

  The image hung in the air. And what did the woman look like who moved so well with his family’s secret? “Computer, wide angle, normal speed.”

  The image altered and began to move again. When the woman spun and faced the camera, Cierto said,

  “Stop, enhance still image.”

  When he saw the woman’s face, he did laugh. Ells did not understand and Cierto did not bother to enlighten him.

  Truly, Cierto thought, truly there must be gods and they must have warped senses of humor. How else to explain such a thing?

  When the lid of the Healy fanned open, Sleel sat up slowly. Even though the machine had stimmed his muscles to hold their tone, he wanted to give his heart a chance to keep the blood flowing to his brain.

  His knee was virtually healed, the new eye was mostly formed and only a few weeks away from being fully grown, and the left hand was well past bud stage, with small but perfect fingers. He would be fitted with the first of a series of robotic glove prostheses to give him useful function until the hand reached normal size. That would take about two months. He was as well physically as this machine could make him.

  “You look better,” Wu said from the doorway.

  “I don’t feel any better.”

  “I brought you something,” she said. She held in her hand a single spetsdod with its plastic flesh backing.

  Sleel shook his head. ;Keep it. I don’t deserve to wear it.”

  The woman nodded, as if to herself. “What will you do now?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “Because my sister did.”

  Sleel slid out of the Healy through the egress slot and stood, testing his weight on the new knee. Weak, but no problem.

  “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. She’s not here and you don’t have to take her place.”

  “You know how she died?”

  Sleel nodded. “Yeah. I was there.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  “It’s old stuff, better to let it lie.” He took a couple of tentative steps. Never know the knee had been blasted into organic goo from the way it now worked. The flesh was hairless, brighter and unscarred but that would eventually fade and change until it looked like the rest of the leg. If he lived that long. He was still naked, but the woman had seen him that way often enough in the last few weeks. It was a little chilly, though.

  She opened a cabinet and pulled a robe from it, tossing the garment to Sleel. He caught it with his good hand.

  “She was my sister. I want to know.”

  Sleel put the robe on, tabbing it shut. After the weeks of nudity, even the soft material felt rough against his skin. “All right. I’ll tell you. Let’s take a walk.”

  Wu listened as Sleel told her the story, trying to picture it. “It was on Earth, during the last push of the revolution. There was a power station on the small continent, Australia, just south of a place called Lake Disappointment. We were supposed to knock the grid offl
ine, to cut the juice. There were six of us: Mayli, Dirisha, Geneva, Bork, Red-he was Geneva’s father-and me.

  “We got into the station okay, even though it was heavily guarded. We got it done, set the explosives, and were leaving when it went sour. Everybody started shooting. Mayli, Red and I, we got hit. Bork-you know about him and Mayli?”

  “Yes. They were lovers. Mayli thought he was the most gentle man she had ever known.”

  Sleel managed a half smile at that. “Bork could tear off your leg and beat an army to death with it, if he wanted. Anyway, Mayli got hit first. Autocarbine, firing explosive antipersonnel rounds. She took one right in the heart, she must have died instantly. We didn’t leave our own behind. Red gave covering fire and Bork picked Mayli up. Then Red caught it. Bork grabbed him, too.”

  Sleel stared down the medical center’s corridor. His stare was unfocused. Wu watched his face, feeling the power play in him.

  “I lost it,” he said quietly, as if from a great distance. “I went dead-brain stupid.” He shook himself, as if shaking water from his face after a shower. “I took a couple of hits, lost a foot and the prosthetic arm I was wearing at the time. I went down, should have died there, but Dirisha covered us, took out the rest of the troopers, and then Bork came back for us. Picked me up like a baby and threw me into the back of the escape vehicle. We had a vouch, but it was too late for Mayli or Red. They died. I didn’t. “

  A long moment passed. “You think about it a lot,” she said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. If I’d been a little bit faster, if I hadn’t been wearing that stupid fucking slow arm, maybe I could have saved them.”

  She touched his shoulder. “That’s a big weight, Sleel. You couldn’t have won the revolution by yourself.

  The others had to have known the risks. Mayli certainly did.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced of that.

  The two of them continued to walk. An old woman wearing a pair of plastic exolegs hobbled past, going in the opposite direction, the hydraulics in the supports humming softly with her steps. She smiled at them. Wu smiled back.

  “What will you do now?”

  Sleel shook his head. “I don’t know. I lost my client. I can’t be a matador anymore.”

  “They wouldn’t kick you out because of that.”

  “It’s not them. It’s me. I can’t do it. I fucked it up, just like I fucked up the rest of my life.”

  Wu stopped. Steel managed another step before he came to a halt. He looked at her.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “Where? Why?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He laughed, a short, sharp sound, almost, she thought, a sob. “No. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Then we’ll go home to Koji.”

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  SLEEL SAT IN a tiny, mostly artificial park, listening to the calls of fake birds. The sounds could have been recorded from real birds, though they were probably computer-generated copies. Birds and calls and park were inside a starship, The Skate, the same one that had brought Kildee Wu to Rift, so she had said. And so here he was, traveling through Bender space on a vessel named after a fish, in the company of a woman named after a bird. Kee, she had asked him to call her.

  His new eye itched. It worked now, though he still had to wear a droptac lens to correct for astigmatism and myopia, both of which would supposedly clear up when the eye was fully matured. He’d never had an eye done before, but it seemed to work as well as the old one. It was interesting to have binocular vision again after the one-eyed flatness of the last few weeks.

