House of the Sun

6

I waited in the open-air lobby while Scott pulled the Phaeton up and out of the underground parking lot. The big Rolls sighed to a stop in front of me, and the rear passenger door swung open.

1 gestured no to that, crossing my hands edge to edge like karate chops meeting each other. Scott's voice sounded from an exterior speaker. "Problems, Mr. Dirk?"

"I don't want to ride in the playpen," I explained-feeling a touch foolish at talking to a car that was so obviously buttoned-up. "Any objection to company up front?"

I heard the ork chuckle, a slightly tinny sound through the speaker. "Your call, bruddah, but you're going to have me forgetting I'm a chauffeur here." The passenger compartment door shut again, and the right side front door clicked open. I walked around the big car, slid inside, and chunked the door shut. The driver's compartment was nothing compared to the playpen in back, predictably, but it still was more comfortable and well-appointed than some dosses I've lived in.

Scott grinned over at me. The hair-thin optic cable connecting his datajack to the control panel seemed to burn in the sun. "Okay, Mr. Dirk, anything in particular you want to see?"

I shrugged. "You're the kama'aina," I said. "You tell me what I should see?"

His grin broadened. "You got it, hoa." At the touch of a mental command, the limo slipped into gear and pulled away. "Any objection to a little music? Local stuff."

I shrugged. "Just as long as it's not 'Aloha Oe,' " I told him.

He laughed at that. "Not in this car, you can bet on that. Ever hear traditional slack-key?" I shook my head. "You're in for a treat, then." As Scott sat back comfortably and crossed his arms, the stereo clicked on and the car filled with music.

I've always had a taste for music-real music, stuff that shows some kind of talent, some kind of musicianship, not the drek that anyone with an attitude and a synth can churn out. Old blues or trad jazz preferably, but I've got a relatively open mind. Hell, I've even listened to country on occasion. Slack-key was something new-acoustic guitars, alternately strummed and intricately finger-picked. Something like bluegrass in technique, but with a sound and a feel all its own.

"You like?"

"I like," I confirmed. "I've got to get some of this for my collection. Who're the musicians?"

"An old group, they recorded back before the turn of the century. Kani-alu, they're called. None of them still alive: they all kicked from old age, or got cacked by the VITAS.

"I just picked up this disk a couple of days back. Some guys have gone back through the old catalog and remastered a bunch of this stuff." He paused. "If you want, you can have my copy when you leave. I'll pick up another."

"Thanks. I'd like that." To the lush strains played by musicians long dead, we cruised off the Diamond Head Hotel property and headed toward the city.

Scott was a good tour-guide; he had amusing and interesting stories to tell about nearly everything we passed. We cruised roughly northeast, then turned northwest to pass through Kapiolani Park in the shadow of Diamond Head itself. Then we cut down onto Kalakaua Avenue (what is it with Hawai'ians and the letter k?), which flanked the beach.

You could tell the tourists from the locals, both on the sand and in the water. The tourists were pale white-like slugs under a rock-or turning a painful-looking pinky-red. (I started thinking about sunscreen and the thinning ozone layer. I'd brought some spray-on SPF 45 goop, but would that be enough? I looked down at my arms: as slug-white as the other newbies.) In contrast, the locals-there weren't that many of them, for some reason-were all bronze or mahogany, the comfortable deep-down tan I'd seen on Sharon Young back in Cheyenne.

There was a little surf rolling in-breakers all of a meter high or so. A couple of pale tourists were trying to catch those waves on surfboards garishly emblazoned with the name of the company that had rented them out. It looked like an awful lot of work just to get wet. As we cruised slowly on, I saw one slag-an ebony-haired elf with ivory skin-actually get up onto his surfboard and ride it… for a whole two meters before he submarined the nose and went sploosh.

