“Please, you must, there’s no one who will help me!”
The little girl squinted up at Will. She couldn’t know what was going on, but she looked miserable.
Christ, for all he knew these were plants sent by the EPs to test the loyalty of their newest member. He stood there like a fool, and the man’s head whipped around again toward the alley and he started dragging the girl away.
Will had the nagging sense of having missed an opportunity. At crucial moments of choice, he remembered reading somewhere, most of the business of choosing is already over. The two were moving away from him then, and as he was just touching his failure, getting accustomed to it, his paralysis suddenly lifted. “Wait!” He ran over to the man and said quickly, “There’s a utility tunnel off Tanamonde Street in Sangaree. Behind the medical offices. Ghosts still go there sometimes, you might be able to make a connection.” The man stared at him, his expression strained and unchanging. “But citycops go there, too, they know about it, so … I don’t know. Take your chances.” Shit, why didn’t the man move? “That’s all I can do, I can’t do anything else.”
He turned on his heel and walked very quickly away. Behind him a girl’s voice said, questioningly, “Daddy?” and a scared reply: “Shut up.” Hurried footsteps followed.
Near the lift station he passed three EPs going the way he’d come. He stepped inside and stood there alone, thankful there were clean clothes to come, for his shirt was cold and wet under his armpits. Then the lift doors opened and he went out, clutching the bag with the EP uniform until his fingers turned white.
“You’re late,” said Hart, as Will buckled into the shuttle seat.
“Thanks for waiting.”
“Any problem? You don’t look terrific.”
“No problem, I just had to change into uniform.”
Hart raised one classic eyebrow. “Wearing civilian clothing off-duty can be a court-martial offense.”
“Court-martial me, then.” Will leaned back in the seat and stretched his legs as far as the space allowed. “If you think I’m wearing this thing in Sangaree, you’re out of your mind.”
Hart did not reply. He leaned his head back on the seat-rest and closed his eyes. He liked to savor the sensation of lift-off without visual stimuli to interfere.
A few days of Everun faded the memory of the man and the little girl quite thoroughly. It was literally another world, with a flood of stimuli, and in an incredibly short span of time, Opal began to seem distant and irrelevant. Will walked the slopes joyously, delighting in the downhill of downhill. He passed roasting nuts in little stalls outside of restaurants, he listened to strangers on the street talk in their fantastic accents. He watched girls display their chests shamelessly. The day after he arrived, he went to the ocean and walked on the sand. He was flushed with a thousand sensations. That night at dinner in the Residence, Hart said, “You’re not having any difficulty?”
“Difficulty?”
Hart poured a glass of the stuff they called tiko. He said, “A certain minority of nonplanetborn never adjust to downhill. Not very many rave and run hysterical, but a fair number are unhappy and nervous.”
“Really?” Will took it in blankly. “I don’t see why. We’ve all seen pictures of other worlds. Why should it come as a shock?”
“You’re one of the lucky majority, then. I have heard that stationers have a harder time than Cities people. I don’t know why.”
Will thought about this a few days later when he gathered his clothes and left the sex-bar in the highest reaches of Lankio Quarter, where the six Baret guards he’d been drinking with the previous night still lay snoring on the floor. He went out to the porch and looked down at the city. The usual morning mist of Everun had gathered from the mountains, and lay like a fairy tale over the shuttered roofs. The sun was far behind it somewhere, friendly and known. Will put on his shoes and wished he had some tea, but he didn’t want to wake anybody.
Imagine being upset by this. He shook his head and, slinging his shirt over one shoulder, descended the steps. The sex-bar was on stilts, being in the favorite pathway (they told him) of a spring run-off from the mountain that Lankio Quarter sat on. He threaded his way through the gambling halls and restaurants and houses until he reached die Flat and the Street of Dreams.
It was about an hour’s walk to the Residence from here. Will stopped in a store with a particularly colorful awning and let the woman inside show him a red silk scarf. Unfolded, it was a good five feet square—Bemie could wrap herself in it, if she wanted. The color was superb, and it felt like a cloud. The woman told him the price, and he whistled. Still, how often was he downhill? He was ready to pay when he remembered that Bemie thought she didn’t look good in red. And he really shouldn’t spend the money anyway….
In the end he got two, red for Lysette and green for Bernadette. He was lighter for the equivalent of two weeks’ pay, but he kept whistling as he walked the streets. He imagined their faces when he gave them the scarves—separately, of course; Bemie and Lysette had never gotten along.
When he reached the Residence, he folded the scarves carefully into his bag and went downstairs to meet Hart and report on what he’d heard from his drinking partners.
Hart took him to the second floor of a brothel in the administrative district. It was also the top floor, and Hart paid for the entire use of it themselves. The manager gave Will an odd look as he followed Hart up
