demonstrated. The key to success was unity toward corporate goals and social cultivation. Daniel resented these requirements because he wasn't any good at them. He mocked the system because of his own lack of confidence at ever being able to succeed in it. He constantly betrayed himself.
For a break from the monotony of code debugging, he walked to the supply room. He didn't need any supplies but he liked the smells of paper and glue in the room, a musty contrast to the antiseptic plastics of Microcore's corridors. He felt comforted by the accumulation of bulk products, like sheaves of arrows kept in a castle armory against attack by an enemy. Reams of colored paper were aligned like the ranks of Napoleonic soldiers, a bright and proud symmetry made glorious by the certainty it would be shattered- not by battle, he conceded, but rather by the more mundane sacrifice of memo and brochure. Glory! That's what life lacks, Daniel thought. The chance of sacrifice for a doomed ideal, or to run to a new world to create ideals for yourself. There was no room for glory in the modern world, he thought. No room for catapults.
Raven had said to bring a light, and he liked that. How often in the city did you have to provide your own illumination? Or heat? It was so bright you could never see the stars. He liked the serendipity of their encounter, a chance meeting that was now to lead to a rendezvous in a subway station. 'Bring a sense of adventure!' He'd thought it wasn't needed. Maybe tonight, with this intriguing new woman, it would be.
CHAPTER FOUR
She was prompt, which Daniel had learned not to expect from women. She was waiting for him.
'Where are we going in the subway?' he asked.
'Not where you'd expect.'
Daniel didn't really care. Her habit of answering obliquely amused him for the moment, and he frankly evaluated her at the entrance to the tube station as she'd evaluated him. Raven had not dressed in anything really feminine, but her cover-suit of synthetics stretched enough to show her to good advantage, slim but with some shape to her. Enough to make him curious to see her in something else. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders and subtle jewelry sparkled. Her choice was the understatement of a woman who understood her effect on men. Daniel had dressed casually but with thought as well, the walking shoes and durable denim shirt trying to suggest a kind of vigorous energy he calculated she might look for in a man. If so, she gave no sign she noticed.
'You look nice,' he offered.
She smiled politely and dipped a shoulder to slip off a small backpack. 'I carried this from home so now it's your turn for a while. It's dinner.'
'When I suggested eating out, I didn't mean to be so literal.'
'We're going to be far out. Did you bring a light?'
'I didn't know what you meant. I've got a flashlight, an antique cigarette lighter, and a matchbook. I would have brought a table lamp but it was awkward under my arm.'
She laughed at that. 'Good! It's best to be prepared.' Then she skipped ahead of him and down the stairs into the tube station. He followed.
Commuters were still streaming upward to go home, trudging in a sluggish gray river of the rumpled and tired. None smiled. Whisper-signs tried to cheer them. 'In the world of United Corporations,' murmured one, 'security assures happiness.'
Daniel got out his fare card and prepared to breast the current but Raven tugged his arm.
'This way.'
She ducked into a shadowy side corridor past posted signs that limited entry to authorized transit employees only. Did she work for the tube? They came to a locked door. A tapping of her fingers at the keycard panel and they were in, the heavy metal clicking behind them. They were in a maintenance storeroom, Daniel saw, filled with janitorial supplies. 'You're a sanitation engineer?'
'I got the combination from a friend. He works here part-time.'
'Ah.' Was she looking for a mop and cleanser tryst? 'Come here often?' he asked lightly, glancing around at the shelves of chemicals. 'We could've just gone to my place.'
She was at the back of the room, working at something on the wall, and didn't even bother to glance back at him. 'Don't kid yourself.' There was a clank and she lifted a vent grate to one side. 'Come on.'
There was a sign above the vent opening: ENTRY FORBIDDEN.
'Can't you read?' he joked.
She was already backing into a concrete chute, her legs dropping down out of sight. 'Can't you think for yourself?'
He followed her to the back of the room and ducked his head through the opening. A concrete tube with rungs led into darkness below. Raven had already swung onto the ladder and was rapidly climbing downward, a light at her belt illuminating the next rungs. Daniel followed, mystified, his feet fumbling in the gloom.
When he reached the bottom thirty feet below he switched on his own light. Three tunnels branched out, bulbs glimmering distantly down two of them. There was the wet, dusty smell of concrete. 'Are we supposed to be down here?' he asked.
'Who are you asking, Daniel? Me? Them?' She pointed toward the surface. 'Or yourself?' She waited a moment for his answer, watching his face.
He looked around, then grinned at her. 'Lead on.'
She took the central tunnel and they emerged in a wider underground corridor, this one brightly lit by lamps every thirty feet. It stretched to a vanishing point in each direction, branching tunnels marked by ovals of shadow. There was a low hum of ventilation fans and a current of air. The concrete tube walls were lined with pipes, two of them a meter wide and others stepping down in size to an electrical conduit the width of a garden hose. Signs dangled with numbers and arrows. Dyson felt as if he was in a labyrinth. 'Where are you taking me? To the minotaur?'
She glanced at him appreciatively. 'A classical reference. Are you a scholar?'
'A history major. Damned useless, my father called it.'
'Did he? What does your father do?'
'He died in marketing, a profession so futuristic in its outlook that he had a heart attack trying to stay trendy. He didn't regard history as merely irrelevant, he saw it as a threat to all he worked for. Which guaranteed I'd gravitate to it.'
'He sounds like a man of strong opinions.'
'Loud opinions, anyway. He believed in the kind of progressive change that keeps things exactly the way they are. I think he liked what the world became. Organized.'
'And you don't?'
'It's dull.'
'Do you really think so?' She looked at him with interest.
'I feel squeezed, sometimes.'
'Yes.' She nodded as if he'd given a correct answer. 'And what about your mother?'
'She learned not to have opinions, which I guess made her minor in feminist literature useless as well. All theory, no practice. She used to say I inherited some of her waffle genes.'
'And did you agree?'
'I didn't agree with much of anything after age twelve. But like most kids I didn't prevail, I merely escaped. A history degree was my best revenge.'
'You sound about as close to your parents as I am to mine.'
'Too strict?'
'Too… absent. I was adopted.' She didn't seem inclined to elaborate.
'When she was widowed my mother announced she was turning over a newly independent leaf,' Daniel said. 'Three months later she married a clone of my father and retired with him to Costa Rica on the insurance. I haven't seen her for two years.'
'And you feel guilty?'
'Relieved.'
