House of the Sun (11 page)

Then, out beyond him, somebody else caught a wave perfectly and was up in an instant. A troll, he was, on a board larger than some dining tables I've owned. His long black hair whipped in the wind as he cut his board back and forth across the margin of the small wave, dodging through the heads of swimmers like gates in a slalom. Swishing into the shallows, he dismounted smoothly, and in one motion he picked up his board—shoulders and arms bulging—swung it around, and started paddling out again. I watched the muscles working under the golden-brown skin of his massive back.

Scott had been watching the same show. "Nice moves,' he said approvingly.

"Do you do that?"

"I do it," he confirmed with a chuckle, "but not around here. If you've got time, let me take you to see some
real
waves, brah. Thirty-footers, and one after another. Pretty close to heaven."

As I nodded, I realized something a little surprising. There was something disturbing about the view on the beach, and it took me a moment to make sense of it. All that bare skin—
that
was what bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. Bare skin is great; I fully and wholeheartedly approve of bare skin, under the right circumstances, and particularly with the right companion. But . . .

Bare skin means
no
armor
. I looked at all the frying tourists sprawled on the sand. Most of them would be
shaikujin
—corporators from one or another of the megas. Where in Seattle would you see this many corporators wandering around in public without the benefit of any armor whatsoever? Nowhere, that's where. Here, a disgruntled sniper with a grudge to settle would have no trouble with one-shot-one-kill. Either the tourists were pretty fragging confident in the security provisions—pretty fragging overconfident, if you asked me—or the tropical sun had cooked the sense of self-preservation right out of their pointy little heads.

I pointed that out to Scott, and he nodded slowly. "A bit of both, that's what it is," he suggested.
"Na
Maka'i
—that's the cops, the Hawai'i National Police Force, the HNPF—they keep things buttoned down pretty tight in Waikiki. This part of town
ain't
a good place to make trouble,
hoa,
trust me on that one. If you ain't corp, you ain't
here,
if you take my meaning."

"You're saying the whole of Waikiki's a corporate enclave?"

"More or less, brah, more or less." He nodded his big head. "It's a security thing. If you're walking the streets and you don't look the part, Na Maka'i's going to pull you over and ask you some questions—real polite, and all, but you'd better give them the right answers and have the datawork to back it up."

He shrugged. "But clamp-downs and heat-waves can do only so much, right? Security's good in Waikiki, but it's not
that
good." He gestured through the window at the scantily clad bodies on the beach. "If I
really
wanted to take down some suits, I could do it . . .
and
get away afterward."

I nodded slowly. That's basically how I had it scanned. "What about the locals, then?" I asked. I pointed to the surfing troll, who was already riding another wave. "You'd expect
him
to know better than to trust the cops. But he's not wearing any armor."

Scott chuckled "No, he's not
wearing
armor,
hoa,
he
is
armor. You know the second most popular elective medical procedure in the whole of the islands?"

"Dermal armor," I guessed.

"You got it, brah.
Nui
dermal armor—dermal armor big-time. Along with bodysculpt to make it look good ... or as
good as you can get. See, now check out that slag over there? Classic example."

I looked where he was pointing, saw an ork strolling along the beach, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts even more garish than Scott's shirt. His arms and legs were scrawny; his shoulders weren't broad. But by Ghu did he have pecs and abs—massively cut, incredibly defined, as if they were chiseled out of some material other than flesh. Which they were, I realized. His chest and back were layered with enough dermal planting to stop a Manhunter round. The Seco on my hip would barely scratch him.

"Want to guess the
most
popular procedure?" Scott asked.

"Tell me."

"Sun-shielding, brah. Genetic treatment of the skin to block UV. They tried various chemical treatments, but you had to keep going in for a refresher because you'd eventually just exfoliate the treated skin. The genetic route, new skin is as resistant as the old. See this?" He extended his hand to me, pinched a fold of his skin. "This is SPF eighty-five,
hoa
. Permanent sunscreen.

