Woken Furies (33 page)

“Yeah, and that back there was none of them.”

We took a real-keel ferry across the Reach to the platform suburb they’re calling East Akan, apparently in the hope that people who can’t afford the slopes of the Akan district itself will settle there instead. Ado went off to find some tea; I stayed by the rail, watching the water traffic and the changing perspectives as the ferry sailed. There’s a magic to Millsport that’s easy to forget while you’re away, but get out on the waters of the Reach and the city seems to open to you. Wind in your face and the belaweed tang of the sea combine to scrub away the urban grimness, and you discover in its place a broad, seafarer’s optimism that can sometimes stay with you for hours after you step back on land.

Trying not to let it go to my head, I squinted south to the horizon. There, shrouded to fading in seamist thrown up by the maelstrom, Rila Crags brooded in stacked isolation. Not quite the southernmost outcrop of the archipelago, but near enough, twenty klicks of open water back north to the nearest other settled piece of land—the tail end of New Kanagawa—and at least half that to the nearest piece of rock you could even stand on. Most of the First Families had staked out high ground in Millsport early on, but Harlan had trumped them all. Rila, beautiful in glistening black volcanic stone, was a fortress in all but name. An elegant and powerful reminder to the whole city of who was in charge here. An eyrie to supplant those built by our Martian predecessors.

We docked at East Akan with a soft bump that was like waking up. I found Mari Ado again, down by the debarkation ramp, and we threaded our way through the rectilinear streets as rapidly as was conducive to checking we weren’t being followed. Ten minutes later, Virginia Vidaura was letting us into the as-yet-unfitted loft apartment space that Brasil had chosen as our base of operations. Her eyes passed across us like a clinical wipe.

“Go okay?”

“Yeah. Mari here didn’t make any new friends, but what can you do?”

Ado grunted and shouldered past me, then disappeared off into the interior of the warehouse. Vidaura closed the door and secured it while I told her about Natsume.

“Jack’ll be disappointed,” she said.

“Yeah, not what I expected, either. So much for legends, eh? You want to come across to Whaleback with me?” I raised my eyebrows clownishly. “Virtual environment.”

“I think that’s probably not a good idea.”

I sighed. “No, probably not.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The monastery on Whaleback and Ninth was a grim, blank-faced place. Whaleback islet, along with about a dozen other similar fragments of land and reclaimed reef, served as a commuting-distance settlement for workers in the docks and marine industries of New Kanagawa. Causeways and suspension spans provided ready access across the short expanse of water to Kanagawa itself, but the limited space on these satellite isles meant cramped, barracks-style apartments for the workforce. The Renouncers had simply acquired a hundred-meter frontage and nailed all the windows shut.

“For security,” the monk who let us in explained. “We run a skeleton crew here, and there’s a lot of valuable equipment. You’ll have to hand over those weapons before we go any farther.”

Beneath the simple gray coveralls of the order, he was sleeved in a basic, low-end Fabrikon synth that presumably ran built-in scanning gear. The voice was like a bad phone connection amplified, and the silicoflesh face was set in a detached expression that may or may not have reflected how he felt about us—small-muscle groups are never that great on the cheaper models. On the other hand, even cheap synths usually run machine levels of reflex and strength, and you could probably burn a blaster hole right through this one without doing much more than piss its wearer off.

“Seems fair,” I told him.

I dug out the GS Rapsodia and handed it over butt-first. Beside me, Sierra Tres did the same with a blunt-looking blaster. Brasil spread his arms agreeably, and the synth nodded.

“Good. I’ll return these when you leave.”

He led us through a gloomy evercrete entry hall whose obligatory statue of Konrad Harlan had been unflatteringly masked in plastic, then into what must once have been a ground-floor apartment. Two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs, as basic as the attendant’s sleeve, were gathered facing a desk and a heavy steel door beyond. A second attendant was waiting for us behind the desk. Like her colleague, she was synth-sleeved and coveralled in gray, but her facial features seemed fractionally more animated. Maybe she was trying harder, working at full acceptance under the new unisex induction decrees.

“How many of you are requesting audience?” she asked, pleasantly enough given the limitations of her Fabrikon voice.

