He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ I reassured him.
‘Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.’
Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.
‘Jack Soul Brasil?’
‘Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?’
A brief smile. ‘Learning.’
‘What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.’
‘Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?’
Brasil shifted awkwardly. ‘Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—’
‘Oh, time here is.’ The smile again. ‘Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.’
We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation, and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him any more.
Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amidst the cobwebby grey scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimetres high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view, I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside of fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.
‘Very nice,’ said Brasil.
I nodded. ‘Yes. You must be very pleased with those.’
‘Only moderately.’ Natsume circled his shred-petalled charges with a critical eye. ‘In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.’
He looked expectantly up at us.
I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there.
‘Are they a bit short?’ I asked finally.
Natsume shook his head and chuckled. ‘No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And – I’m so sorry – I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanour. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.’
He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself. He gestured out at the plants.
‘They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matt. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.’
‘Nik…’
He looked at Brasil. ‘Yes.’
‘Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.’
I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.
‘Some stuff?’ Natsume nodded. ‘What stuff would that be, then?’
‘We.’ I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. ‘I need your help, Nik.’
‘Yes, clearly. But in what?’
‘It’s.’
Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?’
Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.
‘You’ve changed, Nik.’
‘Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?’ For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. ‘That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Of course I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?’
Brasil came down a step towards him, abruptly. ‘Oh, you think this is better?’
He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.
‘You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow flowers instead of living, and you’re going to accuse me of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.’
‘What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?’
‘I was standing on a ten-metre wall four days ago.’ Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. ‘That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.’
‘Is it?’ Natsume shrugged. ‘If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?’
‘That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—’
‘I don’t hate—’
‘Out there, actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.’
‘Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.’
‘My point?’ Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly. ‘None of this is fucking real, Nik.’
I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them, quite literally hovering. His feet were a clear thirty centimetres off the uneven paving.
‘Norikae-san?’ asked the other.
I shifted stance minutely, wondering idly if they were real inhabitants of the monastery or not, and if not what operating parameters they might have in circumstances like these. If the Renouncers ran internal security systems, our chances in a fight were zero. You don’t wander into someone else’s virtuality and brawl successfully unless they want you to.
‘It’s nothing, Katana-san.’ Natsume made a hurried and complicated motion with both hands. ‘A difference of perspective between friends.’
‘My apologies, then, for the intrusion.’ Katana bowed over fists gathered one into the other and the two newcomers withdrew into the arched tunnel. I didn’t see whether they walked away in real time or not.
‘Perhaps,’ began Natsume quietly, then stopped.
‘I’m sorry, Nik.’
‘No, you are right of course. None of this is real in the way we both used to understand it. But in here, I am more real than I ever was before. I define how I exist, and there is no harder challenge than that, believe me.’
Brasil said something inaudible. Natsume resumed his seat on the wooden steps. He looked back at Brasil, and after a moment the surfer seated himself a couple of steps higher up. Natsume nodded and stared at his garden.
‘There is a beach to the east,’ he said absently. ‘Mountains to the south. If I wish, they can be made to meet. I can climb any time I wish, swim any time I wish. Even surf, though I haven’t so far.