An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.
“Weed trade’s been bad, huh?” I shouted over the turbines.
Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.
“Say what?”
“The weed trade,” I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. “Been bad recently, right?”
She shrugged. “Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.”
It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics were some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.
I went back to watching the skyline.
After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing, and pressed it to my ear.
“Yeah, what?”
The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear
there isn’t much time left
“Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.”
can’t hold them back much longer . . .
“Yeah, I’m
working
on it.”
working now . . .
It sounded like a question.
“Yeah, I
said
—”
there are wings out there . . . a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked . . .
It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again
cracked open from edge to edge . . . it’s beautiful, Micky . . .
And gone.
I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.
Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.
“Bad news?”
“Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?”
She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one-handed.
“Not safely, no.”
I nodded and thought back through the communiqué I’d just had.
“And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?”
“About double?”
“Fine. Do it.”
A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximized. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist.
Get below and keep your hands off . . .
something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.
She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.
“You, too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.”
“I can hang on.”
“Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.”
I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin. Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers. Cables and jacks. I thought back, too, to the kid’s demeanor and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.
“Sure,” I said. “Always good to have someone to talk to, right?”
She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rainbowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.
Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.
You start by noticing detail—the arched root system of a tepes thicket breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mud bank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.
You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go.
. . . hurry . . .
I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her, her, her, her . . .
Her.
Sylvie, maned in silver gray. Her face—
Her
face, subtly changed by the woman who had crept out and stolen it from her.
Her
voice, subtly modulated . . .
I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back.
Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.
She wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity.
She wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests.
Todor Murakami’s lean, attentive features on the ferry. Pipe smoke, whipped away in the wind.
So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organized crime. Why you going up north again?
It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.
The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.
Stop fucking calling me that.
And screams. And gaping holes cut in spines at neck height. And the weight of cortical stacks in my palm, still slick with clinging gore. And the hollow that would never be filled.
Sarah.
The job in hand.
I’m trying to fucking help.
. . . hurry . . .
I’m trusting you . . .
I’m trying to fucking . . .
. . . hurry . . .
I’m TRYING—
“Coastline.” Suzi Petkovski’s voice rinsed through the cabin speaker, laconic and firm enough to grab at. “Be hitting Sourcetown in fifteen.”
I dumped my brooding and looked left where the Kossuth coast was slicing back toward us. It raised as a dark bumpy line on the otherwise featureless horizon, then seemed to leap in and resolve as a procession of low hills and the occasional flash of white dunes beyond and between. The backside of Vchira, the drowned nubs of an ancient mountain range worn down geological ages past to a seven-hundred-kilometer curve of marsh-fringed tidal barrier on one side and the same stretch of crystalline white sand on the other.
Someday,
one of Sourcetown’s long-term inhabitants had informed me nearly half a century ago,
the sea’s going to break through all along here.
Break through and pour into the Weed Expanse like an invading army breaching a long-disputed frontier. Wear down the last remaining bastions and wreck the beach.
Some Day, man,
the Sourcetowner repeated slowly, and capitalized the phrase and grinned at me with what I’d already come to recognize as typical surfer detachment,
Some Day, but Not Yet. And until Yet, you just got to keep looking out to sea, man. Just keep looking out there, don’t look behind you, don’t worry what’s keeping it all in place.
Some Day, but Not Yet. Just look out to sea.
You could call it a philosophy, I suppose. On Vchira Beach, it often passed for one. Limited maybe, but then I’ve seen far worse ways of relating to the universe deployed elsewhere.
The sky had cleared up as we reached the southern fringes of the Expanse, and I started to see signs of habitation in the sunlight. Sourcetown isn’t really a place, it’s an approximation, a loose term for a 170-kilometer coastal strip of surfer support services and their associated infrastructure. In its most tenuous form, it comes into being as scattered tents and bubblefabs along the beach, generational fire circles and barbecue sites, roughly woven belaweed shacks and bars. Settlement permanence increases and then decreases as the Strip approaches and then passes the places where the surf is not merely good but phenomenal. And then, in the Big Surf zones, habitation thickens to an almost municipal density. Actual streets appear on the hills behind the dunes, rooted street lighting along them and clusters of evercrete platforms and jetties sprouting backward off the spine of land and into the Weed Expanse. Last time I’d been here, there were five such accretions, each with its gang of enthusiasts who swore that the best surf on the continent was
right fucking here, man.