Jack Soul Brasil and I raised our hands; Sierra Tres stood pointedly to one side. The female attendant gestured to us to follow her and punched out a code on the steel door. It opened with an antique metallic grinding, and we stepped into a gray-walled chamber fitted with half a dozen sagging couches and a virtual transfer system that looked like it might still run on silicon.

“Please make yourselves comfortable in one of the couches and attach electrodes and hypnophones as in the instruction holo you will see at your right side.”

Make yourselves comfortable
was an ambitious request—the couches were not automold and didn’t seem to have been made with comfort in mind. I was still trying to find a good posture when the attendant stepped across to the transfer control suite and powered us up. A sonocode murmured through the hypnophones.

“Please turn your head to the right and watch the holoform until you lose consciousness.”

Transition, oddly enough, was a lot smoother than I’d expected from the surroundings. At the heart of the holosphere, an oscillating figure-eight formed and began cycling through the color spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the light show expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping toward the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shriveled to white and the blending roar of the stream in my ears. There was a tilting of everything under me, a sense of the whole world being turned 180 degrees, and suddenly I was deposited upright on a worn stone platform behind a waterfall in full flood. The remains of the oscillating spectrum showed up briefly as an edge of refracted light in faint mist, then faded like a dying note. Abruptly there were puddles around my feet, and cold, damp air on my face.

As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil. The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again. The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.

“It’s this way, I think,” I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.

We followed the steps around a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside, and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.

It rose among gently rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.

“Well, you can see why they went virtual,” I said, mostly to myself. “It beats Whaleback and Ninth.”

Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have gotten over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.

We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately colored tapestries, and as we moved into the center of the hall a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward, and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.

“May I help you?” he asked gently.

Brasil nodded. “We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.”

“Natsume.” The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again. “He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.”

The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-age man with a gray ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.

“Nik?” Brasil moved forward to meet him. “Is that you?”

“Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.” Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood; a hint of the same manic charm in his face.
Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-meter crawl up a polished steel chimney.
But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw. “Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.”

He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of colored threads, and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinized both of us. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I reassured him.

“Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.”

Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.

“Jack Soul Brasil?”

“Yeah. What are you
doing
in here, man?”

A brief smile. “Learning.”

“What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.”

“Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?”

Brasil shifted awkwardly. “Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—”

“Oh, time here is.” The smile again. “Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.”

We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye, and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him anymore.

Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amid the cobwebby gray scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimeters high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view; I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.

“Very nice,” said Brasil.

I nodded. “Yes. You must be very pleased with those.”

“Only moderately.” Natsume circled his shred-petaled charges with a critical eye. “In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.”

He looked expectantly up at us.

I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there.

“Are they a bit short?” I asked finally.

Natsume shook his head and chuckled. “No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And—I’m so sorry—I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanor. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.”

He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself. He gestured out at the plants.

“They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matte. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.”

“Nik . . .”

He looked at Brasil. “Yes.”

“Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.”

I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.

“Some stuff?” Natsume nodded. “What stuff would that be, then?”

“We.” I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. “I need your help, Nik.”

“Yes, clearly. But in what?”

“It’s.”

Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.

“Jack,” he said. “This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?”

Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.

“You’ve changed, Nik.”

“Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?” For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. “That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-meter pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market, and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.”

“That’s not—”

“Of
course
I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?”

Brasil came down a step toward him, abruptly. “Oh, you think
this
is better?”

He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.

“You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow
flowers
instead of living, and you’re going to accuse
me
of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.”

“What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?”

“I was standing on a ten-meter wall four days ago.”
Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. “That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.”

“Is it?” Natsume shrugged. “If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?”

“That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—”

“I don’t hate—”

“Out
there,
actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.”

“Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.”

“My point?” Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly.
“None of this is fucking real, Nik.”

I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them quite literally hovering. His feet were a clear thirty centimeters off the uneven paving.

“Norikae-san?” asked the other.

I shifted stance minutely, wondering idly if they were real inhabitants of the monastery or not, and, if not, what operating parameters they might have in circumstances like these. If the Renouncers ran internal security systems, our chances in a fight were zero. You don’t wander into someone else’s virtuality and brawl successfully unless they want you to.