To Hold Infinity (30 page)

Orange insects crawled across her face, antennae waving, black compound eyes scanning, scanning—

She jerked her head into wakefulness.

If I were a smartatom bug, where would I be?

“Oh, dear God.”

Yoshiko leaned back in the taxi, feeling dreadful.

A grey sky, tinged with sickly green, scudded past outside.

“What time is it?”

The taxi's system silently displayed the time: 14:35.

Over thirty-five hours since she had slept. Travel sickness and incipient paranoia were only to be expected.

Thumbed her wrist terminal. Nothing. No replies to any of her urgent enquiries.

Vin…

Nothing she could do.

The temptation to redirect the taxi to a hotel was overwhelming—but she had only fifty-five minutes to go before her meeting. If she plunged into sleep, she would be a long time waking.

“Can you show me a map of Lowtown?”

There were many levels in Lowtown: the translucent holo showed bridges and aqueducts and a profusion of cobbled arcades. The Pilots' Sanctuary was just within the boundaries. A yellow rectangle, denoting a taxi landing-pad, was nearby. Yoshiko started to indicate it, then changed her mind.

Paranoia?

Maybe. But she was glad she had specified her destination only as Lowtown.

With its multitude of levels, criss-crossing bridges and skywalks and underground halls, the district would be a difficult one to surveille from above. The place seemed quite a maze.

“
Landing facility L17
,” the system announced as Yoshiko pointed at a different yellow pad. “
Close to Daralvia Cloister, Penny Boulevard, and the Arconway. There are facilities for—
”

“Good enough. Land there.”

The system fell silent.

She examined the holo some more. Off to one side, a text plane in red warned visitors to be careful after dark, and to stay within the busy areas. Friendlier icons offered the map's planning functions for everything from clothes-shopping to an extended bar crawl.

Gesturing to her wrist terminal, she was about to download the semi-intelligent map when she changed her mind, and powered the bracelet down again. Downloading code from a taxi she had called from Lori's home—perhaps that was not a good idea.

Paranoid, paranoid.

Yoshiko waved the display away.

 

The taxi flew in past green spires, many-levelled red-brick aqueducts, amber skywalks, glass and marble domes and towers. Organic and intricate. Transparent ellipsoids and open piazzas held restaurants and daistral houses.

Tourist country.

The taxi whispered onto yellow bricks, sighed softly as it powered down. The bricks flowed—expensive, but ground vehicles were illegal—taking the taxi into a covered pagoda.

By a comfortable waiting-area, the taxi stopped. Yoshiko touched her one working ring, her credit ring, to the old-fashioned silver plate set in the taxi's cabin, and the rather quaint gull-wing door swung up and she slid out.

Definitely tourist country.

Feeling curiously disembodied and light-headed, she stood at the edge of a cobbled piazza, getting the sense of it, of how the district was put together. From here, she could see the gold-furnished Gothic architecture of the most expensive malls like cathedrals to consumerism. They were spired and domed and arched, their surfaces glazed in burgundies or olive greens, or finished in apparently natural stonework.

Small groups of people wandered slowly across the cobbles, talking, laughing. A man sat idly by the fountain which tinkled at the square's centre.

A faint chill, not unwelcome, played across Yoshiko's cheeks as she stepped to the piazza's edge. The other three sides narrowed to streets at the same level, but this side ended in a silver railing. Leaning over, she saw there was a long drop to the level below, where dark waves carried in an aqueduct sparked silver highlights as they caught the sun.

When she turned back, the man by the fountain was gone.

Shivering, Yoshiko left the piazza via an ornate archway, finding herself in a circular marketplace beneath a crystal dome. In front of her, two jugglers were performing, their only audience a few children accompanied by a patient-looking young woman, and two shabby drunks or crystalheads who were watching from a doorway. The two derelict men looked more interested in the show than the children were.

One of the men, dirty and unshaven, looked up as Yoshiko walked past. Was that a gleam of intelligence in his eye? She looked back, but the man turned away, muttering to himself.

I'm short of sleep, that's all.

On an outdoor balcony, she stepped onto a white elevator disk. Wind tugged at her hair as the balcony fell away below. Then she was stepping out onto a bank which ran alongside another aqueduct.

In one of the semicircular rest areas, she sat down on bright red and yellow cushions, and watched people walking up and down beside the water.

She ordered daistral from a table; she had to use her cred-ring first, before it would allow her to choose a flavour. When it came, though, the apple-and-cream daistral tasted fine.

No one appeared interested in her. But how could she tell?

She wondered if it mattered. A deep background check on Tetsuo would have revealed the family's links to the Pilots' research programme. Historic links: she had done nothing for them for a long time.

If Jana could provide any assistance, though, it would be best kept secret.

Yoshiko recalled her microsleep-dream of bugs. If you were the kind of person or agency who could break into a secure house system, how would you track someone you wanted to keep an eye on?

It must be Rafael.

Rafael, with help?

She put her unfinished daistral down carefully, and stood. This was her problem to deal with. First, she was going to have to find the less salubrious parts of Lowtown.

Walking briskly now, not wanting to be late for her meeting, she took a disk down three levels, finding herself in a dark cavernous hall. Summoning up her memory of the map as best she could, Yoshiko took a narrow exit tunnel, which opened out onto a long deserted street.

A few holos advertised clubs, but most of the establishments were closed, waiting for the night. Farther down the street, Yoshiko could see the figures of women in a few floating globes, hovering near the ground.

This was the kind of area she needed.

Her skin seemed to grow greasy and itchy, as she walked the shabby street. At night, bright holos would hide the tawdry reality, no doubt.

