‘Nothing worthwhile’s ever easy,’ I answered. To Cahuella, I said, ‘Gitta can fire a gun now and discriminate between friend and foe most of the time. There isn’t anything magical about it, though she’s worked hard to achieve what she has and deserves credit. But if you want more than that, it might not be so easy.’
‘She can always keep learning. You’re the master teacher, after all.’ He nodded down at the gun, into which I’d just slipped a fresh clip. ‘Hey. Show her that trick you do.’
‘Which one would that be?’ I said, trying to keep my temper under control. Normally Cahuella knew better than to label my painfully acquired skills as tricks.
Cahuella took a sip of his drink. ‘You know the one I mean.’
‘Fine; I’ll take a guess.’
I reprogrammed the gun so that the bullets would no longer be deflected if they were on hazardous trajectories. If he wanted a trick, he was going to get one — whether it cost him or not.
Normally when I shot a small weapon, I adopted the classic marksman’s stance: legs slightly spread for balance, gun’s grip held in one hand, supported by the other hand from beneath; arms outstretched at eye-level, locked against recoil if the gun fired slugs rather than energy. Now I held the gun single-handed at waist-height, like an oldtime quick-draw gunfighter with a six-shooter. I was looking down on the gun, not sighting along it. But I had practised this position so thoroughly that I knew exactly where the bullet would go.
I squeezed the trigger and put a slug into one of his hamadryad statues.
Then walked to inspect the damage.
The statue’s gold had flowed like butter under the impact of the bullet, but it had flowed with beautiful symmetry around the entrance point, like a yellow lotus. And I had placed the shot with beautiful symmetry as well — mathematically centred on the hamadryad’s brow; between the eyes if the creature’s eyes had not been situated inside its jaw.
‘Very good,’ Cahuella said. ‘I think. Have you any idea what that snake cost?’
‘Less than you pay me for my services,’ I said, programming the gun back into safe mode before I forgot.
He looked at the ruined statue for a moment before shaking his head, chuckling. ‘You’re probably right. And I guess you’ve still got the edge, right, Tanner?’ He clicked his fingers at his wife. ‘Okay; end of lesson, Gitta. Tanner and I need to talk about something — that’s why I came out here.’
‘But we’ve only just begun.’
‘There’ll be other times. You wouldn’t want to learn everything right away, would you?’
No; I thought — I hoped that never happened, because then I would have no reason to be around her. The thought was dangerous — was I seriously thinking about trying something on with her, while Cahuella was no further away than another room in the Reptile House? Crazy too, because until tonight nothing Gitta had done had indicated any kind of reciprocal attraction towards me. But some of the things she’d said had made me wonder. Maybe she was just getting lonely, out here in the jungle.
Dieterling came out behind Cahuella and escorted Gitta back into the building, while another man dismantled the field generator. Cahuella and I walked away towards the wall around the terrace. The air was warm and clammy, with no hint of a breeze. During the day it could be almost unbearably humid; nothing like Nuevo Iquique’s balmy coastal climate where I had spent my childhood. Cahuella’s tall, broad-shouldered frame was wrapped in a black kimono patterned with interlocked dolphins, his feet bare against the terrace’s chevroned tiles. His face was broad, with what always struck me as a touch of petulance around the lips. It was the look of a man who would never accept defeat gracefully. His thick black hair was permanently slicked back from his brow; brilliant grooves like beaten gold in the light from the hamadryad flames. He fingered the damaged statue, then bent down to pick up a few shards of gold from the floor. The shards were leaf-thin, like the foil which illuminators once used to decorate sacred texts. He rubbed them sadly between his fingers, then tried to place the gold back into the statue’s wound. The snake was depicted curling around its tree, in its last phase of motility before the arboreal fusion-phase.
‘I’m sorry about the damage,’ I said. ‘But you did ask for a demonstration.’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter; I’ve got dozens of them in the basement. Maybe I’ll even leave it as a feature, right?’
‘Deterrence?’
‘Has to be worth something, hasn’t it?’ Then his voice lowered. ‘Tanner, something’s come up. I need you to come with me tonight. ’
‘Tonight?’ It was already late, but then Cahuella tended to keep unusual hours. ‘What are you planning — a late-night hunting trip?’
‘I’m in the mood, but this is something else entirely. We’ve got visitors coming in. We need to go and meet them. There’s a clearing about twenty klicks up the old jungle road. I want you to drive me there.’
I thought about that carefully before answering. ‘What kind of visitors are we talking about here?’
He stroked the hamadryad’s pierced head, almost lovingly. ‘Not the usual kind.’
Cahuella and I were on our way from the Reptile House within half an hour, driving one of the ground-effect vehicles. It had just been enough time for Cahuella to dress for the trip, donning khaki trousers and shirt, under an elaborately pocketed tan hunting jacket. I nosed the car between the shells of derelict, vine-enshrouded buildings around the Reptile House until I found the old trail, just before it plunged into the forest. In another few months the journey would not have been possible at all — the jungle was slowly healing the wound cut through the heart of it. It would take flame-throwers to scythe it clear again.
The Reptile House and its environs had once been part of a zoological garden, built during one of the hopeful ceasefires. That particular ceasefire had only lasted a decade or so — but at the time it must have seemed that there was a good chance of peace enduring; enough for people to build something as militarily valueless and as civically improving as a zoo. The idea had been to house Terran and native specimens in similar exhibits, emphasising the similarities and differences between Earth and Sky’s Edge. But the zoo had never been properly completed, and now the only intact part of it was the Reptile House, which Cahuella had made into his personal residence. It served him welclass="underline" isolated and easily fortified. He had ambitions to restock its basement vivaria with a private collection of captured animals, prime amongst which would be the pre-adult hamadryad he had yet to catch. The juvenile took up a large volume already; he would need a whole new basement for a large one — not to mention extensive new expertise in the care of a creature with a substantially different biochemistry than its younger phase. Elsewhere, the House was already filled with the skins and teeth and bones of animals he had brought home as dead prizes. He had no love for living things, and the only reason that he wanted live specimens was because it would be obvious to his visitors that greater skill had been required in their capture than if they had been killed in the field.
Branches and vines slapped against the car’s bodywork as I gunned it down the track, the howl of the turbines out-screeching every other living thing for miles around.
‘Tell me about these visitors,’ I said, my throat-mike relaying my words to Cahuella through the headphones which clamped his skull.
‘You’ll see them soon enough.’
‘Did they suggest this clearing as a meeting place?’
‘No — that was my idea.’
‘And they know which clearing you were talking about?’
‘They don’t have to.’ He nodded upwards. I risked a glance towards the forest canopy, and when the canopy thinned for a moment — revealing sky — I saw something painfully bright loitering above us, like a triangular wedge cut out of the firmament. ‘They’ve been following us ever since we left the House.’