‘Zef?’ said a female voice.
‘Hell’s caries,’ Zefla groaned. ‘I might have known. I suppose this is your car?’
‘Good to see you too, Zefla,’ Sharrow said, smiling, as Dloan Franck came out of the doorway and offered his sister a hand. Zefla took hold and was pulled upright to stand, swaying hardly at all in front of Sharrow, who folded her arms and grinned at her.
Zefla felt Dloan dust her down and pull a few luminous leaves out of her tangled blonde hair.
‘Nice car,’ she said to Sharrow, as Dloan fussed and tutted, pulling a twig from the sleeve of her dress. She stood one-legged, leaning on her brother and rubbing at her bruised shin. ‘Thought they had collision-avoidance radar.’
‘It’s switched off,’ Sharrow said, stooping to retrieve Zefla’s shoes from the cobbles.
Zefla sighed. ‘Mine too.’
Sharrow offered her the shoes, but she knocked them gently aside and took the other woman in her arms.
‘Sorry about your leg,’ Sharrow told Zefla, hugging her.
‘Never mind; it cured my - hic! - aw, shit . . .’
Showered, dried, powdered and perfumed, Zefla Franck lounged magnificently on a relaxer, her red-brown skin gleaming where her bath sheet didn’t cover; another towel kept her hair piled high over her head. She drank a restorative from a long glass and looked out over the junklit valley and the lights of distant villages and houses; the glass of the old conservatory reflected her image and those of Sharrow and Dloan.
Sharrow stood by the glass wall, a drink in her hand, looking out.
Dloan sat in a hanging-chair, his hands deep in the neck fur of a sarflet, ruffling the animal’s tawny pelt while it sat there with an expression of sleepy bliss on its broad, black-snouted face.
Zefla shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Shar; they could start trying to trash Geis with the Passports, but it’d eat time; your cuz has lawyers the way other people have freckles, and he can afford wizards; grade one legal slicks with minds like writ-grenades. Toss a few of those boys into the fray and they could stall the Huhsz for decades; get them so entangled they won’t be able to take a piss without applying for a court order …’ Zefla hiccuped. ‘Damn!’ She gulped. ‘Excuse me; more sober juice.’
She drank deeply from the tall glass again. ‘. . . Shit,’ she continued, ‘even if they got blanket discovery Geis could keep ahead of them just generating new companies; dance their grubby little asses through the taxloop Labyrinth of No Return, shuffling liability, using anonymous proxies, cascading ownership . . . It would take them months to sort out what he’s already got, never mind what he could create if he wanted to put up a smokescreen. The point to remember is, they’ve only got a year; with that sort of cast-iron limitation, even Geis’s public exposure won’t suffer more than a - hic! shit - blip when the shareholders realise it’s just a glorified nuisance action that’s going to evaporate like a fart in a hurricane when the clock stops.’
Zefla drank again, then said, ‘What are you grinning at?’
Sharrow had turned away from the view while Zefla had been talking. She stood, smiling down at the other woman. ‘I’ve missed you, Zef.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Zefla said, holding one long leg out in front of her and looking at the bruise. ‘Wish I could say the same for your car.’
Sharrow looked down and ran her finger round the top of her glass. ‘So are you saying I should just go to Geis?’
‘Hell, no; I’m just saying that if you ever did have to especially as a last resort after you’ve run the Huhsz round in circles for a few months and aren’t getting any closer to the Gun - you needn’t worry about hurting him legally.’
‘Even so,’ Sharrow said, frowning at her drink. ‘But just because of that . . . maybe I should take him up on his offer now.’
‘You - hic! - want to?’ Zefla said, her eyebrows rising.
‘No,’ Sharrow admitted, glancing at her.
‘Then,’ said a deep, rumbling, reasonable voice from the other side of the conservatory, ‘don’t.’
Sharrow looked at Dloan. He was even taller than Zefla, and much broader. He had precise, short-cropped blond hair which merged smoothly into an equally carefully trimmed blond beard; he lounged in a crumpled sweatsuit, exuding fitness. He kept on tickling the sarflet, and looked up only momentarily at Sharrow, smiling as though shyly, then looking away again.
‘And let’s not forget the law is just one way of the Huhsz getting what they want,’ Zefla told Sharrow. ‘I’d guess what Geis would really have to worry about if he sheltered you wouldn’t be a legal manoeuvre, it’d be simple betrayal. One disgruntled employee, one, spy, one Huhsz convert in the right place, and all the law in the system wouldn’t make any difference; they’d get you and destroy Geis.’
