Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 27

And Antonio had enemies aplenty. Mighty enemies. A G.o.dawful long list. Headed by Pope Clement V, Christ's Vicar on Earth, and lapdog of Philip the Fair. Guelfs in general hated him. So did the Visconti vipers of Milan. Then there were the French, a blasphemous nation of traitors and ingrates. Whole hosts of people would be happy to hear that the n.o.ble Dog had died in some dark alley. Some would even take the trouble to arrange it.

But it was easier wished than done. He glanced past the two men to the woman.

She took no active part, standing motionless, lips parted in horror-or perhaps excitement; her mask made it impossible to tell.

"Drop your sword," the Jester shouted. "We only mean to talk."

"Just a word," the Plague Doctor a.s.sured him.

"My word is 'Begone,'" Antonio retorted. "Draw if you be men!"

The Jester drew blade, saying over his shoulder, "Back me."

Antonio sprang to meet him. Swords clashed and grated. Bells rang on the Jester's cap as he backpedaled, parrying briskly. Fighting drunk, and full of anger, Antonio easily forced them back. Too easily. Both men swiftly gave ground.

Suddenly the Jester slipped in his floppy boots, going down on one knee with a shriek of fear.

p.i.s.s-poor acting. Instead of trying to get in past the man's guard, Antonio spun about, putting his back to a wall.

A third a.s.sa.s.sin, dressed like a Saracen in a cloak and turban, leaped from a doorway. His scimitar sliced empty air, where the n.o.ble Dog had been.

The trap had been obvious even to the half-drunk Antonio. Two men falling back before one, while the ringing bells on the Jester's cap covered the third attacker's footsteps. Antonio had seen it done before. And better.

He slashed at the Saracen's throat, feeling the solid jar of contact down the length of his sword arm. Sure of his kill, the Saracen never had time to parry. Blood sprayed the width of the alley. The a.s.sa.s.sin crumpled, his head hanging sideways.Antonio congratulated himself. Not bad for fighting on a head full of bardolino! It was two to one again.

The Jester scrambled back to his feet, cursing. He called to the Doctor, "Come, man, make worm's meat out of him!"

The Jester met Antonio's drunken attack, while the black-cloaked Plague Doctor tried to get at the n.o.ble Dog's left side. Cool professionals, they acted unfazed by the death of their comrade. But the narrowness of the alley fought for Antonio, keeping them from both getting to him at once.

Abandoning his caution, the Jester pressed Antonio hard, trying to create an opening for the Doctor. Swords met, rasped, struck sparks. Antonio parried with his dagger, thrusting past the Jester's guard. His point pierced the Jester's jacket, which was sewn with playing cards. Striking metal, the n.o.ble Dog's blade bounced back.

There was steel hidden beneath the card-sewn jacket. The Jester's boldness was explained-his ringing Fool's Cap hid the clang of armor.

Grinning, the Jester came on, bolder than ever, hacking and slas.h.i.+ng. He did not fear a body blow, and probably had an armored codpiece to boot.

Antonio feinted low, as though going for the groin. The Jester rose on his toes, aiming a downward slash. Antonio again parried high with the dagger-this time aiming his sword thrust beneath the upraised arm. His grandfather had been on the losing side at Benevento, and never tired of telling how King Manfred's German mercenaries were cut down by French knights striking a I'estoc into the armpit. His point slid through the Jester's sleeve, and over the cuira.s.s.

The Belled Fool folded up, staggered, and fell gasping against the Doctor. He had the impudence to take Antonio's blade with him, its point tangled in the puffed sleeve and the top of his lung.

Letting go of the sword, Antonio sprang forward with just his dagger, staking everything on a single drunken rush. Pus.h.i.+ng the dying Jester aside, the bird-faced Doctor aimed a sweeping blow at Antonio. Too late. The n.o.ble Dog got inside his guard, grabbing the Doctor's right wrist, slamming him against the alley wall. His dagger at the man's throat, he hissed, "Yield."

Helpless, the Doctor let his blade fall. His white bird mask looked blankly at the n.o.ble Dog.

