Drakon (11 page)

Crazy bitch.

She stood at the rail of the boat, looking over at the floats that marked where the divers were working.
Crazy, and I can't figure her.
He couldn't even decide whether she was white or not. She'd darkened up considerably since they started, to milk chocolate color, but the tan seemed to go all over—he had a good view, with the loose cotton shorts and sleeveless singlet she was wearing. The green eyes and red hair were genuine, though. Her papers said Colombian, but the accent was American—South Carolina, maybe, or Louisiana, hard to place, despite the pretty
latina
secretary she had hanging around. The body said American too, the fitness-freak look, like some of the richer women tourists. Not very bulgy, but every muscle precisely delineated, moving under the smooth skin like machined steel in oil.

Nice tits, though. And no bra.
Maybe a hundred and forty pounds, a little more.

One of the standing bets had been whether or not she was queer. That was settled up when Jamie Simms had been seen coming out of her cabana back in Marsh Harbor at six in the morning, but the young deckhand had steadfastly refused all details. That was odd, because everyone had expected a stroke-by-stroke description, and he'd screamed at them to stop asking and then quit the job. Damned odd.

Lowe moved up to stand beside her. "How much longer?" he said.

"Until it's found," she replied. Her voice was soft and pleasant, rather deep, but the tone expected instant obedience.

He gritted his teeth. Sure, she was paying, but there wasn't enough money in the world to make him swallow that much longer.

"It's your three hundred thousand," he said. And the meter was still running. Next week it would be four hundred thousand.

She didn't bother to reply.

Lowe felt the bottom drop out of his gut when the diver surfaced, tearing off his mask and waving something in the air. It looked like a black lump at this distance—exactly the black of corroded silver.

"Silver," she said. "Silver ingots and coin, gold ingots and chains, and a bronze casket full of emeralds. After your government takes its cut, probably about eight million dollars' worth." She smiled slightly. "Aren't you sorry you insisted on a flat fee instead of a percentage of the take?"

Lowe pulled off his hat, knotting it in one ham fist, and took a step toward her. She'd offered him a quarter share and he'd laughed in her face, and she'd given him the same damned smile then.
I'm going to
knock her
—.

The green eyes narrowed slightly, and he stopped; stopped: as if he had run into a wall of ice.

"Not even in your dreams," she whispered.

He coughed to cover his confusion. "How? How the fuck did you know?"

She turned her head back to the divers. Two more had surfaced, and the first was dancing around the deck of the barge.

"I knew what, and where," she said. "Then I checked to see if anyone had found it. Nobody had.

Therefore it had to be here."

She went on, still looking out over the water. "I'm doubling your fee, Captain Lowe. I'll probably need your services again, and your nephew the pilot."

That put a different face on things. "Happy to oblige, ma'am."

"Just remember this," she said. "What I say I can do, I can do. Those who get in my way will regret it. Those who help me can expect to get rich. Very rich. Wealth, and great power . . ."

She turned and smiled at him. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Captain Lowe."

Another face altogether. He made a sweeping bow, grinning back. "
Happy
to oblige, ma'am."

Crazy bitch of a woman. But crazy like a fox.

***

Thomas Cairstens lifted his glass and clinked it against hers.

Woman of the hour,
he thought, as he smiled at Gwen, although she'd managed to evade the Nassau press with delicate skill—giving them just enough to prevent a feeding frenzy. Lost pirate treasure stories were an overnight sensation. The foreign press had dropped it a week ago, although she'd become well known locally.

The dining room of Greycliff was emptying out, as the Friday evening moved toward midnight and the clientele made for bed or nightspot. The fans turned lazily overhead, and the air smelled of flowers from the small yard outside as well as of traffic from West Hill Street, muffled by the high whitewashed wall of limestone blocks that fronted the restaurant. The room itself smelled of good food and expensive perfumes.

A bit of a guilty pleasure, but one he allowed himself after a profitable deal.

She pushed a check across the table at him. "For Greenpeace," she said.

Tom looked down at it and raised his brows before he tucked it into his jacket pocket. A
hundred
thousand. Not too shabby.

