The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (52 page)

“Two men … were waiting in the bedroom when I came in. They’d bypassed the alarms on the balcony door.”

“You deserve a refund on your security tax,” I said. “What happened next?”

“We struggled. They seemed to be dragging me toward the door. One of them had an injector but I managed to knock it out of his hand.”

“What made them leave?”

“I activated the in-house alarms.”

“But not Hive security?”

“No. I didn’t want them involved.”

“Who hit you?”

Johnny smiled sheepishly. “I did. They released me, I went after them. I managed to trip and fall against the nightstand.”

“Not a very graceful brawl on either side,” I said. I switched on a lamp and checked the carpet until I found the injection ampule where it had rolled under the bed.

Johnny eyed it as if it were a viper.

“What’s your guess?” I said. “More AIDS II?”

He shook his head.

“I know a place where we can get it analyzed,” I said. “My guess is that it’s just a hypnotic trank. They just wanted you to come along … not to kill you.”

Johnny moved the drypad and grimaced. The blood was still flowing. “Why would anyone want to kidnap a cybrid?”

“You tell me. I’m beginning to think that the so-called murder was just a botched kidnapping attempt.”

Johnny shook his head again.

I said, “Did one of the men wear a queue?”

“I don’t know. They wore caps and osmosis masks.”

“Was either one tall enough to be a Templar or strong enough to be a Lusian?”

“A Templar?” Johnny was surprised. “No. One was about average Web height. The one with the ampule could have been Lusian. Strong enough.”

“So you went after a Lusian thug with your bare hands. Do you have some bioprocessors or augmentation implants I don’t know about?”

“No. I was just mad.”

I helped him to his feet. “So AIs get angry?”

“I do.”

“Come on,” I said, “I know an automated med clinic that’s discount. Then you’ll be staying with me for a while.”

“With you? Why?”

“Because you’ve graduated from just needing a detective,” I said. “Now you need a bodyguard.”

   My cubby wasn’t registered in the Hive zoning schematic as an apartment; I’d taken over a renovated warehouse loft from a friend of mine who’d run afoul of loan sharks. My friend had decided late in life to emigrate to one of the Outback colonies and I’d gotten a good deal on a place just a klick down the corridor from my office. The environment was a little rough and sometimes the noise from the loading docks could drown out conversation, but it gave me ten
times the room of a normal cubby and I could use my weights and workout equipment right at home.

Johnny honestly seemed intrigued by the place and I had to kick myself for being pleased. Next thing you knew, I’d be putting on lipstick and body rouge for this cybrid.

“So why do you live on Lusus?” I asked him. “Most offworlders find the gravity a pain and the scenery monotonous. Plus your research material’s at the library on Renaissance V. Why here?”

I found myself looking and listening very carefully as he answered. His hair was straight on top, parted in the middle, and fell in reddish-brown curls to his collar. He had the habit of resting his cheek on his fist as he spoke. It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it. And beneath that there was a hint of lilt that brought back the overtones of a cat burglar I’d known who had grown up on Asquith, a quiet, backwater Web world settled by First Expansion immigrants from what had once been the British Isles.

“I have lived on many worlds,” he said. “My purpose is to observe.”

“As a poet?”

He shook his head, winced, and gingerly touched the stitches. “No. I’m not a poet.
He
was.”

Despite the circumstances, there was an energy and vitality to Johnny that I’d found in too few men. It was hard to describe, but I’d seen rooms fulls of more important personages rearrange themselves to orbit around personalities like his. It was not merely his reticence and sensitivity, it was an
intensity
that he emanated even when merely observing.

“Why do
you
live here?” he asked.

“I was born here.”

“Yes, but you spent your childhood years on Tau Ceti Center. Your father was a senator.”

I said nothing.

“Many people expected you to go into politics,” he said. “Did your father’s suicide dissuade you?”

“It wasn’t suicide,” I said.

“No?”

“All the news reports and the inquest said it was,” I said tonelessly, “but they were wrong. My father never would have taken his own life.”

“So it was murder?”

“Yes.”

