Against A Dark Background (18 page)

She discovered that the other Solipsists saw no contradiction in being part of a group of which they were not the leader; they all assumed they were, and Roa was just something they had imagined to deal with the boring parts of the job. There were still arguments, but the system of Roa being in charge appeared to work. (Democracy was out; they’d only vote for themselves again.)

Roa wisely did not name a second-in-command, in case this was taken as a sign that he was growing uncertain. This had happened before, and Roa had almost been murdered in his sleep by the person/figment concerned. Roa had dealt with the person sternly, hence at least one of the dents in the Solo’s stern starboard airscrew.

The old ACV powered along the coast of Nasahapley towards Ais. An hour before they got there, she watched from the flight deck as they passed the territory’s religious cantonment, the sprawling, walled settlement on the coastal flood-plain dominated by the black and gold spires of the Huhsz World Shrine.

She waited for the regretful words, the apologetic explanation and the change of course that would take the hovercraft curving round towards the Shrine, but it never happened.

The Solo was too large to be allowed to travel in Greater Aïs county, where they had rules about that sort of thing. Elson Roa and a couple of the others unloaded a small half-track from the ACV’s garage deck and took her to the city in that, leaving the other apparences to argue with the harbour authorities about landing dues, mooring rates and untreated sewage discharges.

The small half-track rumbled into the dusty main square of Ais; ochre, colonnaded buildings sloped on all sides. They had driven part of the way down the central reservation of a boulevard, collecting a couple of small shrubs on the nudge bars and a traffic violation. The half-track’s driver - a young albino originally called Keteo who drove with more enthusiasm than skill and more speed than accuracy - skidded the half-track to a stop just before the square’s central fountain, and sat staring malevolently at the flower-beds across the other side of the square.

It was a hot day; the sun was bright in the clear sky. The terminus of the Trans-Continental Monorail stood just beyond the flower-beds Keteo was staring at so intently. Sharrow looked around the square, where traffic - mostly buses - moved, and people - almost all totally nude - walked.

‘Oh shit,’ Sharrow said. `Just my luck to arrive in Nudist Week.’

Roa, who had been looking strangely tense until that point, relaxed and smiled. ‘Nudist Week,’ he said, sounding relieved. ‘Yes; they really are, aren’t they? Of course.’

Sharrow looked around the square again, wondering if Miz and the Francks were here yet.

‘Well,’ Roa said to her. ‘Here we are. I have no idea whether I shall need you in the future, but I trust I imagine you well, if we do meet again.’ He fell silent and stared at his finger nails.

She looked from him to the other two Solipsists; the man beside Roa was sitting with his eyes tightly closed. Keteo the driver was gunning the engine and muttering something as he glared at the distant flower-bed. Roa looked away and closed his eyes. He made a humming noise and started to roll his head.

She got down out of the half-track and stood on the road. Buses grumbled past; people - mostly naked, many carrying briefcases - walked past.

Elson Roa opened his eyes. He looked briefly delighted, then saw her standing on the road surface and started. He frowned down at her.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Politeness: He reached down with one hand. She shook it. ‘Good-bye,’ he said.

‘Good-bye,’ she replied, and turned and walked away.

When she looked back, Roa and the other back-seat Solipsist were arguing vehemently with the driver and gesticulating alternately at the flower-beds and the boulevard.

She walked self-consciously to the monorail station. As she walked up the steps, the Solipsist half-track roared out of the square, just missing the flower-beds and sending mostly naked pedestrians scattering in all directions as it bounced down the boulevard back towards the port.

She felt more and more awkward walking amongst the naked people in the station concourse, so she stopped to take her clothes off in a phone booth and was promptly arrested for stripping in public, an offence against common decency.

The K’lel desert was a few million square kilometres of karst; eroded limestone devoid of topsoil. Karst forms when carbon dioxide dissolved in rain reacts with porous limestone as the moisture permeates it on its way to an underlying layer of impervious rock. Golter had had not one but several ages when there had been widespread and rather crude industrialisation, and each time one of the major centres had been downwind of K’lel, a lushly but shallowly forested area already vulnerable to the scouring effect of the Belt winds; the succession of increased carbon dioxide levels and heavy acid rainfall in the past had gradually destroyed the forests and eroded the rock while the Belt winds had produced a dust-bowl from the remaining soil, creating a change in the climate that only accelerated the desertification.

