Consider Phlebas (28 page)

The Ishlorsinami jerked his head in the direction of the corridor leading to the main arena entrance. ‘He just left.’ The humanoid’s voice sounded like two pieces of broken glass being rubbed together. Horza winced, but nodded quickly and, pushing his way back through the crowd, ran up the corridor.

In the vestibule of the arena complex there was an even bigger crowd. Guards, wheeled security drones, private bodyguards, car drivers, shuttle pilots, city police; people with desperate looks waving negotiable cards; others listing those who were buying space on shuttle buses and hovers running out to the port area; people just hanging around waiting to see what was going to happen or hoping that an ordered taxi was about to show up; people just wandering around with lost expressions on their faces, their clothes torn and dishevelled; others with smiles, all confidence, clutching bulky bags and pouches to themselves and frequently accompanied by a hired guard of their own: they all milled around in the vast expanse of noisy, bustling space which led from the auditorium proper to the plaza outside, in the open air, under the stars and the bright line of the Orbital’s far side.

Pulling his hood further over his face, Horza pushed through a barricade of guards. They still seemed concerned with keeping people out, even at this late stage in the game and in the countdown to destruction, and he was not hindered. He looked over the swirling mass of heads, capes, helmets, casings and ornamentation, wondering how he was going to catch Kraiklyn in this lot, or even see him. A wedge of uniformed quadrupeds pushed past him, some tall dignitary carried on a litter in their midst. As Horza was still staggering, a soft pneumatic tyre rolled over his foot as a mobile bar touted its wares. ‘Would you like a drug-bowl cocktail, sir?’ said the machine.

‘Fuck off,’ Horza told it, and he turned to head after the wedge of four-legged creatures making for the doors.

‘Certainly, sir; dry, medium or - ?’

Horza elbowed his way through the crowd after the quadrupeds. He caught up with them, and in their wake had an easy passage to the doors.

Outside, it was surprisingly cold. Horza saw his breath in front of him as he looked quickly around, trying to spot Kraiklyn. The crowd outside the arena was hardly less thick and rowdy than that inside. People hawked wares, sold tickets, staggered about, paced to and fro, tried to beg money from strangers, picked pockets, scanned the skies or peered down the broad spaces between buildings. A constant bright stream of machines appeared, roaring out of the sky or sweeping up the boulevards, stopped, and after taking people on, raced off again.

Horza just couldn’t see properly. He noticed a huge hire-guard: a three-metre-tall giant in a bulky suit, holding a large gun and looking about with a vacant expression on a broad, pale face. Wisps of bright red hair poked from underneath his helmet.

‘You for hire?’ Horza asked, doing a sort of breast stroke to get to the giant through a knot of people watching some fighting insects. The broad face nodded gravely, and the huge man came to attention.

‘That I am,’ the great voice rumbled.

‘Here’s a Hundredth,’ Horza said quickly, shoving a coin into the man’s glove, where it looked quite lost. ‘Let me up on your shoulders. I’m looking for somebody.’

‘All right,’ the man said, after a second’s thought. He bent down slowly on one knee, the rifle in his hand put out to steady him, butt first on the ground. Horza slung his legs over the giant’s shoulders. Without being asked, the man straightened and stood again, and Horza was hoisted high above the heads of the people in the crowd. He pulled the hood of the blouse over his face again, and scanned the mass of people for a figure in a light one-piece suit, although he knew that Kraiklyn might have changed by now, or even have left. A tight, nervous feeling of desperation was building in Horza’s belly. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter that much if he lost Kraiklyn now, that he could still make his way alone to the port area and so to the GSV that the Clear Air Turbulence was on; but his guts refused to be calmed. It was as though the atmosphere of the game, the terminal excitement of the Orbital, the city, the arena in their last hours, had altered his own body chemistry. He could have concentrated on it and made himself relax, but he couldn’t afford to do that now. He had to look for Kraiklyn.

He scanned the gaudy collection of individuals waiting in a cordoned area for shuttles, then recalled Kraiklyn’s thought about having wasted a lot of money. He looked away and surveyed the rest of the crowd.