“Despite the fact that there was no motive or hint of a suspect?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” said Johnny. The yellow glow from the loading dock lamps came through the dusty windows and made his hair gleam like new copper. “Do you like being a detective?”

“When I do it well,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Then let’s get some sleep. You can have the couch.”

“Do you do it well often?” he said. “Being a detective?”

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

   In the morning Johnny farcast to Renaissance Vector at about the usual time, waited a moment in the plaza, and then ’cast to the Old Settlers’ Museum on Sol Draconi Septem. From there he jumped to the main terminex on Nordholm and then ’cast to the Templar world of God’s Grove.

We’d worked out the timing ahead of time and I was waiting for him on Renaissance V, standing back in the shadows of the colonnade.

A man with a queue was the third through after Johnny. There was no doubt he was Lusian—between the Hive pallor, the muscle and body mass, and the arrogant way of walking, he might have been my long-lost brother.

He never looked at Johnny but I could tell that he was surprised when the cybrid circled around to the outbound portals. I stayed back and only caught a glimpse of his card but would’ve bet anything that it was a tracer.

Queue was careful in the Old Settlers’ Museum, keeping Johnny in sight but checking his own back as well. I was dressed in a Zen
Gnostic’s meditation jumper, isolation visor and all, and I never looked their way as I circled to the museum outportal and ’cast directly to God’s Grove.

It made me feel funny, leaving Johnny alone through the museum and Nordholm terminex, but both were public places and it was a calculated risk.

Johnny came through the Worldtree arrival portal right on time and bought a ticket for the tour. His shadow had to scurry to catch up, breaking cover to board the omnibus skimmer before it left. I was already settled in the rear seat on the upper deck and Johnny found a place near the front, just as we had planned. Now I was wearing basic tourist garb and my imager was one of a dozen in action when Queue hurried to take his place three rows behind Johnny.

The tour of the Worldtree is always fun—Dad first took me there when I was only three standard—but this time as the skimmer moved above branches the size of freeways and circled higher around a trunk the width of Olympus Mons, I found myself reacting to the glimpses of hooded Templars with something approaching anxiety.

Johnny and I had discussed various clever and infinitely subtle ways to trail Queue if he showed up, to follow him to his lair and spend weeks if necessary deducing his game. In the end I opted for something less than the subtle approach.

The omnibus had dumped us out near the Muir Museum and people were milling around on the plaza, torn between spending ten marks for a ticket to educate themselves or going straight for the gift shop, when I walked up to Queue, gripped him by the upper arm, and said in conversational tones, “Hi. Do you mind telling me what the fuck you want with my client?”

There’s an old stereotype that says that Lusians are as subtle as a stomach pump and about half as pleasant. If I’d helped confirm the first part of that, Queue went a long way toward reinforcing the second prejudice.

He was fast. Even with my seemingly casual grip paralyzing the muscles of his right arm, the knife in his left hand sliced up and around in less than a second.

I let myself fall to my right, the knife slicing air centimeters from
my cheek, hitting pavement and rolling as I palmed the neural stunner and came up on one knee to meet the threat.

No threat. Queue was running. Away from me. Away from Johnny. He shoved tourists aside, dodged behind them, moving toward the museum entrance.

I slid the stunner back into its wristband and began running myself. Stunners are great close-range weapons—as easy to aim as a shotgun without the dire effects if the spread pattern finds innocent bystanders—but they aren’t worth anything beyond eight or ten meters. On full dispersal, I could give half the tourists in the plaza a miserable headache but Queue was already too far away to bring down. I ran after him.

Johnny ran toward me. I waved him back. “My place!” I shouted. “Use the locks!”

Queue had reached the museum entrance and now he looked back at me; the knife was still in his hand.

I charged at him, feeling something like joy at the thought of the next few minutes.

Queue vaulted a turnstile and shoved tourists aside to get through the doors. I followed.

It was only when I reached the vaulted interior of the Grand Hall and saw him shoving his way up the crowded escalator to the Excursion Mezzanine that I realized where he was headed.

