Which suited me fine. People will believe what they want to believe – look at the fucking Beards – and I got the distinct impression that there was some storage time in Japaridze’s past. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but I got an invite up to the bridge on our second evening out of Tekitomura and by the time we left Erkezes on the southernmost tip of the Saffron Archipelago, we were swapping notes on preferred Newpest drinking-holes and how best to barbecue bottleback steaks.
I tried not to let the time chafe at me.
Tried not to think about the Millsport Archipelago and the long westward arc we were cutting away from it.
Sleep was hard.
The night-time bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter provided a viable alternative. I sat with Japaridze and drank cheap Millsport blended whisky, watching as the freighter ploughed her way south into warmer seas and air that was fragrant with the scent of belaweed. I talked, as automatic as the machines that kept the vessel on her curving course, stock tales of sex and travel, memories of Newpest and the Kossuth hinterlands. I massaged the muscles of my left arm where they still ached and throbbed. I flexed my left hand against the pain it gave me. Beneath it all, I thought about ways to kill Aiura and myself.
By day, I prowled the decks and mingled with the other passengers as little as possible. They were an unappealing bunch anyway, three burnt-out and bitter-talking deComs heading south, maybe for home, maybe just for the sun; a hard-eyed webjelly entrepreneur and his bodyguard, accompanying an oil shipment to Newpest; a young New Revelation priest and his carefully wrapped wife who joined ship at Erkezes. Another half dozen less memorable men and women who kept to themselves even more than I did and looked away whenever they were spoken to.
A certain degree of social interaction was unavoidable. Haiduci’s Daughter was a small vessel, in essence not much more than a tug welded onto the nose of four duplex freight pods and a powerful hoverload driver. Access gantries ran at two levels from the forward decks between and alongside the pods and back to a narrow observation bubble bolted on to the rear. What living space there was felt crowded. There were a few squabbles early on, including one over stolen food that Japaridze had to break up with threats of putting people off at Erkezes, but by the time we left the Saffron Archipelago behind, everybody had pretty much settled down. I had a couple of forced conversations with the deComs over meals, trying to show interest in their hard-luck stories and life-in-the-Uncleared bravado. From the webjelly oil merchant I got repetitive lectures on the economic benefits that would emerge from the Mecsek regime’s austerity programme. The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterwards.
We made good time from Erkezes to the Gulf and there was no sign of a storm when we got there. I found myself crowded out of my usual brooding spots as the other passengers came out to enjoy the novelty of warm weather and sun strong enough to tan. You couldn’t blame them – the sky was a solid blue from horizon to horizon, Daikoku and Hotei both showing clear and high up. A strong breeze out of the north east kept the heat pleasant and lifted spray from the ruffled surface of the sea. Westward, waves broke white and just audible on the great curving reefs that heralded the eventual rise of the Kossuth gulf coastline further south.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said a quiet voice beside me at the rail.
I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realised, several months pregnant.
I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.
Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.
‘I’ve never travelled this far south before,’ she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. ‘Have you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is it always this hot?’
I looked at her again, bleakly. ‘It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.’
‘Ah.’ She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. ‘You do not approve?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.’
‘Mecsek.’ She made a small spitting sound. ‘He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.’
‘Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.’
She flinched.
‘You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—’
‘Four.’ I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. ‘I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.’
I saw colour rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.
‘The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,’ she murmured. ‘Many of us—’
‘Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your gynocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.’
Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.
‘You misjudge me.’ She touched the scarf she wore. ‘I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.’
‘Then you’re more stupid than you look.’
An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.
‘So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—’
‘Look,’ I said coldly. ‘Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.’
‘See,’ she said, voice turned slightly shrill. ‘You lust after her like all the others. You give in to her cheap sensual tricks and—’
‘Oh, please. For my money, Mitzi Harlan’s a stupid, superficial little trollop, but you know what? At least she lives her life as if it belongs to her. Instead of abasing herself at the feet of any fucking baboon who can grow a beard and some external genitalia.’
‘Are you calling my husband a—’
‘No.’ I swung on her. It seemed I didn’t have it cranked down after all. My hands shot out and grasped her by the shoulders. ‘No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.’