He saw him. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was standing, his suit partly covered by a grey cloak, his arms folded and his feet apart, in a queue of people waiting to get buses and taxis, thirty metres away. Horza dipped forward and leant over until he was looking at the hire-guard’s upside-down face. ‘Thanks. You can put me down now.’

‘I have no change,’ the man rumbled as he stooped; the vibration went up through Horza’s body.

‘That’s OK. Keep it.’ Horza jumped off the guard’s shoulders. The giant shrugged as Horza ran, swerving and ducking to get past people, towards where he had seen Kraiklyn.

He had his terminal fastened to his left cuff; the time was minus two and a half hours. Horza squeezed and shoved and excused and apologised his way through the crowd, and on his way saw many people squinting at watches, terminals and screens, heard many little synthesised voices squawk the hour, and nervous humans repeat it.

There was the queue. It looked surprisingly orderly, Horza thought, then he noticed that it was being supervised by the same security guards who had been inside the arena. Kraiklyn was near the front of the queue now, and a bus had almost finished filling up. Road cars and hovers waited behind it. Kraiklyn pointed at one of them as a security guard with a notescreen talked to him.

Horza looked at the row of waiting people and guessed there must be several hundreds of them in it. If he were to join it he would lose Kraiklyn. He looked around quickly, wondering what other way there might be of following.

Somebody crashed into him from behind, and Horza turned round to the noise of shouting and voices and a press of brightly dressed people. A masked woman in a tight silver dress was shouting and screaming at a small, puzzled-looking man with long hair, clad only in intricate loops of dark green string. The woman shouted incoherently at the small man and struck out at him with her open hands; he backed off, shaking his head. People watched. Horza checked that he hadn’t had anything stolen when he was bumped into, then looked round again for some transport, or a taxi tout.

An aircraft flew overhead noisily and dropped leaflets written in a language Horza didn’t understand.

‘ . . . Sarble,’ a transparent-skinned man said to a companion as they both squeezed out of the nearby crowd and went past Horza. The man was trying to look at a small terminal screen as he walked. Horza caught a glimpse of something which puzzled him. He turned his own terminal onto the appropriate channel.

He was watching what looked like the same incident he had seen for real in the auditorium a few hours earlier: the disturbance on the terrace above his own when he’d heard that Sarble the Eye had been caught by the security guards. Horza frowned and brought the screen on his cuff closer.

It was that same place, it was that incident, seen from almost exactly the same angle and apparent distance he’d watched it from. He grimaced at the screen, trying to imagine where the picture he was watching now could have been taken from. The scene ended and was replaced by candid shots of various eccentric-looking beings enjoying themselves in the auditorium, as the Damage game went on somewhere in the background.

. . . If I’d stood up, Horza thought, and moved over just a -

It was the woman.

The woman with the white hair he’d seen early on, standing in the highest pan of the arena, fiddling with a tiara: she’d been on that same terrace, been standing by his lounger when the incident on the terrace above took place. She was Sarble the Eye. Probably the tiara was the camera and the person on the higher terrace was a decoy, a plant.

Horza snapped off the screen. He smiled, then shook his head as though to dislodge the small, useless revelation from the centre of his attention. He had to find some transport.

He started walking quickly through the crowd, threading his way through people in groups and lines and queues, looking for a free vehicle, an open door, a tout’s eyes. He caught a glimpse of the queue Kraiklyn was in. The CAT’s commander was at the open door of a red road car, apparently arguing with its driver and two other people in the queue.

Horza felt sick. He started to sweat; he wanted to kick out, to throw all the people crowding around him out of his path, away from him. He doubled back. He would have to risk trying to bribe his way into Kraiklyn’s queue at the front. He was five metres away from the queue when Kraiklyn and the two other people stopped arguing and got into the taxi, which drove off. As he turned his head to watch it go past, his stomach sinking, his fists clenching, Horza saw the white-haired woman again. She wore a hooded blue cloak, but the hood fell back as she squeezed out of the crowd to the edge of the road, where a tall man put his arm round her shoulders and waved into the plaza. She pulled the hood up again.

Horza put his hand into his pocket and onto the gun, then went forward towards the couple - just as a sleek, matt-black hover hissed out of the darkness and stopped beside them. Horza stepped forward quickly as the hover’s side door winged open and the woman who was Sarble the Eye stooped to enter.

