House of the Sun (13 page)

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 camera 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.

"Like I said, Mr. Tokudaiji had biz on the outer islands yesterday," Scott explained patiently. "He's under no obligation to see you at all, see? He could just dust you off, and nobody could say drek about it."

I digested that as Scott turned the limo onto a northbound highway that soon plunged into a tunnel through a range of hills. Either Scott didn't know on whose behest I was working—this Tokudaiji wouldn't be dusting
me
off, he'd be dusting off Jacques Barnard, executive vice president of Yamatetsu North America—or Tokudaiji was a
very
important man indeed.

"Are you packing?" Scott asked suddenly.

The Seco suddenly felt heavy on my hip. "Yes," I said slowly.

Scott made a
tsk
sound. "Should have warned you about that. You'll have to leave it in the car when you go in to see Mr. Tokudaiji."

Like
frag
I
will
... That's what I
wanted
to say, but I held my tongue with a sigh. "I'm not sure I like the way this is working out."

For a moment the old Scott reappeared in his smile. "Hey, brah, at least
you
won't have to go through a cavity search."

The highway emerged from the tunnel, and the whole landscape had changed. The north side of the island was much lusher than the south, which implied more rain. (Hadn't I read somewhere that changing wind patterns had really fragged with the weather in the islands over the last half century? Well, whatever.) The highway curved northwest, judging by the position of the sun, then switchbacked to the northeast, descending a hillside. Directly north was a rocky promontory, with something that looked like a military installation at its base. On the west side of the promontory, the coastline opened out into a sweeping bay so beautiful it almost couldn't be real. "Mr. Tokudaiji's got himself a pretty fair view, you ask me," Scott said, again seeming to read my mind.

We pulled off the highway and followed a harshly weathered secondary road that flanked the bay. After a klick or two, Scott took an unmarked turn, and the quality of the road improved drastically. Private road, I guessed . .. and a glimpse of a surveillance camera tracking the car from a hibiscus bush confirmed it a moment later. I patted my pockets to be sure I hadn't misplaced Barnard's message chip after all this, and, a little grudgingly, unclipped the Seco's holster from my waistband. "You can just leave your piece in the back there," Scott suggested. "It'll be safe."

The limo sighed to a stop at a security gate, but not any kind of security gate I was used to. No electrified chain-link fences here, no strands of cutwire, no powered metal gate running on reinforced tracks. Instead, we faced a large palisade—that's about the best word I can find for it—made of finely finished dark wood. A Japanese-style arch topped the gate. I saw the motif worked into that arch and into the double gate itself and felt a faint chill in my gut. A chrysanthemum, that was the key image, replicated everywhere. Just fragging peachy.

As we sat, waiting, I examined the gate and the palisade. Though the whole setup looked like a set from an old Kurosawa flatfilm—
Ran,
maybe—it didn't take much brains to guess that things were a lot more secure than they seemed. Maybe the façade of the gates and the fence
were
real wood—if I hadn't noticed the chrysanthemum pattern, I'd have wagered they were cheaper macroplast—but they certainly covered material a lot more resilient. Reinforced ballistic composite at the very least, possibly armored ferrocrete. Though it looked as though those carved gateposts would fall like bowling pins if Scott gunned the Rolls into the gates, I'd have laid a very big bet that even a light panzer would have difficulty taking down Ekei Tokudaiji's first line of defense.

After a minute or so—enough time for security personnel to scan the car with every available frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably—a small postern gate opened and two figures emerged. They wore expensively tailored suits, not the ancient Nihonese armor I'd half expected, but their faces, their manner, and the general way they carried themselves wouldn't have seemed out of place in a samurai epic.

Neither had any visible weapons, but one of them took up a perfect position for covering fire anyway. The second approached the driver's side. Scott powered down the window and gave the guard a formal nod.
"Konichi-wa,
" the driver said, then went on in Japanese faster than my limited comprehension could match. I heard
Tokudaiji-sama
once, and my own name—I think—a couple of times, but beyond that I couldn't make any sense of it.

When Scott had run down, the guard nodded again. "Go ahead," he said in unaccented English and stepped aside to join his comrade. The double gates swung silently back, and the Rolls sighed forward.

Outside the compound, the forest had been allowed to run more or less riot. Inside, everything—the position of every tree and shrub, even the proportions of the winding driveway—seemed to be laid out with mathematical precision. I felt like I was cruising through a tropical version of a Japanese formal garden . . . which is exactly what I was doing, of course.