Then, out beyond him, somebody else caught a wave perfectly and was up in an instant. A troll, he was, on a board larger than some dining tables I've owned. His long black hair whipped in the wind as he cut his board back and forth across the margin of the small wave, dodging through the heads of swimmers like gates in a slalom. Swishing into the shallows, he dismounted smoothly, and in one motion he picked up his board-shoulders and arms bulging-swung it around, and started paddling out again. I watched the muscles working under the golden-brown skin of his massive back.

Scott had been watching the same show. "Nice moves," he said approvingly.

"Do you do that?"

"I do it," he confirmed with a chuckle, "but not around here. If you've got time, let me take you to see some real waves, brah. Thirty-footers, and one after another. Pretty close to heaven."

As I nodded, I realized something a little surprising. There was something disturbing about the view on the beach, and it took me a moment to make sense of it. All that bare skin-that was what bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. Bare skin is great; I fully and wholeheartedly approve of bare skin, under the right circumstances, and particularly with the right companion. But…

Bare skin means no armor. I looked at all the frying tourists sprawled on the sand. Most of them would be shaikujin-corporators from one or another of the megas. Where in Seattle would you see this many corporators wandering around in public without the benefit of any armor whatsoever? Nowhere, that's where. Here, a disgruntled sniper with a grudge to settle would have no trouble with one shot, one kill. Either the tourists were pretty fragging confident in the security provisions-pretty fragging overconfident, if you asked me-or the tropical sun had cooked the sense of self-preservation right out of their pointy little heads.

I pointed that out to Scott, and he nodded slowly. "A bit of both, that's what it is," he suggested. "Na Maka'i-that's the cops, the Hawai'i National Police Force, the HNPF- they keep things buttoned down pretty tight in Waikiki. This part of town ain't a good place to make trouble, hoa, trust me on that one. If you ain't corp, you ain't here, if you take my meaning."

"You're saying the whole of Waikiki's a corporate enclave?"

"More or less, brah, more or less." He nodded his big head. "It's a security thing. If you're walking the streets and you don't look the part, Na Maka'i's going to pull you over and ask you some questions-real polite, and all, but you'd better give them the right answers and have the datawork to back it up."

He shrugged. "But clamp-downs and heat-waves can do only so much, right? Security's good in Waikiki, but it's not that good." He gestured through the window at the scantily clad bothes on the beach. "If I really wanted to take down some suits, I could do it… and get away afterward."

I nodded slowly. That's basically how I had it scanned. "What about the locals, then?" I asked. I pointed to the surfing troll, who was already riding another wave. "You'd expect him to know better than to trust the cops. But he's not wearing any armor."

Scott chuckled. "No, he's not wearing armor, hoa, he is armor. You know the second most popular elective medical procedure in the whole of the islands?"

"Dermal armor," I guessed.

"You got it, brah. Nui dermal armor-dermal armor big-time. Along with bodysculpt to make it look good… or as good as you can get. See, now check out that slag over there? Classic example."

I looked where he was pointing, saw an ork strolling along the beach, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts even more garish than Scott's shirt. His arms and legs were scrawny; his shoulders weren't broad. But by Ghu did he have pecs and abs-massively cut, incredibly defined, as if they were chiseled out of some material other than flesh. Which they were, I realized. His chest and back were layered with enough dermal planting to stop a Manhunter round. The Seco on my hip would barely scratch him.

"Want to guess the most popular procedure?" Scott asked.

'Tell me."

"Sun-shielding, brah. Genetic treatment of the skin to block UV. They tried various chemical treatments, but you had to keep going in for a refresher because you'd eventually just exfoliate the treated skin. The genetic route, new skin is as resistant as the old. See this?" He extended his hand to me, pinched a fold of his skin. "This is SPF eighty-five, hoa. Permanent sunscreen.

I got my eyes done, too-modified iris and photosensitive chemicals in the lens. I don't need shades no matter how bright it gets."

"Expensive, I guess?"

"The eyes, yes," he admitted. Then he chuckled. "Glad Nebula picked up the tab.

