Finally, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and returned to me couch. After a few moments I joined him. Pohaku still looked as though he wanted an excuse to rip somebody's lungs out-anybody's-but at least he still had the presence of mind to freshen our Scotches.
Ho stretched, working his neck and shoulders. He looked like he'd aged a decade in me past couple of hours, I noticed suddenly. Well, I guess getting deposed, men seeing your country stumbling toward me brink of war might do that to you.
"What now?" I asked.
Ho looked over at me and smiled. (I think mat's what the expression was supposed to be, at least. It looked more like the facial reaction of a torture victim.) "I've given up on me oracle business," he said. Then his smile faded, and his eyes seemed to grow even more haunted.
"The government doesn't have much choice," he went on quietly. "They've got to act fast, before the Corporate Court does. Which means they can't do much about ALOHA."
I nodded. That made grim and nasty sense. Hunting down and neutralizing a militant policlub-a terrorist group by another name, when you mink about it-is never a short-term solution. It takes resources and it takes time. The Na Kama'aina-dominated Hawai'ian government might have the former, but Ho obviously didn't mink the corps would give it the latter… and I had to agree. Hell, when you came right down to it, stamping out a militant policlub wasn't necessarily possible even in the long term. Ask the FBI teams tasked with eliminating Humanis and Alamos 20K. "So what are the options?" I asked.
Gordon Ho shrugged. "Few." He sighed. "Negotiation- but that requires the corps to be interested in listening, which isn't a certainty at this point.
"Or a counterthreat," he went on, his voice bleak. "The corps have a gun to the government's head, Thor. The government has to draw its own gun." He shrugged again. "Mexican standoff. But at least it gives both sides a little more time to negotiate before me killing begins."
I raised an eyebrow at mat. "Bluff, you mean?"
"Bluff wouldn't work. The counterthreat has to be substantive."
"Yeah, right," I snorted. "Threatening the corps?" The idea was so ludicrous I almost laughed out loud.
But Ho obviously didn't mink it funny. "You'd be surprised, Dirk," he said darkly.
I did laugh out loud now… and then shut up so abruptly I almost swallowed my tongue. Suddenly, I'd remembered some of the weird things Scott had rattled on about during our first breakfast together, about me freaky drek that had gone down around Secession Day. Frag, now that I let myself realize it, there'd been some major questions rolling around in my head about the Secession.
For one, how come the U. S. had let Hawai'i go so easily? (Okay, the feds had tried to clamp down… once. But after the warning Thor shots on the naval task force, they'd basically rolled over and played dead. No attempts to take back their military bases.) For another, how had the equivalent of a civilian militia been able to defeat the Civil Defense Force-full-on military? The only answer that made any sense whatsoever was some kind of big stick with which to threaten the good ol' US of A.
I turned to Gordon Ho. "Spill it," I said quietiy.
"Magic, of course," he answered at once. "Nui magic. Big magic."
In the back of my mind I heard a kind of almost subliminal click. "Sites of power," I said.
The ex-king nodded. "Of course," he confirmed. "Hawai'i has some major ones."
I felt a cold wind blow through my soul. "You've got some kind of project going, haven't you? Since before Secession, you've had it going."
"Of course," he said again. "We're a small nation. We need an equalizer."
'Tell me about it."
Ho shrugged. "It was my father's idea, I think. He and his kahuna-his shamanic advisor-they came up with the details. They'd heard about the Great Ghost Dance in the States, of course," he explained softly. "The federal government wanted to suppress details, but news always leaks out. When my father and his advisors learned that another group of aboriginals, the Amerindians, had developed large-scale magic as a military tool, they figured if it could work on the Great Plains, why not on the islands?"
"You did your own Great Ghost Dance," I said wonderingly.
Ho nodded. "In essence, yes. The details were different, of course. Hawai'ian traditions are very different from those that Daniel Howling Coyote used. But the principles were the same: massed shamans-kahunas-using their own life-force to power a great ritual.
"We had a major advantage that Howling Coyote didn't, however," the Ali'i continued. "We had those sites of power you mentioned. The kahunas were able to draw a large measure of the mana they needed directly from the land, rather than from their own life-force. Some died anyway, of course, but the cost was much less for us than for Howling Coyote."
I shivered. It was chilling, the almost casual way Ho was talking about this. The kind of rituals he was describing were "blood-magic." I'd read somewhere that the "cost" of the Great Ghost Dance was measured in dozens, maybe hundreds, of shamans who'd given their lives to power it. The same in Hawai'i, apparently: "True believers" had effectively suicided to give the islands their independence.
"Where did this happen?" I asked. "Puowaina?"
'The Hill of Sacrifice?" Ho's eyebrow quirked. "It would have been appropriate, wouldn't it? But no, the volcanic crater of Haleakala was chosen because it had a higher magical background count, which made the ritual easier."
Something else went click in the back of my mind. It was like I'd been struggling vainly with a jigsaw puzzle for the last couple of days, and suddenly somebody had started handing me the pieces I needed, one by one. "It's still going on, isn't it?"
"The Dance?" Ho shook his head. "No," he said firmly. Then, "Not as such."
I looked into his eyes and saw him trying to decide what to tell me and what to keep hidden. "Spill it, e ku'u lani," I said again.
He hesitated for a long moment, then I saw him come to his decision. "The Dance ended with Secession," he said firmly, "but there were some interesting consequences. For some reason, the background count in the Haleakala crater was higher after the Dance than it was before. Considerably higher, in fact. We wanted to know why, of course. And we also wanted to learn how to use the additional power. My father established a research station on the crater rim. He code-named the program Sunfire. A staff of kahunas were assigned to Project Sunfire to figure out what had happened to the background count…"
"And how to use it," I completed.
Ho nodded uncomfortably. "Yes," he acknowledged. "Initially. When I took the throne, though, I decided to back off from that side of things."