Chapter 31: Shoot to Kill
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"I know where," she said in a secret voice. "Down by the old power station." She pointed off down the hill, towards the dome foundations in the distance. "Teach me?" I looked into her slaty blue eyes. I might as well have looked at a couple of bottle tops. "All right. Give me back the gun until I see if the place looks all right." She smiled and made a mouth, then handed it back with a secret naughty air, as if she was giving me a key to her room. We walked up the steps and round to my rickshaw. The gardens seemed deserted. The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter's smile. We got into the rickshaw and drive down the sunken driveway and out though the gates. "Where's Vivian?" I asked. "Not up yet." She giggled. We drove on down the hill through the quiet opulent streets with their faces washed by the rain, then bore spinwards. We reached the place she meant in about ten minutes. "In there." She leaned out of the window and pointed. It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn't been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. We followed the ruts along and the noise of habitat traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the habitat at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained beam of an anti-matter containment vessel handling crane stuck up over a branch. I could see the old steel cable in the block. The crane probably hadn't moved in a year. Containers were no longer being delivered here, the egress airlock was closed and unpowered. Half a dozen empty vessels lay in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, old-scummed water of the old cooling sump iridescent in the sunlight. "Are they going to make a park of all this?" I asked. She dipped her chin down and gleamed at me. "It's about time. The smell of that sump would poison a herd of goats. This the place you had in mind?" "Uh-huh. Like it?" "It's beautiful." I directed the rickshaw bot to pull up beside the loading platform. The hum of the traffic was a distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees. The place was as lonely as a churchyard. Even after the rain the tall eucalyptus trees still looked dusty. They always look dusty. A branch broken off by the wind had fallen over the edge of the sump and the flat leathery leaves dangled in the water. I walked around the sump and looked into the pump-house. There was some junk inside it, nothing that looked like recent activity. Outside a big wheel in stained grey plastic was tilted against the wall. It looked like a good place all right. I went back to the rickshaw. The girl stood beside it preening her hair and holding it out in the sun.
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Part 1