"I didn't know you were an environmentalist," he said. She'd been all business while he handled the incorporation of IngolfTech.

"I'm anti-stupidity," she replied coolly. She was dressed simply, in a cream-colored linen dress that brought out her café-au-lait complexion and the brilliant green eyes; an emerald dragon brooch closed the high neck.

"In a hundred years or less, this planet's going to collapse—it might even become uninhabitable,"

she went on.

He nodded grimly, turning the wineglass in his hands. "That's why I got into Greenpeace in California," he said.

"Why did you get out?"

He put the glass down and met her eyes.
Compelling. God, that's an attractive woman.
He wasn't normally very receptive to feminine charms, but there was the occasional exception. Gwendolyn Ingolfsson just didn't
feel
like a woman, though. Or quite like anyone he'd ever met.
Smart, too. How did
she know about me?
When she was there, you just didn't
notice
anyone else.

"Because it wasn't doing any good," he went on. "Not Greenpeace or Earth First, or any of the others. We were putting Band-Aids on cancers at best. More often, we were just provoking backlash.

Earth First couldn't think of anything better to do than try and get poor dumb loggers fired. I'd have joined the ecoterrorists,
if
I thought they'd accomplish anything. Detroit can produce bulldozers a lot faster than anyone can blow them up, though."

"So you gave up and came to the Bahamas to practice corporate law," she said.

He nodded his head jerkily. He'd gone a little further into the fringes than that, which made the move advisable until things quieted down, but it was essentially true. His parents had helped; Dad had real pull, enough to square his work permit with the Bahamian government. It was stupid not to take advantage of family connections if you had them. There were more lawyers in Nassau than sharks in the waters offshore, but he'd done well.

"Sure. Why not dance on the deck if the Titanic's going down?"
And what a depressing subject
for a dinner date.

Gwen leaned forward, fixing his eyes with hers. "Imagine a world," she said softly, almost whispering, forcing him to lean closer to hear, "where the population of Earth is five hundred million and stable, not seven billion and rising. Where not an ounce of fossil fuel is burned. No mines, no factories, no fission reactors or coal-burning plants, no tankers full of oil. The sea and the skies and the land swarm with life, and whole continents are nature preserves."

He jerked his head away. "That's not funny."

"No, it's not funny. But it's
possible,
given the right technology and the right management."

"And we'll never get there from here," he said, feeling anger mount. "Look, what's the
point
of this?"

She smiled and pulled a featureless black rectangle the size of a credit card out of her bag.

"Yes, this civilization is never going to do that," she agreed, and ran a fingernail down its side.

The card opened out, and opened again, until it was the size of a hardcover book. The surface was black in a way he'd never seen before, as if it drank every photon that impacted on it and reflected nothing.

A hole in the table, thinner than a sheet of paper and completely rigid. She touched the side, and the background noise faded quickly to nothing. He looked around in startlement; they were off in one corner, near the tall windows, but he could see mouths moving in talk, silverware in use. Everything was dead silent, like a video with the sound control turned off.

"What is that thing?" he said. His voice sounded slightly flat in the perfect silence, as if in a room with absorptive baffles on the walls.

"It's the equivalent of a file-folder," Gwen replied. "For old-fashioned types like me who don't like to just close their eyes and downlink from the Web through their transducers for an image. Now, we were discussing the potential future of civilization."

Tom felt sweat break out on his forehead and trickle clammily down his flanks, more than the Bahamian night could account for. He reached for his wineglass and drank. It was no easy thing, to have your ordinary life suddenly touched by strangeness.

"Go ahead," he said softly.

"A planetary surface is a bad place for an industrial economy," she went on. "You could have gotten out of that trap, but it's probably too late now, and certainly will be in another generation."

Tom shook his head. "Technofixes wouldn't solve our problems. It's in the nature of humanity to foul its nest. We'd have to change human nature: that's why I gave up."

"I'm glad you said that," Gwen said, her smile growing broader. "You agree then, that humans aren't fit to be in charge here?"