Eventually only the rock had been left, frayed and sculpted into spears and pinnacles of knife-sharp karst; a forest of pitted stone blades stretching from horizon to horizon, baked to the heat of the equatorial sun and dotted with collapsed caves where a few parched plants clung on in dark, sunken oases, and striated by tattered ribbons of seemingly level ground where the karst’s brittle corrugations were on a scale of centimetres rather than kilometres.

There were always plans to revivify the dead heart of the continent, but they never came to anything; even the seemingly promising scheme to replace the main space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere, Ikueshleng, with a new complex in the desert had failed. Apart from some ruins, a sprinkling of old waste silos, a few vast, automated solar energy farms, and the Traps-Continental Monorail - also sun-powered -the K’lel was empty.

She squatted on her haunches in the shadow of the monorail support, holding her rifle butt down on the dusty ripples of stone, clenching the gun between her knees while she adjusted the scarf round her head, tucking one end into the collar of her light jacket.

It was mid-morning; the high cirrus clouds were poised like feathery arches over the warming expanse of karst, and the still air sucked sweat from exposed skin with an enthusiasm bordering on kleptomania. She slipped the mask up over her mouth and nose and reseated the dark visor over her eyes, then sat back, holding the gun, her fingers tapping on the barrel. She took a drink from her water bottle and glanced at her watch. She looked over at Dloan, crouching at the other leg of the monorail, rifle slung over his back, wires from his head-scarf leading into an opened junction box in the support leg. He looked up at her and shook his head.

Sharrow leant back against the already uncomfortably warm support leg. She shifted her satchel so that it was between her back and the hot metal of the monorail support. She looked at the time again. She hated waiting.

They met up again in the Continental Hotel in Ais, after Sharrow had bailed herself out of Ais’s Vice Squad pound and bribed the desk sergeant to lose the record of her arrest.

She finally arrived at the hotel-clothed again, and veiled, even if it did attract attention - but there was nobody there registered as Kuma or any other name she could imagine the others might be using.

She stood, tapping her fingers on the cool surface of the reception desk while the smiling and quite naked clerk scratched delicately under one armpit with a pen. She wondered whether to ask if there were any messages for her; she was starting to worry about giving her location away to the Huhsz. She’d think about it. She bought a newssheet to see if the Huhsz had their Passports yet and headed for the bar.

The first person she saw was a fully clothed Cenuij Mu.

`My watch says the damn thing should be visible by now,’ Miz said, tight-beaming from the top of the monorail line, two kilometres away round the shallow curve the twinned tracks took to avoid a region of collapsed caves.

`Mine too,’ Sharrow said into the mask. She squinted into the distance, trying to make out the tiny dot that was Miz, sitting on the baking topsurface of the monorail; the last time she’d looked she’d been able to see him and the lump on the ground beneath him, which was the camouflaged-netted All-Terrain, but the heat had increased sufficiently in just the last ten minutes for it to be impossible to see either now; with the naked eye the white line of the rail writhed and shimmered, smearing any detail. She tried adjusting the magnification and the polarisation of the visor, but gave up after a while.

‘Nothing on the phones?’ she asked.

‘Just expansion noises,’ Miz replied.

She looked at her watch again.

‘So what changed your mind?’ she asked Cenuij, in the elevator to the floor where the others were waiting.

He sighed and pulled back the left sleeve of his shirt.

She bent forward, looking. ‘Nasty. Laser?’

‘I believe so,’ he said, pulling down his sleeve again. ‘There were three this time. They wrecked my apartment. Last I heard -before I had to run away-my insurance company was refusing to pay out.’ Cenuij made a sniffing noise and leant back against the wall of the lift, arms crossed. ‘When all this is over I shall ask you to cover that loss.’

‘I promise,’ Sharrow said, holding up one hand.

‘Hmm,’ Cenuij said as the elevator slowed. ‘Meanwhile, Miz appears to think there’s some point in staging . . .’ Cenuij looked round the elevator, then shrugged, ‘a train robbery.’

Sharrow raised her eyebrows. The elevator stopped.

