She fell asleep again eventually, her thoughts still revolving and repeating and echoing in her skull, dancing graceless pirouettes of hopelessness and despair.
Apart from some trouble with a group of peasant-squatters and an overhead power line, the Solo’s journey to Aïs was uneventful. Sharrow had been released from her cabin. Her passport and her satchel full of personal effects-including her gun, credit cards and cash, rather surprisingly-had been returned. She had watched the latter part of the journey from the flight deck of the old ACV, and talked to more of the Solipsists.
She discovered that the other Solipsists saw no contradiction in being part of a group of which they were not the leader; they all assumed they were, and Roa was just something they had imagined to deal with the boring parts of the job. There were still arguments, but the system of Roa being in charge appeared to work. (Democracy was out; they’d only vote for themselves again.)
Roa wisely did not name a second-in-command, in case this was taken as a sign that he was growing uncertain. This had happened before, and Roa had almost been murdered in his sleep by the person/figment concerned. Roa had dealt with the person sternly, hence at least one of the dents in the Solo’s stern starboard airscrew.
The old ACV powered along the coast of Nasahapley towards Aïs. An hour before they got there, she watched from the flight deck as they passed the territory’s religious cantonment, the sprawling, walled settlement on the coastal flood-plain dominated by the black and gold spires of the Huhsz World Shrine.
She waited for the regretful words, the apologetic explanation and the change of course that would take the hovercraft curving round towards the Shrine, but it never happened.
The Solo was too large to be allowed to travel in Greater Aïs county, where they had rules about that sort of thing. Elson Roa and a couple of the others unloaded a small half-track from the ACV’s garage deck and took her to the city in that, leaving the other apparences to argue with the harbour authorities about landing dues, mooring rates and untreated sewage discharges.
The small half-track rumbled into the dusty main square of Aïs; ochre, colonnaded buildings sloped on all sides. They had driven part of the way down the central reservation of a boulevard, collecting a couple of small shrubs on the nudge bars and a traffic violation. The half-track’s driver-a young albino originally called Keteo who drove with more enthusiasm than skill and more speed than accuracy-skidded the half-track to a stop just before the square’s central fountain, and sat staring malevolently at the flower-beds across the other side of the square.
It was a hot day; the sun was bright in the clear sky. The terminus of the Trans-Continental Monorail stood just beyond the flower-beds Keteo was staring at so intently. Sharrow looked around the square, where traffic-mostly buses-moved, and people-almost all totally nude-walked.
“Oh shit,” Sharrow said. “Just my luck to arrive in Nudist Week.”
Roa, who had been looking strangely tense until that point, relaxed and smiled. “Nudist Week,” he said, sounding relieved. “Yes; they really are, aren’t they? Of course.”
Sharrow looked around the square again, wondering if Miz and the Francks were here yet.
“Well,” Roa said to her. “Here we are. I have no idea whether I shall need you in the future, but I trust I imagine you well, if we do meet again.” He fell silent and stared at his finger nails.
She looked from him to the other two Solipsists; the man beside Roa was sitting with his eyes tightly closed. Keteo the driver was gunning the engine and muttering something as he glared at the distant flower-bed. Roa looked away and closed his eyes. He made a humming noise and started to roll his head.
She got down out of the half-track and stood on the road. Buses grumbled past; people-mostly naked, many carrying briefcases-walked past.
Elson Roa opened his eyes. He looked briefly delighted, then saw her standing on the road surface and started. He frowned down at her.
“Oh,” he said. “Politeness.” He reached down with one hand. She shook it. “Good-bye,” he said.
“Good-bye,” she replied, and turned and walked away.
When she looked back, Roa and the other back-seat Solipsist were arguing vehemently with the driver and gesticulating alternately at the flower-beds and the boulevard.
She walked self-consciously to the monorail station. As she walked up the steps, the Solipsist half-track roared out of the square, just missing the flower-beds and sending mostly naked pedestrians scattering in all directions as it bounced down the boulevard back towards the port.
She felt more and more awkward walking amongst the naked people in the station concourse, so she stopped to take her clothes off in a phone booth and was promptly arrested for stripping in public, an offence against common decency.
7 Operating Difficulties
The K’lel desert was a few million square kilometres of karst; eroded limestone devoid of topsoil. Karst forms when carbon dioxide dissolved in rain reacts with porous limestone as the moisture permeates it on its way to an underlying layer of impervious rock. Golter had had not one but several ages when there had been widespread and rather crude industrialisation, and each time one of the major centres had been downwind of K’lel, a lushly but shallowly forested area already vulnerable to the scouring effect of the Belt winds; the succession of increased carbon dioxide levels and heavy acid rainfall in the past had gradually destroyed the forests and eroded the rock while the Belt winds had produced a dust-bowl from the remaining soil, creating a change in the climate that only accelerated the desertification.
Eventually only the rock had been left, frayed and sculpted into spears and pinnacles of knife-sharp karst; a forest of pitted stone blades stretching from horizon to horizon, baked to the heat of the equatorial sun and dotted with collapsed caves where a few parched plants clung on in dark, sunken oases, and striated by tattered ribbons of seemingly level ground where the karst’s brittle corrugations were on a scale of centimetres rather than kilometres.
There were always plans to revivify the dead heart of the continent, but they never came to anything; even the seemingly promising scheme to replace the main space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere, Ikueshleng, with a new complex in the desert had failed. Apart from some ruins, a sprinkling of old waste silos, a few vast, automated solar energy farms, and the Traps-Continental Monorail-also sun-powered-the K’lel was empty.
She squatted on her haunches in the shadow of the monorail support, holding her rifle butt down on the dusty ripples of stone, clenching the gun between her knees while she adjusted the scarf round her head, tucking one end into the collar of her light jacket.
It was mid-morning; the high cirrus clouds were poised like feathery arches over the warming expanse of karst, and the still air sucked sweat from exposed skin with an enthusiasm bordering on kleptomania. She slipped the mask up over her mouth and nose and reseated the dark visor over her eyes, then sat back, holding the gun, her fingers tapping on the barrel. She took a drink from her water bottle and glanced at her watch. She looked over at Dloan, crouching at the other leg of the monorail, rifle slung over his back, wires from his head-scarf leading into an opened junction box in the support leg. He looked up at her and shook his head.
Sharrow leant back against the already uncomfortably warm support leg. She shifted her satchel so that it was between her back and the hot metal of the monorail support. She looked at the time again. She hated waiting.