There was a little surf rolling in-breakers all of a meter high or so. A couple of pale tourists were trying to catch those waves on surfboards garishly emblazoned with the name of the company that had rented them out. It looked like an awful lot of work just to get wet. As we cruised slowly on, I saw one slag-an ebony-haired elf with ivory skin-actually get up onto his surfboard and ride it… for a whole two meters before he submarined the nose and went sploosh.
Then, out beyond him, somebody else caught a wave perfectly and was up in an instant. A troll, he was, on a board larger than some dining tables I've owned. His long black hair whipped in the wind as he cut his board back and forth across the margin of the small wave, dodging through the heads of swimmers like gates in a slalom. Swishing into the shallows, he dismounted smoothly, and in one motion he picked up his board-shoulders and arms bulging-swung it around, and started paddling out again. I watched the muscles working under the golden-brown skin of his massive back.
Scott had been watching the same show. "Nice moves," he said approvingly.
"Do you do that?"
"I do it," he confirmed with a chuckle, "but not around here. If you've got time, let me take you to see some real waves, brah. Thirty-footers, and one after another. Pretty close to heaven."
As I nodded, I realized something a little surprising. There was something disturbing about the view on the beach, and it took me a moment to make sense of it. All that bare skin-that was what bothered me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. Bare skin is great; I fully and wholeheartedly approve of bare skin, under the right circumstances, and particularly with the right companion. But…
Bare skin means no armor. I looked at all the frying tourists sprawled on the sand. Most of them would be shaikujin-corporators from one or another of the megas. Where in Seattle would you see this many corporators wandering around in public without the benefit of any armor whatsoever? Nowhere, that's where. Here, a disgruntled sniper with a grudge to settle would have no trouble with one shot, one kill. Either the tourists were pretty fragging confident in the security provisions-pretty fragging overconfident, if you asked me-or the tropical sun had cooked the sense of self-preservation right out of their pointy little heads.
I pointed that out to Scott, and he nodded slowly. "A bit of both, that's what it is," he suggested. "Na Maka'i-that's the cops, the Hawai'i National Police Force, the HNPF- they keep things buttoned down pretty tight in Waikiki. This part of town ain't a good place to make trouble, hoa, trust me on that one. If you ain't corp, you ain't here, if you take my meaning."
"You're saying the whole of Waikiki's a corporate enclave?"
"More or less, brah, more or less." He nodded his big head. "It's a security thing. If you're walking the streets and you don't look the part, Na Maka'i's going to pull you over and ask you some questions-real polite, and all, but you'd better give them the right answers and have the datawork to back it up."
He shrugged. "But clamp-downs and heat-waves can do only so much, right? Security's good in Waikiki, but it's not that good." He gestured through the window at the scantily clad bothes on the beach. "If I really wanted to take down some suits, I could do it… and get away afterward."
I nodded slowly. That's basically how I had it scanned. "What about the locals, then?" I asked. I pointed to the surfing troll, who was already riding another wave. "You'd expect him to know better than to trust the cops. But he's not wearing any armor."
Scott chuckled. "No, he's not wearing armor, hoa, he is armor. You know the second most popular elective medical procedure in the whole of the islands?"
"Dermal armor," I guessed.
"You got it, brah. Nui dermal armor-dermal armor big-time. Along with bodysculpt to make it look good… or as good as you can get. See, now check out that slag over there? Classic example."
I looked where he was pointing, saw an ork strolling along the beach, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts even more garish than Scott's shirt. His arms and legs were scrawny; his shoulders weren't broad. But by Ghu did he have pecs and abs-massively cut, incredibly defined, as if they were chiseled out of some material other than flesh. Which they were, I realized. His chest and back were layered with enough dermal planting to stop a Manhunter round. The Seco on my hip would barely scratch him.
"Want to guess the most popular procedure?" Scott asked.
'Tell me."
"Sun-shielding, brah. Genetic treatment of the skin to block UV. They tried various chemical treatments, but you had to keep going in for a refresher because you'd eventually just exfoliate the treated skin. The genetic route, new skin is as resistant as the old. See this?" He extended his hand to me, pinched a fold of his skin. "This is SPF eighty-five, hoa. Permanent sunscreen.
I got my eyes done, too-modified iris and photosensitive chemicals in the lens. I don't need shades no matter how bright it gets."
"Expensive, I guess?"
"The eyes, yes," he admitted. Then he chuckled. "Glad Nebula picked up the tab.
"But the skin treatment? No, brah, it's not bad at all. The clinics have got it down to a real assembly-line process, and you've got nui kinds to pick from. Full treatment costs five thousand nuyen, good for life. And lots of the clinics, they offer special family packages-you, the wife, and all the ankle-biters for seven-Kay." He poked my pale forearm. "If you decide to stay here, you might consider it yourself."
"Hey," I protested quickly, "I'm not staying. Just doing my job, then I'm gone."
The chauffeur shrugged. 'That's what everyone says," he told me, "at first."
Still on Kalakaua Avenue, we rolled westward into downtown Waikiki.
I didn't really know what to expect from Waikiki, except that I thought it would be different, somehow. I was disappointed. It was just another city, really. Apart from the curving beach, the rich blue ocean, and the perfect weather, it could just as well have been the corporate enclave in just about any metroplex anywhere in the world. Okay, it was cleaner than most other cities I've seen. But apart from that, this could just as easily have been the rich corporate quarter of Tokyo or Chiba.
Why did I pick two Japanese cities as examples? The people on the sidewalks, chummer, that's why. Nine out of ten of them were Nihonese. I wondered about that for a while, but then I remembered something I'd read a long time ago.
Apparently, during the last decades of the last century, lots of Japanese-and lots of Japanese money-moved into the islands. (The smart-ass who'd written the article I read said something like, "After the Japanese couldn't conquer Ha-wai'i in World War II, they came in afterward and bought it.") Add a large resident Nihonese population to the influx of tourists from Japan-based megacorps, and that would explain it
Scott tooled the Phaeton along the broad, spotless street of Waikiki, showing me all the major sites. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel-"The Pink Lady," Scott called it-a flamingo pink extravaganza of pseudo-Moorish architecture that was more than a century old, but was still recognized as one of the most sumptuous hotels in the islands. The International Market Place, an open-air market comprising scores of booths and stores, under the spreading branches of a banyan tree. (Scott explained that the original International Market Place had been turned into a convention center around the turn of the century, but that after a fire destroyed the center in 2022, the City Council ordered another banyan planted, and the Market Place returned to its earlier glory.) And on and on. Eventually, the sumptuous-looking hotels started to blur into one another, and my eyes started to glaze over.
Scott noticed almost immethately, pulled the car over, and turned to me. "You getting bored, is that it?"