"But the skin treatment? No, brah, it's not bad at all. The clinics have got it down to a real assembly-line process, and you've got nui kinds to pick from. Full treatment costs five thousand nuyen, good for life. And lots of the clinics, they offer special family packages-you, the wife, and all the ankle-biters for seven-Kay." He poked my pale forearm. "If you decide to stay here, you might consider it yourself."

"Hey," I protested quickly, "I'm not staying. Just doing my job, then I'm gone."

The chauffeur shrugged. 'That's what everyone says," he told me, "at first."

Still on Kalakaua Avenue, we rolled westward into downtown Waikiki.

I didn't really know what to expect from Waikiki, except that I thought it would be different, somehow. I was disappointed. It was just another city, really. Apart from the curving beach, the rich blue ocean, and the perfect weather, it could just as well have been the corporate enclave in just about any metroplex anywhere in the world. Okay, it was cleaner than most other cities I've seen. But apart from that, this could just as easily have been the rich corporate quarter of Tokyo or Chiba.

Why did I pick two Japanese cities as examples? The people on the sidewalks, chummer, that's why. Nine out of ten of them were Nihonese. I wondered about that for a while, but then I remembered something I'd read a long time ago.

Apparently, during the last decades of the last century, lots of Japanese-and lots of Japanese money-moved into the islands. (The smart-ass who'd written the article I read said something like, "After the Japanese couldn't conquer Ha-wai'i in World War II, they came in afterward and bought it.") Add a large resident Nihonese population to the influx of tourists from Japan-based megacorps, and that would explain it

Scott tooled the Phaeton along the broad, spotless street of Waikiki, showing me all the major sites. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel-"The Pink Lady," Scott called it-a flamingo pink extravaganza of pseudo-Moorish architecture that was more than a century old, but was still recognized as one of the most sumptuous hotels in the islands. The International Market Place, an open-air market comprising scores of booths and stores, under the spreading branches of a banyan tree. (Scott explained that the original International Market Place had been turned into a convention center around the turn of the century, but that after a fire destroyed the center in 2022, the City Council ordered another banyan planted, and the Market Place returned to its earlier glory.) And on and on. Eventually, the sumptuous-looking hotels started to blur into one another, and my eyes started to glaze over.

Scott noticed almost immethately, pulled the car over, and turned to me. "You getting bored, is that it?"

I shrugged. "Call it culture shock, maybe."

The ork snorted. "You call this culture? This is glitz, brah, pure and simple."

"That's what I mean," I told him. "I'm not used to this much money concentrated in one place."

"I got it now, Mr. Dirk." Scott laughed. "You want to see the other side of the coin, right? Okay, you'll get it." And he pulled the car back out into the traffic.

As soon as we were out of the Waikiki enclave, into the real Honolulu, I felt a lot more at home and comfortable. (Depressing, in a way, but there it is.) According to Scott, the official population of Honolulu is almost three million- just a hundred thousand or so less than Seattle's. That's the official figure, of course, in both cases. In Seattle, if you lump in the SINless-the homeless, the indigent, the transient, and the shadowy-the total rises to, depending on which estimate you believe, just short of four million to well over five and a quarter million.

The Honolulu number is probably an underestimate as well, but-cruising down its highways and byways-I couldn't believe that the difference between official population and real population was that great. Don't get me wrong, I did see vagrants and homeless types. (I made sure that Scott included appropriate places on the tour.) But they were nowhere near as numerous as in Seattle, or even in Cheyenne. There were some pretty drekky low-rent areas, and one or two ancient tenement complexes that prompted ideas of urban renewal using high-explosives, but there wasn't anything I'd really class as slums. And there certainly wasn't anything as squalid and soul-killing as Hell's Kitchen, Glow City, or the Barrens back in Seattle.

The most interesting thing about Honolulu, to my mind, was the proximity of the drekkier parts of town to the corporate heart. Around the intersection of King Street and Punchbowl Street, you've got the financial guts of the city, all pristine skyrakers and corp smoothies on the street. Less than half a klick away, there's the "vice shopping mall" that is Hotel Street, lined with sex shows, tough-looking bars, and porno chip outlets, populated by broken-down jammers of all four orientations (hetero and homo male, hetero and homo female), by chipleggers and flashmeisters, and by the fresh meat strolling by to do business with same. Even Seattle has managed to segregate the two facets of its economy a little more.

