The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Gredel thought she didn’t miss living with Ava that much. She had a place with Nelda, and Antony wasn’t around often. Nelda had two children of her own, a boy and a girl, and a boy named Jacob she was looking after for another friend. She just liked having children around, and made sure they were fed and clothed and attended school.

  School was something Gredel liked, because she could learn about places that weren’t the Fabs. She spent hours on the display terminal, both at home and at school, working with the instructional programs connected with her class-work, and often simply looking up things on her own.

  There were advantages to working with the terminal. If she was quiet, Antony wouldn’t notice her.

  Once, she stumbled across a picture of the Arch of Macedoin, with its triple towers. She was struck by the sight: the Arch’s ornate, eerie architecture was so unlike the Fabs. It was even different from Maranic Town. She shifted the display into three-dimensional projection and looked at it more intently, seeing towers crowned by pinnacles that looked as if they were made of white icing, and in the niches the Colossi of Macedoin.

  The Colossi, she was surprised to discover, were all Terrans. Louis XIV, she read, Henry VIII, M. Portius Cato, Shih Huangdi, V.I. Lenin, Alexander son of Philip, Mao Zedong, Marcus Aurelius, Kongfuzi…All heroes of Earth, she learned, who before the arrival of the Shaa had striven to bring into being something like the Praxis, which of course was the most perfect form of government possible.

  Earth, she learned, was also called Terra, a word that meant the same thing in another dead language—Earth had apparently once had lots of languages, which must have been difficult for people when they wanted to talk to one another. Earth, she learned, was where her ancestors had come from.

  Gredel became fascinated by Earth. She knew it wasn’t an important planet in the Shaa dominion, because most of its wormhole gates didn’t lead anywhere useful, but there were still billions of Terrans living there or in its star system. Most of them, she was disappointed to discover, lived in places more like the Fabs than the Arch of Macedoin, but still there were ancient cities on Earth of great beauty and majesty. Byzantium, Nanjing, SaSuu, Lima…

  Gredel devoured everything she could find about Earth. She knew the succession of dynasties in China, learned the names of the kings of France, and could tell the difference between a saker and a demiculverin. She even learned to speak with an Earth accent from watching videos of Earth people. Ava, on one of her visits, was astonished that her little girl spoke of the members of the Capetian court on the same familiar terms with which she referred to her neighbors.

  Her friends started calling her “Earthgirl.” It wasn’t intended as a compliment particularly, but Gredel didn’t care. Earth history seemed at least as interesting as anything anyone in the Fabs got up to.

  But eventually her interest in Earth history waned, because Nelda’s prediction came true.

  Gredel had grown older and—they said—beautiful. And, as Nelda had predicted, she was loved, and for all the wrong reasons.

  “Hey, Earthgirl! I got someone for you to meet!”

  Stoney was excited. He was almost always excited. He was one of Lamey’s lieutenants, a boy who hijacked cargo that came over the sea to Maranic Port and sold it through Lamey’s outlets in the Fabs. Stoney wore soft felt boots and a puffy padded jacket with rows of tiny little metal chimes that rang when he moved, and a hard round plastic hat without a brim, the clothes that all Lamey’s linkboys wore when they wanted to be noticed.

  Gredel came into the room on Lamey’s arm. He had dressed her in a gown of short-haired kantaran leather set off with collar and cuffs of white satin, big clunky white ceramic jewelry inlaid with gold, shiny little plastic boots with nubbly surfaces and tall heels. The height of fashion, at least as far as the Fabs were concerned.

  Lamey liked shopping for Gredel. He took her to the stores and bought her a new outfit two or three times each week.

  He was called Lamey because he’d once had a defect that made him walk with a limp. It was something he’d got fixed as soon as he had the money, and when Gredel first met him, he glided along like a prince, putting each foot down with deliberate, exaggerated care, as if he were walking on rice paper and didn’t want to tear it. Lamey was only twenty-five years old in Shaa measure, but already ran a set of linkboys, and had linkages of his own that eventually ran up to some of the Peers responsible for running places like the Fabs. He had millions, all in cash stashed in various places, and three apartments, and half a dozen small stores through which he moved the material acquired by his crews.

