Sleeping Dogs Page 4
Draiken would like to search the man for any clues to his purpose here, but knows that he likely does not have the time; so he lowers the young man to the ground, reverses direction and follows the wall back the way he came.
The landlady’s reference to two young men makes it no surprise when he encounters another off-worlder, as overdressed for the tropics as the first, the second he turns back into the alley. This one has a weapon drawn. Though he carries it drawn like a gun, it is neither projectile nor energy weapon; it is something else Draiken recognizes, something that he has only encountered used by the representative of governments.
Teemers are considered non-violent weapons, because they do nobody any physical damage; they just imprint a fractal image on the mind and induce a state not unlike catatonia capable of immobilizing an enemy for days or weeks. The horror people feel for them has less to do with the all-consuming helplessness that follows than the occasional grim side-effect: flashbacks that can incapacitate a victim, at irregular intervals, for years.
The last thing Draiken wants is to have it used on him, so he shuts his eyes at once and gets only the impression of blinding light, not the more debilitating effect the device would have had on him if he had permitted instant of direct eye contact. At the same moment he lashes out and strikes his opponent at the seam between jaw and neck. It’s soft tissue and the impact sends the young man stumbling backward, gagging.
The young man manages to raise the teemer again. This time Draiken blocks the barrel with his palm. Blinding light escapes through the gaps between his fingers, but no image hits Draiken’s eyes and so the effect is nil. He rips the weapon away, flings it aside, and drives the heel of his right foot into his enemy’s left foot, breaking three toes.
The young man falls. It would be easy to flee now, because though the young man is still dangerous at close range there is no possibility of him getting up and running as fast as Draiken can. But if Draiken runs Draiken is left with the same problems. So instead he dives for the teemer and returns with it while the young man is still writhing on the ground.
Kneeling, he presses the light emitting end of the barrel against one of the young man’s eye sockets.
He says, “Are there any more of you?”
The young man curses him in a language Draiken doesn’t recognize: a language that in fact doesn’t make any sense to him, because the phonemes sound garbled and arbitrary. Draiken can’t even be sure it is a language.
He puts more pressure on the barrel. “I don’t need to understand you, son, but I do need to confirm that you understand me. If you get the sense of my words, pat the ground twice.”
The young man obliges.
“All right. Listen up. If you’ve ever been outside on a sunny day, you know that your eyelids are not opaque, but translucent. You can still make out bright light sources through them. I’ve never tried to teem anybody through a closed eyelid, but at this range I’m willing to bet that much of the image will still get through—and that even if it doesn’t put you down it’s still going to be extremely unpleasant, perhaps to the point of permanent disability. Understand that I’d rather not. Pat the ground twice if you’re with me.”
The young man pats the ground another couple of times.
“Would you like to escape this conversation without suffering any additional damage?”
Two more pats.
“Then answer me. Do you know who I am?”
No pat.
“Do you know how I mean when I reference the white-haired man?”
Two pats.
“Very well, then. Get up and report to your master. Tell him that I am somebody whose acquaintance he would like to make. Tell him that I will be at the Glass Cathedral at midnight.”
* * *
Draiken leaves the village immediately after passing on his message. He returns to his launch and pilots a course into deeper waters, taking a zigzag route until he’s left land far behind.
The sea comforts him. He knows that it is not his friend. It can kill him any number of ways. It can drown him. It can present him with monsters capable of tearing him in half. It can confuse his sense of direction and leave him drifting far from the map points known by men, into places so far from Greeve’s form of civilization that he will die of starvation and thirst. It can turn violent and crush him with a swat by some unexpected rogue wave. It is not his friend. It is terrain of no constancy, and therefore terrain of the greatest possible constancy, that serves him best by never offering reason for trust.
It is also terrain that offers distance from his fellow human beings, an attribute that can be lonely at times but also frees him from having to seek hidden snares in every sentence, unknown manipulations in every offer of friendship, horrid lies buried in the most undeniable truths.
The need to think this way takes far more out of Draiken than he likes to admit, so much that he has long wondered if his refusal to treat this world as a home is the prudence he likes to pretend, or a form of broken cowardice. He doesn’t know. He only knows that after the life he has lived, even offers of love and friendship such as he suspects he could have with Aletha, drain him.
Perhaps he is too good at playing the game of foes and enemies.
Perhaps, he thinks, he might find some way of brushing these current annoyances aside and set himself to building a life for himself, while it remains possible for him to have one.
But then, perhaps he might die tonight, and be spared the necessity of making an effort.
By the time he decides he has retreated far enough, the night has gone dark, save for the stars that glow by tens of thousands in the skies above Greeve. He has some time and he needs to keep up his strength, so he opens up his stasis locker and takes out a favorite delicacy of his, a spicy fish called Chazheri. It is so common in Greevian waters that the locals have long since grown bored with its flavor, comparing it to cardboard or driftwood or sand; they consider it no good for anything but bait. He has never known what they were talking about. To his foreign palate, it is a subtle and delightful mixture of flavors, stunning at first bite and hypnotic with delicate aftertaste for long minutes to follow. He has long since given up on figuring out whether he has a more sophisticated sense of taste, or a more undemanding one, than those who grow up here. He only knows that his preferences are his.
