House of the Sun (12 page)

I jandered across to an open booth, thinking about the gun on my hip as I walked. That's all it takes, really—just
think
about the heat you're packing, and where you're packing it. It changes your walk, the way you carry your weight, very subtly. Anyone with street instincts is going to pick up on that change and interpret it correctly. In a totally nonconfrontational and nonthreatening way, I'd made it abundantly clear to those who mattered that I wasn't traveling unheeled. Scott followed me, and we slid into the curved booth, sitting side by side with our backs to the wall.

A waitress—a hard-faced woman with black roots to her bottle-blond hair—was with us in a minute. "What can I get you?"

"Nothing for me," Scott started, but I shot him a look. He hesitated, then beamed. "Gimme a dog, then," he said.

I raised an eyebrow in question.

"Black Dog beer," Scott explained. "A microbrewery out Kailua way makes it. Real good, if you like your beer dark."

"I'll have a dog too, then," I told the waitress. She walked away without acknowledgment, but a few minutes later returned to place two half-liter glasses filled to the brim with dark liquid on our table.

I tried to pay, but Scott was too fast. "I'll get this one," he said, slipping some money—real folding money, which surprised me—to the waitress. "You got breakfast."

"Did I?"

He chuckled. "It got charged to your room, anyway." He glanced down at his glass. "I shouldn't be doing this, not on duty, but"—he grinned like a bandit, and raised his glass—
"okolemaluna!
"

I toasted him in return. "Whatever you just said." The beer had a nice head to it, and a sweet, slightly nutty taste. I took a second swig and nodded approvingly. "Good. How's the food here?"

* * *

By the time we'd finished our lunch—a large soyburger with Maui chips, two of the same for Scott—the afternoon crowd had started to roll in. A succession of dancers—quite pretty, most of them, and some could even dance—disrobed and strutted their stuff for the indifferent audience. As the patrons gathered along the bar and in the shadowy booths, I felt even more at home. Apart from style of dress and the preponderance of deep tans, these slags were almost exactly like the crowd that frequented my favorite watering holes in Seattle and Cheyenne. Hard-edged customers, most of them—totally at home in the reality of the streets, if not full-on denizens of the shadows. Many were packing—I could see it in the way they moved—and those who weren't looked as though they could more than hold their own even without a weapon.

I sipped at my second beer. Scott was still nursing his first and refused my offer of a refill. "Drinking and driving ain't a good thing with a vehicle control rig," he told me firmly.

A knot of real hard cases were talking biz in the back corner. Macroplast glinted momentarily in the light as a credstick changed hands. I leaned over toward Scott and nodded toward the negotiators. "What are the shadows like around here?" I asked quietly.

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.