Palace (5 page)

The shape she’d read as a stair panel was nothing of the sort, only an angled black slab, featureless, joined to the wall along its height - some land of old-fashioned Map access panel. Maybe, just maybe, it would have a help icon or a transmit. When she touched it, she felt a flare of warmth under her palm as the station came to life and brought hope with it, but no icons appeared. When in frustration she ran her hand over the surface, a faint glow caught the corner of her eye. She turned to see a revenant, its ghostly form shimmering through a series of body-shapes, human and alien. You didn’t see many revenants in Pleasure Sect, though some of the older stations did produce them. Since they weren’t fully functional, they appeared randomly, rarely spoke, and vanished without warning. This rev finally settled on a human shape, apparently solid though it glowed around the edges, a man with large black eyes and very long metallic silver hair, which undulated as if in a private breeze. He looked strange, his skin far darker than any she’d ever seen, even on Karlo Peronida and his family, and his face was ridged with knobs of smooth metal. He wore a glittering jewelled gown like the clothes in historical holonovels set in the early years of the Pinch. The revenant considered her, then raised one hand. A light flashed into her eyes. When she flinched back and yelped, he grinned.

‘Je’nevrelevpadumindoroolasveel -’ The revenant spoke very quickly, with a strange accent.

‘Huh?’

‘Je’ne padum las vyl -’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Vas’i je!’ The ghostly hologram flickered and turned dim. After a few seconds, he returned to full power. ‘I have assimilated current lingua-bases. Building Gen heuristic. Complete. Beginning identity search. Search complete. Searching for gene-base. Gene-base found. Cross-checking gene-base for verification.’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘Greetings, User. Your genotype is a recognized priority access deen. Enter meta.’

‘What?’

‘Enter meta.’

‘What’s a meta?’

‘A meta is an unambiguous data string for unique access and development of coordinated routines for action.’

‘Huh?’

‘Wait. Heuristic counter-program activated. Adjusting levels. Lexicons active. A meta is a password, a means for individual encrypted interaction with an artificial intelligence. I require a meta to create your account.’

‘A password?’

‘Yes,’ said the rev. ‘Enter meta.’

Vida’s wrist-tel was flashing red and fast now. The fake Lifegiver must be closing in, probably at the bottom of the tower. ‘I don’t know the password.’

‘No, no, Veelivar, you give me the password! I record it, you use it. The password becomes my name to you.’

‘Oh, well, then.’ She thought, remembered Brother Lennos and the Eye. ‘The password is Calios.’

‘Done. I am Calios. Veelivar account active. All stations unlocked.’

‘That won’t help!’

‘Help? Enter your request.’

‘I’m being chased, so I don’t suppose you know a way out of here?’

‘Explain.’

Vida raised her left wrist and showed the rev her flashing wrist-tel.

‘Someone wants to hurt me, and they’re using this to find me.’

‘Interesting.’ The rev’s expression blanked for less than a heartbeat. Abruptly, the wrist-tel ceased flashing. ‘I have re-directed this matrix. Please confirm with visual input.’

Vida crawled to the tower window and flattened herself against the wall so that she could look out sideways. She saw the figure in Lifegiver’s robes at the base of the tower, but he wasn’t looking up. Instead, he was staring at his wrist-tel. When he shook his hand, as if trying to shake some life back into a suddenly dead tel, his sleeve slid back. His wrist was covered with scales in a pattern of red and green swirls. So, it
was
a Lep, and that pattern would identify his family line. He also held a weapon, judging from the slender barrel and the power pack clipped to the handle. Weapons were forbidden on Palace, punishable by death. Why would a Lep risk so much to chase an unMarked girl? It didn’t make any sense. All at once, the Lep’s wrist-tel began flashing again. Cursing, he ran back across the garden with amazing speed and grace. She watched him hurry across the bridge, climb over to the gantry, and whip himself into the longtube.

She turned around. ‘That worked. Thank you.’

The rev was paying her no attention.

‘Warning, trackers activated. End meta.’

‘What?’

‘End meta. Speak your password, Veelivar.’

‘Uh ... Calios?’

The rev grinned one last time, nodded, and vanished before Vida could ask what a veelivar was. She had no time to mess around here, anyway, when her pursuer might return at any moment. And she had a hunch that the rev had been running from someone or something, too.