"I got my eyes done, too—modified iris and photosensitive chemicals in the lens. I don't need shades no matter how bright it gets."

"Expensive, I guess?"

"The eyes, yes," he admitted. Then he chuckled. "Glad Nebula picked up the tab.

"But the skin treatment? No, brah, it's not bad at all. The clinics have got it down to a real assembly-line process, and you've got
nui
kinds to pick from. Full treatment costs five thousand nuyen, good for life. And lots of the clinics, they offer special family packages—you, the wife, and all the ankle-biters for seven-Kay." He poked my pale forearm. "If you decide to stay here, you might consider it yourself."

"Hey," I protested quickly, "I'm not staying. Just doing my job, then I'm gone."

The chauffeur shrugged. "That's what everyone says," he told me, "at first."

Still on Kalakaua Avenue, we rolled westward into downtown Waikiki.

I didn't really know what to expect from Waikiki, except that I thought it would be
different,
somehow. I was disappointed. It was just another city, really. Apart from the curving beach, the rich blue ocean, and the perfect weather, it could just as well have been the corporate enclave in just about any metroplex anywhere in the world. Okay, it
was
cleaner than most other cities I've seen. But apart from that, this could just as easily have been the rich corporate quarter of Tokyo or Chiba.

Why did I pick two Japanese cities as examples? The people on the sidewalks, chummer, that's why. Nine out of ten of them were Nihonese. I wondered about that for a while, but then I remembered something I'd read a long time ago.

Apparently, during the last decades of the last century, lots of Japanese—and lots of Japanese money—moved into the islands. (The smart-ass who'd written the article I read said something like, "After the Japanese couldn't conquer Hawai'i in World War II, they came in afterward and
bought
it.") Add a large resident Nihonese population to the influx of tourists from Japan-based megacorps, and that would explain it.

Scott tooled the Phaeton along the broad, spotless street of Waikiki, showing me all the major sites. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel—"The Pink Lady," Scott called it—a flamingo pink extravaganza of pseudo-Moorish architecture that was more than a century old, but was still recognized as one of the most sumptuous hotels in the islands. The International Market Place, an open-air market comprising scores of booths and stores, under the spreading branches of a banyan tree. (Scott explained that the original International Market Place had been turned into a convention center around the turn of the century, but that after a fire destroyed the center in 2022, the City Council ordered another banyan planted, and the Market Place returned to its earlier glory.) And on and on. Eventually, the sumptuous-looking hotels started to blur into one another, and my eyes started to glaze over.

Scott noticed almost immediately, pulled the car over, and turned to me. "You getting bored, is that it?"

I shrugged. "Call it culture shock, maybe."

The ork snorted. "You call
this
culture? This is glitz, brah, pure and simple."

"That's what I mean," I told him. "I'm not used to this much money concentrated in one place."

"I got it now, Mr. Dirk." Scott laughed. "You want to see the other side of the coin, right? Okay, you'll get it." And he pulled the car back out into the traffic.

* * *

As soon as we were out of the Waikiki enclave, into the
real
Honolulu, I felt a lot more at home and comfortable. (Depressing, in a way, but there it is.) According to Scott, the official population of Honolulu is almost three million—just a hundred thousand or so less than Seattle's. That's the
official
figure, of course, in both cases. In Seattle, if you lump in the SINless—the homeless, the indigent, the transient, and the shadowy—the total rises to, depending on which estimate you believe, just short of four million to well over five and a quarter million.

The Honolulu number is probably an underestimate as well, but—cruising down its highways and byways—I couldn't believe that the difference between official population and real population was that great. Don't get me wrong, I
did
see vagrants and homeless types. (I made sure that Scott included appropriate places on the tour.) But they were nowhere near as numerous as in Seattle, or even in Cheyenne. There were some pretty drekky low-rent areas, and one or two ancient tenement complexes that prompted ideas of urban renewal using high-explosives, but there wasn't anything I'd really class as slums. And there
certainly
wasn't anything as squalid and soul-killing as Hell's Kitchen, Glow City, or the Barrens back in Seattle.

