She kept the gun pointing at the one in the chair, then lowered it.
She aimed deliberately at the book, slowly closing one eye.
The man on the beach threw himself in front of the metal casing. The one in the chair leapt up, arms out towards her and his hands spread. He stepped over his twin, lying hunched up over the book.
“Now, now, Lady Sharrow,” he said. “There’s no need to turn vandal.” He smiled nervously.
She took a deep breath, then pocketed the gun.
“I really can’t work you people out at all,” she said.
The one standing facing her, trunks repeating the surfing scene, looked puzzled and pleased at the same time. She turned on her heel and walked away across the flaking concrete, back to the doorway.
Her skull and back tingled the whole way there, again waiting for a shot, or for the pain, but when she turned round in the doorway they were still in the same positions; one curled up, fetal, round the book casing, the other standing in front of his twin, watching her.
She walked down through the shattered ramps of concrete and the wilderness of fractured lava, back to the snow-cliff and the tunnel where the crawler was waiting.
The crawler took her back to Mine Seven; the weather stayed clear enough for her to take a flight to Trench City, where the hired spacecraft was waiting. She used its terminal to get in touch with the others. She couldn’t contact them directly, but there was a filed message from Zefla reporting all was well in SkyView. She left an entry in the personal columns of the Net Gazette letting them know she had made the delivery. Thinking of cryptic messages, she checked up on the Tile race results for the past week.
There had been one winner called Hollow Book, three days earlier, the day she’d left from Miykenns.
She scanned the other mounts mentioned, wondering if it could just all be coincidence. Shy Dancer? Wonder Thing? Little Resheril Goes North? Sundry Floozies? Borrowed Sunset? Molgarin’s Keep? Right Way Round? Mash That Meat? Scrap The Whole Thing? Crush That Butt? Bip!?… None of the other names seemed to mean anything. Unless Shy Dancer was another reference to Bencil Dornay, of course… and Wonder Thing could refer to the Lazy Gun, and… She gave up; if you thought hard enough there could be significance in every name or none, and there was no way of knowing where to draw the line.
She kept thinking about the crash and the time she’d spent in the mining hospital. She tried hacking into the relevant data banks from Trench, but the war-time records weren’t accessible from outside the mining complex where they were held. She left the meter running on the hired spacecraft Wheeler Dealer (and left its two-woman crew, Tenel and Choss Esrup, to lose more money in Trench’s casinos and game-bars) and took a tube train to the First Cut mine, where she’d been hospitalised originally, after the crash.
The First Cut mine had been the first large-scale mining operation to be set up on the Ghost. The supply of heavy metals in its immediate area had been mostly worked out millennia earlier and the big companies had moved to lusher pastures, leaving smaller concerns to work the thin veins of ores still left. First Cut’s accommodation warrens had been largely abandoned, an underground city reduced to the population of a town.
“Ysul Demri,” she said, sitting in the seat the clerk indicated. “I’m interested in the part the Ghost played in the Five Per Cent War and I’d like access to the complex records for the time.”
The clerk was a big, blotchily skinned woman who ran her section of the First Cut warren’s administrative affairs from a booth in a small, steamy cafe in Drag Three, one of the warren’s main hall-streets. People walked past outside, some pushing trolleys and stalls; in the centre of the street, small cars hummed past, warners chiming. The clerk watched her with one eye; the other was kept closed while she lid-screened.
“Only abstracts and interpretations available in the city archives,” she said.
A plumbing loom of eight small-bore pipes ran from the counter samovar-cisterns round the cafe’s walls to the various booths and over the ceiling to loop down to the central tables. The clerk put her cup under one of the small brass taps on the wall and poured herself a measure of something sweet-smelling.
“I know,” Sharrow said. She had bought her own cup, and filled it from the same tap the clerk had used. “I was really hoping to get to the raw stuff.”
The clerk was silent and still for a couple-of seconds, then she drank from her cup. “You want the Foundation,” she told Sharrow. “They took over the DBs when the hospital moved to new quarters, just after the war; hospital leases back what it needs from them, like us.”
Sharrow sipped the warm, bittersweet liquid. “The Foundation?” she asked.
“Commonwealth Foundation,” the clerk said, opening both eyes for a second and looking surprised. “The People. Haven’t you heard of them?”
“I’m sorry, no,” Sharrow said.
The clerk closed both eyes for a moment. “I guess not. We tend to forget, out here,” she said. She opened one eye. “Level Seven on down, any shaft. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
“Thank you,” Sharrow said.
“But they don’t part with stuff without a good reason, usually. Best of luck.”
“To sum up; the history of Golter, and of the system, is one of a continual search for stability. It is a search which has itself consistently helped destroy the quality it was instigated to discover. Arguably, every conceivable system of political power-management has now been tried; none survive conceptually with any degree of credibility, and even the last full-scale bid to impose central authority in the shape of the Ladyr dynasty was more of a retro-fashion pastiche of previous imperial eras which even the participants themselves found it difficult to take seriously-than a serious attempt to establish a lasting hegemony over the power-functions of the system.
“The current stalemate between progressive and regressive forces has given us seven hundred years of bureaucratic constipation in the shape of the World Court and the associated but largely symbolic Council. Power today rests in the hands of the lawyers. Those whose function it ought to be merely to help regulate have-following the failure of nerve in those with the rightful claim and historical provenance required for leadership-come instead to legislate. By their very nature, they will ensure that having taken the reins of power into their hands, they cannot legally be wrested from them.
“What has to be remembered by those who care for the future as well as the history of our species is that law is no more than an abstraction of justice; an expression of a society’s political will and philosophical conceptions. Truth, right and justice are processes, not states. They are dynamic functions which can only be expressed and understood through action… And arguably the time for action is fast approaching. Thank you.”
The young lecturer executed a small bow to the packed theatre and started boxing his paper-written notes. The hall erupted, startling her. She stood at the back of the lecture theatre, clutching her satchel and looking round the two thousand or so people crammed into the space. They were all on their feet, clapping and cheering and stamping their feet.
Lectures in Yadayeypon had never been like this, she thought. The lecturer-a slim, medium-tall young man with dark curls and darker eyes-was escorted from the foot of the theatre by a shield of efficient-looking security guards in white uniforms who had taken up the first row of seats in the auditorium. The guards had to keep a hundred or so people back from the door the young man had exited through; the besieging crowd waved notebooks and cameras and recorders, pleading with the blank-faced guards to let them through.