My father had taken me on the Templar Excursion when I was three. The farcaster portals were permanently open; it took about three hours to walk all the guided tours on the thirty worlds where the Templar ecologists had preserved some bit of nature which they thought would please the Muir. I couldn’t remember for sure, but I thought the paths were loop trails with the portals relatively close together for easy transit by Templar guides and maintenance people.

Shit
.

A uniformed guard near the tour portal saw the confusion as Queue cut through and stepped forward to intercept the rude intruder. Even from fifteen meters away I could see the shock and disbelief on the old guard’s face as he staggered backward, the hilt of Queue’s long knife protruding from his chest.

The old guard, probably a retired local cop, looked down, face
white, touched the bone hilt gingerly as if it were a gag, and collapsed face first on the mezzanine tiles. Tourists screamed. Someone yelled for a medic. I saw Queue shove a Templar guide aside and throw himself through the glowing portal.

This was not going as I’d planned.

I vaulted for the portal without slowing.

Through and half sliding on the slippery grass of a hillside. Sky lemon yellow above us. Tropical scents. I saw startled faces turned my way. Queue was halfway to the other farcaster, cutting through elaborate flower beds and kicking aside bonsai topiary. I recognized the world of Fuji and careened down the hillside, clambering uphill again through the flower beds, following the trail of destruction Queue had left. “Stop that man!” I screamed, realizing how foolish it sounded. No one made a move except for a Nipponese tourist who raised her imager and recorded a sequence.

Queue looked back, shoved past a gawking tour group, and stepped through the farcast portal.

I had the stunner in my hand again and waved it at the crowd. “Back! Back!” They hastily made room.

I went through warily, stunner raised. Queue no longer had his knife but I didn’t know what other toys he carried.

Brilliant light on water. The violet waves of Mare Infinitus. The path was a narrow wooden walkway ten meters above the support floats. It led out and away, curving above a fairyland coral reef and a sargasso of yellow island kelp before curving back, but a narrow catwalk cut across to the portal at the end of the trail. Queue had climbed the
NO ACCESS
gate and was halfway across the catwalk.

I ran the ten paces to the edge of the platform, selected tightbeam, and held the stunner on full auto, sweeping the invisible beam back and forth as if I were aiming a garden hose.

Queue seemed to stumble a half step but then made the last ten meters to the portal and dived through. I cursed and climbed the gate, ignoring shouts from a Templar guide behind me. I caught a glimpse of a sign which reminded tourists to don therm gear and then I was through the portal, barely sensing the shower-tingle sensation of passing through the farcaster screen.

A blizzard roared, whipping against the arched containment field
which turned the tourist trail into a tunnel through fierce whiteness. Sol Draconi Septem—the northern reaches where Templar lobbying of the All Thing had stopped the colonial heating project in order to save the arctic wraiths. I could feel the 1.7-standard gravity on my shoulders like the yoke of my workout machine. It was a shame that Queue was a Lusian also; if he’d been Web-standard in physique, there would have been no contest if I caught him here. Now we would see who was in better shape.

Queue was fifty meters down the trail and looking back over his shoulder. The other farcaster was somewhere near but the blizzard made anything off the trail invisible and inaccessible. I began loping after him. In deference to the gravity, this was the shortest of the Templar Excursion trails, curving back after only two hundred or so meters. I could hear Queue’s panting as I closed on him. I was running easily; there was no way that he was going to beat me to the next farcaster. I saw no tourists on the trail and so far no one had given chase. I thought that this would not be a bad place to interrogate him.

Queue was thirty meters short of the exit portal when he turned, dropped to one knee, and aimed an energy pistol. The first bolt was short, possibly because of the unaccustomed weight of the weapon in Sol Draconi’s gravity field, but it was close enough to leave a scorched slash of slagged walkway and melted permafrost to within a meter of me. He adjusted his aim.

I went out through the containment field, shouldering my way through the elastic resistance and stumbling into drifts above my waist. The cold air burned my lungs and wind-driven snow caked my face and bare arms in seconds. I could see Queue looking for me from within the lighted pathway, but the blizzard dimness worked in my favor now as I threw myself through drifts in his direction.