Horza reached out and tapped the woman on the shoulder. She whirled round to face him. The tall man started towards him, and Horza shoved his hand forward and up in his pocket, so that the gun pressed out. The man stopped, looking down, uncertain; the woman froze, one foot on the door’s sill.

‘I think you’re going my way,’ Horza said quickly. ‘I know who you are.’ He nodded at the woman. ‘I know about that thing you had on your head. All I want is a lift to the port. That’s all. No fuss.’ He gestured with his head in the direction of the security guards at the head of the main queue.

The woman looked at the tall man, then at Horza. She stepped back slowly. ‘OK. After you.’

‘No, you first.’ Horza motioned with the hand in his pocket. The woman smiled, shrugged and got in, followed by the tall man and Horza.

‘What’s he - ?’ began the driver, a fierce-looking bald woman.

‘A guest,’ Sarble told her. ‘Just drive.’

The hover rose. ‘Straight ahead,’ Horza said. ‘Fast as you like. I’m looking for a red-coloured wheeled car.’ He took the gun out of his pocket and pivoted round so that he faced Sarble the Eye and the tall man. The hover accelerated.

‘I told you they put that ‘cast out too soon,’ the tall man hissed in a hoarse high voice. Sarble shrugged. Horza smiled, glancing occasionally out of the window at the traffic around the cab, but watching the other two people from the corner of his eye.

‘Just bad luck,’ Sarble said. ‘I kept bumping into this guy inside the place, too.’

‘You really are Sarble, then?’ Horza said to the woman. She didn’t look round and didn’t reply.

‘Look,’ the man said, turning to Horza, ‘we’ll take you to the port, if that’s where this red car’s going, but just don’t try anything. We’ll fight if we have to. I’m not afraid to die.’ The tall man sounded frightened and angry at the same time; his yellow-white face looked like a child’s, about to cry.

‘You’ve convinced me.’ Horza grinned. ‘Now, why not watch out for the red car? Three wheels, four doors, driver, three people in the back. Can’t miss it.’

The tall man bit his lip. Horza motioned him to look forward, with a small movement of the gun.

‘That it?’ the bald-headed driver said. Horza saw the car she meant. It looked right.

‘Yes. Follow it; not too close.’ The hover dropped back a little. They entered the port area. Cranes and gantries were lit in the distance; parked road vehicles, hovers and even light shuttles lay scattered on either side of the road. The car was just ahead now, following a couple of struggling hover buses up a shallow ramp. Their own hover’s engine laboured as they climbed.

The red car branched off the main route and followed a long curve of roadway, water glittering darkly on either side.

‘Are you really Sarble?’ Horza asked the white-haired woman, who still didn’t turn to him. ‘Was that you earlier, outside the hall? Or not? Is Sarble really lots of people?’

The people in the car said nothing. Horza just smiled, watching them carefully, but nodding and smiling to himself. There was silence in the hover, only the wind roaring.

The car left the roadway and angled down a fenced boulevard past huge gantries and the lit masses of towering machinery, then sped along a road lined on both sides with dark warehouses. It started to slow by the side of a small dock.

‘Pull back,’ Horza said. The bald-headed woman slowed the hover as the red car cruised by the dockside, under the square cages of crane legs.

The red car drew up by a brightly lit building. A pattern of lights revolving round the top of the construction spelt out ‘SUB-BASE ACCESS 54′ in several languages.

‘Fine. Stop,’ Horza said. The hover stopped, sinking on its skirts. ‘Thanks.’ Horza got out, still facing the man and the white-haired woman.

‘You’re just lucky you didn’t try anything,’ the man said angrily, nodding sharply, his eyes glistening.

‘I know,’ Horza said. ‘Bye now,’ he winked at the white-haired woman. She turned and made what he suspected was an obscene gesture with one finger. The hover rose, blasted forward, then skidded round and roared off the way it had come. Horza looked back at the sub-plate shaft entrance, where the three people who had got out of the car stood silhouetted against the light inside. One of them might have looked back down the dock towards Horza; he wasn’t sure they did, but he shrank back into the shadows of the crane above him.

Two of the people at the access tube went into the building and disappeared. The third person, who might have been Kraiklyn, walked off towards the side of the dock.