Hotel Street was the heart of Chinatown, according to Scott, but I didn't see too many ethnic Chinese on the streets. Lots of big slags and biffs who I guessed were native Polynesians and an almost equal number I tentatively labeled as Filipinos. As we cruised slowly by, I watched the action-contract negotiations of various sordid kinds-come to a stop as the participants stared at the Phaeton gliding past. There probably weren't that many Rolls-Royces to be seen in this neck of the woods, I figured. (Come to think of it, that slow cruise pointed out another difference between Honolulu and the underbelly of Seattle: nobody so much as took a potshot at the car.)

From Chinatown we headed west again, swinging past the airport, past the huge restricted area that was the Pearl Harbor military base, and into the region known as Ewa (EH-vah; Scott made sure I got the pronunciation right). As recently as thirty years ago, my tour-guide told me, Ewa had been a city in its own right, close to but still distinct from Honolulu itself. No longer: The larger city had sprawled out, eventually absorbing the smaller. (Much like Everett and Fort Lewis, now that I came to think about it.) Apart from the weather and the clarity of the air, as we drove the streets of Ewa I could easily imagine I was in Renton.

I checked my watch. We'd been cruising for almost two hours, and my stomach was starting to make growling noises again, despite the big breakfast. "I need a bite to eat," I told Scott. "And it's getting on to Miller time, too."

"The bar's fully stocked in the back," the ork told me, "and if you look in me bottom of the fridge there's food-"

"No," I cut him off, "I want to stop somewhere around here. Consider it part of the tour."

He smiled at that. "What do you have in mind?"

I told him, and his smile grew even broader. "Mo' bettah, brah, that's okay. I got just the place in mind."

The place was called Cheeseburger in Paradise, and it was in the grimy heart of Ewa. Scott told me the name as if it was a joke, but I didn't get it. He had to explain about a song by some dead country-folkie called Jimmy Buffet whom I'd never heard of, and by that time it wasn't really funny anymore. In any case, he explained. Cheeseburger in Paradise was originally a chain that had started up in Maui during the nineteen eighties, and eventually spread to the other islands. The chain had gone belly-up in the 'twenties, and recently this place had picked up the name as an ironic commentary. Something like a rat-bag flophouse calling itself the Hilton.

I felt at home the moment I walked in the door. Almost subliminal waves of tension, of intensity, of danger and violence only barely held in check, washed over me. In the semidarkness of the tavern, I could easily imagine I was back in The Blue Flame in Seattle, or even The Buffalo Jump in Cheyenne.

I went in first-Scott had wanted to lead, but I'd insisted-and I felt the eyes on me from the darkened booths and tables. The bartender, a grizzled ork with chipped fangs, gave me a welcoming sneer. From the rough direction of the dance stage-currently vacant, although the lights gleamed on something that could be oil on the worn carpet covering-I heard a muttered comment, something highly derogatory by its tone, and a harsh laugh. Yep, this was just the kind of place I was looking for.

The door opened again behind me, and I felt the looming presence of Scott at my back. Instantly, the feel of the place-the strange dynamic that you can always feel, if you're tuned in closely enough to your instincts-changed. I couldn't believe that the locals of Cheeseburger in Paradise knew Scott personally, but they had to recognize what he was, if not precisely who: a bodyguard, and a very competent one. I could feel the shift as the patrons quickly reoriented their perceptions of me.

I jandered across to an open booth, thinking about the gun on my hip as I walked. That's all it takes, really-just think about the heat you're packing, and where you're packing it. It changes your walk, the way you carry your weight, very subtly. Anyone with street instincts is going to pick up on that change and interpret it correctly. In a totally non-confrontational and non-threatening way, I'd made it abundantly clear to those who mattered that I wasn't traveling unheeled. Scott followed me, and we slid into the curved booth, sitting side by side with our backs to the wall.