Antonio glanced up to see the woman disappear into the Arena archway. d.a.m.n.

Missed her again. The man beneath him would die for that. But first.

Keeping the dagger clenched in his hand, he grabbed the beak of the white bird-mask, wrenching it back. Finding the face beneath irritatingly familiar. He knew this man from somewhere. "Why?" Antonio demanded. "Why dare to accost me?"

Amazingly calm, despite sure death at his throat, the man managed a devil-may-care smirk. "There is a call on your service. Clients are coming down the Beanstalk."

HEARTBREAK HOTEL.

Tearing off his headset, Toni stared at the 3V deck resting on his knees. Naked thighs shone slick and white in the artificial light. Disoriented and drenched in sweat, it took time for the truth to sink in. Those were his thighs. He was no longer in Verona. No longer the n.o.ble Dog. No longer wearing pants.

An audio beeper indicated incoming messages. Toni ignored it, still fixed on Verona. Who was she? Had she really gone into the Arena?

Beeps increased in volume, dragging him into the here-and-now, badgering him with incoming calls. He hated that. Hated being jerked out of the program. h.e.l.l, he hated being out of the program period. Hated being anywhere but Verona.

Shutting down the beeper, he stared at the stained white ceiling of the sanitary unit. Sitting bare-a.s.sed in a dingy portable toilet, fed by a glucose drip, was a p.i.s.s-poor subst.i.tute for being a prince's nephew at Carnival time. Or at any time.

Setting aside the 3V deck, he climbed up on his exercise bike, thankful that Ariel's pull was only .5g. Any more, and he never would have made it off the toilet seat. Toni found physical exercise boring-but most realtime activities were essentially tedious. So Toni put his tedium to maximum use, telling Proteus-Programmed Techno-Environmental Utilization Service-"Give me the priority messages."

The housekeeping program obeyed. Grunting atop the bike, Toni responded to his calls as best he could.

"Check. Hunting party headed down the Beanstalk."

"Yes. Of course I still think of you."

"f.u.c.k off."

"2100 tomorrow-at the soonest."

"Will call back."

"s.h.i.+t. OK, OK, I'll get to it."

When he could not take any more, he told Proteus, "Dump everything over forty hours old. Hold the rest."

Toni got down off the bike, inserted the glucose drip, and set the deck on his lap, tempted to return at once to Verona. He had to follow her into the Arena. And...

His hand hovered above the deck, fingers itching to hit VERONA. He hit DRAGON HUNT instead.

Instantly, Toni was outside-standing at the base of the Beanstalk, looking out over Freeport with infrared eyes. Geodomes and apartment blocks glowed softly from internal heat. Powered filters showed as bright firefly streaks. Pair-a-Dice Beanstalk towered above him, piercing the dawn sky, connecting Freeport to the Pair-a-Dice geosync platform thousands of klicks overhead. The topless stalk cast a thin shadow onto the cloud plain, a dark razor-straight line disappearing in thedirection of Nightside.

It was early morning. Prospero had just cut a notch in the cloud plain surrounding Mt. Beanstalk. Another long drawn-out day had begun. This far into the Twilight Belt, it was always dawn or dusk. Ariel kept the same face turned toward her primary, Prospero. Orbital libration produced a slow-mode version of day and night; long cool mornings alternating with shady twilights. Prospero never climbed too high in the sky, nor sank too low below the horizon.

A Transgalactic Liner was in on Pair-a-Dice. Tourists jammed the slide walk, wearing tinsel wigs and chrome yellow pompoms-laughing, joking, and generally embarra.s.sing themselves. Toni was not in the mood to be amused by rich fools with nothing to do. And he could have done something about it. At the moment he was three meters tall, standing head and shoulders above the crowd on duraluminum legs.

His metal arms-all four of them-could have scythed through the throng, braining the lot of them without so much as raising a sweat. Plasti-metal does not perspire.

But he had better things to do. Better as in paid. Otherwise, he would have deleted Freeport completely, and gone straight to Verona. He flipped off the infrared filters. The last time he had inhabited the cyborg body had been for a Nightside hunt.