* * *

Uncle Hi had long legs and used them, striding so fast through the lestival that Rico Hernanes y Jons was hard pressed to keep up. I hanks to the crowds, though, every now and then Hi had to pause, muttering under his breath about wasted time, and Rico would sneak a fast look around. Once, he saw the Countess of Motta in her silver litter, marked with the stylized sigil of her family’s Gene-glyph, bobbing through the crowd behind saccule footmen sashed in silver over a red shift. A little later they paused at a blocked intersection, where, hanging from the side of a building, a two-storey high vidscreen showed a collage of images from the festival. Out in the street sapients stood looking up, trying to catch a glimpse of themselves or someone they knew onscreen while the actual festival swarmed around them. Rico joined them, tipping his head back to look.

‘Come on, kid!’ Hi snapped.

‘Yes, Se!’

Rico ran to catch up. He’d been dodging Hi’s foul mood all day, from the moment Hi had yelled at his Garang bodyguard for the crime of arguing with him about his plans. Rico didn’t know why his uncle wanted to come to the festival without his staff, but he’d told all twenty members of it to find other business for the day. Even Hi’s factor, Jevon, had received a lecture about her place for pointing out that the Master of the Cyberguild had no business running around Pleasure Sect without a bodyguard, a dressing down that had left her pale and shaking.

When they reached the Boulain, Uncle Hi paused long enough to buy himself and his nephew an iced klosh. Rico dribbled pink juice down his best white shirt, while Hi ate at an angle, leaning forward to munch without staining his ceremonial robes, the midnight blue of the Cyberguild.

‘You’re a mess, kid,’ Hi said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Rico took a napkin from the vendor and rubbed in vain. ‘Sorry.’

For a moment Hi considered him, his dark eyes brirnming sad, as if the sight of his nephew made him weary. He was getting on, Hi, over a hundred now, and his thick grey hair, touched with white at the temples, showed it.

‘We better finish our business here before it gets too late,’ Hi said at last. ‘I’m due back in Tech Sect tomorrow. Remember, this is just between us, right?’

‘Not a word, yeah.’

‘Good. Now come on.’ Hi winked. ‘It never pays to keep Aleen waiting.’

Rico nodded, not trusting his voice. If Uncle Hi realized how nervous he was, he’d become a family joke - well, a joke to most of them, anyway. It was the Jons clan custom to let their youngsters, boys and girls both, learn about sex at the proper age from professionals, and Rico had just achieved his Not-child status. His mother, though, had her own ideas about such things, and a much stricter view of life, and he knew she’d hate it - if she ever found out. He wasn’t too crazy about it himself. He would have rather stayed at the hotel and worked with their interface to the Map; Pleasure Sect had some archaic access points, fascinating stuff to Rico’s way of thinking.

They started across a public square only to find it filled with a procession of Lifegivers. Muttering something unreligious, Hi motioned for Rico to stop and wait with him off the side. Rico found the spiral dancing and the shrieking whistles and gongs profoundly uninspiring. He started looking over the crowd for Marked citizens, the ones his older cousins had told him about. They had the bright red sun glyph of the Pleasure Sect tattooed on their foreheads, his cousins said, so you could tell them apart from the boys and girls who weren’t Not-children yet. UnMarked girls were off-limits. Marked girls had no limits. His cousins always smirked when they made that distinction.

Rico grimaced. He wished there was some way he could avoid this. Like most upper-class children on Palace, he’d been immersed in such an overwhelming education that sexual matters belonged only to the dark corners of the night, when cousins whispered together about what they’d been promised for ‘later’. Well, ‘later’ was here now, with a vengeance. Maybe he could just ask to go home? But Uncle Hi was his family’s chief patron, and when you were just barely a Not-child, disobeying a patron’s orders was a good way to get into deep trouble.

As the Lifegivers ended their dance and began to clear the square, Rico saw a girl standing and watching the monks. She was younger than he was, and plainly unMarked, but he couldn’t help thinking that she was the most beautiful girl he’d seen in the entire festival. She stood straight, her hands on her slender hips, frowning a little, her eyes wide - even from this distance, he could tell they were a startling deep green. Her hair, a rich reddish colour that he’d never seen before, tumbled down her back in waves. Rico frankly stared as she strode across the plaza, her walk lithe, graceful. If Aleen’s girls were like her, he decided, this whole thing was going to be easier than he thought. Only half-consciously he moved after her, following her through the crowd. When she paused to speak with a young monk, he hesitated.

