Lamey took her hand and put the note into it. His blue eyes looked into hers. “Take it and welcome,” he said. “Buy yourself something nice with the rest.”
Gratitude flooded Gredel’s eyes. Tears fell down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said. “I know I don’t deserve it.”
“Of course you do,” Lamey said. “You deserve the best, Earthgirl.” He kissed her, his lips coming away salty. “Now you take this to the building agent, right? You don’t give it to Nelda, because she might give it away again.”
“I’ll do that right away,” Gredel said.
“And—” His eyes turned solemn. “Does Antony need taking care of? Or need encouragement to leave? You know what I mean.”
Gredel shrank from the idea. “No,” she said. “No—he won’t stay long.”
“You remember it’s an option, right?”
She made herself nod in answer.
Gredel took the money to the agent, a scowling little woman who had an office in the building and who smelled of cabbage and onions. She insisted on a receipt for the two months’ rent, which the woman gave grudgingly, and as Gredel walked away, she thought about Lamey and how this meant that he loved her.
Too bad he’s going to die.The thought formed in her mind unbidden.
The worst part was, she knew it was true.
People like Lamey didn’t survive for long. There weren’t manyold linkboys—that’s why they weren’t called linkmen. Sooner or later they were caught and killed. And the people they loved—their wives, their lovers, their children—paid as well, like Ava, with a term on the labor farms, or with their own execution.
The point was reinforced a few days later when Stoney was caught hijacking a cargo of fuel cells in Maranic Port. His trial was over two weeks later, and he was executed the following week. Because stealing private property was a crime against common law, not against the Praxis, he wasn’t subjected to the tortures reserved for those who transgressed against the ultimate law, but simply strapped into a chair and garotted.
The execution was broadcast on the video channel reserved for punishments, and Lamey made his boys watch it. “To make them more careful,” he said simply.
Gredel didn’t watch. She went to Caro’s instead and surprised herself by helping Caro drink a bottle of wine. Caro was delighted at this lapse on Gredel’s part, and was at her most charming all night, thanking Gredel effusively for everything she’d done for her. Gredel left with the wine singing in her veins. She had rarely felt so good.
The euphoria lasted until she entered Nelda’s apartment. Antony was in full cry. A chair lay in pieces on the floor, and Nelda had a cut above her eye that wept red tears across her face. Gredel froze in the door as she came in, then tried to slip toward her room without attracting Antony’s attention.
No such luck. He lunged toward her, grabbed her blouse by its shoulder. She felt the fabric tear. “Where’s the money?” he shouted. “Where’s the money you get by selling your tail?”
Gredel held out her pocketbook in trembling hands. “Here!” she said. “Take it!”
It was clear enough what was going on, it was Antony Scenario Number One. He needed cash for a drink, and he’d already taken everything Nelda had.
He grabbed it and poured coins into his hand. Gredel could smell the juniper scent of the gin reeking off his pores. He looked at the coins dumbly, then threw the pocketbook to the floor and put the money in his pocket.
“I’m going to put you on the street myself, right now,” he said, and seized her wrist in one huge hand. “I can get more money for you than this.”
“No!” Gredel filled with terror, tried to pull away.
Anger blazed in Antony’s eyes. He drew back his other hand.
Gredel felt the impact not on her flesh but in her bones. Her teeth snapped together, her heels went out from under her, and she sat on the floor.
Then Nelda was screaming, her hands clutching Antony’s forearm as she tried to keep him from hitting Gredel again. “Don’t hit the child!” she wailed.
“Stupid bitch!” Antony growled, and turned to punch Nelda in the face. “Don’t ever step between me and her again!”
Turning his back was Antony’s big mistake. Anger blazed in Gredel, an all-consuming blowtorch annihilating fury that sent her lunging for the nearest weapon, a chair leg that had been broken off when Antony smashed the chair in order to underscore one of his rhetorical points. Gredel kicked off her heels and rose to her feet and swung the chair leg two-handed for Antony’s head.
Nelda gaped at her, her mouth an O, and wailed again. Antony took this as a warning and started to turn, but it was too late. The wooden chair leg caught him in the temple, and he fell to one knee. Made of compressed dedger fiber, the chair leg had broken raggedly, and the splintery end gouged his flesh.
Gredel gave a shriek powered by fifteen years of pure, suppressed hatred and swung again. There was a solid crack as the chair leg connected with Antony’s bald skull, and the big man dropped to the floor like a bag of rocks. Gredel dropped her knees onto his barrel chest and swung again and again. She remembered the sound that Lamey’s boots made going into Moseley and wanted badly to make those sounds come from Antony. The ragged end of the chair leg tore long ribbons out of Antony’s flesh. Blood splashed the floor and walls.
She only stopped when Nelda wrapped her arms around her and hauled her off the unconscious man. Gredel turned to swing at Nelda, and stopped only when she saw the older woman’s tears.
Antony was making a bubbling sound as he breathed. A slow river of blood poured out of his mouth onto the floor. “What do we do?” Nelda wailed as she turned little helpless circles on the floor. “What do we do?”
