There. That was raffish enough, if you ignored the searching, critical look in the eyes.
“I’m going with you,” Macnamara insisted. “The streets aren’t safe.”
Sula sighed and decided she might as well concede. “Very well,” she said. “You can follow me to the club a hundred paces behind, but once I go in the door, I don’t want to see you for the rest of the evening.”
“Yes,” he said, and then added, “my lady.”
She wondered if Macnamara’s protectiveness was actually possessiveness, if there was something emotional or sexual in the way he related to her.
She supposed there was. There was with most men in her experience, so why not Macnamara?
She hoped she wouldn’t have to get stern with him.
He followed her like an obedient, heavily armed ghost down the darkened streets to the Cat Street club. Yellow light spilled out of the doors, along with music and laughter and the smell of tobacco. She cast a look over her shoulder at Macnamara, one that warned him to come no farther, and then she hopped up the step onto the black and silver tiles and swept through the doors, nodding to the two bouncers.
Casimir waited in his office, along with two others. He wore an iron-gray silk shirt with a standing collar that wrapped his throat with layers of dark material and gave a proud jut to his chin, heavy boots that gleamed, and an ankle-length coat of some soft black material inset with little triangular mirrors. In one pale, long-fingered hand he carried an ebony walking stick that came up to his breastbone and was topped by a silver claw that held a globe of rock crystal.
He laughed and gave an elaborate bow as she entered. The walking stick added to the odd courtly effect. Sula looked at his outfit and hesitated.
“Very original,” she decided.
“Chesko,” Casimir said. “This time next year, she’s going to be dressing everybody.” He turned to his two companions. “These are Julien and Veronika. They’ll be joining us tonight, if you don’t mind.” Julien was a younger man with a pointed face, and Veronika was a tinkly blonde who wore brocade and an anklet with stones that glittered.
Interesting, Sula thought, for Casimir to include another couple. Perhaps it was to put her at ease, to assure her that she wouldn’t be at close quarters with some predator all night.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I’m Gredel.”
Casimir gave two snaps of his fingers and a tiled panel slid open in the wall, revealing a well-equipped bar, bottles full of amber, green, and crimson liquids in curiously shaped bottles. “Shall we start with drinks before supper?” he asked.
“I don’t drink,” Sula said, “but the rest of you go ahead.”
Casimir, on his way to the bar, was brought up short. “Is there anything else you’d like? Hashish or—”
“Sparkling water will be fine,” she said.
Casimir hesitated again. “Right,” he said finally, and handed her a heavy cut-crystal goblet that he’d filled from a silver spigot.
He mixed drinks for himself and the others, and everyone sat on the broad, oversoft chairs. Sula tried not to oversplay.
The discussion was about music, songwriters, and musicians she didn’t know. Casimir told the room to play various audio selections. He liked his music jagged, with angry overtones.
“What do you like?” Julien asked Sula.
“Derivoo,” she said.
Veronika gave a little giggle. Julien made a face. “Too intellectual for me,” he said.
“It’s not intellectual at all,” Sula protested. “It’s pure emotion.”
“It’s all about death,” Veronika said.
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Sula said. “Death is the universal constant. All people suffer and die. Derivoo doesn’t try to hide that.”
There was a moment of silence in which Sula realized that the inevitability of misery and death was perhaps not the most appropriate topic to bring up on first acquaintance with this group; and then she looked at Casimir and saw a glimmer of wicked amusement in his dark eyes. He seized his walking stick and rose.
“Let’s go. Take your drinks if you haven’t finished them.”
Casimir’s huge Victory limousine was built along the lines of a pumpkin seed, and painted and upholstered in no less than eleven shades of apricot. The two Torminel guards sat in front, their huge, night-adapted eyes perfectly at home on the darkened streets. The restaurant was paneled in old, dark wood, the linen was crisp and close-woven, and the fixtures were brass that gleamed finely in the subdued light. Through an elaborate, carved wooden screen Sula could see another dining room with a few Lai-own sitting in the special chairs that cradled their long breastbones.
Casimir suggested items from the menu, and the elderly waitron, whose stolid, disapproving old face suggested he had seen many like Casimir come and go, suggested others. Sula followed one of Casimir’s suggestions, and found her ostrich steak tender and full of savor; the krek-tubers, mashed with bits of truffle, were slightly oily but full of complex flavors that lingered long on her palate.
Casimir and Julien ordered elaborate drinks, a variety of starters, and a broad selection of desserts, and competed with each other for throwing money away. Half what they ordered was never eaten or drunk. Julien was exuberant and brash, and Casimir displayed sparks of sardonic wit. Veronika popped her wide eyes open like a perpetually astonished child and giggled a great deal.
