‘I think that’s probably not a good idea.’
I sighed. ‘No, probably not.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The monastery on Whaleback and Ninth was a grim, blank-faced place. Whaleback islet, along with about a dozen other similar fragments of land and reclaimed reef, served as a commuting-distance settlement for workers in the docks and marine industries of New Kanagawa. Causeways and suspension spans provided ready access across the short expanse of water to Kanagawa itself, but the limited space on these satellite isles meant cramped, barracks-style apartments for the workforce. The Renouncers had simply acquired a hundred-metre frontage and nailed all the windows shut.
‘For security,’ the monk who let us in explained. ‘We run a skeleton crew here and there’s a lot of valuable equipment. You’ll have to hand over those weapons before we go any further.’
Beneath the simple grey coveralls of the order, he was sleeved in a basic, low-end Fabrikon synth that presumably ran built-in scanning gear. The voice was like a bad phone connection amplified and the silicoflesh face was set in a detached expression which may or may not have reflected how he felt about us – small muscle groups are never that great on the cheaper models. On the other hand, even cheap synths usually run machine levels of reflex and strength, and you could probably burn a blaster hole right through this one without doing much more than piss its wearer off.
‘Seems fair,’ I told him.
I dug out the GS Rapsodia and handed it over butt-first. Beside me, Sierra Tres did the same with a blunt-looking blaster. Brasil spread his arms agreeably and the synth nodded.
‘Good. I’ll return these when you leave.’
He led us through a gloomy evercrete entry hall whose obligatory statue of Konrad Harlan had been unflatteringly masked in plastic, then into what must once have been a ground-floor apartment. Two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs, as basic as the attendant’s sleeve, were gathered facing a desk and a heavy steel door beyond. A second attendant was waiting for us behind the desk. Like her colleague, she was synth-sleeved and coveralled in grey, but her facial features seemed fractionally more animated. Maybe she was trying harder, working at full acceptance under the new unisex induction decrees.
‘How many of you are requesting audience?’ she asked, pleasantly enough given the limitations of her Fabrikon voice.
Jack Soul Brasil and I raised our hands, Sierra Tres stood pointedly to one side. The female attendant gestured to us to follow her and punched out a code on the steel door. It opened with an antique metallic grinding and we stepped into a grey-walled chamber fitted with a half dozen sagging couches and a virtual transfer system that looked like it might still run on silicon.
‘Please make yourselves comfortable in one of the couches and attach electrodes and hypnophones as in the instruction holo you will see at your right side.’
Make yourselves comfortable was an ambitious request – the couches were not automould and didn’t seem to have been made with comfort in mind. I was still trying to find a good posture when the attendant stepped across to the transfer control suite and powered us up. A sonocode murmured through the hypnophones.
‘Please turn your head to the right and watch the holoform until you lose consciousness.’
Transition, oddly enough, was a lot smoother than I’d expected from the surroundings. At the heart of the holosphere, an oscillating figure eight formed and began cycling through the colour spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the lightshow expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping towards the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shrivelled to white and the blending roar of the stream in my ears. There was a tilting of everything under me, a sense of the whole world being turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and suddenly I was deposited upright on a worn stone platform behind a waterfall in full flood. The remains of the oscillating spectrum showed up briefly as an edge of refracted light in faint mist, then faded like a dying note. Abruptly there were puddles around my feet, and cold, damp air on my face.
As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil. The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again. The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.
‘It’s this way, I think,’ I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.
We followed the steps round a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.
It rose among gently rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.
‘Well you can see why they went virtual,’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘It beats Whaleback and Ninth.’
Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have got over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.
We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.
‘May I help you?’ he asked gently.
Brasil nodded. ‘We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.’
‘Natsume.’ The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again. ‘He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.’
The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.
‘Nik?’ Brasil moved forward to meet him. ‘Is that you?’
‘Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.’ Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw. ‘Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.’