Gredel knew the answer to the question perfectly well. She got her phone out of her pocketbook, went to her room and called Lamey. He was there in twenty minutes with Panda and three other boys. He looked at the wrecked room, at Antony lying on the floor, at Gredel standing over the man with the bloody chair leg in her hand.
“What do you want done?” he asked Gredel. “We could put him on a train, I suppose. Or in the river.”
“No!” Nelda jumped between Antony and Lamey. Tears brimmed from her eyes as she turned to Gredel. “Put him on the train. Please, honey, please.”
“On the train,” Gredel repeated to Lamey.
“We’ll wake him up long enough to tell him not to come back,” Lamey said. He and his boys picked up Antony’s heavy body and dragged it toward the door.
“Where’s the freight elevator?” Lamey asked.
“I’ll show you,” Gredel said.
The tenants were working people who went to bed at a reasonable hour, and the building was silent at night and the halls empty. Lamey’s boys panted for breath as they hauled the heavy, inert carcass with its heavy bones and solid muscle. They reached the freight elevator doors, and the boys dumped Antony on the floor while they caught their breath.
“Lamey,” Gredel said.
He looked at her. “Yes?”
She looked up at him, into his accepting blue eyes.
“Put him in the river,” she said.
Something floated by on the surface of the water, and Sula tried not to look at it. Martinez gathered her in his arms and began to kiss her. She kissed him back, briefly, distractedly. She jerked and gave a shiver as a fat raindrop spattered on the back of her hand.
“Are you cold? Let me close the canopy.”
Martinez pushed a lever, and the boat’s plastic canopy flapped forward, cutting off the breeze. Suddenly there was no air. Sula lunged forward and heaved the canopy back with a cry.
“What’s wrong?” Martinez asked, startled.
“Boat!” Sula commanded. “Go to the quay! Now!” Panic flapped in her chest like torn canvas flogging in the wind. Raindrops spattered on her face.
Martinez took her by the hand. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“No!” she managed to shout, and wrenched her hand free. The boat slid against the quay and Sula launched herself for dry land. Pain jolted her shins as they barked against the stone quay, but after a brief scramble she was on her feet and walking briskly away. Martinez remained behind, his arms thrown out for balance, ridiculous in the swaying little boat.
“What did I do wrong?” he called, bewildered.
Rain hit her face in cold little slaps.
“Nothing!” she answered over her shoulder, and increased her pace.
SEVEN
The catafalque of the last Great Master rolled past, moving at a silent, glacial glide along the length of the Boulevard of the Praxis, all the way from the Great Refuge at the peak of the city’s acropolis to the Couch of Eternity on the other end of the High City’s great rock. Atop the monstrous catafalque was an image of the last Shaa itself, twice life size. The massive body reclined amid sculpted folds of slack gray skin, its flat-topped, prow-shaped head erect, like some lonely butte in a distant desert country, and gazing ahead into a future that only those as wise as the Shaa could expect ever to see.
Martinez had been standing under somber skies for what seemed hours. He wore parade mourning dress, with cape and brocade and epaulets and jackboots, and a tall black leather shako atop his head. Service colors were reversed in mourning garb, so instead of green tunic and trousers with silver buttons and braid, the tunic and trousers were the white of mourning, with green collar, cuffs, braid, buttons, and brocade. The cape was white and lined with green, and weighted at the corners to preserve its line.
The uniform was stiff with starch and unfamiliarity, and the tall collar chafed the underside of Martinez’s chin. The jackboots were hot and heavy, and the shako with its silver plate sat like a millstone on his skull. The scabbard of the sickle-shaped dress knife, with which he was entitled to slice the throats of subordinates who displeased him, banged against his thigh when he walked.
The catafalque crept past, followed by a band—all Cree, with motorized booming kettledrums and double-reed flutes that wailed a weird, wild chant like the keening of some half-savage species from the dawn of time. These were followed by a float that held the various machines that rumor maintained had been connected to Anticipation of Victory during the latter portion of its life. These were covered with white shrouds, and would be burned along with the last Shaa, taking their secrets with them.
Martinez couldn’t help but think this was a pity. The Shaa had been very private where their anatomy and physiology were concerned, let alone their mentation. On their decease, each Shaa had been cremated along with their personal servants and gear, and the surviving Shaa had made certain that all proper procedures were followed. Whatever was going on beneath those folds of skin, or in those prow-shaped heads, remained a secret of the Shaa alone.
But now therewere no surviving Shaa to assure that the evidence was destroyed. This was a perfect opportunity for a postmortem if not an actual dissection. If Martinez had been in charge of arrangements, the funeral and its solemn procession would have been postponed for days if not months, while expert pathologists sought out every last secret of Shaa physiology, and the best cyberneticians examined the machines to determine if they were, in fact, repositories of Shaa memory.
But Martinez was not in charge, and the secrets of the Shaa would die with the last of their kind.
Following Anticipation of Victory and its machines came the senior mourners, all in their reversed mourning uniforms: the white and deep red of the lords convocate, the white and brown of the Civil Service, the white and green of the Fleet, each service organized by species, in order of the seniority of conquest. The Naxids were first, their long bodies curving right and left in order to
