‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re right, I wasn’t there.’
And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.
Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.
Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.
I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.
‘Tres?’ he asked us quietly.
Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. ‘Still mending. We left her with. With Her.’
‘Right. Good.’
The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.
‘We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?’
Koi shook his head. ‘Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.’
‘Mari Ado?’
He closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Jack.’
The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all – they traded gruff arm’s-length grip-pings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off towards the harbour master’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.
‘They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances. Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.’
I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniperfire.
‘Can we trust these people?’
Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. ‘The very large majority, yes. Pictures is Drava-built, most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original co-operative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.’
‘Yeah? Sounds a little Utopian to me. What about casual crew?’
Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. ‘Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for. Pictures has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.’
Brasil cleared his throat. ‘How many of them know what’s going on?’
‘Know that we’re here? About a dozen. Know why we’re here? Two, both ex-Black Brigade.’ Koi looked up at the rayhunter, searchingly. ‘They’ll both want to be there for Ascertainment. We’ve got a safe house set up in the stern lowers where we can do it.’
‘Koi.’ I slotted myself into his field of vision. ‘We need to talk first. There are a couple of things you should know.’
He regarded me for a long moment, lined face unreadable. But there was a hunger in his eyes that I knew I wasn’t going to get past.
‘It’ll have to wait,’ he told me. ‘Our primary concern here is to confirm Her identity. I’d appreciate it if none of you call me by name until that’s done.’
‘Ascertain,’ I said sharply. The audible capitalisation of her was starting to piss me off. ‘You mean ascertain, right Koi?’
His gaze skipped off my shoulder and back to the rayhunter’s side.
‘Yes, that’s what I mean,’ he said.
A lot has been made of Quellism’s underclass roots, particularly over the centuries since its principal architect died and passed conveniently beyond the realm of political debate. The fact that Quellcrist Falconer chose to build a powerbase among the poorest of Harlan’s World’s labour force has led to a curious conviction among a lot of neoQuellists that the intention during the Unsettlement was to create a leadership drawn exclusively from this base. That Nadia Makita was herself the product of a relatively privileged middle class background goes carefully unremarked, and since she never rose to a position of political governance, the central issue of who’s going to run things after all this blows over never had to be faced. But the intrinsic contradiction at the heart of modern Quellist thought remains, and in neoQuellist company it’s not considered polite to draw attention to it.
So I didn’t remark on the fact that the safe house in the stern lowers of Pictures of the Floating World clearly didn’t belong to the elegantly spoken ex-Black Brigade man and woman who were waiting in it for us. Stern lowers is the cheapest, harshest neighbourhood on any urbraft or seafactory and no one who has a choice about it chooses to live there. I could feel the vibration from Floating World’s drives intensifying as we took a companionway down from the more desirable crew residences at superstructure levels over the stern, and by the time we got inside the apartment it was a constant background grind. Utilitarian furniture, scuffed and scraped walls and a minimum of decoration made it clear that whoever did quarter here didn’t spend much time at home.
‘Forgive the surroundings,’ said the woman urbanely, as she let us into the apartment. ‘It will only be for the night. And our proximity to the drives makes surveillance a near impossibility.’
Her partner ushered us to chairs set around a cheap plastic table laid with refreshments. Tea in a heated pot, assorted sushi. Very formal. He talked as he got us seated.
‘Yeah, we’re also less than a hundred metres from the nearest hull maintenance hatch, which is where you’ll all be collected from tomorrow morning. They’ll drive the skimmer right in under the load-bearing girders between keels six and seven. You can climb straight down.’ He gestured at Sierra Tres. ‘Even injured, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.’
There was a rehearsed competence to it all, but as he talked, his gaze kept creeping towards the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s body, then skidding abruptly away. Koi had been doing much the same thing since we brought her off the Angelfire Flirt. Only the female Brigade member seemed to have her eyes and hopes under real control.
‘So,’ she said smoothly. ‘I’m Sto Delia. This is Kiyoshi Tan. Shall we begin?’
Ascertainment.
In today’s society, it’s as common a ritual as parental acknowledgement parties to celebrate a birth, or reweddings to cement newly re-sleeved couples in their old relationship. Part stylised ceremony, part maudlin what about that time when session, Ascertainment varies in its form and formality from world to world and culture to culture. But on every planet I’ve ever been, it exists as a deeply respected underlying aspect of social relations. Outside of expensive hi-tech psychographic procedures, it’s the only way we have to prove to our friends and family that, regardless of what flesh we may be wearing, we are who we say we are. Ascertainment is the core social function that defines ongoing identity in the modern age, as vital to us now as primitive functions like signature and fingerprint databasing were to our pre-millennial ancestors.