From the restaurant they motored to a club, a place atop a tall building in Grandview, the neighborhood where Sula had once lived until she had to blow up her apartment with a group of Naxid police inside. The broad granite dome of the Great Refuge, the highest point of the High City, brooded down on them through the tall glass walls above the bar. Casimir and Julien flung more money away on drinks and tips to waitrons, bartenders, and musicians. If the Naxid occupation was hurting their business, it wasn’t showing.
Sula knew she was supposed to be impressed by this. But even years ago, when she was Lamey’s girl, she hadn’t been impressed by the money he and his crowd threw away. She knew too well where the money came from.
She was more impressed by Casimir once he took her onto the dance floor. His long-fingered hands embraced her gently, but behind the gentleness she sensed the solidity of muscle and bone and mass, the calculation of his mind. His attention in the dance was entirely on her, his somber dark eyes intense as they gazed into her face while his body reacted to her weight and motion.
This one thinks! she thought in surprise.
That might make things easy or make them hard. At any rate, it made the calculation more difficult.
“Where are you from?” he asked her after they’d sat down. “How come I haven’t seen you before?” Julien and Veronika were still on the dance floor, Veronika swirling with expert grace around Julien’s enthusiastic clumsiness.
“I lived on the ring,” Sula said. “Before they blew it up.”
“What did you do there?”
“I was a math teacher.”
His eyes widened.
“Give me a math problem and try me,” Sula urged, but he didn’t reply. She wondered if her phony occupation had shocked him.
“When I was in school,” he said, “I didn’t have math teachers like you.”
“You didn’t think teachers went to clubs?” she said.
A slow thought crossed his face. He leaned closer and his eyes narrowed. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why, when you’re from the ring, you talk like you’ve spent your life in Riverside.”
Sula’s nerves sang a warning. She laughed. “Did I say I’ve spent my whole life on the ring?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
“I could check your documents,” his eyes hardening, “but of course you sell false documents, so that wouldn’t help.”
The tension between them was like a coiled serpent ready to strike. She raised an eyebrow. “You still think I’m a provocateur?” she asked. “I haven’t asked you to do a single illegal thing a
ll night.”
One index finger tapped a slow rhythm on the matte surface of the table before them. “I think you’re dangerous,” he said.
Sula looked at him and held his gaze. “You’re right,” she said.
Casimir gave a huff of breath and drew back. Cushions of aesa leather received him. “Why don’t you drink?” he asked.
“I grew up around drunks,” she said. “I don’t want to be like that, not ever.”
Which was true, and perhaps Casimir sensed it, because he nodded. “And you lived in Riverside.”
“I lived in Zanshaa City till my parents were executed.”
His glance was sharp. “For what?”
She shrugged. “For lots of things, I guess. I was little, and I didn’t ask.”
He cast an uneasy look at the dancers. “My father was executed, too. Strangled.”
Sula nodded. “I thought you knew what I meant when I talked about derivoo.”
“I knew.” Eyes still scanning the dance floor. “But I still think derivoo’s depressing.”
She found a grin spreading across her face. “We should dance now.”
“Yes.” His grin answered hers. “We should.”
They danced till they were both breathless, and then Casimir moved the party to another club, in the Hotel of Many Blessings, where there was more dancing, more drinking, more money spread around. After which he said they should take a breather, and he took them into an elevator lined with what looked like mother-of-pearl and bade it rise to the penthouse.
The door opened to Casimir’s thumbprint. The room was swathed in shiny draperies, and the furniture was low and comfortable. A table was laid with a cold supper, meats and cheeses and flat wroncho bread, pickles, 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 than I’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’re what?” 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.”
“A hundred?” 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 cab has 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 meant Someone 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 a grenade?” 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’ll do 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 ration tobacco, would you?—and we’ll make a fortune.”
“Damn them,” Macnamara said again.
Sula gave him a pointed loo
k. “Good night,” she said. “Dad.”
He flushed and shambled to bed. Sula turned to her work.
“What if they ration alcohol?” 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 for Resistance 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 a crime.
People who committed crimes needed protection. Casimir was going to be more necessary than ever.
“Damn it,” she said.
SIXTEEN
Macnamara failed to procure a large stash of food. Police were already in force at the market, and foodsellers had been told not to sell large quantities to any one person. He wisely decided to avoid attracting attention and bought only quantities that might be considered reasonable for a family of three.
The announcement of rationing had been made while Sula slept and the food marts were packed. Tobacco had not been included, but Sula couldn’t hope for everything. Citizens were given twenty days to report to their local police station in order to apply for a ration card. The reason given by the government for the imposition of rationing was the destruction of the ring and the decline in food imports.
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