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promptly threw up.
Sharrow felt Cenuij fall against her and watched his body tumble from the door
and bounce on the hovercraft's skirt a hundred times that night, as the big
ACV rumbled down the Yallam.
Disaster came at Eph, where the river flowed past and round the city in a
narrow gorge. Heavy rains upstream a few days earlier meant the river had
risen a couple of metres since the Solipsists had come upstream, and the
Solo lost all four of its propellers under the first railway bridge.
They drifted downriver, engines still roaring as Roa's helmsman tried to use
the stumps of the shattered propeller blades to keep some way on the craft. It
didn't work; the
Solo bumped into barges, bridge-supports and wharves all the way round the
city, watched by townspeople and tracked by a small flotilla of brightly lit
pleasure craft held back by a couple of police boats.
`
Why
?' Sharrow asked Roa when he came staggering down the steps into the ACV's
echoing garage space.
`Why what?' he shouted above the noise of the screaming engines, looking tired
and confused.
`Why did you attack the Land Car?' she yelled, steadying herself against the
bulkhead as the hovercraft lurched.
`What was the point?'
`We were hired to,' Roa shouted, frowning, as though it should have been
obvious.
`By whom?'
`I don't know,' Roa said quietly, so that she saw rather than heard the words.
The Solipsist leader closed his eyes and started to hum. The ACV lurched again
and he was thrown against the bulkhead. Roa braced himself with one arm, then
said, `Excuse me,' and disappeared back up the stairs to the flight deck.
Roa didn't object when they proposed buying one of a couple of assault
inflatables they'd found in the hovercraft's garage.
He took a cheque.
They took to the waves as they were passing the lagoon of the Stramph-Veddick
Circus Lands and made it into the enclave despite a black-bodied, almost
silent and armed-looking heli-drone coming down to take a long, hard
look at them as they bounced over the chopping dark waters towards the
fabulous lights of the Circus.
The
Solo sailed forlornly on into the night. The Solipsists had switched its
lights back on and the last they saw of it the old hovercraft was scraping
under some trees on its way downriver, losing what remained of its propellers
against the overhanging branches in a distant, explosive clattering.
Miz had business contacts in the Circus; he talked them out of some money and
the team onto a tourist charter flight out of the themepark that morning. He
picked up money from one of his office managers when they landed in
BoChen in southern Jonolrey and hired an auto car. They slept fitfully most of
the way to Vembyr, and when Zefla woke it was with the opinion that having
slept on it, with the exception of Sharrow, probably the best thing they could
do was go to Yadayeypon voluntarily and answer their indictments after all.
Miz had taken a few days to be convinced.
`I am sorry you lost your friend,' Feril said.
`Friend,' she repeated, frowning a little. `I'm not sure Cenuij was ever a
friend,'
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she said. `But-'she gave a strange, small laugh `- we were very close.'
She stood on an old tarpaulin spattered with tiny flecks of dried plaster. A
single, naked electric-bulb burned brightly in the middle of the room,
shedding a fierce yellow-white light throughout the room and casting a deep
shadow across the floor behind her. She was thinking about going for a walk.
There was something inexplicably soothing about watching the android work, but
there was also something about the harshness of the light that made her
uncomfortable.
The tall, wide windows looked out onto darkness.
`Have you many happy memories of him?' Feril asked. The android was perched on
a step-ladder holding a small bucket in one hand and a trowel in the other.
`Not many,' she said, trying to remember. `Well, yes; some.' She sounded
exasperated as she said, `We argued a lot . . . but I've never objected to a
good argument.'
`You said he was your team classicist. Will you have to get another?'
She shook her head. `It doesn't work that way.'
`Oh,' Fend said. It scooped a glistening lump of plaster from the bucket onto
the trowel-blade, then set the bucket down on the top step of the ladder.
`May I ask a favour of you?' she said.
`Yes,' Feril said. An ornate plaster frieze shaped like a long, flower-filled
trellis filled the angle between the wall and the ceiling of half the room,
starting in the corner by the door and ending where the android stood on the
ladder.
It carefully applied the plaster to the end of the frieze.
`I'd like to find out if there have been any androids who've suddenly left
Vembyr and disappeared recently;
especially pairs of androids. Androids who could pass for human at very close
range.'
The android was silent for a couple of seconds, patiently using the trowel to
keep the drooping lump of plaster in place. Then it said, `No, none have been
reported leaving the city for the last nine years.
`Hmm. Before that?'
The machine paused only briefly. `The city records go back five millennia,'
the machine said, sounding regretful.
`During that time the android population of Vembyr has remained roughly static
at twenty-three thousand, with perhaps a tenth of that number at large in the
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