They met up again in the Continental Hotel in Aïs, after Sharrow had bailed herself out of Aïs’s Vice Squad pound and bribed the desk sergeant to lose the record of her arrest.
She finally arrived at the hotel-clothed again, and veiled, even if it did attract attention-but there was nobody there registered as Kuma or any other name she could imagine the others might be using.
She stood, tapping her fingers on the cool surface of the reception desk while the smiling and quite naked clerk scratched delicately under one armpit with a pen. She wondered whether to ask if there were any messages for her; she was starting to worry about giving her location away to the Huhsz. She’d think about it. She bought a newssheet to see if the Huhsz had their Passports yet and headed for the bar.
The first person she saw was a fully clothed Cenuij Mu.
“My watch says the damn thing should be visible by now,” Miz said, tight-beaming from the top of the monorail line, two kilometres away round the shallow curve the twinned tracks took to avoid a region of collapsed caves.
“Mine too,” Sharrow said into the mask. She squinted into the distance, trying to make out the tiny dot that was Miz, sitting on the baking top-surface of the monorail; the last time she’d looked she’d been able to see him and the lump on the ground beneath him, which was the camouflaged-netted All-Terrain, but the heat had increased sufficiently in just the last ten minutes for it to be impossible to see either now; with the naked eye the white line of the rail writhed and shimmered, smearing any detail. She tried adjusting the magnification and the polarisation of the visor, but gave up after a while.
“Nothing on the phones?” she asked.
“Just expansion noises,” Miz replied.
She looked at her watch again.
“So what changed your mind?” she asked Cenuij, in the elevator to the floor where the others were waiting.
He sighed and pulled back the left sleeve of his shirt.
She bent forward, looking. “Nasty. Laser?”
“I believe so,” he said, pulling down his sleeve again. “There were three this time. They wrecked my apartment. Last I heard-before I had to run away-my insurance company was refusing to pay out.” Cenuij made a sniffing noise and leant back against the wall of the lift, arms crossed. “When all this is over I shall ask you to cover that loss.”
“I promise,” Sharrow said, holding up one hand.
“Hmm,” Cenuij said as the elevator slowed. “Meanwhile, Miz appears to think there’s some point in staging…” Cenuij looked round the elevator, then shrugged, “a train robbery.”
Sharrow raised her eyebrows. The elevator stopped.
“For… artifacts,” Cenuij said, as the doors opened and they left, “that are indestructible, can’t be hidden and it would be suicide to hold on to.” He shook his head as they walked down the wide corridor. “Does the Log-Jam turn everybody’s brains to mush?”
“It does when you head-butt a hydrofoil from twenty metres up,” she told him.
She pulled her mask down; the air was a hot blast at the back of her throat. She waved at Dloan. He took the plugs out of his ears, cocked his head.
“Aren’t you getting anything?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Just the carrier signal; nothing about the train being late or being on this section of track yet.”
She turned back, frowning. “Shit,” she said, and flicked a grain of dust off the muzzle of the hunting rifle. She put the mask back up.
Miz stood looking out of the hotel-room window, glaring at Aïs’s dusty eastern suburbs. He glanced at Cenuij, who was taking the doll apart on the table, a magnifier clipped over his eyes.
“I was set up,” Miz said incredulously. He flapped his arms as he turned back to look at the others. “Some bastard had me steal the fucking necklace and let Lebmellin think he was going to double-cross me, but they had it all worked out; fucking Mind Bomb shit and the guns it switched off. And the set-up in the tanker; it was all done that day; I checked that route myself during the morning…” His voice trailed off as he sat heavily on the couch beside Sharrow. “And look at this!” He reached out to the low table in front of the couch and snatched up the newssheet Sharrow had brought with her. “Re-purloined Jewel wins the first race in Tile yesterday! Bastards!”
“Hey,” Sharrow said, putting her arm on his shoulders.
“Anyway,” he said, “enough. You had a worse time.” He squinted at her. “Two identical guys?” he said.
“Completely identical,” Sharrow nodded, taking her arm away. “Clone identical.”
“Or android identical,” Cenuij said from the table, putting down the magnifier.
“You think so?” she asked.
Cenuij stood, stretching. “Just a thought.”
“I thought androids came kind of expensive,” Sharrow said, swirling her drink. “I mean, when the hell do you ever see an android these days?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ve dated a few,” Zefla grunted, going to the room’s bar for a drink.
“They tend to stay in Vembyr, certainly,” Cenuij agreed. “But they travel, occasionally, and like everybody else,” Cenuij smiled frostily at Sharrow, “they each have their price.”
“Dloan was in Vembyr once,” Zefla said, turning from the flasks and bottles displayed in the cooler. “Weren’t you, Dlo?”
Dloan nodded. “Arms auction.”
“What’s it like?” Miz asked him.
Dloan looked thoughtful, then nodded and said, “Quiet.”
“Anyway,” Zefla said, taking a bottle from the cooler, “fuck the androids; what about that doll?”
Cenuij looked at it lying spread out on the table. “Could have been made anywhere,” he told them. “PVC body with strain gauges and an optical wiring loom; battery pack and a chunk of mostly redundant circuitry foam, plus an electronic coder-transmitter working at the long-wave limit of normal net frequencies.” Cenuij looked at Dloan. “Could the doll have been linked to some form of nerve-gun to do what she’s described?”
Dloan nodded. “Modified stunner can produce those effects. Illegal, most places.”
“I didn’t see any gun,” Sharrow said, trying to remember. “There were the two guys, the two chairs, the gas cylinder…”
“Chlorine!” Miz said, slapping both knees and jumping up from the couch to go to the window again, running one hand through his hair. “Fucking chlorine! Sons of bitches.”
“The gun could have been anywhere in the tank,” Cenuij said, glancing at Dloan, who nodded. “Possibly with the master unit controlling the androids, if that’s what they were. Or,” Cenuij added, nodding at Sharrow, “the doll could have been transmitting directly.”
Nobody said anything.
Sharrow cleared her throat. “You mean there might be something inside me picking up the signals from the doll?”
“Possible,” Cenuij said, gathering the bits and pieces of the doll together. “This long-wave transmitter isn’t how you’d normally slave a gun to a remote. It’s… strange.”
“But how could there be something in me?” Sharrow said. “Inside my head…?”
Cenuij shoved the remains of the doll into a disposal bag. “Had any brain surgery recently?” he asked, smiling humourlessly.
“No,” Sharrow shook her head. “I haven’t been near a doctor for… fourteen, fifteen years?”
Cenuij scraped the last few bits of the doll into the bag. “Not since Nachtel’s Ghost, in fact, after the crash,” he said. He sealed the disposal bag. “So it was a nerve-gun.”
“I hope so,” Sharrow said, staring towards the window where Miz was standing again, looking out over the dusty city.
“You want this?” Cenuij asked her, holding up the bag with the doll’s remains in it.
She shook her head and crossed her arms, as though cold.
They booked a private compartment on the dawn-hour Aïs-Yadayeypon Limited. Three hours into the journey the train left the last vestiges of Outer Jonolrey’s prairies behind and decelerated across the first jagged outcrops of karst for its last stop before the eastern seaboard. They completed their breakfast and watched the pale-grey, intermittently spired landscape below start to dot with houses, solar arrays and fenced compounds.