Against A Dark Background (12 page)

She frowned. ‘You’re losing me with all this technical jargon, Tech King.’

He slapped her thigh gently. ‘You know what I mean; the nano-event holes left over after the AIT Accident. Each Passport’ll incorporate one of them, won’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And they’ll be coming out of Yada to be initiated at the Huhsz World Shrine?’

‘I imagine so, but. . .’

He sat back, tapping the side of his head. ‘I have a Fiendish Plan, my Leader,’ he said.

She shook her head, sighing. ‘And I thought you might have gotten sensible in your old age.’

‘Perish the thought.’ He grimaced. ‘And anyway; you’re the one wants to go looking for a book that hasn’t been heard of for a millennium without even the benefit of a paying contract in the vague hope it’ll somehow lead to a Lazy Gun.’

‘Yes,’ she said, dropping her voice and putting her face close to his. ‘But the book is only lost, not the most heavily guarded piece of jewellery on the fucking planet.’

Miz waved this distinction away with one hand as though it was a bothersome fly. ‘Did you get your contract set up with the Sea House guys?’

‘Spoke to them this morning. Scale Two exes.’

‘Huh. They handling it themselves?’

She shook her head. ‘Agency called The Keep.’

‘The Keep?’ Miz frowned. ‘Never heard of them.’

‘Me neither; must be new. Seem to know what they’re talking about.’

‘What is this damn book, anyway?’ Miz asked, sounding annoyed. ‘The U.P.; what’s it about?’

Sharrow shrugged. ‘The only known part of the text is the dedication page; that gives a very rough idea, but the whole point of the fashion for noble houses commissioning Unique books was that the contents stayed a secret. For what it’s worth, just going on the names involved, this Unique’s meant to be the best of them.’

‘Hmm. Maybe I’ll wait till they make the holo.’ He shrugged. ‘And anyway, how come you think you can track it down when nobody else has been able to?’

‘Gorko,’ Sharrow said. ‘And Breyguhn.’

‘What, your grampa?’

‘Yes. According to Breyguhn, Gorko found out where the book was, but didn’t try to lift it. He’s supposed to have left a record of where it is, or was. Breyguhn claims she knows how I can get hold of this information.’

Miz thought about this, then said, ‘Shit, yes, the book. That’s what she was after when she broke into the Sea House, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. And she thinks she’s on the trail now.’ Sharrow shrugged. ‘Or she could be having a joke at my expense.’

‘A joke?’ Miz looked intrigued.

She shook her head. ‘Wait till you hear how I’m supposed to access the information Breyguhn’s found.’

‘Tell me now; I hate being teased.’

`No.’

‘Tell me!’ he said, leaning closer and tickling her waist.

She stifled a shriek and tried to slide away, slapping his hand. ‘Stop that! Behave yourself!’ She held up her glass in front of her. ‘Look at this. See; empty.’

He stopped trying to tickle her and looked round for a waiter, a wide grin on his face. His expression changed as he looked back up the ramp to the barge. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Somebody I’d like you to meet. Back in a trice.’ He sprang from the shell-boat, leaving it rocking.

She watched him go as he paced up the pontoon, waving at some people calling from another shell-boat.

Sharrow sat back in the seat, staring into the middle distance where another aim of the Log-jam sparkled in the sunshine, light reflecting off a thousand windows of a floating apartment block. The Crownstar Addendum, she thought. Oh dear. She had the unnerving feeling that they were all going off the rails; Miz trying to stay young by getting involved with this preposterous scheme to snatch one of the system’s most secure treasures; Cenuij chasing scar-girls in Lip; Zefla getting wasted every night, and Dloan becoming a screen-junkie. As for herself, she was just getting old, mired in banality.

A waiter appeared with a drink on a tray. She looked round to see Miz at the far end of the ramp, talking to a tall, plump man in long ceremonial robes of blue and gold; the Log-Jam’s colours. The two men walked down towards the shell-boats, the tall official nodding his head tolerantly as Miz made a joke. A small entourage of lesser officials followed behind. She sipped her drink as the group approached. The official made a small gesture with one gloved, heavily ringed hand; his minions stopped a few metres back on the pontoon, and stood there in the sunlight trying to look dignified while he and Miz walked to the shell-boat where she sat.