A waitress-a hard-faced woman with black roots to her bottle-blond hair-was with us in a minute. "What can I get you?"

"Nothing for me," Scott started, but I shot him a look. He hesitated, then beamed. "Gimme a dog, then," he said.

I raised an eyebrow in question.

"Black Dog beer," Scott explained. "A microbrewery out Kailua way makes it. Real good, if you like your beer dark."

"I'll have a dog too, then," I told the waitress. She walked away without acknowledgment, but a few minutes later returned to place two half-liter glasses filled to the brim with dark liquid on our table.

I tried to pay, but Scott was too fast. "I'll get this one," he said, slipping some money-real folding money, which surprised me-to the waitress. "You got breakfast."

"Did I?"

He chuckled. "It got charged to your room, anyway." He glanced down at his glass. "I shouldn't be doing this, not on duty, but"-he grinned like a bandit, and raised his glass- "okolemaluna!"

I toasted him in return. "Whatever you just said." The beer had a nice head to it, and a sweet, slightly nutty taste. I took a second swig and nodded approvingly. "Good. How's the food here?"

By the time we'd finished our lunch-a large soyburger with Maui chips, two of the same for Scott-the afternoon crowd had started to roll in. A succession of dancers-quite pretty, most of them, and some could even dance-disrobed and strutted their stuff for the indifferent authence. As the patrons gathered along the bar and in the shadowy booths, I felt even more at home. Apart from style of dress and the preponderance of deep tans, these slags were almost exactly like the crowd that frequented my favorite watering holes in Seattle and Cheyenne. Hard-edged customers, most of them-totally at home in the reality of the streets, if not full-on denizens of the shadows. Many were packing-I could see it in the way they moved-and those who weren't looked as though they could more than hold their own even without a weapon.

I sipped at my second beer. Scott was still nursing his first and refused my offer of a refill. "Drinking and driving ain't a good thing with a vehicle control rig," he told me firmly.

A knot of real hard cases were talking biz in the back corner. Macroplast glinted momentarily in the light as a credstick changed hands. I leaned over toward Scott and nodded toward the negotiators. "What are the shadows like around here?" I asked quietly.

He sipped beer to give himself a moment to tiiink. "Pretty dark, brah," he said at last. "When the sun's bright, the shadows can get pretty fragging dark."

"Big shadow community?"

He shrugged. "Depends on how you define it, I guess. There's a fair bit of biz to be done, that's what I hear at least." He grinned crookedly. "Comes from having such a big megacorp presence, that's the way I read it.

"But the core group, the real players?" He shrugged again. "Not too many of them, I guess. Probably fewer than where you're from. And fewer wannabes, too."

"Why's that?"

The ork smile turned predatory for a moment. "Nature of the islands, hoa, that's all. It's a small community here. You frag up, and there's no space to run. The way I hear it, you're good… or you're dead."

I nodded slowly. That made a disturbing kind of sense. As a kind of mental exercise, I ran through a few contingency plans for getting off the islands if things went screwy in a hurry… and quickly realized how few options there really were. Disturbing. I always liked to have running room. "How much actual biz goes down here?" I asked after a moment.

Scott raised his eyebrows. "Hey, you're asking the wrong wikanikanaka, brah," he protested mildly, "I'm just a chauffeur, here."

My expression communicated just what I thought of that disclaimer. "Get actual, chummer," I told him. "You're connected. Somebody like you has got to be. Right?"

I watched his eyes as he debated standing pat with his bluff, and eventually decided against it. He smiled a little self-consciously. "Yeah, okay, I got my ear to the ground. I hear things." He paused. "Some biz goes down here, and in other places like this. But the shadows are different here than they are elsewhere-that's the way I hear it, at least. On the mainland, if you got a good brag-sheet, you get biz. Fixers deal with you on the basis of your street rep, doesn't matter whether they know you or not. Right?"