"What's the alternative—a Dolphin Liberation Front?" he replied.

She tapped the black rectangle. "Look."

He glanced down. The surface of the square . . . vanished. It wasn't a screen; the view through it had full depth, exactly like a window. He reached out and touched it with an involuntary reflex. It was completely smooth and neutral in temperature.

"This is Haiti," she said.

He knew Haiti; the wasted, eroded hills barren as the Sahara, the pitiful starving people, hardly a tree or an animal besides goats left west of the Dominican border.

This showed tropical rainforest, lush and untouched, the view sweeping down mountain valleys where mist hung in ragged tatters from the great trees. A spray of birds went by, feathers gaudy; he could hear their cries, faint and raucous. The view swept down to the coast. Here were people, squares of sugarcane, a hillside terraced and planted to glossy-leaved bushes he recognized as coffee. Workers with hand tools or simple machines were busy among them. The view moved closer; he could see they were brown-skinned, stocky and muscular, well-clothed. One laughed as he heaved a full basket onto a floating platform. In the middle distance a white stone building covered in purple bougainvillea stood on a hillside amid gardens. Beyond it was Port-au-Prince harbor. There was no city, no teeming antheap of ragged peasant refugees. Just a few buildings half-lost amid greenery, a stone wharf, and a schooner tied to it.

And a big skeletal structure, like a dish of impossibly rigid rope.

"That's the orbital power receptor," Gwen said. "Now, the Yangtze Gorges."

The great river ran unbound through tall beautiful cliffs, no sign of the giant concrete dam the Chinese had used to tame the wild water.

"Great plains, North America—near what you'd call Fargo."

Tall grass, stretching from horizon to horizon. And across it buffalo unnumbered, in clumps and herds of thousands each. The horned heads lifted in mild curiosity; there was a stir, and a pack of great gray lobo wolves trotted through, twenty strong.

"Bitterfield, eastern Germany."

He knew that, too; one of the worst chemical-waste nightmares left by the old East German regime. The picture showed a stream flowing through thick poplar forest. Behind it were oaks, huge and moss-grown. He heard the chuckle of water, the cries of birds, wind in the branches. The view moved through them at walking pace, pausing at a wildcat on a tree limb, at a sounder of wild boar, in a sun-dappled meadow clearing where an aurochs raised its head in majesty. Its bellow filled his ears.

"The Aral Sea."

Which had disappeared almost altogether, leaving salt flats poisoned with insecticide—the legacy of the old Soviet Union's insane irrigation megaprojects.

The window into a world that wasn't showed white-caps on blue water.

"The delta of the Syr Darya, where it empties into the Aral." A huge marsh. Through the reeds and onto a firmer island moved striped deadliness, a Siberian tiger. Waterfowl rose from the water in honking thousands, enough to cast shadow on the great predator.

"Paris."

No Eiffel Tower, although Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe still stood. The air was crystal. From overhead, he could see that the medieval core remained, Notre Dame, the radial roadways laid out in Napoleon III's time. None of the great sprawl of suburbs he knew; Versailles stood alone among its ordered gardens. Dense forest and open parkland stretched from the outskirts; occasionally a building would rise above them, usually roofed in green copper. The roadways were grassy turf. Foot traffic was pedestrians, or small machines that floated soundlessly beneath their passengers. Aircraft moved through the air above, elongated teardrop shapes and blunt wedges moving without visible support; a colorful hot-air balloon drifted among them.

"The Serengeti, looking northeast."

A herd of hundreds of elephants, moving with slow ponderous dignity through a landscape of lion-colored grass and scattered flat-topped thorn trees. His eyes darted about; lions, giraffe, antelope, a
dozen
rhino . . . Snow-topped Kilimanjaro rose like an empress in the distance. Beyond it was something new, something alien: a great pillar stretching up into the sky until it turned into a curving thread, vanishing in the blue.

"What's that?" he asked, hearing his voice shake.

"The Kenia beanstalk—think of it as a tower or a cable reaching from Low Earth Orbit to the surface." She touched the edge of the window. "And this is the Valles Marineris, on Mars."