Ray Aldridge - The Emperor of Everything

“I must try,” said Ruiz.

Somehow the news that Remint had been deconstructed by the Gencha came as no great surprise to Ruiz. The events and circumstances of his visit to Sook seemed to be taking on some great incomprehensible symmetry; he felt like a player in some feverish drama, a performance full of obscure symbolism and contrived irony. “Where is he?”

The mythagogue fell silent for a long minute, until Ruiz began to consider how he might force the information from the man without attracting the attention of the Celadon Wind’s security devices. But finally the man spoke in a thin frail voice, completely unlike the declamatory tone he had used before. “If I tell you, and you fail to destroy him, he will punish me in ways I cannot bear to think of.”

“I won’t fail,” said Ruiz in as positive a voice as he could manage.

The man nodded. “Perhaps. You’re much like Remint, as he was before they killed him.” He seemed to come to a decision; his back straightened and he spoke in a stronger voice. “He told me to call him at the SweetShimmer joypalace, which is just two levels below the Celadon Wind, in this very stack. I can’t guarantee that he’s there, of course, but… look for him in Suite B-448.”

“Thank you,” said Ruiz Aw, and slipped away.

“A FINE PERFORMANCE,” said Remint to the cyborg, who had raised his head inquiringly. Then Remint switched to the outside spy bead, and followed Ruiz on his rapid retreat from the Hall of Pain and Renewal.

Corean shook her head in wonderment. “Doesn’t the mythagogue’s hatred concern you? The emotion was unmistakably genuine. Is it safe to leave such a virulent creature alive?”

Remint looked at her without expression and did not speak.

As far as Ruiz could tell, the woman did not follow him, though he thought he sensed her interest as he left the rotunda.

He moved as quickly as he could without attracting unwelcome attention. As he trotted along, he gave thought to the spy bead the mythagogue had mentioned. Surely it was still locked on him; how could he rid himself of it before he entered the joypalace?

He left the Celadon Wind by a back way provided for those who wished to keep their entertainments private. As soon as he had emerged from the exit, he turned and reentered the fabularium.

As he had hoped, the parallel ingress was equipped with surveillance stripping gear, available to patrons for a price, and he waited in the security lock while the lock’s devices combed three spy beads from the air. A mech arm gathered up the deactivated devices and handed them to him, sealed in a plastic bag.

He examined them with some surprise. Three? He wondered who else was monitoring his movements. Publius owned one of the beads, almost certainly. Perhaps Diamond Bob was the other watcher. He shrugged, tossed the beads down a disposal slot, and left the fabularium again.

Two levels up from the Celadon Wind, he found a market in a low-ceilinged hall. The floor was crammed with tents and booths and kiosks, selling food, fashion, weapons, and various of the cruder forms of entertainment: drugs, wiregames, flashdeath, personality implants.

Ruiz wandered about until he noticed a booth that purveyed information. There he bought a current map of the stack.

Across the hall Ruiz found a cafe. A dozen small tables were scattered about under a canopy of Old Earth plants, gene-tailored to survive under the bluish artificial light. He sat down close to the solid metal at the hall’s perimeter, where he could watch the few other patrons without worrying overmuch that someone might sneak up behind him.

The waiter was a brainchopped woman of great apparent age, who showed him a menu and accepted his order silently, then shuffled back to the little black tent that held the cafe’s machinery. She returned with his meal almost instantly; it consisted of a platter of gray textured protein and vatted fungi in various fluorescent hues, sliced into bite-size pieces and covered with a thick bluish sauce. It tasted marginally better than it looked, and he ate it while he examined his map.

The map, installed in a disposable dataslate, allowed him to scroll crudely through the stack, level by level. The major features were represented by wireframe diagrams and touch-dot labels. When he located the Sweetshimmer, three levels below the Celadon Wind, he was immediately struck by its suitability for an ambush. There were only two entries into the joypalace, according to the map, and one watcher could cover both of them. The corridor that led to Suite B-448 served only a half-dozen other suites, and was accessible from a single elevator bank.

He finished his meal and looked out at the people passing through the market. He watched for a few minutes; none of the shoppers resembled the woman with the steel slippers.

He slipped out of the cafe and found a shop specializing in full bodymasks. The shop was housed in an inflatable structure covered with anodized alloy scales, so that it looked like a giant lavender artichoke. The clerk, another elderly brainchopped woman, served him without detectable interest, and a few minutes later Ruiz left the shop disguised as a fat merchant. He wore a poisonous-green puffsuit, gold-mirrored ankle boots, and a stylish pink visor. He’d also purchased a somatic inductance overlay, which lay against the nape of his neck and changed his gait into a mincing waddle, made his arms flip about in a disarmingly frivolous manner, and raised his voice an octave.

He was confident no one would recognize him, though he feared that if he ran into one of the muggergangs which infested the city, he would be attacked. The bodymask restricted his movements and prevented access to most of his weapons, and the face-covering restricted his vision. Worse, he had been forced to leave his armor behind, in a public locker that would surely be broken open and emptied as soon as he was out of sight. He felt naked and vulnerable, protected only by a layer of spongy synthetic flesh.

But he could think of no better plan, so he went to the public lifts and dropped down to the level of the Sweetshimmer.

At the moment Remint lay back on the couch, eyes closed. Corean was reminded of a mech recharging its batteries — the slayer’s face seemed even less human in repose, the grotesquely muscled features even more like some murderous alien mask. She wondered how he could sleep with Ruiz Aw so close to his trap. Probably, she thought, he wasn’t asleep, but only resting, husbanding his energies in a wholly logical manner. She wondered what would happen if she were to go to his couch and touch him. Would she survive the experiment?

She returned her attention to the spyscreen, which now displayed a view of the corridor outside the suite. In the last few moments the traffic in the corridor had picked up. A fat man in a ridiculous green puffsuit simpered and clung to the arm of a rather homely albino joyboy in a leather whipping jumper. A few paces behind the fat man, a tall cadaverous man in the dull black shipsuit of a Dead God acolyte trudged along, face solemn; he was trailed by a brightly dressed covey of preadolescent girls, all of whom wore identical looks of unchildlike resignation.

The lights in the corridor went out.

Corean sat in bemusement for an instant, before she realized that something was wrong. She opened her mouth to shout for Remint, when the red emergency lights strobed on, then off. In that blink of time, she saw the fat man moving with astonishing speed up the corridor, a look of wooden calm on his doughy face. The albino sprawled on his back, legs kicking, and the tall acolyte was soaring over the fallen joyboy in a tigerish bound.

She turned and shrieked a warning at Remint, who was already rising from his couch, when the suite’s door shattered and the fat man burst through, a splinter gun in his hand.