"Sometimes," I allowed.

"That's not the way it happens here, hoa," he said firmly. "Not the way I hear it, at least… and keep in mind this is all secondhand; I'm a driver, not a runner, okay?" He paused, ordering his thoughts. "The way I hear it, in the islands it's personal relationships that matter more than a brag-sheet, even more than a street rep. People deal with people they know personally, people they've come to trust. Some malihini newcomer to the islands rolls up with a brag-sheet as long as your fragging leg-'I shaved Fuchi ice, I blew away a division of Azzie hard-men, I took Dunkelzahn in a con game'-and nobody's going to touch him, 'cause he's an unknown quantity, see? The kalepa-the fixers- they're going to go with the runners they know, the ones they've dealt with personally before… even if it means going with some hawawa who's not as good as the newcomer. At least the kalepa knows exactly what to expect."

I nodded slowly. That made a certain amount of sense in a tight community with limited running room. You're less likely to bet on an unknown quantity, because if the drek drops into the pot you might find you don't have anyplace to run.

A tight knot of people-lots of black synthleather and studs-jandered in and cruised over to the bar. I could almost feel the attitude from where I sat. Beside me, Scott looked up and grinned. "Somebody you might want to meet, hoa," he told me. Then he raised his voice. "Te Purewa. Hele mai."

One of the black-clad arrivals turned and looked our way. I felt his eyes on me like lasers, burning out of a face that could well have been chiseled from black lava rock. Hawk nose, duck brows, short black hair. And tattoos all over his fragging face: swirls and geometricals and curlicues around his eyes until he looked like a paisley necktie. He smiled- the kind of expression I associated with thoughts of ripping out someone's liver-and he strode over toward our table. He was one big son of a slitch, I saw as he loomed up over us. Big and broad; the bulges of his muscles had bulges on them. "Howzit, Scotty?" he rumbled.

Scott shrugged. "Li' dal." He gestured my way. "Want you to meet somebody, Te Purewa. Bruddah from the mainland, Dirk Tozer."

Te Purewa-was that his name, or some Hawai'ian phrase I hadn't caught yet?-turned those burning dark eyes on me. "Kia oral" he barked at me. And then he bugged out his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

My natural response was to laugh; and when I saw the anger flare in those eyes I knew I'd made a mistake. The big guy scowled, and his tattoos seemed to writhe. Then, without another word, he turned his back on us and strode away.

I turned to Scott. "Oops," I said quietly.

"You got that, bruddah." The ork shook his head. "Shoulda warned you, I guess. Te Purewa-"

"That's his name?"

"Yeah, it's Maori, from Aotearoa-used to be called New Zealand." Scott signed. "Every time I see him, he's more Maori. Good guy, at heart, but sometimes he takes things too far, y'know? All this heritage kanike… Last year it was the tats"-he traced imaginary lines on his face-"then a coupla months back he got himself a linguasoft so he could speak Maori. And now he's doing the traditional greeting crap as well. That whole tongue stuff? He says Maoris look fierce at you as a sign of respect." He shrugged. "Sounds like kanike to me."

"So now he hates me forever?"

Scott chuckled. "Honestly? Te Purewa doesn't have the attention span for holding long grudges, hoa. Next time you see him, snarl at him and say 'Kia oral', and he'll treat you like a long lost bruddah." He paused, and his smile faded. "Thought you might like to meet him 'cause he's the closest thing I know to a real shadowrunner. Te Purewa's SINless, he hangs with some of the fringe kalepa, the fixers on the edge of the action. Don't know what land of biz he does for them-don't really want to know, is it-but he's the closest thing to real street action I know around here."

He glanced at his watch. "Another beer?"

I thought about it, then shook my head. "What's the next stop on the tour?"