For all I knew, any one of them could have been correct. For all I knew, there’d be another five by now.
No less subject to flux were the inhabitants themselves. There were population cycles in lazy motion all the way along the Strip—some of them geared to the turn of Harlan’s World’s five seasons, some to the complicated rhythm of the trilunar tides, and some to the longer, languid pulse of a functional surfer sleeve’s lifetime. People came and went and came back. Sometimes their locational loyalties to a part of the beach endured from cycle to cycle, lifetime to lifetime; sometimes they shifted. And sometimes, that loyalty was never there to begin with.
Finding someone on the Strip was never going to be easy. In a lot of cases, that was the reason people came here.
“Kem Point coming up.” Petkovski’s voice again, against a backdrop of downwinding turbines. She sounded tired. “This good for you?”
“Yeah, as good as anywhere. Thanks.” I peered out at the approaching evercrete platforms and the low-rise tangle of buildings they held up over the waters of the Expanse, the untidy sprawl of structure marching up the hill beyond. There were a handful of figures sitting in view on balconies or jetties, but for the most part the little settlement looked emptied of life. I had no idea if this was the right end of Sourcetown or not, but you’ve got to start somewhere. I grabbed a handstrap and hauled myself to my feet as the skimmer banked left. Glanced across the cabin at my silent companion. “Nice talking to you, Mikhail.”
He ignored me, gaze pinned to the window. He’d said nothing the whole time we’d shared the cabin space, just stared morosely out at the vast lack of scenery around us. A couple of times, he’d caught me watching as he scrubbed at his jack sockets, and stopped abruptly with a tightening look on his face. But even then, he said nothing.
I shrugged, was about to swing out onto the railed decking, then thought better of it. I crossed the cabin and propped myself against the glass, interrupting Mikhail Petkovski’s field of vision. He blinked up at me, momentarily surprised out of his self-absorption.
“You know,” I said cheerfully. “You got lucky in the mother stakes. But out there, it’s all guys like me. And we don’t give a flying fuck whether you live or die. You don’t get off your ass and start taking an interest, no one else is going to.”
He snorted. “The fuck’s it got to do with—”
Someone more street would have read my eyes, but this one was too washed out with the wirewant, too puffed up with maternal life support. I reached easily for his throat, dug in, and hauled him out of the seat.
“See what I mean? Who’s going to stop me crushing your larynx now?”
He croaked. “Ma—”
“She can’t hear you. She’s busy up there, earning a living for you both.” I gathered him in. “Mikhail, you are infinitely less important in the scheme of things than her efforts have led you to believe.”
He reached up and tried to unpin my fingers. I ignored the feeble prisings and dug in deeper. He started to look genuinely frightened.
“The way you’re headed,” I told him in conversational tones, “you’re going to end up on a spare-parts tray under low lighting. That’s the only use you are to men like me, and no one else is going to get in our way when we come for you, because you’ve given no one a reason to care. Is that what you want to be? Spare parts and a two-minute rinse and flush?”
He jerked and flapped, face turning purple. Shook his head in violent denial. I held him a couple of moments longer, then loosened my grip and dumped him back in the chair. He gagged and coughed, eyes wide on me and flooded with tears. One hand crept up to massage his throat where I’d marked it. I nodded.
“All this, Mikhail? Going on all around you? This is life.” I leaned closer over him and he flinched. “Take an interest. While you still can.”
The skimmer bumped gently against something. I straightened up and went out onto the side deck into sudden heat and brightness. We were floating amid a crosswork of weathered mirrorwood jetties secured at strategic intervals by heavy evercrete mooring buttresses. The skimmer’s motors kept up a low mutter and gentle pressure against the nearest landing stage. Late-afternoon sun glinted hard off the mirrorwood. Suzi Petkovski was standing up in the cockpit and squinting against the reflected light.
“That’ll be double,” she reminded me.
I handed over a chip and waited while she ran it. Mikhail chose not to emerge from the cabin. Maybe he was thinking things over. His mother handed me back the chip, shaded her eyes, and pointed.
“They got a place you can hire bugs cheap about three streets over. By that transmission mast you can see. The one with the dragon flags.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. Hope you find what you’re looking for here.”