Here, he did not need them.

Ali, Harpo, and Doc came striding up. They too were three meters tall, with plasti-metal bodies. Except for Ali, who was a head shorter, nonchalantly carrying his cyborg cranium tucked under his arm. The helmeted head, with its radar dome, sonar receptors, and binocular lenses, looked up at Toni. "Draw if you be men," the head dared him. Its speak-box exactly mimicked the n.o.ble Dog's accent.

Toni glared at the talking head.

"Or we'll make worm's meat of you," Harpo added.

"Shut up with the Shakespeare," Toni growled. In Verona, he could have had the three of them flayed.

The cyborgs laughed. In Ali's case, the chuckle came from under his arm. He hefted the head and screwed it-still laughing-onto his shoulders. "We had to come for you."

"But not just then. I was this close." Toni lifted his upper left hand, holding two heavy gauntleted fingers a micron apart.

"Gives you a reason to go back." Harpo's attempt at a grin looked like the front end of a ground car. As if Toni needed a reason. As if any of them did. They all had their private Veronas. They enjoyed jerking him out merely because misery loves company. He would get them back.

A soft subsonic buzz warned that their Pair-a-Dice cap-sule had arrived. The pressure door at the base of the Beanstalk began to disgorge luggage. Hand-tooled leather flight bags. Fancy holographic camcorders. Field shelters. Night gla.s.ses and freeze-dried gourmet rations. An autobar and a silver tea-service. Along with sufficient ancillary equipment to start a small colony.Port workers in mint-green candy-striped coveralls attacked the mountain of belongings, loading them onto gravity sleds, working briskly, but without enthusiasm. They wore electronic shackles and shock collars. Most were government employees-addicts, vagrants, debtors, and moral degenerates, working off their debt to society.

Then came the hunting party. First the Client, flanked by a pair of SuperChimp bodyguards, looking sure of himself and overly successful. He had a squat bald head, cropped ears, beady eyes, pink jowls, several chins, and no noticeable neck.

His lace-trimmed purple doublet and parti-colored hose merely made him look more grotesque, like Quasimodo in a clown suit. Anyone who could easily afford biosculpt, but still looked that ugly, obviously did not give a d.a.m.n what an age of artificial beauty thought. People had to take him as he was, or not at all. His walk matched his looks, brusque and self-absorbed. Oblivious to underlings scurrying around him, he talked through an open comlink to someone in orbit. Toni told Proteus to put a name to the face.

Proteus obeyed-(Alexander Gracchus, CEO of Trans-galactic for the Deneb Kaitos, offices in Mt. Zion in Mt. Zion system, on Aesir III and Vanir II in the Twin Systems, and on Pair-a-Dice in Prospero System. Personal residences: Baldar, main moon of Aesir VII, Sylvan Hall on Vanir II, and a lodge in the Quartz Peaks Hunt Preserve on Aesir III. Three wives, five children, 2s. 3d.) The rest of the party looked tiny compared to Gracchus and his hulking bodyguards. Two of them were women. Proteus identified them as Gracchus's younger wives-Selene and Pandora. Selene, older and senior, had blond hair and fair skin dusted with silver. She wore a feathered, flaring gown better suited to a ballet than a Wyvyrn hunt. Pandora, the junior wife, was more sensibly dressed, wearing thigh-length boots and a leopard-skin leotard. Alert and self-reliant, she had a friendly, curious face framed by untidy lacquered hair trimmed to ten-centimeter spikes. Like the stevedores, she wore an electronic slave collar-only diamond-studded.

Pandora immediately took charge of the baggage, helping to stow it aboard a big aerial barge docked by the Beanstalk. Working briskly and cheerfully in her spiked hair and leotards, she encouraged the convict labor by pa.s.sing out stim tabs from a pillbox on her wrist. Toni lumbered over to lend his four mechanical hands. If he could not be in Verona, he meant to be doing something.

The baggage pile vanished into the barge, and Pandora (whose name meant "All-giving") emptied the contents of her pillbox, pa.s.sing out extra tabs as rewards.