The cultural/historical part of the tour was next, it turned out. Scott tooled the big Phaeton back through the financial heart of downtown Honolulu, then continued east into the government sector of the city. First stop was a relatively undistinguished two-story building that looked as though it was made of dressed lava rock. Despite the fact that the place was nothing special, it looked vaguely familiar, as if I'd seen it before. It took me a few seconds to tag the memory. That was it-an old two-D TV show I'd seen at some retrospective festival up in Seattle, something about cops in Hawai'i; that's where I'd seen the place before.

I mentioned this to Scott, but he just shrugged. "Don't know about that, brah, but it's possible, I guess. That's the Iolani Palace. Old place, century and a half old."

"But what is it?" I asked.

The ork looked at me like I'd just misplaced a couple of dozen points of IQ. "It's the palace, hoa. The capitol, where the Ali'i lives and holds court with his kahuna."

"His shaman?"

Scott shook his head. "No. Well, maybe, but… You'll find words in Hawai'ian can have a drek-load of meanings. Take aloha-'hello,' right? Also means 'love,' 'mercy,' 'compassion', 'pity,' maybe half a dozen others.

"And kahuna? Shaman, sure. Priest. But it also means 'advisor,' particularly when you're talking about the Ali'i and his kahuna." Scott chuckled. "Also means someone who's nui good at something, okay? Remember that guy we saw on the surfboard? He's one big kahuna when it comes to surfing."

He paused and shrugged. "Where was I? Oh yeah. The Iolani Palace, it's the 'working' capitol. On some big, nui important ritual days, the Ali'i and his court fly over to the old capitol on the Big Island. But most of the time, this is where King Kam does his stuff."

"This is King Kamehameha V, right?"

"That's it, brah." The ork pointed across the street. "You want to see King Kam I, Kamehameha the Great? There he is."

I looked where he was pointing and saw the large statue he meant. It showed a perfectly proportioned man with mahogany skin and noble features, holding a spear. He wore a yellow cape and a weird kind of curving headdress, both apparently made of feathers. "Quite the outfit," I noted.

'The traditional dress of the Ali'i," Scott agreed. "King Kam wears the same stuff for official business." He paused. "From what I've heard, that statue's life-size, by the way. Kam the Great was one big boy."

I glanced back at the statue. At a guess, I'd have said it was at least 2.2 meters tall-7'3" for the metrically challenged-and that didn't include the headdress. "Big boy, all right," I agreed. "Any troll blood in the king's lineage?"

Scott chuckled at that as he pulled ahead.

Our last stop was maybe a block from the palace, the other side of the government business. Scott pointed to a big ferrocrete building whose vertical lines evoked images of both classical columns and waterfalls. Over a set of large double doors hung a massive disk of metal-bronze, probably, judging by its color-bearing a crest. "That's the Haleaka'aupuni," Scott announced. "I guess you could translate that as 'Government House.' The legislature sits here, and this is where the administrators and the datapushers do their thing."

I remembered some of the material I'd scanned on the flight in. "Is the king still scrapping it out with the legislature?" I asked.

The ork shot me a speculative look. "You're not as out-of-touch as I thought, brah," he said with a hint of respect. "Yeah, King Kam's still butting heads with the Na Kama'aina hotheads in the legislature." We turned a corner, cruising down another side of Government House, and Scott pointed ahead. "There's some of the hotheads' constituents now."

I looked.

It wasn't large as demonstrations go-I've seen larger mobs protesting a hike in monorail fares in Seattle-but there was something about it, something I couldn't quite put my finger on, that made me think it was well-organized. There were maybe a hundred people massed before the steps of Government House. Not many, in the grand scheme of things, but every time the news photographer who was standing at the top of the steps panned his vidcam over them, they all packed in tighter in the area he was scanning. To make the crowd look denser, and hence much bigger, when the footage aired on the news tonight, I realized. That was too much media awareness for a "spontaneous gathering." I could well be looking at the Hawai'ian version of something an old Lone Star colleague had once called "rent-a-mob"-professional agitators, or at least a group led by professional agitators.

