The Musashi Flex (29 page)

Shaw frowned at the need for the hotel room. The fighter he had come to find had apparently dropped from sight—his agents had lost track of him, and until they found him again, Shaw would just have to wait.

Azul wouldn’t have wanted to be the operative who had lost Shaw’s quarry; likely, that one would be looking for a new job even as she thought it. And if the man got offworld before they regained contact? All of the ops involved would be needing work, she was sure. Shaw wasn’t a man to reward failure.

Well. It didn’t matter. While she was looking forward to seeing how well Shaw actually could fight, her purposes would be served whether he did or did not. As long as she was in proximity, she could continue to work her skills on him. He had already opened up with her in ways she suspected he never had with anybody else, and she was just getting started.

The flitter put down on the roof of the hotel, and it was a very short ride in the lift to the top floor, all of which had been reserved for Shaw and his party. Cervo went off to instruct the local bodyguards. Shaw decided he needed a shower. Azul went to the hotel’s shopping kiosk on the ground floor. She wanted to buy some sexy underwear, and to replenish some cosmetics.

“Charge whatever you need to our rooms,” Shaw said.

“You think you can afford it?”

“You want the hotel? I can have it wrapped and delivered. Might be hard to get it through its own door.”

She laughed. He was funny.

At the shopping center, she wandered around and found what she wanted, including a pair of panties made from silk so fine they were almost invisible. It was not so much the material as the idea that made them exciting. She presented her cube for payment. The clerk, a tall and thin woman of fifty or so, smiled. “Find everything you needed, F. Azul?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Have a nice visit.”

When the clerk handed her the bag with her purchases, she pressed a short-term flimsy into Azul’s palm along with the bag. The greasy feel of the quikrot sheet under her fingers was unmistakable. Azul smiled. “Is there a fresher nearby?”

“Through the front there and to your right,” the clerk said.

“Thank you.”

Trying to hurry while looking as if you were strolling was a trick, but having to pee might do that. She knew she had a pair of bodyguards assigned to watch her, a man and a woman—she had spotted them pretty quickly when she’d come off the lift. Shaw wouldn’t want anybody trying to grab his paramour. But since she had maybe ninety seconds left before the flimsy just triggered degraded into a puff of dust, she couldn’t wait to get back uplevels to her floor to read it.

In the fresher, she took a stall, shut and latched the door, and checked to make sure there weren’t any obvious cams watching her. She pulled her orthoskins down, sat on the toilet, and peed, and as she did, she unfolded the flimsy and read it.

“REPORT” was all it said.

A few seconds later, the sheet curled, dried, and fell apart. She dusted her hands into the toilet as she stood and pulled her pants back up.

Well, well. Planetary Representative Randall was apparently not a patient man. And this little demonstration made it perfectly clear that she was only a small cog in his large machine, one that he could crank as he wished. That he had a clerk installed, however temporary she might be, and a note ready to be passed would certainly be impressive to the uninitiated. Azul had more than a little experience in such matters, and knew how it could be done, but still, it did indicate a pretty good level of function to be on top of it this way. He wanted to know what she knew.

The thing was, she didn’t have anything to tell Randall yet.

There were ways, then there were ways, but the simplest and easiest was to use the conduit provided to tell him.

She left the fresher, went back to the kiosk.

“Forget something?” the clerk asked.

“Yes. I don’t know where my brain is this evening. I needed some clear droptacs, completely slipped my mind.”

“Ah, well, here you are. That it?”

She pretended to think about it. “Let me search my poor memory . . . no, I can’t find anything else rattling around.” She looked directly at the woman. “Nothing else to report, I’m afraid.”

The woman smiled. Azul smiled back at her. Message received and message answered.

She turned and left the shop.

Whatever this Reflex was that Randall wanted to know about, it must be very valuable, indeed. She’d have to figure out a way to get Shaw to tell her about it. That would be a trick, since she couldn’t just drop it into a conversation.

Well. Shaw was unfolding, it was only a matter of time until she got what she needed. Randall would just have to wait. She might not be able to paint, but she was, in her own way, an artist. Just in a different medium.

The starliner was fast approaching the port for download to Koji, the lone habitable planet in the Heiwa System. Sola and Mourn were in their cabin aboard the liner
Athena’s Tears,
occupying a small, middle-class unit that would, theoretically, draw less attention.

Lying next to him on the bed, naked and sated, Sola said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Really? Who says?”

“Some Terran philosopher, prestellar-space travel,” she said. “Socrates? Plato? Lennon? One of those.”

Mourn said, “And you bring this up why?”

“Seems appropriate, given where we are going. A lot of the folks there are doing a lot of examination. I don’t think it means picking lint out of your navel, but that if all you ever do is put one foot in front of the other and never worry about where you’ve been or where you are going, you miss things.”

“Ah. So we’re talking about goals?”

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Yeah. And maybe more. My biggest goal when I met you was to get my documentary done, sell it, see it on the entcom net, and become rich and famous. Pretty much that was it, but when you think about it, it’s not a long-term reach. Say it takes a year, or even two or three. Then what? I’ve achieved my heart’s desire, where do I go from there?”

He said, “Another documentary. Or maybe you branch out, do fiction. Write books, maybe.”

“Yeah, I could do that, but it would be more of the same, wouldn’t it? More money, more fame, and once you get to a certain point, what
is
the point? You can only sleep in one bed at a time, right? Once you can afford the best food, clothes, shelter, transportation, then how is a bigger pile of money going to help?”

“Point taken. So what are you talking about? Some higher purpose?”

“Maybe. Maybe I start some kind of foundation, feed the hungry or help educate the poor.”

“Admirable activities.”

“Yeah, but again, so what? The poor and hungry will always be with us in some form. And even if I had trillions to play with, which I’m guessing won’t be the case, I can’t cure that. I’m helping folks, sure, but to what end?”