Two tough-looking young women, black bats flitting across white orbs where their eyes should have been, watched Yoshiko from a doorway.

Yoshiko walked on, betraying no reaction, though her head began to ache with fatigue.

A large man offered her illegal drugs, smartviruses, anything she wanted. Behind him, femtovirus graffiti—coded subtly enough so the self-cleaning building failed to recognize the intrusion—defaced the wall, urging her to abuse a Luculentus today.

She carried on, past surgery shops and greasy cafés, looking down alleyways, until she saw an establishment with a discreet sign: FRIENDLY EYES.

Feeling uneasy, she walked up to the blank membrane of its entrance, and stepped through.

“Yeah? Can I help you?”

The shaven-headed woman behind the counter, chewing something fluorescent which played tinny music in time to the rhythm of her jaws, watched Yoshiko distrustfully.

“I need a clean-up,” said Yoshiko. “Isn't that what you call it?”

“Maybe.” Her jaws worked faster, and the music raised tempo.

Yoshiko held up her credit-ring, and the woman touched her bracelet, checking Yoshiko's balance.

“Good enough. Stand over there.” She indicated a kind of archway, covered in black cloth.

Unsure that she was doing the right thing, Yoshiko took the indicated position. She wondered if this was a scam. How could she know if there was any debug apparatus in the archway at all?

If I were a smartatom bug, where would I be?

Answer: in Yoshiko's clothes, her hair, or under her skin. Anywhere at all.

“Guess you're dirty. Infested with the buggers.” Beside the
woman, a pale blue holo grew: an array of fuzzy spherical clouds, a smartatom lattice. “Scanning—Shit!”

The lattice broke apart.

Silence, as the woman forgot to chew.

“Am I clean now?” Yoshiko stepped out from under the archway.

“Oh, yeah.” Faint notes from the gum, as she talked. “You're clean, honey.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“But—”

“Forget it. I didn't do nothing.” Discordant accompaniment. The woman turned and spat the gum out, and it landed on the floor with a whine. “Time you went, honey.”

“You said I'm clean.”

“Self-destruct, alright? Soon as I scanned.” The woman reached below the counter, and came up with a small black cylinder, and pointed the transmission end at Yoshiko. “And I want you out of my shop, right now. Got it?”

Yoshiko left, without a word.

 

Thoughts swirling, Yoshiko headed back along the street, aiming for the better areas. Perhaps another cup of daistral, at one of the nicer establishments, would straighten her out. She couldn't go to her meeting like this: shaky and trembling, her wits scattered.

In an ornate arcade, right at the cusp where the dingy street met glistening gallerias, she stopped in a doorway, leaned against the window, and closed her eyes.

Pain beat insistently above her left eye.

Tired and depressed, she used her thumb on the pressure point in her hand, but for once it had no effect.

A smell of Terran coffee drifted out of the store.

Almost sobbing with gratitude, Yoshiko pushed open the old-fashioned door and went inside. On a counter just inside the doorway, a jug of coffee and a plate of jantrasta-coated beans lay temptingly beneath a sign which said they were free.

Yoshiko took a mug and filled it, sat on a stool, and drank hungrily, wincing as it burned her mouth.

God, it felt good.

She drank some more, then turned her stool around, to see what kind of store she was in.

It was an Aladdin's-cave of wonders: small carved wooden birds with ruby eyes which squawked when you looked at them, delicate crystalline life-forms from Altracon Three which spun their clear mysterious strings of glass and sang heart-rending songs.

How wonderful.

Already, her headache was receding.

At the back of the store, a slender man with sparkling intelligent eyes was tending shop, running a hand over his balding pate as he listened to a woman and her husband, local store-owners themselves by the sound of it, expounding their woes.

Three other people, a couple and a woman on her own, were browsing quietly through the shop, delighted wonder dancing in their eyes.

Mug in hand, Yoshiko got off her stool, to examine a display shelf. Nestling on it—occasionally fluttering into flight, but always coming back to rest—were tiny butterflies whose wings were the pages of books—Aesop and Shakespeare and Goethe and Baudelaire—which you could read through a magnifying field if you touched the butterfly's head gently.

On the shelf below were yodelling bears and a flamenco-dancing flamingo and, along one wall, a series of intricate flat sand-paintings which took Yoshiko's breath away.

“Thanks, Roger.” At the back of the store, the woman was taking her leave of the storekeeper, holding her husband's arm. “We always feel better for talking to you.”

The storekeeper ducked his head almost shyly, and waved at them as they left the shop. An old-fashioned bell tinkled as they left.

“Can I help you?” he asked Yoshiko. “Or would you just like to look around?”

“I could stay here all day.” Yoshiko put her now-empty coffee mug down on the counter. “But I have to go somewhere. I'll take one of the butterflies, though, if I may.”

She pointed out the one she wanted.

“Ah,
Les Fleurs du Mal
,” he said. “One of my favourites.”

“
Moi aussi
,” murmured Yoshiko.

He enclosed the butterfly in a crystal case, then wrapped it in patterned paper—his slender fingers moving surely and fluidly—and folded it so intricately that it needed no sealing or fastening, though it was not a smart material of any kind. Yoshiko had not seen such elegant origami since she had sat at her grandmother's knee in Vancouver. He slipped the package into a small bag.

“Thank you,” she said, picking up the bag. “
Merci bien
.”

“Enjoy.
Bonne chance
.”

As she was turning to leave, the storekeeper added, “May I give you some advice? Back this way—” He pointed. “Isn't the best of areas. Circle around, if you have to go that way.”

“I'm going to the Pilots' Sanctuary.” Yoshiko was surprised at her own openness.

“Oh. Who's there at the moment? Is it Jana?”