A guard wearing a purple skin-suit with broad white vertical stripes strolled over, one hand resting on a bolstered riot pistol. He signed for her to stop. Without saying a word, Pandora whipped a miniature chrome holocam off her wrist. Smiling, she handed the holocam to the guard, who pocketed it, turning his back on the proceedings.

One port worker refused the pills. An older woman with graying hair, she glared at Pandora, saying that she did not need "hoppers." Whatever crime the woman had towork off probably didn't come close to pa.s.sing out drugs to convicts. Or bribing a trustee.

Pandora deftly handed her tabs to the next guy. Reaching up, she removed two sapphire chip earrings, putting them in the older woman's palm. "No one should work for nothing."

The woman gaped at the tiny blue stones, then swiftly closed her hand before the guard could see.

Pandora smiled ruefully up at Toni. What could you give a three-meter-tall cyborg? "Maybe later," she said, and shrugged. Toni did not answer-totally uninterested in whatever she had to offer.

The hunting party trooped aboard the barge and lifted off into dawn light.

Freeport and Pair-a-Dice Beanstalk fell behind them. The barge was big, resting on huge rounded helium tanks, with a wide observation deck forward, and a jet-powered hover car sitting on the fantail. Toni stood on the foredeck, staring out across tens of thousands of square klicks of dazzling white cloud plain, wis.h.i.+ng he were in Verona. Beneath him, below the cloud plain, lay Ariel's surface, a pressure-cooked caldron of searing hot winds and greenhouse gases. Partial terraforming had given the planet a rudimentary biosphere based on mountaintops and high plateaus. Incompletely habitable, Ariel was very much a work in progress.

Telescopic vision let Toni make out their destination, the ringwall of Elysium poking through the sea of clouds. A ma.s.sive volcanic caldera rearing up into the biosphere, Elysium formed a huge natural amphitheater .more than a hundred klicks across, a great green bowl of misty jungle, surrounded by stadium-like walls.

Seeing Elysium ringwall reminded Toni of the Arena in Verona-the ancient Roman amphitheater that the Lady-in-Gold had vanished into. Seized by the image, his mind immediately tried to catapult back to Verona. Toni fought the impulse.

Such spontaneous flashbacks terrified him. They were symptoms of acute mental feedback, severe glitches in his neural circuitry. A hazard Toni would rather not think about-and one he had to hide from his employers at all cost. If Dragon Hunt suspected him of having cybernetic seizures, they would yank his program-stranding him in real time.

The jolt of landing helped jerk Toni back to reality. The landing zone sat on a cleared semicircle blasted out of the crater rim, big enough for the barge and a base camp. A trail sloped downward, choked with cycad fronds and tall bam-boo. Vines and creepers kept Toni from seeing more than a couple of meters into the tangle.

Happy to be back in control of his augmented psyche, Toni helped with the unloading, piling safari supplies about the landing site. Turning up his hypersensitive hearing, he tried to tell if the Hunt Guide had noticed his lapse.

"... but with the brain shot the angle of entry varies too much to rely on surface features. Don't count on aiming between the eye cells. Or above the mandibles." The Guide was giving a short lecture on the best way to scramble a Wyvyrn's neuroanatomy."What should I aim for?" Gracchus asked. His weapon hung loosely from one huge hand-a long gray 30mm recoil-less minicannon, with a padded shoulder rest and a broad ugly snout.

"Imagine a line running between the bases of the primary antennae. The Wyvyrn's cerebrum is a barbell-shaped pair of ganglia midway along that line."

Gracchus grunted. "Sounds tricky."

"It is," the Guide admitted, "unless you're close enough to tickle its tonsils. You might want to try for heart number one. It is located in the center of the second segment back from the head..."

Fine. The Guide was too busy bulls.h.i.+tting Gracchus to care what his cyborgs were up to. It surprised Toni that someone so obviously successful as Gracchus could fall for such a shuck. But the allure-and expense-of a real hunt, with real prey, was too much for folks with more money than sense.

