Sula needed the appropriate documents for her demonstration, so it was two days before she could approach Casimir. During that time there were a pair of bombings in different parts of the city, causing no fatalities though each explosion was big enough so that the Naxids felt they couldn’t suppress the news. Fifty-three hostages were shot.
While she waited, she went to the Cat Street club with Spence and Macnamara—it was a huge place, with one dance band in the main room and another on the lower level, glass-walled courts for ball games, a long curved bar made of black ceramic and silver alloy, and a wide selection of computerized entertainments. Women in low-slung pantalettes, bottles in holsters on their hips, wandered from table to table pouring drinks straight into the open mouths of the clientele. Smoking was permitted, and a permanent fog of tobacco and hashish hung below the high ceiling.
Sula confined her debauchery to sparkling water, but she found herself smiling as she glanced over the club. Gredel had spent a great many nights in places like this with her lover, Lamey, who had done much the same sort of work as Casimir. On Zanshaa they might be called clique members, but on Spannan they were linkboys. They were young, because few lived to be old before encountering the work farm or the garotte. Gredel’s father had been a linkboy who fled ahead of an indictment, and her mother spent years on an agricultural commune paying for her man’s misstep.
Gredel had grown up in an environment where she was going to meet certain people and make certain decisions. She tried not to make the mistakes her mother had made, and instead invented mistakes all her own.
The sound of the club, the music and laughter and electronic cries, rose around her. Sula had only just reached her majority at twenty-three, but somehow to her the Cat Street club seemed a younger person’s idea of fun. The club was a straightforward appeal to the flesh, to desire for sex or rhythm or companionship or oblivion. For a terrorist, who plotted death by gun or bomb, it was perhaps a little tame.
One-Step looked at her reproachfully as Sula walked home reeking of other people’s vices. “One-Step would show you a better time,” he said.
“One-Step—” Sula began, then sneezed. She wasn’t used to being around tobacco, and vowed she would wash her hair before bed, and stuff her clothing in an airtight laundry bag where she couldn’t smell it.
“One-Step needs a job,” she said through her stuffed nose.
“You get your money from Casimir, maybe you’ll give One-Step some work.”
“Maybe,” Sula smiled.
The idea, she admitted, had a certain wayward appeal.
“More hostages taken today,” One-Step said. “I need to get off the street.”
Good point, Sula thought. “I’ll see what I can do,” she told him.
Whatever else you could say about One-Step, he had better people skills than she did.
Sula dressed in fine Riverside low style for her meeting with Casimir. The wide, floppy collar of her blouse overhung a bright tight-waisted jacket with fractal patterns. Pants belled out around platform shoes. Cheap colorful plastic and ceramic jewelry. A tall velvet hat, crushed just so, with one side of the brim held up by a gold pin with an artificial diamond the size of a walnut.
Riverside was still, and the pavement radiated the heat of the day as if exhaling a long, hot breath. Between bars of light, the long shadows of buildings striped the street like prison bars. Sula saw no sign of Naxid or police patrols.
The night was young and the Cat Street club was nearly deserted, inhabited only by a few people knocking back drinks on their way home from or to work. The hostess said that Casimir wasn’t in yet. Sula sat at a back table, ordered sparkling water, and transformed the tabletop into a video screen so she could watch a news program—the usual expressionless Daimong announcer with the usual bland tidings, all about the happy, content people of many species who worked productively for a peaceful future beneath the Naxids.
She didn’t see Casimir come in: the hostess told her that he had arrived then escorted her to the back of the club, up a staircase of black iron, and to a door glossy with polished black ceramic. Sula looked at her reflection in the door’s lustrous surface and adjusted the tilt of her hat.
Inside, she saw a pair of Torminel guards, fierce in their gray fur and white fangs, and concluded that Casimir must be nervous. Lamey had never gone around with guards, not until the very end, when the Legion of Diligence was after him.
The guards patted her down—she’d left her pistol at home—and scanned her with a matte-black polycarbon wand intended to detect any listening devices. Then they waved her through another polished door.
She entered a large suite decorated in black and white, from the diamond-shaped floor tiles to the onyx pillars that supported a series of white marble romanesque arches, impressive but nonstructural, intended purely for decoration. The chairs featured cushions so soft they might tempt a sitter to sprawl. There was a video wall that enabled Casimir to watch the interior of the club, and several different scenes played there in silence. Sula saw that one of the cameras was focused on the table she’d just left.
Casimir came around his desk to greet her. He was a plain-featured young man a few years older than Sula, with longish dark hair combed across his forehead and tangled down his collar behind. He wore a charcoal-gray velvet jacket over a purple silk shirt, with gleaming black boots beneath fashionably wide-bottomed trousers. His hands were long and pale and delicate, with fragile-seeming wrists; the hands were posed self-consciously in front of his chest, the fingers tangled in a kind of knot.
“Were you watching me?” she asked, referring to the surveillance camera.
“I hadn’t seen you around,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep and full of gravel, like a sudden flood over stony land. “I was curious.”
She felt the heat of his dark eyes and knew at once that danger smoldered there, possibly for her, possibly for Casimir himself, possibly for the whole world. Possibly he didn’t know; he might strike out at first one, then the other, as the mood struck him.
The chord of danger chimed deep in her nerves, and it was all she could do to keep her blood from thundering an answer.
“I’m new,” she said. “I came down from the ring a few months ago.”
“Are you looking for work?” He tilted his head and affected to consider her. “For someone as attractive as you, I suppose something could be found.”
“I already have work,” she said. “What I’d like is steady pay.” She took from an inner pocket of her vest a pair of identity cards and offered them.
“What’s this?” Casimir approached and took the cards. His eyes widened as he saw his own picture on both, each of which identified him as “Michael Saltillo.”
“One’s the primary identity,” Sula said, “and the other’s the special card that gets you up to the High City.”
Casimir frowned, took the cards back to his desk and held them up to the light. “Good work,” he said. “Did you do these?”
“The government did them,” Sula said. “They’re genuine.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “You work in the Records Office?”
“No. But I know someone who does.”
He gave her a heavy-lidded look. “You’ll have to tell me who that is.”
Sula shook her head. “No. I can’t.”
He glided toward her. Menace flowed off him like an inky rain. “I’ll need that name,” he said.
She looked up at him and willed her muscles not to tremble beneath the tide of adrenaline that flooded her veins. “First,” she said, speaking softly to keep a tremor from her voice, “she wouldn’t work with you. Second —”
“I’mvery persuasive, ” Casimir said. The deep, grating words seemed to rise from the earth. His humid breath warmed her cheek.
“Second,” Sula continued, as calmly as she could, “she doesn’t live in Zanshaa, and if you turn up on her doorstep she’ll call the police and turn you in. You don’t have any protection where she is, no leverage at all.”
A muscle pulsed in one half-lowered eyelid: Casimir didn’t like being contradicted. Sula prepared herself for