  He also had a seventeen-year-old girlfriend called Earthgirl.

  Lamey had offered to set her up in an apartment, but Gredel still lived with Nelda. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because she hoped she could protect Nelda against Antony. Or maybe because once she moved into a place that Lamey bought her, she’d have to spend all her time there waiting for him to come see her. She wouldn’t be able to leave, for fear that he’d come by and find her gone and get angry; and she couldn’t have her friends visit because they might be there when Lamey turned up, and that would probably make him mad too.

  That was the kind of life Ava had always led, waiting in some apartment somewhere for some man to turn up. Gredel wanted a different life for herself. She had no idea how to get it, but she was paying attention, and maybe someday she’d learn.

  Gredel still attended school. Every afternoon when she left her school, she’d find Lamey in his car waiting for her, Lamey or one of his boys, who would take her to wherever Lamey waited.

  Gredel’s attending school was something Lamey found amusing. “I’m going around with a schoolgirl,” he’d laugh, and sometimes reminded her to do her schoolwork when he had to leave with his boys on some errand or other. Not that he left her much time for schoolwork. Her grades had plunged to the point where she would probably get kicked out of school before she graduated.

  Tonight, the eve of the Festival of Spring, Lamey had taken Gredel to a party at Panda’s place. Panda was another of Lamey’s linkboys, and he worked on the distribution end. He’d pointed Stoney and his crew at a warehouse full of wine imported from Cavado, and pharmaceuticals awaiting shipment to a Fleet hospital on Spannan’s ring. The imported wine had proven difficult to sell, there not being much of a market in the Fabs for something so select; but the pharmaceuticals were moving fast through Panda’s outlets, and everyone was in the mood to celebrate.

  “Come on, Earthgirl!” Stoney urged. “You’ve got to meet her!”

  A warning hummed through Gredel’s nerves as she saw everyone at the party looking at her with eyes that glittered from more than whatever they’d been consuming earlier in the evening. There was an anticipation there Gredel didn’t like. So she dropped Lamey’s arm and straightened—because she didn’t want these people to see her afraid—and walked to where Stoney waited.

  “Earthgirl!” Stoney said. “This is Caro!” He was practically jumping up and down with excitement, and instead of looking where Stoney was pointing, Gredel just gave him a long, cool glance, because he was just so outrageous this way.

  When she turned her head, her first thought was, She’s beautiful. And then the full impact of the other girl’s face struck her.

  “Ah. Ha,” she said.

  Caro looked at her with a ragged grin. She had long golden hair and green eyes, and skin smooth as butter cream, flawless…

  “It’s your twin!” Stoney almost shouted. “Your secret twin sister!”

  Gredel gaped while everyone laughed, but Caro just looked at her and said, “Are you really from Earth?”

  “No,” Gredel said. “I’m from here.”

  “Help me build this pyramid.”

  Gredel shrugged. “Why not?” she said.

  Caro wore a short dress and a battered jacket with black metal buckles, and boots that came up past her knees—expensive stuff. She stood by the dining table carefully building a pyramid of crystal w
ineglasses. “I saw this done once,” she said. “You pour the wine into the one glass on the top, and when it overflows it fills all the others. If you do it right you fill all the glasses and you don’t spill a drop.”

  Caro spoke with a kind of drawl, like Peers or rich people did when they made speeches or announcements on video.

  “We’re going to make a mess,” Gredel predicted.

  “That’s all right, too,” Caro shrugged.

  When the pyramid was completed, Caro got Stoney to start opening bottles. It was the wine his crew had stolen from the warehouse in Maranic Port, and it was bright silver in color and filled the glasses like liquid mercury.

  Caro tried to pour carefully, but as Gredel had predicted, she made a terrible mess, the precious wine bubbling across the tabletop and over onto the carpet. Caro seemed to find this funny. At length all the glasses were brimming full, and she put down the bottle and called everyone over to drink. They took glasses and cheered and sipped. Laughter and clinking glasses rang in the air. The glasses were so full that the carpet got another bath.