• • •
I skipped the bug hire, at least initially, and wandered up through the little town, soaking up my surroundings. Up to the crest of the hill, I could have been in any Expanse-side suburb of Newpest. The same utilitarian architecture predominated, the same frontage mix of waterware mech- and soft-shops mingling with eating houses and bars. The same stained and worn fused-glass streets, and the same basic smells. But from the top of the rise looking down, the resemblance ended like waking from a dream.
Below me, the other half of the settlement fell away downward in haphazard structures built out of every material you could readily bring to mind. Bubblefabs rubbed shoulders with wood-frame houses, driftwood shacks, and, toward the bottom, actual canvas tents. The fused-paving thoroughfares gave way to poorly laid evercrete slabs, then to sand, then finally to the broad, pale sweep of the beach itself. Here there was more movement on the streets than on the Expanse side, most of it semi-clad and drifting toward the shoreline in the late sun. Every third figure had a board slung under one arm. The sea itself was burnished a dirty gold in the low-angle light and flecked with activity, surfers floating astride their boards or upright and cutting casual slices across the gently flexing surface of the water. The sun and distance turned them all to anonymous black tin cutouts.
“Some fucking view, eh, sam?”
It was a high, child’s voice, at odds with the words it uttered. I glanced around and saw a boy of about ten watching me from a doorway. Body rib-thin and bronzed in a pair of surfslacks, eyes a sun-faded blue. Hair a tangled mess from the sea. He was leaned in the door, arms folded nonchalantly across his bared chest. Behind him in the shop, I saw racked boards. Shifting screen displays for aquatech software.
“I’ve seen worse,” I admitted.
“First time at Vchira?”
“No.”
Disappointment notched his voice. “Not looking for lessons then?”
“No.” I paused a moment, measuring advisability. “You been long on the Strip yourself?”
He grinned. “All my lives. Why?”
“I’m looking for some friends. Thought you might know them.”
“Yeah? You a cop? Enforcer?”
“Not recently.”
It seemed to be the right answer. His grin came back.
“They got names, these friends?”
“They did last time I was here. Brasil. Ado, Tres.” I hesitated. “Vidaura, maybe.”
His lips twisted and pursed and he sucked his teeth. It was all gesture learned in another, much older body.
“Jack Soul Brasil?” he asked warily.
I nodded.
“You a Bug?”
“Not recently.”
“Multiflores crew?”
I drew breath. “No.”
“BaKroom Boy?”
“Do you have a name?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Sure. Milan. Around here they call me Gungetter.”
“Well, Milan,” I told him evenly. “You’re beginning to irritate the fuck out of me. Now, are you going to be able to help me or not? You know where Brasil is, or are you just getting off on the rep vapor he trailed through here thirty years back?”
“Hey.” The pale blue eyes narrowed. His arms unfolded, fists tensed to small hammers at his sides. “You know, I fucking
belong
here, sam. I
surf.
Been shooting curls at Vchira since before
you
were a fucking splatter up your mother’s tube.”
“I doubt that, but let’s not quibble. I’m looking for Jack Soul Brasil. I’ll find him with or without you, but you can maybe save me some time. Question is, are you going to?”
He stared back at me, still angry, stance still aggressive. In the ten-year-old sleeve, it was less than impressive.
“Question is, sam, what’s it
worth
to help you?”
“Ah.”
Paid, Milan was forthcoming in grudging fragments designed to disguise and eke out the very limited nature of his knowledge. I bought him rum and coffee in a street café across from the shop he was tending—
can’t just close it up, sam, be more than my job’s worth
—and waited out the storytelling process. Most of what he told me was readily identifiable as well-worn beach legend, but from a couple of things he said I decided he really had met Brasil a few times, maybe even surfed with him. The last encounter seemed to have been a decade or so back. Side-by-side empty-handed combat heroism in confrontation with a gang of encroaching Harlan Loyalist surfers a few klicks south from Kem Point. Facedown and general battery, Milan acquits himself with modestly understated savagery, collects a few wounds—
you should have seen the fucking scars on that sleeve, man, sometimes I still miss it
—but the highest praise is reserved for Brasil.
Like a fucking swamp panther, sam. Fuckers ripped him in the chest, he didn’t even notice. He tore them all down. Just, like, nothing left when he was done. Sent them back north in pieces.
All followed by orgiastic celebration—bonfire glow and the cries of women in wild orgasm on a surf backdrop.