Sharrow nodded. ‘All right, but the alternative is to take to the trail again, and ask you guys to come with me.’
‘Shar, kid,’ Zefla said. ‘We never wanted to give it up.’
‘But I feel I’m being selfish; especially if I could just run to Geis and everything would be all right:’
Zefla sighed exasperatedly. ‘Geis is a pain, Sharrow; the guy has a kind of charming facade but basically he’s a social inadequate whose real place in life is out mugging pensioners and cheating and beating on his girlfriends, and if he had three more names and been raised in a rookery in The Meg rather than the nursery at house Tzant, that’s exactly what he would be doing. Instead he jumps out of the commercial equivalent of dark alleys, strips companies and fucks their employees. He’s got no idea how real people work so he plays the market instead; he’s a rich kid who thinks the banks and courts and Corps are his construction set and he doesn’t want anybody else to play. He wants you the way he wants a sexy company, as a bauble, a scalp, something to display. Never get beholden to people like that, they’ll piss on you and then charge irrigation fees. You crawl under that scumball’s skirts and I’ll never talk to you again.’
Sharrow grinned and sat on a small chair by the glass wall. ‘So, do we go back on the road?’
Zefla drank, nodded. ‘Just point us to the on-ramp, girl.’
‘You’re sure?’
Zefla made a pained expression. ‘Shar, I’ve been lecturing law at Capitaller for the last five years; I’ve said all I’m ever going to say and I keep hearing the same old fucking questions; a really smart student comes along now and again, but it’s getting
harder and harder to wait during the fallow times in between; an exciting day is when a hunky student bends over or one of the male staff starts growing a beard. My brain’s atrophying. I need some excitement.’
Sharrow looked at Dloan, who was sitting back in the gently swaying hanging-chair and sipping at his drink, the sarflet snoring at his feet. ‘Dloan?’ she said.
Dloan sat looking at her for a while. Eventually he took a long deep breath, and said, ‘I was watching some screen a few days ago.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Some adventure series. The bad guys were firing bi-propellent HE rounds from FA 300s, fitted with silencers.’
Dloan fell silent.
Sharrow looked at Zefla, who rolled her eyes.
‘I’m holding my breath here, Dloan,’ Sharrow said.
Dloan looked down at the animal at his feet. ‘Well, obviously there’s no point fitting a silencer when you’re firing bi-propellents; the rocket stage makes . . . lots of noise.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Sharrow said. ‘Of course.’
‘Come on, Dlo,’ Zefla said. ‘That sort of stuff always annoyed you. So what?’
‘Yes,’ Dloan said. ‘But it was the third act before I realised.’ He sucked his lips in and shook his head.
Zefla and Sharrow exchanged looks. Dloan reached down to stroke the sleeping sarflet.
‘I think,’ Zefla said, ‘he means he’s get-hic!-zing disgustingly rusty and it’s time he saw some action before he forgets which end of a gun goes against your shoulder.’
Sharrow looked back to Dloan, who just sat there being blond and nodding wisely.
‘Fine,’ Sharrow said.
Zefla drank again. ‘So; via the Book to the Gun. Think the Huhsz really will call off the hunt if you get them the Lazy Gun first?’
‘So It Is Written,’ Sharrow said with sarcastically emphatic pronunciation.
‘And Breyguhn’s clue - whatever it is - is it going to work?’
‘It sounds semi-plausible,’ Sharrow said, shrugging. ‘These days that’s about the best I have to go on.’
‘The Universal Principles,’ Zefla breathed. She looked thoughtful. ‘Supposed to be somewhere midsystem, if you can believe thousand-year-old rumours. This just an excuse to put some vacuum between you and the Huhsz?’
Sharrow shook her head.Like I say, I have a lead.’ She glanced at Dloan, who was stroking the sarflet.Gory details to follow,’ she told Zefla.
`Can’t wait,’ Zefla said, waggling her dark blonde brows and flexing her perfect toes.
Sharrow raised her glass. ‘Think team,’ she said.
Zefla raised her glass. `Yo to that.’
Dloan raised his glass. ‘Team,’ he said.
Zefla frowned at her glass as though it contained something disgusting. ‘This calls for something stronger,’ she said.And I’m getting too sober anyway.’ She put the glass down under her seat, felt around and pulled out an inhalant tube with a look of victorious anticipation on her face.Let’s get into something mindbending!’