‘Rico, hey, where are you going?’ Hi was following him.

‘Sorry. I’d just like to see some of the festival, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, so would I. But.’

Rico glanced back to find his uncle smiling, a rueful twist of his mouth.

‘I hate to admit this,’ Hi said. ‘But that hairy bastard of a Garang was right, y’know. This isn’t all that safe. Let’s stick together, okay?’

‘Okay.’

They headed down the Boulain, dodging clowns and street vendors, ducking through the trees and food booths. Every time Hi saw a gridjockey, he’d swear and steer Rico away fast, before they could end up on the newsfeed or in some special presentation. At one point they found themselves caught between a parked tenwheel, all covered with flowers and full of chanting priests, and a portable Map terminal where gridjockeys stood jacked in, their eyes vacant as they stared into space, waiting for their downloads to finish.

‘Almost there, too,’ Hi muttered. ‘Damn it.’

Cowering behind the tenwheel, they waited for the pix and intakes to move on. Out on the Boulain itself a crowd of sapients drifted in a thick crush, ordinary citizens, most of them, with a sprinkling of drug addicts and drunks. Pleasure Sect sheltered a lot of trash sapients as well as hard-working citizens, or so Rico had always heard them called, trash and sapient garbage. They shambled along, begging shamelessly, Leps as well as humans, holding out trembling hands as the prosperous citizens passed them by or paused, glancing around in embarrassment, to drop a few coins into their palms.

One of the beggars weaving unsteadily across the Boulain had a face that glistened with metal - circuit plate embedded into his cheek and studding his forehead. Around one eye gleamed a web of tri-stil, the optical fibre used to connect cybers to primary access stations for the AI network. He was wearing a piss-stained pair of grey trousers, but instead of a shirt or tunic he wore the tattered remains of a blue robe, all greasy and cut off short. Rico took off running, dodging his way through the startled crowd. On the far kerb he caught him.

‘Arno. Oh my God, Arno!’

The beggar stopped, swaying a little, and raised a gaunt hand to a stubbled face. Around his metal eye the web stalks opened and fluttered as his head jerked to one side. His hand spasmed and flew up, dragging a dirty arm with it.

‘I know you.’ His voice rasped and croaked. ‘Son of the morning.’

‘Arno, no, look, it’s Rico. Your cousin.’ His voice broke. ‘Your friend. Arno, don’t you remember me?’

Glittering in the sunlight the metal face turned his way. The mouth, flesh barely visible under the circuit plate, twitched in something like a smile.

‘Yeah. Yeah. I knew you on the stations of our cross, eh? We jammed together in the morning light, all-meta.’

‘All-meta?’

‘All-meta, morning light. For the son of the morning. Child of ihe Gyre.’ His head twitched, flopped nearly to his chest, raised itself again. Inside their cage of tri-stil the eyes peered out, suddenly steady. ‘Rico? That really you, cuz?’

Arno held out a hand and held it steady, his mouth twisted right from the effort of will. Rico knew what his cousin wanted him to do. He glanced at the back of his own hand, where the flat circle of cuproid, his first implant jack, glittered. If they tried to connect in this jostling crowd? Dangerous, yes, but worth a try.

‘Rico!’ Uncle Hi’s voice, booming in rage. ‘Rico! Where the hell are you?’

‘Who’s that?’ Arno muttered. ‘Knew that voice.’

‘Yeah. I’ll bet you did. Here!’ Rico turned, waving. ‘Uncle Hi, come here!’

Striding in a wave of authority, all blue robe and hard dark eyes, Uncle Hi parted the crowd and swept through. He grabbed Rico by the shoulder.

‘Come on. There’s no time to waste here.’

‘But it’s Arno. We’ve got to get him out of here.’

Uncle Hi glanced at Arno, a flick of his eyes, then away. ‘He’s where he wants to be,’ Hi said, but for the briefest of moments his voice wavered.

‘Shit!’

Arno staggered back, then broke into a shambling run.

Rico realized that a pair of Protectors, dressed in their semi-armoured crowd control uniforms, stiff and red, were trotting after his cousin. They had their stunsticks raised and ready. Rico stepped forward and blocked their way.

‘What’s the trouble, officer?’

The Protector stared at him in sheer disbelief, then turned to Hi, the obvious authority.

‘Well?’ Hi said. ‘What’s going on?’