When he is done he pilots the launch to a reef he knows about, a number of kilometers removed from the Glass Cathedral, and drops anchor there. He secures his belongings, activates his fail-safes, inflates the cover that will prevent the vessel from being swamped by any unexpected surf, and lowers himself into the water. He takes a deep breath, and begins to swim.
What follows over the next hour or so is a fairly impressive feat of navigation without instruments, accomplished in darkness with only the stars to guide him. His stroke is smooth, steady, and controlled, disturbing the water not at all. It takes the strength of the currents into account and aims him not at his destination but an invisible point useful to him only in that if aimed for, the ocean will steer him toward the destination he wants, by an amount close to what he needs.
From time to time he stops, takes his bearings, and makes small corrections; once or twice he takes a deep breath and descends, finding in the geography of the ocean floor the landmarks that allow him to make small adjustments to his trajectory. Once he suffers a few bad moments when he descends and does not find the ancient wreckage that he’s been depending on as touchstone; he reaches the surface thinking that he must be off course, but tries again after ten more minutes of swimming and locates the place he’s been looking for, almost directly beneath him. He attributes the error to miscalculating both the strength of the currents, and his own physical condition, which he confesses to himself must have slipped a few notches while he wasn’t paying attention. Not happy about that but aware that it’s only inevitable for the years on a world without rejuvenation treatments to have taken their toll, he makes the necessary adjustments to his internal ma
p and presses on.
He swims, rests, swims some more, descends now and then to see if he recognizes underwater landmarks, and just when he’s begun to wonder if he’s lost again, stops, because he sees a moving light in the distance.
It’s a skimmer, about twice the size of the boy Squall’s, slowing to a stop about two hundred meters away. It’s an open cabin and its lights blink as they’re occluded by something passing before it, no doubt a passenger changing seats. It could belong to any native of Greeve, but the natives are not particularly fond of night fishing, and those that are would have little reason to be following that vessel’s course toward the vicinity of the Glass Cathedral. Given the time of night, the location and the specific confluence of circumstances, Draiken is comfortable with the provisional conclusion that these are the people he’s been looking for.
He’s not comfortable with how early they have arrived. His mental clock estimates that he still has ninety minutes or so before local midnight; they would not be here this early unless they wanted to get here before him.
Of course, they’re likely prepared to track vessels, the major reason he’s gone to this much effort to approach this meet as a lone swimmer. From this perspective he can see just how many people answer his invitation.
It’s also good that their lack of concern about lighting up the water as they go gives him a destination he can track from a distance.
He stops paddling and lets the current sweep him in a direction parallel to theirs, until it becomes clear to him that they’ve stopped. At that point he ducks beneath the water again and descends about ten meters, just to confirm that he can find the light source he seeks. He does see a glow, lighting up the dark water in that direction. It’s a small matter to swim as far as he can toward that glow, to surface for a breath, then descend again and make another swim for the light.
He is still a fair distance when he has erased all doubt that his destination stands before him.
The Glass Cathedral is not made of glass, nor is a cathedral. The name is a compromise between accuracy and poetry, a wink to a time when an offworld entrepreneur tried to sell Greeve in general and Fritaun in particular as a tropical paradise where the Confederacy’s wealthy might want to vacation or build homes.
The venture failed because it was wrong-headed. The wealthy of the universe don’t want to live far from the centers of their power; they consolidate their little kingdoms and build their little paradises wherever that power is strongest. In an age when the privileged can engineer entire worlds to their specifications, Greeve is just too authentically undiscovered an Eden to be useful.
This had not stopped the misguided developers from making a number of small, welcome contributions to Fritaun’s infrastructure, including a luxurious bungalow that never knew a paying client and is now occupied by the first families to claim it as squatters; and improvements to the sewage system that did wonders for the cleanliness of the waters immediately off-shore. No longer would clay pipes vulnerable to the region’s many storms dump the region’s effluent just offshore where any shift of currents could bring it back home so often that the locals had no recourse other than getting used to it; now a nanite scrubbing system that would have broken what little discretionary income the people here possessed compressed all waste to its most basic elements in a fraction of the time, a service that the wealthy would have appreciated had they ever deigned to come here and make use of it.
The Glass Cathedral is the most grandiose of the white elephants. It’s a permanent bell-shaped structure standing on a trio of supports anchored thirty meters below the ocean surface, its only purpose the maintenance of a comfortable enclosed lounge that visitors can use to survey the surrounding reef at their leisure. The locals have taken apart and scavenged all the furnishings, leaving the room bare. But the air recycling system still works years later and so nobody who bothers to swim down past the glass windows and enter the chamber through its moon pool needs to worry about suffocation by C02 buildup.
