They had emerged from the elevator onto a terrace above the carousel’s main community, a collision of buildings piled between stepped valley sides. Rimtown, they called it. It was an eyesore of architectural styles reflecting the succession of different tenants which the carousel had enjoyed throughout its history. A line of rickshaws waited at ground level, the driver of the closest quenching his thirst from a can of banana juice which sat in a holder rigged to the taxi’s handlebars. Hegazi passed the driver a piece of paper marked with their destination. The driver held it closely to his black, close-set eyes, then grunted acknowledgement. Soon they were trundling through the traffic, electric and pedal vehicles barging recklessly around each other, pedestrians diving bravely between openings in the seemingly random flow. At least half the people Volyova saw were Ultranauts, evidenced by their tendency towards paleness, spindly build, flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies. None of the Ultras she saw were extreme chimerics, with the possible exception of Hegazi, who probably qualified as one of the half-dozen most augmented people in the carousel. But the majority wore their hair in the customary Ultra manner, fashioned in thick braids to indicate the number of reefersleep stretches they had done, and many of them had their clothes slashed to expose their prosthetic parts. Looking at these specimens, Volyova had to remind herself that she was part of the same culture.
Ultras, of course, were not the only spacegoing faction spawned by humanity. Skyjacks—at least here—made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras, with their dreadlocks and old-fashioned expressions. There were others still. Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication. Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were so incapable of normal respiration and locomotion that they had to move around in huge robotic fishtanks when not on duty.
And then there were Conjoiners: descendants of an experimental clique on Mars who had systematically upgraded their minds, swapping cells for machines, until something sudden and drastic had happened. In one moment, they had escalated to a new mode of consciousness—what they called the Transenlightenment—precipitating a brief but nasty war in the process. Conjoiners were easy to pick out in crowds: recently they had bio-engineered huge and beautiful cranial crests for themselves, veined to dissipate the excess heat produced by the furious machines in their heads. There were fewer of them these days, so they tended to draw attention. Other human factions—like the Demarchists, who had long allied themselves with the Conjoiners—were acutely aware that only Conjoiners knew how to build the engines which powered lighthuggers.
“Stop here,” Hegazi said. The rickshaw darted to the streetside, where wizened old men sat at folding tables playing card games and mah-jong. Hegazi slapped payment into the driver’s fleshy palm and then followed Volyova onto the streetside. They had arrived at a bar.
“The Juggler and the Shrouder,” Volyova said, reading the holographic sign above the door. It showed a naked man emerging from the sea, backdropped by strange, phantasmagoric shapes among the surf. Above him, a black sphere hung in the sky. “This doesn’t look right.”
“It’s where all the Ultras hang out. You’d better get used to it.”
“All right, point made. I suppose I wouldn’t feel at home in any Ultra bar, come to think of it.”
“You wouldn’t feel at home in anything that didn’t have a navigational system and a lot of nasty firepower, Ilia.”
“Sounds like a reasonable definition of common sense to me.”
Youths barged out into the street, plastered in sweat and what Volyova hoped was spilt beer. They had been arm wrestling: one of their number was nursing a prosthetic which had ripped off at the shoulder, another was riffling a wad of notes he must have won inside. They had the regulation sleep-stretch locks and the standard-issue star-effect tattoos, making Volyova feel simultaneously ancient and envious. She doubted that their anxieties extended much beyond the troubling question of where their next drink or bed was coming from. Hegazi gave them a look—he must have seemed intimidating to them, even given their chimeric aspirations, since it was difficult to tell which parts of Hegazi were not mechanical.
“Come on,” he said, pushing through the disturbance. “Grin and bear it, Ilia.”
It was dark and smoky inside, and with the combined synergistic effects of the noise from the music—pulsing Burundi rhythms overlaid with something that might have been human singing—and the perfumed, mild hallucinogens in the smoke, it took Volyova a few moments to get her bearings. Then Hegazi pointed to a miraculously spare table in the comer and she followed him to it with the minimum of enthusiasm.
“You’re going to sit down, aren’t you?”
“I don’t suppose I have much choice. We have to look as if we at least tolerate each other’s company or people will get suspicious.”
Hegazi shook his head, grinning. “I must like something about you, Ilia, otherwise I’d have killed you ages ago.”
She sat down.
“Don’t let Sajaki hear you talking like that. He doesn’t take kindly to threats being made against Triumvir members.”
“I’m not the one who has a problem with Sajaki, in case you forgot. Now, what are you drinking?”
“Something my digestive system can process.”
Hegazi ordered some drinks—his physiology allowed that—waiting until the overhead delivery system brought them.
“You’re still annoyed by that business with Sudjic, aren’t you?”
“Don’t worry,” Volyova said, crossing her arms. “Sudjic isn’t anything I can’t handle. Besides, I’d be lucky to lay a finger on her before Sajaki finished her off.”
“He might let you have second pickings.” The drinks arrived in a little perspex cloud with a flip-top, the cloud suspended from a trolley which ran along rails mounted on the ceiling. “You think he’d actually kill her?”
Volyova attacked her drink, glad of something to wash away the dust of the rickshaw ride. “I wouldn’t trust Sajaki not to kill any of us, if it came to that.”
“You used to trust him. What made you change your mind?”
“Sajaki hasn’t been the same since the Captain fell ill again.” She looked around nervously, well aware that Sajaki might not be very far from earshot. “Before that happened, they both visited the Jugglers, did you know that?”
“You’re saying the Jugglers did something to Sajaki’s mind?”
She thought back to the naked man stepping from the Juggler ocean. “That’s what they do, Hegazi.”
“Yes, voluntarily. Are you saying Sajaki chose to become crueller?”
“Not just cruel. Single-minded. This business with the Captain…” She shook her head. “It’s emblematic.”
“Have you spoken to him recently?”
She read his question. “No; I don’t think he’s found who he’s looking for, though doubtless we’ll find out shortly.”
“And your own quest?”
“I’m not looking for a specific individual. My only constraint is that whoever I find should be saner than Boris Nagorny. That ought not to pose any great difficulties.” She let her gaze drift around the drinkers in the bar. Although none of the people looked definitely psychotic, neither was there anyone who exactly looked stable and well-adjusted. “At least I hope not.”