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.