‘The Lady Sharrow,’ Miz said. ‘The honourable Vice-Invigilator Ethce Lebmellin.’

The official bowed slowly, with just that degree of care that indicated he was not used to bowing. Sharrow nodded.

`My lady, this is indeed a pleasure,’ the Vice-Invigilator said. His voice was high and soft; his face was leaner than the body beneath the long, formal robes suggested. His eyes looked dark and cold.

‘How do you do?’ she said.

‘May I welcome you to our humble city?’

`You may indeed,’ she said. ‘Will you join us, sir?’

‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure, dear lady, but I regret affairs of state require my presence elsewhere. Perhaps another time.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, and smiled.

‘Mister Kuma,’ Lebmellin said, turning to the other man.

‘Triplicate, Mister Lebmellin,’ Miz said quietly.

Sharrow frowned, wondering if she’d heard right. Triplicate? she thought. She wouldn’t have heard the word at all but for the fact Miz pronounced it so carefully.

The robed official didn’t look in the least confused; he just looked at the other man for a second, then said, ‘Triplicate,’ also very quietly. Miz smiled.

The official turned to her, bowing again, and returned along the pontoon to the barge, his entourage sweeping behind him like chicks after their mother.

Miz sat back down in the shell-boat, looking quietly pleased with himself.

‘That your tame official?’ Sharrow said quietly.

Miz nodded. ‘Devious big fuck; wouldn’t trust him further than I could throw him. But he’s the guy who can be in the right place at the right time, and he’s hungry.’

‘You really are going ahead with this, aren’t you?’

‘Damn right I am.’

‘And the, ah . . . T-word just there; a password?’

Miz giggled. ‘Kind of.’ He glanced at her. ‘Tee-hee-hee,’ he said.

‘You’re mad,’ she told him.

‘Nonsense. This’ll work out fine.’

‘What boundless optimism you display, Miz,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Why not?’ Then a look of uncertainty crossed his face. ‘There is just one slightly worrying development, recently. Well, over the last few weeks.’ He pulled at his lower lip with his fingers. ‘Not sure if it’s actually a security leak as such, but kind of worrying.’

‘What?’ she said.

He turned side-on to face her again. ‘You know they have those sial races, down in Tile?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They take the animals’ own brains out and replace them with human ones.’

‘Yeah, criminals’ brains, Tile being a bit uncivilised. Anyway.’ He coughed. ‘Somebody seems to be naming sials after my embarrassments.’

‘What?’

‘For example, three weeks ago I had a shipment of, um . . . legally sensitive antique electronic circuitry being moved on a Land Car from Deblissav to Meridian. As the car was going through a pass in a mountain range called The Teeth, it was mined, attacked and looted. Bandits got clean away.’ He shrugged. ‘Two days later, the winner at Tile Races was called Electric Toothache.’

She considered this. ‘Kind of tenuous, though, isn’t it?’ she said, amused.

‘There have been others,’ he said. He looked genuinely worried. ‘I’ve had my agent there look into it, but we can’t work out how it’s being done. The stables keep the names secret until the race and then decide on a name on the day; supposed to help prevent cheating. Somebody’s getting the owners to name their beasts after things that go wrong in my affairs. And I can’t work out why.’

She patted his shoulder. ‘You’re working too hard, dear,’ she said.

‘I should have known better than to tell you,’ he said, draining his glass. He nodded at hers. ‘Come on; take your drink and we’ll go and watch the race finish.’

They abandoned the little boat, leaving it rocking on the waves. She twirled her parasol as they walked back towards the barge, the water under the pontoon making slapping, gulping noises on the slats and floats of the walkway and the circular hulls of the shell-boats.

Thrial was the sun. Rafe was little more than a molten blob, while M’hlyr was solid on its one ever outward-facing side. Fian was sufficiently cold near its unwobbling poles for water ice to exist despite the fact most metals would run like water at its equator. Trontsephori was smaller than Golter; a clouded water world whose weather systems were so classically simple they resembled a crude simulation. Speyr was almost as large as Golter, terraformed five millennia earlier. Then came Golter, with its three moons, followed by a belt of asteroids; then Miykenns, colonised even earlier than Speyr, followed by the system’s giants; Roaval - ringed and mooned - and Phrastesis, shelled in still settling debris after the enigmatic destruction of its moons during the Second War. After it came the small giant, Nachtel, with its cold, just-habitable moon, Nachtel’s Ghost. Plesk, Vio and Prenstaleraf made up the outer system, each one colder and rockier and tinier in turn, trailing off like something at the end of a sentence. Assorted debris and comets completed the system.