Toni had a true 3V addict's contempt for "real" adventure. For a tiny fraction of the cost, Gracchus could be a 3V Beowulf, or Siegfried. He could kill Fafnir, battle sea serpents, and f.u.c.k Brunhilde, all without leaving home. But that would be too much like the plebs.

Toni looked about, seeing the impa.s.sive Chimp bodyguards. And Gracchus's two wives, now drenched in sweat.

Selene's fairy gown was drooping, and smeared with silver dust. Pandora looked cooler in her leopard-spotted leotard. Neither dared to complain.

Why haul everyone through this? Dragging folks about in the flesh-just to show that Gracchus had the power and money to make it happen. The Guide's little bulls.h.i.+t lecture made no mention of collared Wyvyrn. Wyvyrn were flying megafauna from Beta Hydri IV. Huge hundred-meter, semi-intelligent, flying omnivores, with less reason to tangle with humans than lions had. Humans didn't taste good to them- and normally they had sense enough to stay out of their way.

To get them to cooperate, Dragon Hunt went into Elysium ahead of time and collared a couple of prime specimens. Once collared, the Wyvyrn could be made to stick around. Even attack. Without control collars, Gracchus would be lucky to see a Wyvyrn, much less get off a "brain" shot.

It was all as phony as 3V. Only less comfortable, and a d.a.m.ned sight more expensive. Which, alas, was the point. So long as Toni was paid, he kept his complaints to himself. Besides, who cared what a cyborg thought?

The Guide signaled with his hand, and they set out. Harpo went ahead, hacking out a path. Toni lifted a field shelter, ration case, and microstove, along with a hundred-odd kilos of baggage and ammunition, falling in behind Doc.

The first couple of klicks were dense brush, a claustrophobic pile of creepers and wrist-thick bamboo, crisscrossed with lianas and strangler vine. Toni kept station a dozen meters behind Doc, turning when he turned.

Without warning, the tangle suddenly opened overhead. Toni strode into a coolcathedral forest of kilometer-tall trees festooned with great red perfumed blossoms.

Slanting Prospero light glittered off the wings of giant insects flitting from flower to flower. A forest imp flew by, a tiny pale humanoid with huge gold eyes, riding on the back of a two-meter dragonfly.

Toni kept his optical sensors aimed low, trying not to tread on the humans hidden by tall ferns and elephant gra.s.s. Ten more hours of slogging and he could go back to Verona.

"Myself was from Verona banished For practicing to steal away a lady..."

-Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV

VIA VENEZIA.

At first light, the morning after Carnival, the n.o.ble Dog rode across the Ponte Romano, the ancient stone bridge over the Adige, leaving Verona. Green suburban hills rose up on the far bank, dotted with palaces, pleasure gardens, churches, and Roman ruins. After him came Proteus with the led horses.

Antonio now had a name to put behind the mask-a name, but not a face. His Lady-in-Gold was Silvia Lucetta Visconti, the daughter of Matteo Visconti, exiled Lord of Milan, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in northern Italy. Proteus had come up with this news, along with word that she had taken the road east toward Padua and Venice, Antonio's manservant was a wizard at ferreting out information-part Gypsy and part thief-never failing to turn up a useful fact.

Always antic.i.p.ating Antonio's wants, and seeing to his needs.

That he had still not seen Silvia made her all the more attractive. Every woman Antonio knew paled in comparison to how he pictured her-no flesh-and-blood female could hope to compete with his imagination.

This obsession led to caustic words between Antonio and his uncle Cangrande, the Big Dog-sparking a family argument that rebounded off the romanesque arches of Can-grande's audience chamber, keeping servants and mistresses awake well after midnight. The Lord of Verona had an absurdly cherubic face, pierced by a pair of sharp compelling eyes. Dismissing Silvia Visconti out of hand, he reminded his nephew of the "bad blood in that family." (The Vipers of Milan were infamous for savage despotism, murderous cruelty, and engaging in all manner of s.e.xual manias-in addition to giving good government and encouraging the arts.) How could the daughter of an exiled enemy be a fit object for marriage?

"Who said I mean to marry her?" Antonio retorted. Being obsessed with a woman was a poor excuse to wed her.