The most interesting thing about Honolulu, to my mind, was the proximity of the drekkier parts of town to the corporate heart. Around the intersection of King Street and Punchbowl Street, you've got the financial guts of the city, all pristine skyrakers and corp smoothies on the street. Less than half a klick away, there's the "vice shopping mall" that is Hotel Street, lined with sex shows, tough-looking bars, and porno chip outlets, populated by broken-down jammers of all four orientations (hetero and homo male, hetero and homo female), by chipleggers and flashmeisters, and by the fresh meat strolling by to do business with same. Even Seattle has managed to segregate the two facets of its economy a little more.

Hotel Street was the heart of Chinatown, according to Scott, but I didn't see too many ethnic Chinese on the streets. Lots of big slags and biffs who I guessed were native Polynesians and an almost equal number I tentatively labeled as Filipinos. As we cruised slowly by, I watched the action—contract negotiations of various sordid kinds—come to a stop as the participants stared at the Phaeton gliding past. There probably weren't that many Rolls-Royces to be seen in this neck of the woods, I figured. (Come to think of it, that slow cruise pointed out another difference between Honolulu and the underbelly of Seattle: nobody so much as took a potshot at the car.)

From Chinatown we headed west again, swinging past the airport, past the huge restricted area that was the Pearl Harbor military base, and into the region known as Ewa
(EH-
vah; Scott made sure I got the pronunciation right). As recently as thirty years ago, my tour-guide told me, Ewa had been a city in its own right, close to but still distinct from Honolulu itself. No longer: The larger city had sprawled out, eventually absorbing the smaller. (Much like Everett and Fort Lewis, now that I came to think about it.) Apart from the weather and the clarity of the air, as we drove the streets of Ewa I could easily imagine I was in Renton.

I checked my watch. We'd been cruising for almost two hours, and my stomach was starting to make growling noises again, despite the big breakfast. "I need a bite to eat," I told Scott. "And it's getting on to Miller time, too."

"The bar's fully stocked in the back," the ork told me, "and if you look in the bottom of the fridge there's food—"

"No," I cut him off, "I want to stop somewhere around here. Consider it part of the tour."

He smiled at that. "What do you have in mind?"

I told him, and his smile grew even broader. "Mo' bettah, brah, that's okay. I got just the place in mind."

* * *

The place was called Cheeseburger in Paradise, and it was in the grimy heart of Ewa. Scott told me the name as if it was a joke, but I didn't get it. He had to explain about a song by some dead country-folkie called Jimmy Buffet whom I'd never heard of, and by that time it wasn't really funny anymore. In any case, he explained, Cheeseburger in Paradise was originally a chain that had started up in Maui during the nineteen eighties, and eventually spread to the other islands. The chain had gone belly-up in the 'twenties, and recently this place had picked up the name as an ironic commentary. Something like a rat-bag flophouse calling itself the Hilton.

I felt at home the moment I walked in the door. Almost subliminal waves of tension, of intensity, of danger and violence only barely held in check, washed over me. In the semidarkness of the tavern, I could easily imagine I was back in The Blue Flame in Seattle, or even The Buffalo Jump in Cheyenne.

I went in first—Scott had wanted to lead, but I'd insisted—and I
felt
the eyes on me from the darkened booths and tables. The bartender, a grizzled ork with chipped fangs, gave me a welcoming sneer. From the rough direction of the dance stage—currently vacant, although the lights gleamed on something that could be oil on the worn carpet covering—I heard a muttered comment, something highly derogatory by its tone, and a harsh laugh. Yep, this was just the kind of place I was looking for.

The door opened again behind me, and I felt the looming presence of Scott at my back. Instantly, the feel of the place—the strange dynamic that you can always feel, if you're tuned in closely enough to your instincts—changed. I couldn't believe that the locals of Cheeseburger in Paradise knew Scott personally, but they had to recognize
what
he was, if not precisely who: a bodyguard, and a very competent one. I could
feel
the shift as the patrons quickly reoriented their perceptions of me.