‘For . . . artifacts,’ Cenuij said, as the doors opened and they left, ‘that are indestructible, can’t be hidden and it would be suicide to hold on to.’ He shook his head as they walked down the wide corridor. ‘Does the Log-Jam turn everybody’s brains to mush?’

‘It does when you head-butt a hydrofoil from twenty metres up,’ she told him.

She pulled her mask down; the air was a hot blast at the back of her throat. She waved at Dloan. He took the plugs out of his ears, cocked his head.

‘Aren’t you getting anything?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Just the carrier signal; nothing about the train being late or being on this section of track yet.’

She turned back, frowning. ‘Shit,’ she said, and flicked a grain of dust off the muzzle of the hunting rifle. She put the mask back up.

Miz stood looking out of the hotel-room window, glaring at Ais’s dusty eastern suburbs. He glanced at Cenuij, who was taking the doll apart on the table, a magnifier clipped over his eyes.

‘I was set up,’ Miz said incredulously. He flapped his arms as he turned back to look at the others. ‘Some bastard had me steal the fucking necklace and let Lebmellin think he was going to double-cross me, but they had it all worked out; fucking Mind Bomb shit and the guns it switched off. And the set-up in the tanker; it was all done that day; I checked that route myself during the morning . . .’ His voice trailed off as he sat heavily on the couch beside Sharrow. ‘And look at this!’ He reached out to the low table in front of the couch and snatched up the newssheet Sharrow had brought with her. ‘Re-purloined Jewel wins the first race in Tile yesterday! Bastards!’

‘Hey,’ Sharrow said, putting her arm on his shoulders.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘enough. You had a worse time.’ He squinted at her. ‘Two identical guys?’ he said.

‘Completely identical,’ Sharrow nodded, taking her arm away. ‘Clone identical.’

‘Or android identical,’ Cenuij said from the table, putting down the magnifier.

‘You think so?’ she asked.

Cenuij stood, stretching. ‘Just a thought.’

‘I thought androids came kind of expensive,’ Sharrow said, swirling her drink. ‘I mean, when the hell do you ever see an android these days?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ve dated a few,’ Zefla grunted, going to the room’s bar for a drink.

‘They tend to stay in Vembyr, certainly,’ Cenuij agreed. ‘But they travel, occasionally, and like everybody else,’ Cenuij smiled frostily at Sharrow, ‘they each have their price.’

‘Dloan was in Vembyr once,’ Zefla said, turning from the flasks and bottles displayed in the cooler. ‘Weren’t you, Dlo?’

Dloan nodded. ‘Arms auction.’

‘What’s it like?’ Miz asked him.

Dloan looked thoughtful, then nodded and said, ‘Quiet.’

‘Anyway,’ Zefla said, taking a bottle from the cooler, ‘fuck the androids; what about that doll?’

Cenuij looked at it lying spread out on the table. ‘Could have been made anywhere,’ he told them. ‘PVC body with strain gauges and an optical wiring loom; battery pack and a chunk of mostly redundant circuitry foam, plus an electronic coder-transmitter working at the longwave limit of normal net frequencies.’ Cenuij looked at Dloan. ‘Could the doll have been linked to some form of nerve-gun to do what she’s described?’

Dloan nodded. ‘Modified stunner can produce those effects. Illegal, most places.’

‘I didn’t see any gun,’ Sharrow said, trying to remember. ‘There were the two guys, the two chairs, the gas cylinder . . .’

‘Chlorine!’ Miz said, slapping both knees and jumping up from the couch to go to the window again, running one hand through his hair. ‘Fucking chlorine! Sons of bitches.’

‘The gun could have been anywhere in the tank,’ Cenuij said, glancing at Dloan, who nodded. ‘Possibly with the master unit controlling the androids, if that’s what they were. Or,’ Cenuij added, nodding at Sharrow, ‘the doll could have been transmitting directly.’

Nobody said anything.

Sharrow cleared her throat. ‘You mean there might be something inside me picking up the signals from the doll?’

‘Possible,’ Cenuij said, gathering the bits and pieces of the doll together. ‘This long-wave transmitter isn’t how you’d normally slave a gun to a remote. It’s . . . strange.’

‘But how could there be something in me?’ Sharrow said. ‘Inside my head . . .?’

Cenuij shoved the remains of the doll into a disposal bag. ‘Had any brain surgery recently?’ he asked, smiling humourlessly.