“No,” said Stef, “except I want a vacation when this is over. And my pay.”
“Stop kidding me, I know you’ll take your pay out of old Yang’s reward money. Don’t try to…wait a minute. Box reports Patal and Sivas-whatever don’t resemble the description. Nish is away from home.
Wait a minute again. Govind Ananda paid the energy bill on No. 71, Jesus and Buddha Court. Didn’t the letter say something about a rosary? And about him being an O.B.?”
“Keep trying Nish, Yama, but send three or four of your thuggi to meet me at J and B Court. I’m going to try Govind. I like the smell of that address. It’s near the University and the names would echo for an Old Believer.”
“You got ’em. Plus a Darksider in case things get rough.”
“And a gas mask.”
Stef rang off, plunged into a battered Korean-style chest on his balcony and brought out his one-centimeter impact pistol. He touched the clip control and chambered one of the fat, black-headed rounds.
Action elated him, freed him from his memories of being beaten, his sense of uselessness. Suddenly he felt wonderful, better than when he was on kif, better than when he was drunk, almost better than when he was about to make love. A flutter of fear in his belly was part of the frisson. So was the taste of iron filings beginning to fill his mouth.
He rummaged through his closet, dragged out his most ample jacket, tore the right-hand pocket to give him access to the space between cloth and lining. Hand in pocket, he pressed the gun against his ribs to hide any bulge and slipped through the door, listening to it click behind him, wondering if he would ever unlatch it again. He whispered a goodbye to Dzhun. On the roof he signaled for a hovercab.
“Jesus and Buddha Court,” he said, when one drew up.
The cab’s blackbox said, “Gratizor.”
On Lake Bai in the evening the tinkle of samisen music mixed with the thrumming of a Spanish guitar, the notes falling like lemon and oleander flowers into the dark, cold water.
Half a click down in the huge lake-really a freshwater inland sea-glacial ice still lingered, surviving into the heat of an earth warmer than it had been since the noontime of the dinosaurs. Shrieking happily, goosepimpled swimmers were leaping into the water from the floating docks of lake side villas. Further on, strings of Japanese lanterns illuminated teahouses and casinos and sliderrinks where the children of grandees cavorted on expensive cushions of air.
Back in the hills, spotlights illuminated palaces. Bijou villas lined the shores, and on the veranda of one of the smaller ones Stef and Dzhun idled, wearing light evening robes and not much else. Dzhun kept returning to Stef’s account of the raid, trying to get the story straight.
“So these terrorists-did you shoot them?”
“Didn’t have to. I’ve seldom felt like such a fool in my life.”
Stef gestured lazily, and Dzhun disturbed herself long enough to pour champagne. The grapes of Siberia were justly famous, the flavor supposedly improved by the low background radiation.
“The terrorists weren’t dangerous?”
“Pair of dumb kids. The boy wearing his funny cross and the girl with the same symbol tattooed on her hand, if you can believe that. The Darksider smashed the door in and let out a roar and they both fainted dead away. Then I jumped in yelling and the thuggi followed, and suddenly the four of us were standing around waving weapons at two unconscious children. Ridiculous scene.
“I almost puked when I had to hand them over to the polizi. Not that there was anything else I could do, with the thuggi and the Darksider there. I was sure Kathmann would tear them limb from limb, but Yama says they woke up spilling their guts. The polizi have got ’em locked up, of course, but Security got everything they wanted in the first three minutes.”
“Dyeva.”
“Absolutely. Iris and Ananda said she’d come in by the Luna shuttle on such and such a day. That was enough. Kathmann called Yama. Yama has shuttle data at his fingertips, there were only four females of the right age on that one, and they all checked out except Akhmatova Maria from a planet called Ganesh, which is, just like it was supposed to be, in the Lion Sector.She stepped off the shuttle and vanished.
“So now they got her hologram, plus retinographs, voiceprints, DNA, all that stuff they take when you get a passport. The kids have positively identified her. Dyeva’s been made, for whatever good it may do us.
“It was an eventful day. The kids had met Dyeva at a villa outside town, so the polizi descended on that and bagged the owner. He went straight to the Chamber and promptly gave them the name of another member of the cell, a woman who has so far evaded capture. A demand for information went out to Ganesh at maximum power and with the most awful threats that Yama could think of on the spur of the moment.
“He’d just laid all this information on Oleary’s desk when another call comes in from Earth Central.
Kathmann’s got the wormholer. Gadget takes a hell of a lot of juice, so his mashini were watching the Ulanor power grid for unusual current surges. Well, a surge of the right size occurred, and Kathmann arrived at the meter with half a dozen Darksiders to find the wormholer standing all by itself in a deserted warehouse in the northwest quadrant.”
Dzhun was frowning. “Then that means-”
“You and I may vanish at any moment,” Stef grinned. “Dyeva’s presumably in the twenty-first century trying to prevent the Time of Troubles. I wish her luck. How’s she going to do it?”
“And we’re here.”
“And we’re here, relaxing, courtesy of the payoff to Yang. My success in cracking Crux convinced Yama that I’m the guy to stop Dyeva. He offered me a hundred thousand to go after her. I laughed in his face.”
“Then who’ll do the job?”
“Some thuggi from Earth Central who’re under military discipline and can’t say no.”
“And what’ll happen to her?”
“In the twenty-first century? Probably get killed by the surface traffic. Or catch a fatal disease. Or get lost in the crowds. I wouldn’t trust Kathmann’s idiots to find their peckers when they need to piss. Dyeva’s safe enough from them.”
Later, he and Dzhun wandered up the shingled beach to a waterside inn that served caviar and Peking duck and other edibles. People of the upper and underworld were crowded together at small tables, eating and drinking. Blue clouds of kif drifted from open censers over the crowd, relaxing everybody.
Dzhun, who had an indelicate appetite, was just piling into her dessert when the haunting notes of a synthesizer drifted like pollen across vast, cool Lake Bai. A band floated up in an open hovercar, and asisi with a piercingly sweet voice performed a popular air, “This Dewdrop World,” whose simple theme was eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. The crowd loved it; silver half-khans and even a few gold khans showered the car. Whenever a coin fell in the water, a musician would jump in after it like a frog and have to be fished out by his friends.
It was a fine end to the evening. When Stef and Dzhun left the restaurant the air had the lingering chill of spring and the scent of lemon groves that were blossoming in the hills. Dzhun pulled Stef’s arm like a scarf around her neck and started to sing the song again. He leaned over her, hugged her close. It was at moments like this that he almost envied people who were foolish enough to fall in love.
“I love that song,” she said. “It’s so nice to be sad. Sadness goes with joy like plums with duck.”
Didn’t statements like that mean that she was, after all, a bit more than just a whore? Stef hugged her tighter, breathing in her off world perfume with the chilly scent of the lemon groves.
They had an amorous night and spent next morning lolling on the deck with their usual strong green tea.
They were supposed to start back to the city today and Dzhun was looking abstracted.
“Can’t wait to get back and go to work?” Stef smiled.
“Stef…there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“My senator wants to set me up in a little house in Karakorum. He’s jealous, and it’ll be the end for you and me.”
That produced silence. Stef cleared his throat, dranktea.
“Ah. So this trip was a kiss off.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