  Caro took one glass for herself and pushed another into Gredel’s hand, then took a second glass for herself and led Gredel to the sofa. Gredel sipped cautiously at the wine—there was something subtle and indefinable about the taste, something that made her think of the park in spring, the way the trees and flowers had a delicate freshness to them. She’d never tasted any wine like it before.

  The taste was more seductive than she wanted anything with alcohol to be. She didn’t take a second sip.

  “So,” Caro said, “are we related?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gredel said.

  Caro swallowed half the contents of a glass in one go. “Your dad was never on Zanshaa? I can almost guarantee my dad was never here.”

  “I get my looks from my ma, and she’s never been anywhere,” Gredel said. Then, surprised, “You’re from Zanshaa?”

  Caro gave a little twitch of her lips, followed by a shrug.

  Interpreting this as a yes, Gredel asked, “What do your parents do?”

  “They got executed,” Caro said.

  Gredel hesitated. “I’m sorry,” she said. Caro’s parents were linked, obviously. No wonder she was hanging with this crowd.

  “Me too.” Caro said it with a brave little laugh, but she gulped down the remains of the wine in her first glass, then took a sip from the second. She looked up at Gredel. “You heard of them maybe? The Sula family?”

  Gredel tried to think of any of the linkages with that name, but couldn’t. “Sorry, no,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Caro said. “The Sulas were big on Zanshaa, but out here in the provinces they wouldn’t mean much.”

  Caro Sula finished her second glass of wine, then got two more from the pyramid and drank them, then reached for Gredel’s. “You going to drink that?”

  “I don’t drink much.”

  “Why not?”

  Gredel hesitated. “I don’t like being drunk.”

  Caro shrugged. “That’s fair.” She emptied Gredel’s glass, then put it with the others on the side table. “It’s not being drunk that I like,” she said, as if she were making up her mind right then. “But I don’t dislike it either. What I don’t like,” she said carefully, “is standing still. Not moving. Not changing. I get bored fast, and I don’t like quiet.”

  “In that case you’ve come to the right place,” Gredel said.

  Her nose is more pointed, Gredel thought. And her chin is different. She doesn’t look like me, not really.

  I bet I’d look good in that jacket, though.

  “So do you live around her someplace?” Gredel asked.

  Caro shook her head. “Maranic Town.”

  “I wish I lived in Maranic.”

  Caro looked at her in surprise. “Why?”

  “Because it’s…not here.”

  “Maranic is a hole. It’s not something to wish for. If you’re going to wish, wish for Zanshaa. Or Sandamar. Or Esley.”

  “Have you been to those places?” Gredel asked. She almost hoped the answer was no, because she knew she’d never get anywhere like that, that she’d get to Maranic Town if she was lucky.

  “I was there when I was little,” Caro said.

  “I wish I lived in Byzantium,” Gredel said.

  Caro gave her a look again. “Where’s that?”

  “Earth. Terra.”

  “Terra’s a hole,” Caro said.

  “I’d still like to go there.”

  “It’s probably better than Maranic Town,” Caro decided.

  Someone programmed some dance music, and Lamey came to dance with Gredel. A few years ago he hadn’t been able to walk right, but now he was a good dancer, and Gredel enjoyed dancing with him, responding to his changing moods in the fast dances, molding her body to his when the beat slowed down.

  Caro also danced with one boy or another, but Gredel saw that she couldn’t dance at all, just bounced up and down while her partner maneuvered her around.

  After a while Lamey went to talk business with Ibrahim, one of his boys who thought he knew someone in Maranic who could distribute the stolen wine, and Gredel found herself on the couch with Caro again.

  “Your nose is different,” Caro said.

  “I know.”

  “But you’re prettier than I am.”

  This was the opposite of what Gredel had been thinking. People were always telling her she was beautiful, and she had to believe they saw her that way, but when she looked in the mirror, she saw nothing but a vast collection of flaws.

