Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

Zefla sighed. “Mine too.”

Sharrow offered her the shoes, but she knocked them gently aside and took the other woman in her arms.

“Sorry about your leg,” Sharrow told Zefla, hugging her.

“Never mind; it cured my -hic! -aw, shit…”

Showered, dried, powdered and perfumed, Zefla Franck lounged magnificently on a relaxer, her red-brown skin gleaming where her bath sheet didn’t cover; another towel kept her hair piled high over her head. She drank a restorative from a long glass and looked out over the junklit valley and the lights of distant villages and houses; the glass of the old conservatory reflected her image and those of Sharrow and Dloan.

Sharrow stood by the glass wall, a drink in her hand, looking out.

Dloan sat in a hanging-chair, his hands deep in the neck fur of a sarflet, ruffling the animal’s tawny pelt while it sat there with an expression of sleepy bliss on its broad, black-snouted face.

Zefla shook her head. “I don’t think so, Shar; they could start trying to trash Geis with the Passports, but it’d eat time; your cuz has lawyers the way other people have freckles, and he can afford wizards ; grade one legal slicks with minds like writ-grenades. Toss a few of those boys into the fray and they could stall the Huhsz for decades; get them so entangled they won’t be able to take a piss without applying for a court order…” Zefla hiccuped. “Damn!” She gulped. “Excuse me; more sober juice.”

She drank deeply from the tall glass again. “… Shit,” she continued, “even if they got blanket discovery Geis could keep ahead of them just generating new companies; dance their grubby little asses through the taxloop Labyrinth of No Return, shuffling liability, using anonymous proxies, cascading ownership… It would take them months to sort out what he’s already got, never mind what he could create if he wanted to put up a smokescreen. The point to remember is, they’ve only got a year; with that sort of cast-iron limitation, even Geis’s public exposure won’t suffer more than a-hic! shit-blip when the shareholders realise it’s just a glorified nuisance action that’s going to evaporate like a fart in a hurricane when the clock stops.”

Zefla drank again, then said, “What are you grinning at?”

Sharrow had turned away from the view while Zefla had been talking. She stood, smiling down at the other woman. “I’ve missed you, Zef.”

“Thank you very much,” Zefla said, holding one long leg out in front of her and looking at the bruise. “Wish I could say the same for your car.”

Sharrow looked down and ran her finger round the top of her glass. “So are you saying I should just go to Geis?”

“Hell, no; I’m just saying that if you ever did have to especially as a last resort after you’ve run the Huhsz round in circles for a few months and aren’t getting any closer to the Gun-you needn’t worry about hurting him legally.”

“Even so,” Sharrow said, frowning at her drink. “But just because of that… maybe I should take him up on his offer now.”

“You-hic!-want to?” Zefla said, her eyebrows rising.

“No,” Sharrow admitted, glancing at her.

“Then,” said a deep, rumbling, reasonable voice from the other side of the conservatory, “don’t.”

Sharrow looked at Dloan. He was even taller than Zefla, and much broader. He had precise, short-cropped blond hair which merged smoothly into an equally carefully trimmed blond beard; he lounged in a crumpled sweatsuit, exuding fitness. He kept on tickling the sarflet, and looked up only momentarily at Sharrow, smiling as though shyly, then looking away again.

“And let’s not forget the law is just one way of the Huhsz getting what they want,” Zefla told Sharrow. “I’d guess what Geis would really have to worry about if he sheltered you wouldn’t be a legal manoeuvre, it’d be simple betrayal. One disgruntled employee, one, spy, one Huhsz convert in the right place, and all the law in the system wouldn’t make any difference; they’d get you and destroy Geis.”

Sharrow nodded. “All right, but the alternative is to take to the trail again, and ask you guys to come with me.”

“Shar, kid,” Zefla said. “We never wanted to give it up.”

“But I feel I’m being selfish; especially if I could just run to Geis and everything would be all right.”

Zefla sighed exasperatedly. “Geis is a pain, Sharrow; the guy has a kind of charming facade but basically he’s a social inadequate whose real place in life is out mugging pensioners and cheating and beating on his girlfriends, and if he had three more names and been raised in a rookery in The Meg rather than the nursery at house Tzant, that’s exactly what he would be doing. Instead he jumps out of the commercial equivalent of dark alleys, strips companies and fucks their employees. He’s got no idea how real people work so he plays the market instead; he’s a rich kid who thinks the banks and courts and Corps are his construction set and he doesn’t want anybody else to play. He wants you the way he wants a sexy company, as a bauble, a scalp, something to display. Never get beholden to people like that, they’ll piss on you and then charge irrigation fees. You crawl under that scumball’s skirts and I’ll never talk to you again.”

Sharrow grinned and sat on a small chair by the glass wall. “So, do we go back on the road?”

Zefla drank, nodded. “Just point us to the on-ramp, girl.”

“You’re sure?”

Zefla made a pained expression. “Shar, I’ve been lecturing law at Capitaller for the last five years; I’ve said all I’m ever going to say and I keep hearing the same old fucking questions; a really smart student comes along now and again, but it’s getting harder and harder to wait during the fallow times in between; an exciting day is when a hunky student bends over or one of the male staff starts growing a beard. My brain’s atrophying. I need some excitement.”

Sharrow looked at Dloan, who was sitting back in the gently swaying hanging-chair and sipping at his drink, the sarflet snoring at his feet. “Dloan?” she said.

Dloan sat looking at her for a while. Eventually he took a long deep breath, and said, “I was watching some screen a few days ago.” He cleared his throat. “Some adventure series. The bad guys were firing bi-propellent HE rounds from FA 300s, fitted with silencers.”

Dloan fell silent.

Sharrow looked at Zefla, who rolled her eyes.

“I’m holding my breath here, Dloan,” Sharrow said.

Dloan looked down at the animal at his feet. “Well, obviously there’s no point fitting a silencer when you’re firing bi-propellents; the rocket stage makes… lots of noise.”

“Oh, yes,” Sharrow said. “Of course.”

“Come on, Dlo,” Zefla said. “That sort of stuff always annoyed you. So what?”

“Yes,” Dloan said. “But it was the third act before I realised.” He sucked his lips in and shook his head.

Zefla and Sharrow exchanged looks. Dloan reached down to stroke the sleeping sarflet.

“I think,” Zefla said, “he means he’s get-hic!-zing disgustingly rusty and it’s time he saw some action before he forgets which end of a gun goes against your shoulder.”

Sharrow looked back to Dloan, who just sat there being blond and nodding wisely.

“Fine,” Sharrow said.

Zefla drank again. “So; via the Book to the Gun. Think the Huhsz really will call off the hunt if you get them the Lazy Gun first?”

“So It Is Written,” Sharrow said with sarcastically emphatic pronunciation.

“And Breyguhn’s clue-whatever it is-is it going to work?”

“It sounds semi-plausible,” Sharrow said, shrugging. “These days that’s about the best I have to go on.”