chutneys, elaborate tarts and cakes, and bottles lying in a tray of shaved ice. It had obviously been intended all along that the evening end here.
Sula put together an open-faced sandwich—nice Vigo plates, she noticed, a clean modern design—then began to rehearse her exit. Surely it was not coincidental that a pair of bedrooms were very handy.
I’ve got to work in the morning.It certainly sounded more plausible thanI’ve got to go organize a counterrebellion.
Casimir put his walking stick in a rack that had probably been made for it specially and reached for a pair of small packages, each with glossy wrapping and a brilliant scarlet ribbon. He presented one each to Sula and Veronika. “With thanks for a wonderful evening.”
The gift proved to be perfume, a crystal bottle containing Sengra, made with the musk of the rare and reclusive atauba tree-crawlers of Paycahp. The small vial in her hand might have set Casimir back twenty zeniths or more—probably more, since Sengra was exactly the sort of thing that wouldn’t be coming down from orbit for years, not with the ring gone.
Veronika opened her package and popped her eyes open wide—that gesture was going to look silly on her when she was fifty, Sula thought—and gave a squeal of delight. She opted for a more moderate response and kissed Casimir’s cheek.
There was the sting of stubble against her lips. He looked at her with calculation. There was a very male scent to him.
She was about to bring up the work she had to do in the morning when there was a chime from Casimir’s sleeve display. He gave a scowl of annoyance and answered.
“Casimir,” came a strange voice. “We’ve got a situation.”
“Wait,” he said, left the room and closed the door behind him. Sula munched a pickle while the others waited in silence.
Casimir returned with the scowl still firm on his face. Without a trace of apology, he looked at Sula and Veronika and said, “Sorry, but the evening’s over. Something’s come up.”
Veronika pouted and reached for her jacket. Casimir reached for Sula’s arm to draw her to the door. She looked at him. “What’s just happened?”
He gave her an impatient, insolent look—it was none of her business, after all—then thought better of it and shrugged. “Not what’s happened, but what’s going to happen in a few hours. The Naxids are declaring food rationing.”
“They’rewhat ?” Sula’s first reaction was outrage. Casimir opened the door for her, and she hesitated there, thinking. He quivered with impatience.
“Congratulations,” she said finally. “The Naxids have just made you very rich.”
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“I’ll be rich too,” she said. “Ration cards will cost you a hundred apiece.”
“Ahundred ?” For a moment it was Casimir’s turn to be outraged.
“Think about it,” Sula said. “Think how much they’ll be worth to you.”
They held each other’s eyes for a moment, then both broke into laughter. “We’ll talk price later,” Casimir said, and hustled her into the vestibule along with Veronika, who showed Sula a five-zenith coin.
“Julien gave it to me for the cab,” she said triumphantly. “And we get to keep the change!”
“You’d better hope the cabhas change for a fiver,” Sula said, and Veronika thought for a moment.
“We’ll get change in the lobby.”
A Daimong night clerk gave them change, and Veronika’s nose wrinkled at his corpse scent. On the way to her apartment Sula learned that Veronika was a former model and now an occasional club hostess.
“I’m an unemployed math teacher,” Sula said.
Veronika’s eyes went wide again. “Wow,” she said.
After letting Veronika off, Sula had the Torminel driver take her within two streets of the communal Riverside apartment, after which she walked the distance to the building by the light of the stars. Overhead, the broken arcs of the ring were a curved line of black against the faintly glowing sky. Outside the apartment she gazed up for a long moment until she discerned the pale gleam of the white ceramic pot in the front window. It was in the position that meantSomeone is in the apartment and it is safe .
The lock on the building’s front door, the one that read her fingerprint, worked only erratically, but this time she caught it by surprise and the door opened. She went up the stair, then used her key on the apartment lock.
Macnamara was asleep on the couch, with a pair of pistols on the table in front of him, along with a grenade.
“Hi, Dad,” Sula said as he blinked awake. “Junior brought me home safe, just like he said he would.”
Macnamara looked embarrassed. Sula gave him a grin.
“What were you planning on doing with agrenade ?” she asked.
He didn’t reply. Sula took off her jacket and called up the computer that resided in the desk. “I’ve got work to do,” she said. “You’d better get some sleep, because I’ve got a job for you first thing in the morning.”
“What’s that?” He rose from the couch, scratching his sleep-tousled hair.
“The market opens at 0727, right?”
“Yes.”
Sula sat herself at the desk. “I need you to buy as much food as you can carry. Canned, dried, bottled, freeze-dried. Get the biggest sack of flour they have, and another sack of beans. Condensed milk would be good. Get Spence to help you carry it all.”
“What’s going on?” Macnamara was bewildered.
“Food rationing.”
“What?”Sula could hear the outrage in his voice as she called up a text program.
“Two reasons for it I can think of,” she said. “First, issuing everyone a ration card will be a way of reprocessing every ID on the planet…help them weed out troublemakers and saboteurs. Second…” She held up one hand and made the universal gesture of tossing a coin in her palm. “Artificial scarcities are going to make some Naxids very, very rich.”
“Damn them,” Macnamara breathed.
“We’lldo very well,” Sula pointed out. “We’ll quadruple our prices on everything on the ration—you don’t suppose they’d be good enough to rationtobacco, would you?—and we’ll make a fortune.”
“Damn them,” Macnamara said again.
Sula gave him a pointed look. “Good night,” she said. “Dad.”
He flushed and shambled to bed. Sula turned to her work.
“What if they rationalcohol ?” she said aloud as the thought struck her. There would be stills in half the bathrooms in Zanshaa, processing potatoes, taswa peels, apple cores, whatever they could find.
In the next few hours she roughed out an essay forResistance denouncing the food ration. Her previous job, before she’d volunteered to get herself killed with partisan forces, had been with the Logistics Consolidation Executive, which had been deeply involved with cataloging and deployment of resources. She knew that, as the Praxis demanded, the planet of Zanshaa was self-sufficient in foodstuffs, and that from the practical point of view of providing food to the population, the ration was nonsense. She quoted numerous statistics from memory, and was able to get the rest out of public data sources.
By the time she finished, dawn was greening in the east. She took a shower to wash the tobacco smell out of her hair and collapsed into bed just as she heard Macnamara’s alarm go off.
She rose after noon, the apartment already hot with the brilliant sun of summer. As she rubbed her swollen eyelids and blinked in the sunlight flooding the front room, she began to remember what it was like to be a clique member’s girlfriend.
And then she had another thought. Thus far Action Team 491 had been selling her own property out of the back of a truck, a business that was irregular but legal. But once the ration came into effect, selling cocoa and coffee off the ration would be against the law. The team wouldn’t just be participating in informal economic activity, they’d be committing acrime.
People who committed crimes needed protection. Casimir was going to be more necessary than ever.
“Damnit,” she said.