Thrial was a ring of pure white gold inset with veins of platinum; it opened on a concealed hinge made from what appeared to be extruded diamond 13. The planets hung on loops of equally unlikely allotropic mercury and were each represented by a flawless example of the relevant birthstone according to the Piphramic Astrology, precisely graded to indicate planetary size on a logarithmic scale. Moons were red diamond, the asteroids emerald dust and the comets a tinily beaded fringe of dark carbon fibres, each tipped with a microscopic sphere of white gold. Distance from Thrial was represented by molecule-wide fines somehow etched into the ambivalent loops of mercury.

The Crownstar Addendum, as the necklace had been called for four or five thousand years, was beyond argument the single most precious piece of jewellery in the system, either extant or missing. All by itself, in its sheer pricelessness, the Crownstar Addendum provided the theoretical security for the Log-Jam’s currency, commercial guarantees and insurance bonds. Its melted-down and split-up value alone would have kept an averagely extravagant noble family comfortably off for a century or so, or even bought a minor house name, but that element of its value was insignificant compared to its intrinsic worth as something precious and mysterious that had somehow survived - and, to the extent that it could, had often been part of - Golter’s frenetically embroiled and feverish history.

Exactly who or what had made it, for whom, and when, and how, nobody knew.

No more did they know what the Crownstar itself was, if there had ever been such a thing. On Golter, the chances were about equal that if the Crownstar had existed it had been hidden, broken up, or just lost.

Whatever the Crownstar had been, and wherever it had ended up, there was no doubt concerning the location of its Addendum; it was kept deep in a special vault located inside a battleship near the centre of the Log-Jam. It was taken out - under intense security - only for very rare and special occasions; it was never, ever worn, and the impregnability of its vault - effectively a gigantic revolving safe made from three thousand tonnes of armour plate - had in recent years become almost as legendary as the fabled necklace itself.

Ethce Lebmellin watched from his plushly decorated seat in the reviewing stand as the two winning yachtsmen acknowledged the cheers of the crowd and started to ascend the steps towards him. The first prize was an ornate and ancient silver cup; it sat in front of him, gleaming in the reflected light striking off the waves. The gaily striped awning above flapped and snapped in the breeze.

Lebmellin looked at the prize cup, studying his reflection on its curved, polished surface. A rather silly prize for a rather silly pastime, he thought. The sort of thing the middle orders tended to waste their lives over, imagining they had accomplished something.

A familiar feeling of self-disgust and bitterness welled up inside him. He felt used and reviled. He was like this cup; this decorative, over-decorated trinket. Like it, he was dragged out for certain ceremonial duties, briefly admired, made use of, then packed away again without as much as a second thought. They were both fussily ornamented, had little apparent practical use and they were both hollow. Was this what he had worked for?

He had spent years in the diplomatic colleges of Yadayeypon, studying hard while the smart-ass lower-order kids made fun of his plodding progress, and the smoothly urbane scions of major houses -and minor houses better off than his own - sneered at his unfashionable clothes.

And what had he received, for all those late nights, all those given-up holidays, all those taunts and sly looks? An undistinguished qualification, while others had drunk and snorted and fornicated their way to outstanding success, and others had simply not cared, their positions in some family concern or Corp guaranteed just by their name.

He doubted any of them even remembered him.

A sinecure; a post of utmost vapidity for a small, parochially eccentric city-state. It was probably no more than his brilliant contemporaries had expected of him.

He rose to present the cup to the two fresh, sweating faces. He let them touch his gloves and kiss his ceremonial rings, wanting to draw his hand away and wipe it, feeling that everybody was watching him and thinking what a fool he looked. He spoke a few predictable, meaningless words to them, then handed the two men their empty prize. They held it aloft, to more cheers. He looked around the crowds, despising them.

You’ll applaud me one day, he thought.

He realised he was smiling, but decided it was only fitting, given the general rejoicing.