“You aren’t trying to convert me to your religion, are you?”

She laughed. “Right. Like I have one. Though that question does come up, doesn’t it? What’s it all about? Who is in charge? You ever think about such things?”

He rolled over to mirror her position. “Not much. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s how it has always been. I’m guessing it will be that way for a long time. Maybe someday we break open the secrets of time and space, skip into alternate universes where we can be pure energy, live forever, and have godlike powers, but that’s not something I can get too excited about. Nobody has come up with answers to the big questions, at least not any that can be proven. Is there a god or gods? If you have faith, that’s what you believe, but if you don’t, nobody has a titanium-clad proof that stands up. Philosophers have been arguing about what it all means for ten thousand years, and there’s never been any kind of consensus acceptable by all. A lot brighter men than I have broken their minds on the problem. Why spend your life worrying about questions that can’t be answered?”

“So you don’t believe in God?”

“Not a hands-on kind. If there is one, look around—he’s doing a pisspoor job. Might go for one who set the top spinning, then went on his way.”

“Maybe that’s on purpose. Gives us something to work on.”

“Not how I would do it.”

“So you do just put one foot in front of the other?”

He sat up, crossed his legs. “Works as well as any of the others, far as I can tell.

“My life’s goal, since I first walked into a school where people took swings at each other, was to get to be
Primero
in the Musashi Flex. I’m forty-five and slowing down, and even with the new moves? I don’t know if I am going to get there. I aimed high, and got pretty high—in theory, as of yesterday, there are nine players between me and what I started out shooting for, and out of the thousands of people who also want the job, that’s not a bad record. I could have done a little better, but I could have done a whole lot worse.”

“But what if you had gotten there? Beat all comers, taken the title? Then what have you done?”

“Moot, isn’t it? I didn’t, so it wasn’t a bridge I had to cross. And probably won’t.”

“Humor, me, Mourn.”

He thought about it. “I’d have probably worked it until I got beaten. Maybe retired before that, I don’t know. I could have lived off endorsements the rest of my life, I expect, or saved enough from them to manage it. Could have opened a school and done pretty well.”

“Until one day you fell over dead.”

“As lives go, that’s not bad. We-all-die is how the game works for everybody, Cayne, unless you know something I don’t?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t. And that’s part of the point. If I got my documentary up and aired, and it made me rich and famous, and I got to roll for another eighty or hundred years in luxury, so what? What would I leave behind when I went into the final chill? Would the galaxy be any better for me having been here?”

“I would,” he said, “be better for you having been here.” He reached out to touch her shoulder, and she sat up and faced him.

“That might be the sweetest thing anybody ever said to me.” She smiled.

“But . . . ?”

“That philosopher, Lennon, he said things that people still remember eons after he said it. People go to churches and study the words of Jesu, thousands of years after he was gone, he is revered, worshiped, adored by millions. As are the Buddha, the Prophet, the Three Ameli.”

“You looking to be the next Jesu? Going to try walking on water?”

“No. But I look around and I see a lot that’s wrong with the way things are. That demonstration we saw back on your birthworld, where the cools waded into the crowd and cracked heads. The daily repression that the Confederation offers to everybody. That’s not right.”

Gently, he said, “No. But you can’t fix that.”

“Not by myself. But I could be part of the solution. Instead of turning a blind eye and being part of the problem.”

He said, “This is pretty deep stuff for a ragged old fighter. Not much I can offer to help that.”

“Don’t give me that ‘ragged-old-fighter’ crap. I just heard you say things that tell me you’ve thought about all this. Maybe what you know is exactly what people need.”

“Beating players up? I honestly don’t see how that would help the galaxy much.”

“Maybe it depends on who
does
the beating versus who
gets
beaten.”

Watching her sit there cross-legged and nude, he couldn’t help but smile. So intense. So young. So beautiful. “You sound like a revolutionary.”

She shook her head again. “No, I don’t think that’s the way to go, not now. I don’t think things have evolved enough to revolve. The wheel is stuck in the mud, and it needs to be rocked onto dry ground before it has that kind of traction.”

“Nice metaphor, but what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe entcom is the wrong way for me to be aiming. Maybe I should be thinking edcom.”

“Lot of call on the education channels for documentaries on washed-up old fighters?”

She gnawed at her lip. “I don’t know. Maybe I should find out. I—I just feel the need to do
some
thing, Mourn.”

So earnest. For a moment, he thought about it. How would it be to have a statue of you as a bird-perch somewhere a thousand years from now, with people studying your life? Because you were the axle upon which the galaxy took a turn for the better? It was a nice fantasy, but that’s all it was. You wouldn’t be there to see it.

Or maybe what they’d be doing was shuddering at the awful atrocities you committed, and using stories about you to scare children into behaving themselves properly. You wanted to be a force for good, but instead became one for evil? Like the Confed had become?

A slippery slope, that one. No risk, no gain, but no loss, either.

“Mourn? Where’d you go?”

He smiled. “Daydreaming,” he said.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“Not at all. I was just remembering another old saying. I dunno who gets the credit for it, but it’s something to the effect of ‘The journey of a thousand kilometers begins with one step.’”

She blinked at him. “What are you saying?”

“Everybody has to be somewhere, Cayne. You wanting to do good for your fellow humans is a lot better place than some you could be.”

She leaned forward. “Well, thank you, sah. And I suppose I could do some good for one of my fellow humans right here and now, hey?” She dropped her hand into his lap.

“Oh, yes. No question about that, fem . . .”

 
Shaw was in the office at the end of the hall on the floor they had at the hotel, dealing with stock reports when Cervo came in. He was carrying a plastic folder.

“Tell me you’ve found my fighter,” Shaw said.