It’s a place where people could go if they wanted, except that there’s no earthly reason but idle curiosity to motivate them. None of the locals are interested in the place. They have their own lives to live and see no point in a structure that offers nothing but an opportunity to gawk at what they can see every day. It’s a whimsy, built for rich people and impractical for anybody who might actually have to make a living.
The only reason Draiken has never claimed the place as a permanent home is that he prefers to move about from one bolt-hole to another, never staying in the same place more than three nights in a row. Some of the other places he stays are outer islands, too low in the water to be considered fit for human habitation, but safe enough at low tide; more often, he lives on his launch or underwater in inflatable habitats that he anchors to the ocean floor and moves from one location to another in order to avoid the unacceptable risk of a fixed address. But the Glass Cathedral is still an old friend, useful in the current circumstances in that it’s isolated, offers a 360 degree view of the surrounding water, and is known by name to the locals. The white-haired man, whoever he is, would not have had any trouble finding a local willing to tell him how to get here.
Draiken surfaces, then half-swims, half-drifts as close to the structure as he dares, close enough to hear the voices of the men in the launch roll over the water, toward him. It seems that they’re having a heated argument of some kind, and he doesn’t need to risk swimming close enough to be detected in order to know what the substance of it might be. He knows what it would be if he were among them, himself. Somebody’s saying that this they’re early. Somebody else is saying that this is an unacceptable risk. Somebody’s suggesting that this might be a trap—in short, all the usual things. Draiken could lip-synch it, if the inclination struck. The most heated disagreements would no doubt have to be about security: to wit, whether it would be acceptable to leave their negotiator alone in the Cathedral, where anything could happen; or whether those who have raised the objections have any smarter suggestions.
Draiken will not glean any useful intelligence listening to any of it, and the longer he stays here the more he risks the possibility that these men have instruments capable of detecting a warm-blooded body in the water.
So he takes a deep breath and swims down, past the bell-shape of the cathedral, past the long metal legs anchoring it to the ocean floor, past the deepest point that even he is usually willing to swim, where he can feel the pressure pounding on his ear…and to a certain underwater structure he knows about, which is anchored at the structure’s base.
The Glass Cathedral is powered by ocean currents, but puts the necessary machinery out of the way in order to avoid marring the simple beauty of the structure above. What Draiken approaches now is a closet-sized maintenance shed, complete with tiny airlock and a cramped cabin large enough for one man.
Few people talk about the shed. There’s no reason to. It’s utilitarian, functional, wholly unspectacular; it’s been pretty much forgotten. But there have been times over the years when the instinctive need to drop out of sight for a while led Draiken to spend days at a time here, out-waiting off-world threats that might or might not have been figments of his imagination.
He suffers a frisson of apprehension when the wheel gear refuses to turn, because descending to this depth has taken so much of his hoarded breath that he’s not sure he has enough left to make it back to some source of air before he passes out.
But then the door slides into the ocean floor and he is able to enter the little airlock in time to close the door behind him and purge the water.
Breath, when it comes, comes in a gasp.
He is aware that once upon a time, not so many years ago, he was able to make it down to this chamber and inside the habitat in relative ease, with much more time to spare before spots started flickering at the edges of his vision. Once upon a time, not so many years ago, if he’d run into trouble with the wheel gear, he would have still felt comfortable with his chan
ces of returning to the surface, or at least the Cathedral, alive.
It might be that the long swim, much more than even he’s used to, has taken more out of him than he expected.
But the simpler and more reasonable explanation gnaws at him.
Old, old man.
The inner door opens with no difficulty. Draiken steps aside into a warm and humid place, lined on one side with cabinets and drawers and protruding machinery, and on the other side by a workstation with a monitor providing real-time updates of local weather and water conditions. On the far end there’s a small bathroom. He enters this now, and uses the heat lamp to dry himself off as best he can. Then he returns to the main chamber.
There’s enough floor space in here for a man to lie down and sleep, though the floor is hard and more like the accoutrement of a jail cell than the perversely pleasant two-room apartment Draiken was provided during his time in custody. The inflatable mattress Draiken used when he stayed here regularly is gone, which disturbs him because he’s not sure whether he took it with him the last time he was here or left it to be scavenged by somebody else. It doesn’t matter. After the day he has had, the swim he has just completed, he wants nothing more than to sleep for eight or ten hours. He knows that he can afford maybe twenty or thirty minutes at most, and after a moment of fumbling at the work station succeeds in setting an alarm.
Once he lies down unconsciousness comes almost immediately.
* * *
He dreams of another room with no windows.
Draiken sits immobile in his chair, a device at his neck cancelling all autonomous nerve function and thus reducing him to temporary quadriplegic. It is better than chains in that being turned off in this manner does him no lasting damage as ropes or chains might, but he is so half-maddened by the stress of his own immobility that sweat pours from his temples in rivulets. He would almost, but not quite, sell his soul to scratch the errant itch at the tip of his nose.