‘Let’s get this over with,’ I muttered.
We moored the dinghy at the beach end where stained and worn plastic jetties leaned in the shallow water at neglected angles. Sierra Tres and the woman who called herself Nadia Makita sat in the stern while Brasil and I unloaded our luggage. Like anyone cruising the Millsport Archipelago, Boubin Islander’s owners had laid in appropriate female clothing in case they had to put in to any of the Northern arm communities, and both Tres and Makita were swathed to the eyes. We helped them out of the dinghy with what I hoped was equally appropriate solicitude, gathered up the sealwrap bags and headed up the main street. It was a slow process – Sierra Tres had dosed herself to the eyes with combat painkillers before we left the yacht, but walking in the cast and flex-alloy boot still forced on her the gait of an old woman. We collected a few curious looks, but these I attributed to Brasil’s blond hair and stature. I began to wish we’d been able to wrap him up too.
No one spoke to us.
We found the village’s only hotel, overlooking the main square, and booked rooms for a week, using two pristine ID datachips from among the selection we’d brought with us from Vchira. As women, Tres and Makita were our charges and didn’t rate ID procedure of their own. A scarfed and robed receptionist nonetheless greeted them with a warmth that, when I explained that my aged aunt had suffered a hip injury, became solicitous enough to be a problem. I snapped down an offer of a visit from the local woman’s doctor, and the receptionist retreated before the display of male authority. Lips tight, she busied herself with running our ID. From the window beside her desk, you could look down into the square and see the raised platform and fixing points for the community’s punishment chair. I stared bleakly down at it for a moment, then locked myself back into the present. We hand-printed for access on an antique scanner and went up to our rooms.
‘You have something against these people?’ Makita asked me, stripping off her head garb in the room. ‘You seem angry. Is this why you’re pursuing a vendetta against their priests?’
‘It’s related.’
‘I see.’ She shook out her hair, pushed fingers up through it and regarded the cloth-and-metal masking system in her other hand with a quizzical curiosity at odds with the blunt distaste Sylvie Oshima had shown when forced to wear a scarf in Tekitomura. ‘Why under three moons would anybody choose to wear something like this?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s not the most stupid thing I’ve seen human beings commit themselves to.’
She eyed me keenly. ‘Is that an oblique criticism?’
‘No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.’
She matched my shrug. ‘Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.’
I drew a hard breath.
‘Assume what you want. I’m going out.’
Down at the commercial end of the harbour, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl of fish ramen, carried it to a window seat and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-aged local wandered across to my table with his tray.
‘Mind if I sit here. It’s kind of crowded.’
I glanced around the ’fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.
‘Suit yourself.’
‘Thanks.’ He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence, then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.
‘Not from around here then?’
I felt a light tautening across my nerves. ‘Makes you say that?’
‘Ah, see.’ He grinned again. ‘If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Not off that rayhunter though, are you?’
I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. ‘What are you, a detective?’
‘No!’ He laughed delightedly. ‘What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green-painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t any more.’
‘So why’d you stay?’
‘Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.’
The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.
I made my voice work. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.’
‘What about your parents? See much of them?’
‘No, they’re dead.’ His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.
I sat and watched him carefully.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said finally.
He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.
‘Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.’ He drew breath as if it hurt him. ‘It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.’
‘Did they get the guy?’
‘No.’ Another painfully hitched breath. ‘No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.’
I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbour complex. I thought about giving him his chance.
‘No money for re-sleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?’
He gave me a hard look. ‘You know we don’t do that.’
‘Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.’
‘Yeah, but.’ He hesitated. Glanced around the ’fab, then back to me. His voice lowered. ‘Look, I came up with the Revelation. I don’t hold with everything the priests say, especially these days. But it’s a faith, it’s a way of life. Gives you something to hold onto, something to bring up your kids with.’
‘You got sons or daughters?’
‘Two daughters, three sons.’ He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. All that shit. You know, down past the point we’ve got a bathing beach. Most of the villages have got them, I remember when I was a kid we used to spend the whole summer in the water, all of us together. Parents would come down after work sometimes. Now, since things got serious, they’ve built a wall right into the sea there. If you go for the day, they’ve got officiators watching the whole time, and the women have to go in on the other side of the wall. So I can’t even enjoy a swim with my own wife and daughters. It’s fucking stupid, I know. Too extreme. But what are you going to do? We don’t have the money to move to Millsport, and I wouldn’t want my kids running around the streets down there anyway. I saw what it was like when I studied there. It’s a city full of fucking degenerates. No heart left in it, just mindless filth. At least the people around here still believe in something more than gratifying every animal desire whenever they feel like it. You know what, I wouldn’t want to live another life in another body, if that was all I was going to do with it.’