  A girl shrieked in another room, and there was a crash of glass. Suddenly, Caro’s mood changed completely: she glared toward the other room as if she hated everyone there.

  “Time to change the music,” she said. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a med injector. She looked at the display, dialed a number and put the injector to her throat, over the carotid. Little flashes of alarm pulsed through Gredel.

  “What’s in there?” she asked.

  “What do you care?” Caro snarled. Her eyes snapped green sparks. She pressed the trigger, and an instant later the fury faded and a drowsy smile came to her lips. “Now that’s better,” she said. “Panda’s got the real goods, all right.”

  “Tell me about Zanshaa,” Gredel said.

  Caro lazily shook her head. “No. Nothing but bad memories there.”

  “Then tell me about Esley.”

  “Sure. What I can remember.”

  Caro talked about Esley’s black granite peaks, with a white spindrift of snow continually blowing off them in the high perpetual wind, and the shaggy Yormak who lived there, tending their equally shaggy cattle. She described glaciers pouring in ageless slow motion down mountain valleys, high meadows covered with fragrant star flowers, chill lakes so clear that you could see all the way to the bottom.

  “Of course, I was only at that mountain resort for a few weeks,” Caro added. “The rest of the planet might be burning desert for all I know.”

  Lamey came back for more dancing, and when Gredel returned to the sofa, Caro was unconscious, the med injector in her hand. She seemed to be breathing all right though, lying asleep with a smile on her face. After a while Panda came over and tried to grope her, but Gredel slapped his hands away.

  “What’s your problem?” he asked.

  “Don’t mess with my sister when she’s passed out,” Gredel told him. He laughed, not exactly in a nice way, but he withdrew.

  Caro was still asleep when the party ended. Gredel made Lamey help her carry Caro to his car, and then got him to drive to Maranic Town to her apartment. “What if she doesn’t wake up long enough to tell us where it is?” Lamey complained.

  “Whatever she took will wear off sooner or later.”

  “What if it’s next week?” But he drove off anyway, heading for Maranic, while Gredel sat with Caro in the backseat and tried to rouse Caro. She woke long enough to murmur that she lived in the Volta Apart
ments. Lamey got lost on the way there, and wandered into a Torminel neighborhood. The nocturnal Torminel were in the middle of their active cycle, and Lamey got angry at the way they stared at him with their huge eyes as he wandered their streets.

  Lamey was furious by the time he found the apartment building. He opened the passenger door and practically dragged Caro out of the car onto the sidewalk. Gredel scrambled out of the car and tried to get one of Caro’s arms over her shoulders so she could help her get to her feet.

  A doorman came scrambling out of the building. “Has something happened to Lady Sula?” he demanded.

  Lamey looked at him in surprise. The doorman stared at Gredel, then at Caro, astonished by the resemblance. But Gredel looked at Caro. Lady Sula? she thought.

  Her twin was a Peer.

  Ah, she thought. Ha.

  The cold touch of the med injector.

  Pressed to the throat.

  Followed by the hiss…

  Cadet Sula thrashed awake from the nightmare memory, only gradually prying its frozen talons from her mind. A light flashed on her instrument panel, accompanied by a soft tone.

  Incoming transmission. Right.

  “Display,” she said.

  It was the lantern-jawed staff lieutenant, Martinez. “Cadet Sula,” he said, “I was wondering if you’re lonely.”

  Surprise brought a savage laugh to Sula’s throat. Lonely? How could you think that?

  “I’m sending you some entertainment,” Martinez said. “It’s all from my personal collection. I don’t know what sort of thing you like, so I’m sending a wide spectrum of stuff. If you’ll tell me what sort of thing you’d prefer, I’ll try to get it to you.”

  He smiled “Enjoy.” Then he hesitated, and added. “I’m receiving requests from reporters who want to interview you in regard to the Blitsharts rescue. The lord commander’s given his permission, so it’s up to you. You’ve become sort of famous here.” And then he brightened again. “Let me know if you need anything. Aside from a hot bath, that is.”