All the protesters seemed to be Polynesian, I noticed. Lots of orks and trolls, with only a few humans and dwarfs tossed in for spice. (No elves, though, I noted, or none that I spotted. Interesting, that…) Lots of bronze or mahogany skin, lots of black hair. Most wore more or less the same as Scott-the same as me, for that matter-but some were dressed in traditional aboriginal costumes of one kind or another. Lots of straw, and grass, and feathers. Most of the placards were too small for me to read from this distance, but I could make out one. "E make loa, haole?" I sounded out to Scott.

He frowned, then snorted in disgust, but didn't translate.

"What's it mean?" I pressed.

"It means, 'Die, Anglo,' " he admitted after a moment. "Like I said, hotheads."

I gestured toward the crowd. "Are these people ALOHA?"

Scott laughed. "Are you lolo, bruddah? You stupid? You think I'd get this close to a pack of ALOHA goons with a fragging haole in the car?" He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was more serious. "ALOHA doesn't go for this kind of kanike. Mr. Dirk. Peaceful demonstrations? Not their style. They blow drek up, that's how they get their ideas across."

"Na Kama'aina, then?"

He shrugged. 'The leaders, sure-one or two of them, the slags who arranged for the newsvid boys to be here. The rest? They're just twinkies come along 'cause they've got nothing better to do with their time."

A couple of the demonstrators at the back of the pack had turned to watch the limo as we rolled by. One of them had the same kind of facial tattoos as the Maori in the bar. Instead of black leather, though, she wore only a loincloth and a kind of skirt made from dried reeds "or some drek. "I can't complain about the costume choice," I remarked, and Scott chortled appreciatively.

"Some people get an idea in their heads, and they just run with it," he said. 'The costumes. Trying to speak the old languages… or what they think are the old languages- some died out, but that doesn't stop the hotheads from pretending." He snorted again. "Look at them. Refugees from the luau shows put on for the tourists… except these ule don't know the show's over."

I blinked in mild surprise at the vehemence in his voice. "Is that what you think of what's-his-name?" I asked quietly after a moment.

'Te Purewa?" He paused. Then, "More or less," he admitted. "I don't think he's taken to waving placards at the government yet, but…" He shrugged.

'Te Purewa's not his real name, is it?" I guessed.

Scott gave a bark of laughter. "You got that," he agreed. "Mark Harrop, that's his real name, can you beat that? Mark fragging Harrop. Couple years back he decided he had Maori blood in his veins-like, a couple drops, maybe-and picked the name out of some book."

I was silent for almost a minute as Scott swung the limo around a corner and headed back toward Waikiki and Diamond Head. At last I asked gently, "What about you, Scott? You don't have any sympathy for Na Kama'aina? You're Polynesian by descent, aren't you?"

He didn't answer right away, and I wondered if I'd offended him. Then he smiled, a little shamefacedly. "I'm a kama'aina," he agreed. "I'm a 'land child'-quarter-blood, but I get it from both sides of my family. My mother, she was a Nene kahuna."

"Nay-nay?" I asked.

"Nene, Hawai'ian goose," he explained. "Looks kind of like a Canada goose-except it's not extinct, it's got claws on its feet, and it likes volcanic rock. One of the local Totems.

"Anyway," he went on, "you can be a kama'aina, a local, without being part of Na Kama 'aina, if you get my drift."

"And you've got no desire to take a Hawai'ian name and run around in grass skirts?"

"Grass makes me itch." He paused. "I've already got the Hawai'ian name," he added quietly after a moment, "I don't have to take one. My mother, she gave me one."

I waited, but he didn't go on. "Well?" I pressed at last.

He sighed. "My given name is Ka wean ula a Hi'iaka I ka poli o Pele ka wahine 'ai ho nua." The polysyllables rolled off his tongue like a smooth flowing river.

"Holy frag," I announced when I was sure he was done.

"Yeah, quite the mouthful."

"And it means?"

"'The red glow of the sky made by Hi'iaka in the bosom of Pele the earth eating woman,' if you can believe that."

"You must get writer's cramp signing your name."

He laughed. "That's why my father called me Scott," he explained.