  The left knee worked fine, and was actually in better shape than the old right one, there being no wear on the ligaments and new bone.

  The prosthetic glove he wore was a bit clunky. It looked like a real hand, the plastic flesh tinted to nearly a perfect match for Sleel’s own skin. Apparently there was a medical specialization that concerned itself almost solely with the cosmetic aspects of such things. A tech with a computer chose from thousands of tones and shadings so that the fake would be indistinguishable from the real. A long way from the crude matching that Red had done for the spetsdod bases when he’d issued Sleel weapons back at the Villa years ago.

  Underneath, the new hand was larger and itself workable, though still too small to function alone with the full-sized forearm muscles. The nerve impulses to the hand were mostly right, the induction pickups routing them to the glove better than the ones in the robotic arm he’d once worn, but there was still a tiny gap between the thought and the movement.

  The sensitivity left something to be desired, too. Not a problem as long as you allowed for it, he wouldn’t be crushing things, but even the best robotics could not match a human hand perfectly.

  He still had not gotten used to going without spetsdods. Both the artificial and his real hand appeared incomplete without the weapons, and Sleel felt naked, even though he forced himself to forgo the dart guns. He had made a bad mistake, he had lost his client, and there was no way around it. He didn’t want to call himself a matador anymore; he did not deserve the name.

  The fake birds chirped, reacting to someone approaching along the path. Sleel looked up to see Kee Wu.

  She wore sandals and shorts and a fluffy short-sleeved blouse, and seemed to be enjoying the warmth of the pretend-sunshine. Very nicely built, Kee Wu, and in another lifetime, Sleel would have been making an effort to play man/woman games with her. Not today.

  “Sleel. “

  ‘Kee. “

  He stood.

  “You don’t have to leave,” she said.

  “Yeah, I do. I’ve been putting it off, but I have to call Reason’s son and tell him about Jersey. He has a right to hear it from me. Just like you did about Mayli.” Sleel shook his head. “Seems like I’m around a lot when good people die.”

  Kee Wu did not speak to this.

  “So, I guess I’ll go back to my room and put in a com to Solov. “

  She blinked. “Solov? This man named his son `Solov’?”

  “Yeah. I thought he had a weird sense of humor when I heard that, too.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I hope I don’t hang funny names on my children if I ever have any.”

  “I don’t guess I’d have a Sleel Junior, either. See you later.” Sleel left her there and went back to his room.

  Solov Reason looked nothing like his father. The image on the holoproj was of a fifty-something man, thick and long dark hair shot full of gray, with a serious expression and a certain gravity to him. A good, upstanding citizen, to judge from his conservative PrimeSat gray suit and neck tattoos. Sleel knew that the look wasn’t altogether accurate, because Solov had gotten into some trouble once that required Dirisha’s help to get him out of. According to what he recalled, Reason’s son now managed some kind of resort on the Great Barrier Reef on Earth.

  Sleel had struggled through the explanation. When he managed to finish, Reason nodded, after a short time-lag. “Sounds as if he made his own choice, just as he always did. You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Excuse me? I let them kill him.”

  “Not if he could have escaped. You told him to, right?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “Sleel, my father was living on borrowed time. He knew it; he’d told me that more than once. He should have died before I was born, he cheated the Skull-and-Bones dozens of times. Every day was a gift, he used to say. If luck had looked the other way, he would have died at the age of twenty.”

  “A lot of people could say that,” Sleel said.

  “Perhaps. But a lot of people don’t. My father made his peace with the cosmos a long time ago. He told me he would know when his number came up for recycling. Sure, he hired you to protect him, he wouldn’t just roll over and die unless he knew it was time, but up on that hill with you, he accepted it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I can,” Reason said. “My father lived a long
and exciting time; he did nearly everything he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. He had family, money, a certain kind of fame, or maybe infamy. He was the best at what he chose to do. Not many can say that.”

  After Sleel broke the communication, he sat and stared at the wall. If Jersey’s son had screamed and foamed and castigated him for failing to protect his father, Sleel would have felt better. That he had been calm and accepting did not go with Sleel’s sense of shame. If Sleel had done his job, Jersey would still be breathing. Sure, the old geep should have taken off like he’d been told to do, probably he could have gotten away clean. But it never should have come to that. That was Sleel’s fault. He’d been living that cock-of-thegalaxy facade for so long he’d halfway come to believe it. He had badly underestimated a deadly enemy and the mistake had been fatal for a man who had hired him to keep him alive. Hubris.

  That was the bottom line, now, wasn’t it? No way around that one. No way.

  Kee Wu felt a coolness touch her as she sat in the ship’s little park, as if a ghostly hand had brushed her spine. She turned, but there was no one else in sight. The sensation was one she had felt before, usually when she noticed she was being watched by someone. Riding a public trans or sometimes when she was working out in crowded places. Every now and then, she would get the cool tingle when she spotted a hidden surveillance camera. Odd that she should feel it now. Maybe there was a spycam set up to watch the park?

  She stood and wandered, trying to look aimless, but could not see either an observer or a hidden camera.

  After a few minutes the feeling abated, though it did not go away entirely. She shrugged it off. She was, she decided, being paranoid. There was no reason anybody should be watching her in particular, and if a surveillance eye happened to be focused on her, well, that was part of living in civilization.