She stood in the doorway and looked out, shivering, at the night. It was raining and the wind was hurrying down the dimly lit street, filling the air with paper scraps like a flock of palely fluttering injured birds. The water in the gutters was thick and black and smelled rancid, washed from some of the hillside tip-mines further up the slope.
She was average height and dressed cheaply but gaudily; high heels, a micro skirt and a figure-hugging top. She clutched a small, shiny black fake-hide purse, and wore a little pillbox hat with a black lace veil which even with the heavy make-up couldn’t quite hide the mass of ridged, twisted scar tissue that covered the left side of her face. She held a little transparent plastic parasol over herself, but some of its spokes were broken and the wind kept gusting, sending rain spraying into her face every now and again. It smelled like somebody had used the doorway as a urinal earlier in the evening.
The street was fairly quiet for this time of night. The occasional car crawled past, windows mirrored. A variety of civilians splashed along the pavement, huddled under cloaks or umbrellas. There were few punters. The ones that were around mostly knew her already; you could always tell the new ones because they’d pass by the doorway she was standing in, do a double-take - or just stare - then come forward, looking her up and down and grinning that big grin that said, My lucky night!
It was only when they looked beneath the veil that they backed off, embarrassed, apologising, as though the Incident had somehow been their fault . . . But there had only been a couple of those this evening.
The wind shook the scrawny wires strung between the low tenements, producing a whistling noise and making the dim yellow streetlamps sway and flicker.
A trolley car went clanking up the street, its skinny whip-mast scratching at the wires above, producing crackling blue sparks. Two boys were hitching a late-night ride on the back fender; they had to keep quiet in case the conductor heard them, but when the blue flashes revealed a girl standing in a doorway, or up an alley with a client, they pointed and waved and made thrusting motions with their groins.
She hoped the trolley wouldn’t make a spark when it went past her, but it did. She flinched at the harsh burst of light and the sizzle of noise. She waited for the boys to make some obscene gesture at her, but they were looking at somebody standing in the alley-way directly across from her. The trolley’s power line flashed again and she caught another glimpse of the figure in the alley opposite. Somebody in a long dark coat. For a moment she had the impression she was being watched. Her heart started to beat faster; oh, not police, not tonight!
Then the figure - medium height, face hidden by a hat and a filter mask - left the alley-way and walked down the pavement on the far side of the street, walking slightly oddly, stiff-legged, like somebody trying to disguise a limp.
Just then two uniformed policemen walked past her doorway, their long capes dripping. She shrank back, but they weren’t on a round-up, not tonight. Probably they were intent on getting back to the precinct station and hitting the canteen. She relaxed again.
Suddenly the figure was in front of her.
She drew her breath in.
`Hi,’ the man said, pulling his mask down.
She relaxed. It wasn’t the person from the other side of the street; it was a regular, the one she’d been hoping would turn up. He wore a short, pale cape and a broad hat. He was a smallish, thin man with muddy-looking skin and intensely blue eyes you couldn’t look at for too long.
Oh,’ she said, and smiled. She had slightly prominent teeth, already spotted with decay.Hi, sweetie.’
‘Sweetie …’ he said, sounding amused. He stood in the doorway with her, and gently put his hand up underneath the lace veil to her face and stroked the rough surface of the old radiation burn. His fingers were delicate and slim. She tried not to flinch.
‘You smell different this evening,’ he said. His voice was like his eyes; sharp and demanding.
‘New perfume. Like it?’
‘It’ll do,’ he said. He withdrew his hand from her ruined face, and sighed. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Okay.’
They left the doorway and walked down the street together, not touching; she had to walk quickly, teetering on her high heels, to keep up with him. A couple of times, glancing at their reflections in shop windows, she thought she saw the figure she’d seen earlier in the alley-way, following them with that odd, stiff-legged gait.
‘Here,’ he said, entering a narrow alley. It was dark, and she almost tripped on rubbish left on the dark, uneven bricks underfoot.
‘But, doll,’ she said, following him down the alley and wondering what was going on. ‘This isn’t your-’
‘Shut up,’ he told her. He started up a flight of rickety wooden steps. She looked back, and saw the stiff-legged figure enter the alley-way behind them, silhouetting against the marginally brighter street behind, then disappearing into the shadows. ‘Hurry up!’ her client hissed from the top of the steps. She glanced back at the darkness where the figure had vanished, and then ran as fast as her high heels would allow, up the creaking wooden steps.