I went outside Stone Palace today. I had to get out. I walked along a street of bars and pleasure houses, where people sell services, their bodies, drugs in any form or effect. And beggars—I have never been approached by beggars before. People used to try to press coins into my hands when I helped my poet through the streets. I regretted not having money or anything else to give the crippled children in the city, until I realized that their deformities are induced, not congenital. They have mutilated themselves, or they have been mutilated.
How could we leave earth to this?
During the following days, Mischa watched the pseudosibs from a distance and found out all she could about them from the people with whom they dealt. She saw that their section of Stone Palace was much less guarded than Blaisse's, and that they seemed not to have such a pathological fear of the city. This encouraged her. Yet time had passed; she was forced to take note of it: her immediate need was to replenish her store of tribute before her uncle and Gemmi called her again. She spied on Stone Palace from the alpha-helix all one day, but did not approach it, and when the lights above began to dim, she left her own shabby section and climbed down to the Circle.
She had been watching one of the bright little import shops facing the Palace. A recess one level above the shop gave her a place to sit where she was not obviously spying on it. The climb had tired her; she kept dozing off as she waited. When the ceiling lights faded to their lowest intensity for the night, the merchant pulled heavy curtains across the multicolored sparkles in the windows and locked his door. Mischa already knew that he lived behind the shop. That was not in itself a hindrance; she was by training and preference a sneakthief, and quiet. It only remained for her to watch his place throughout one night, to discover whether he had a companion contract or a security subscription.
The patrol did stop once, early on. Mischa inspected the Family people hopefully, but neither of the pair was the ice-eyed administrator. She must be long since promoted from foot patrol, but Mischa would have liked to rob a place whose protection was that one's responsibility.
Mischa waited until the night was half over. Finally, doubting her ability to stay awake another four hours, another one hour, she walked slowly home.
The next night, the hours passed slowly. Mischa watched from a higher vantage point. The security patrol stopped only once, at the same time as the night before. Mischa knew it was good: she knew she could walk in and take what she wanted whenever she decided to.
Perspiration broke out on her forehead. She held out her hand and found it trembling. She clenched her fist and the new scars on her wrists turned white. Her body tried to tell her that she had been too badly hurt too recently, that she was still weak, that she was tired from her vigil. She climbed down across the roofs until she was over the shop. Her knees and her stomach felt the same, frightened. When she drove the shaking out with anger, it was anger at herself and at her fear: tomorrow when the time came to return, would she find some excuse against it? She might fool herself into being too tired, too weak, any of a hundred things. The possibility of that much self- deception scared her as much as the possibility that she was losing her nerve.
There was no motion nearby, little sound, an aura of life, but sleeping life. Lying flat on the roof, she listened, and received a reward of silence. Looking over the edge, she found the windows dark and curtained and the door firmly closed.
Chris had taught her to pick locks so early that she could not remember the lessons. He had been a good thief; she was better. She swung down to the next level. The shop door was recessed, putting her in deep shadow. With her lockpicks she gently probed the double locks. Opening them took longer than she liked, but the door finally clicked open, with neither the shrill scream of a scare-alarm nor the low reverberation of a warning device in the merchant's sleeping quarters.
Mischa eased through the doorway. Inside the shop, semiprecious stones glowed deep black or glinted brightly. As Mischa shut the door, the outside lights flickered. For half a second the shop was a shattered rainbow. It would soon be light in Center.
The single doorway at the back of the shop was closed only by a curtain. Mischa crept quietly about, checking for silent-alarm wires, finding none.
The glass cases were locked and uninteresting. Everything on display was semiprecious or artificial, and set. Unset stones were less trouble, harder to trace.
Beneath the cases, shallow drawers in tiers of four each opened toward the back. Narrow panels separated them. The drawers were locked, but no more securely than the front door. They held boxes of pendants and rings and anklets of no higher quality than the jewelry already displayed. Unperturbed, Mischa stopped actively searching, sat back against the wall, and simply looked, as she did for the moon on the nights she was outside. The sky-glow behind the clouds would catch on the edge of her vision, not where her sight was sharpest. This search was similar, but she made her mind act, rather than her eyes.
She knelt again before the drawers and slid her fingers beneath their lower edges. She tapped the panels between them, listening for any hollowness, and tugged at them gently. One opened, swinging upward and outward smoothly and quickly. The hinge clicked faintly; the panel remained open.
A flexible coil of thin insulated wire, badly balanced on a narrow shelf, slipped out. Mischa caught it before its attachments clattered on the floor. She sat back on her heels, holding the lock leads. Outside, the lights flickered again, casting a quick streak of gold past the shop's window curtains. The radiance caught on the tips of the paired electrodes. The light faded, and the shop was scarlet and ebony once more.
Mischa placed the cold electrodes against her temples. They attached themselves, pushing fibers into her skin; they drew her out, and sent her along the thin silver wires. She could feel the resonances of the man sleeping in the room behind the shop. His recorded essences formed a barrier; the lock should open only to him.
Mischa did not like being forced so close to anyone; with the lock recording on one side and the merchant on the other, she could perceive him better than she had ever been able to perceive any ordinary person, anyone but Chris or Gemmi. The usual faint aura took shape, clarified, solidified. Wanting to fling the contacts away and leave, Mischa touched the wall of a simulated consciousness, and reached out for the true being. She became a channel for thoughts; she could not shield herself. They washed in, unaltered, amplified, but she took them and molded her own patterns to fit, and ran up against the barrier. It resisted, yielded, but did not open. She shifted and tried again, racing through the spaces of several independent variables. Mischa struggled to stay afloat and aware in an inundation of hidden, half-controlled fears and desires.
The barrier shuddered and dissolved; the lock on the hidden compartment fell open. Mischa pulled away the sticky contacts and threw them down. She was dripping with sweat, but steady.
The secret drawer slid open to gentle pressure. Mischa lifted out one of the fist-sized leather sacks that filled it.
The stones, poured into her palm, glowed as though ready to erupt with light and heat. Each was all colors, one at a time. They shifted and moved in her hands like living things.
Mischa put the first bag under her jacket. The others were filled with set stones, but set stones worth stealing. She took as many as she could comfortably and unobtrusively carry in her inner pockets. At the bottom of the drawer lay a flat black box with a pebbled leather surface. She opened it slowly.
Even in the darkness the eyes glittered out at her. The size of a fingernail, or a thumbnail, or the entire exposed area of an eye, they were small multicolored multifaceted concavoconvex discs that fractured light through the planes of precious stones or reflected it from polished metal. The opaque iris enhancers had openings for the pupil, but many of the even minimally transparent ones were a single expanse of decoration. In a person's eyes they turned the world different colors or broke it into pieces or turned it upside down. They were hand-made, hand- designed; no two pair were alike. One pair was pink roses with an effect of three dimensions. Another held spirals that could drink a soul. Mischa shut the box and kept it.
Since the eyes were not displayed, they must be contraband, smuggled in past the Family of the gate without duties or taxes. And that meant, in turn, that Mischa was almost safe in taking them; the theft could not be reported to security, and the merchant had little other recourse. She was almost sorry to steal from a man who cheated the Lady Clarissa's people.
The drawer stuck when she tried to close it. She eased it out and pushed again. It squeaked against its runners. She froze, but behind her the merchant came groggily awake, broadcasting the desire to pretend he had heard nothing. He was indecisive and afraid, and without being aware of the cause, upset by the remnants of Mischa's intrusion into his mind.
Mischa heard him get up; his attempted silence was marred by his weight. Even on tiptoe he sent vibrations through the floor. Mischa moved back and waited beside the curtained doorway. In a moment the naked shopkeeper
