The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

“Why?”

  “Maybe they could help you. They may feel that they owe your parents that.”

  Sula considered this for a moment, and then her eyes hardened. She shook her head. “It’s the job of the dead to stay dead,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  SIX

  Sula raged inwardly against her certainty that everything she said was wrong. She was making a botch of the whole evening, and all because she didn’t know how to talk to someone who liked her.

  She had been another person once, and then decided not to be that person again, and to avoid anything, like alcohol, that might bring that person back. But she didn’t know how to be this new person very well, and she kept getting it wrong.

  It’s the job of the dead to stay dead. Nice light cocktail-bar conversation, that.

  She reminded herself that Martinez was only trying to help.

  Of course, he was also trying very hard to get her into bed. This prospect wasn’t entirely without its attractions, though she’d been chaste for so long that she wondered if she’d have any idea how to behave with a man. It would be on a par with everything else this evening to somehow make a total botch of it.

  Martinez could probably handle any problem that would arise, she decided. She could trust to his efficiency that way.

  She might as well surrender. It wasn’t as if chastity had benefited her in any way that she could see, and Martinez could hardly make her life worse than it was.

  Fortunately, entertainment began before she could completely poison the conversation. A pair of singers and a band mounted the stage and began a series of dance tunes, and Martinez seemed pleased that it was she who asked him to dance and not the other way around.

  Sula had once enjoyed dancing, but her only practice in recent years had been at the academy, where everyone stood nervous and perspiring in dress uniforms and hampered by a rigid etiquette. She was out of practice at dancing for pleasure, but fortunately, Martinez was an able partner—those stumpy legs knew their business, she decided—and his expertise neutralized her initial awkwardness. She discovered in herself a tendency to bounce on the balls of her feet with each step, but reminded herself that the whole point was to keep a low center of gravity, and told herself sternly to glide, not bound like an eager puppy.

  As the evening progressed her awkwardness faded and she relaxed into the movements, the steps, and Martinez’s arms. Their bodies moved into a close synchrony, and she found herself responding easily to the merest suggestion of his touch, the lightest impulse on her palm or hip or back. Her body molded to his during the slow dances, and warm blood flushed her skin at his nearness. There seemed progressively less point to the whole chastity business.

  They danced for an hour and then stepped outside to cool off. Clouds scudded low overhead, obscuring Zanshaa’s ring, and gusts of wind blustered around the corners of the buildings. A pleasure boat floated past on the canal, darkened, but with its contours outlined in cool blue neon—it looked like a skeleton boat, a visitation from another plane. Martinez dabbed sweat from his brow with a handkerchief and opened his high uniform collar. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll wear civvies.”

  “Thank you for reminding me how much fun this is,” Sula said. “I’ve only been to formal balls for—oh, years.”

  “Service dances?” He looked at her. “They can be deadly, can’t they?” He turned to the canal, saw the neon-lit pleasure boat floating past, and his eyes lit with an idea. “I have a notion. Would you like to go for a ride on the canal?”

  “I—”

  “Come on!” He took her by the hand and set off at a trot. She followed, the wind tearing a laugh from her lips.

  There was a stand for excursion boats a short distance ahead. Martinez showed the elderly Torminel attendant his credentials and was shown to a small, two-person canal boat, with strands of colored lights hanging from its stumpy mast and its canopy folded halfway back over a sofa seat. Martinez wiped water from the seat with his handkerchief, then helped Sula down from the stone quay—the light, resinous hull swayed as she stepped in, and water made a viscous sucking sound against the moss-draped stone—and then he seated himself next to her and instructed the autopilot.

  Iodine, weed and moss, bird droppings, things that were dead and floating in the chill dark water—the scent of the canal struck like a bludgeon at Sula’s memory. She hadn’t tasted air like this in a long time. Suddenly she wanted to protest the whole excursion, but Martinez was near and smiling, happy in his adventure; and she didn’t want to ruin the evening, not after it had finally begun to go well.

  The silent electric motor accelerated smoothly. Sula tried to relax against Martinez’s arm. “There’s a lovely view of the High City coming up,” he said in her ear.

  Put him in the river, Gredel had said, years of pent-up hatred burning in her words.

  The High City was obscured by low cloud. Martinez murmured his disappointment. “I’ll have to show it to you another time,” he said.

  A chill wind shivered along Sula’s bones. She thought of the body slipping in silence beneath the surface of the Iola, streetlight shimmering gold on the spreading, dying ripples, the water rising over the mouth and nose, the vision rising in Sula’s mind like the obdurate flood of memory, the scent of river and time and death.

  Lady Sula?

  She wasn’t even Lady Caro, she was Lady Sula. She wasn’t just any Peer, she was head of the whole Sula clan.

  Lamey’s fury faded away quickly—it did that, came and went with lightning speed—and he picked Caro up in his arms and carried her to the elevator while the doorman fussed around him. When they arrived on the top floor, the doorman opened Caro’s apartment, and Lamey walked in as if he paid the rent himself and carried Caro to her bedroom. There, he put Caro down on her bed and had Gredel draw off the tall boots while he covered her with a comforter.

  Gredel had never admired Lamey so much as at that moment. He behaved with a strange delicacy, as if he were a Peer himself, some Lord Commander of the Fleet cleaning up after a confidential mission.

  The doorman wouldn’t let them stay. On the way out Gredel saw that Caro’s apartment was a terrible mess, with clothes in piles and the tables covered with glasses, bottles, and dirty dishes.

  “I want you to come back here tomorrow,” Lamey said as he started the car. “I want you to become Caro Sula’s best friend.”

  Gredel fully intended this, but she wondered why Lamey’s mind and her own were running in the same track. “Why?”

  “Peers are rich,” Lamey said simply. “Maybe we can get some of that and maybe we can’t. But even more than the money, Peers are also the keys to things, and maybe Caro can open some doors for us. Even if it’s just the door to her bank account, it’s worth a try.”

  It was very, very late, almost dawn, but Lamey wanted to take Gredel to one of his apartments. There they had a brisk five minutes’ sex, hardly worth taking off her clothes as far as Gredel was concerned, and then Lamey took her home.

  As soon as she walked in the door she knew Antony was back. The apartment smelled different, a blend of beer and tobacco and human male and fear. Gredel took off her boots at the door so she wouldn’t wake him, and crept in silence to her bed. Despite the hour, she lay awake for some time, thinking of keys and doors opening.

  Lamey didn’t know what he wanted from Caro, not quite. He was operating on an instinct that told him Caro could be useful, give him connections, links that would move him upward. Gredel had much the same intuition where Caro was concerned, but she wanted Caro for other things. Gredel didn’t want to stay in the Fabs. Caro might show her how to do that, how to behave, perhaps, or how to dress, how to move up, and maybe not just out of the Fabs, but off Spannan altogether, loft out of the ring station on a tail of fire to Esley or Zanshaa or Earth, to a glittering life that she felt hovering around her, a kind of potential waiting to be born but that she couldn’t quite imagine.

  She woke just before noon and put on her robe to sh
ower and use the toilet. The sounds of the Spring Festival zephyr-ball game blared from the front room, where Antony was watching the video. Gredel finished her business in the bathroom and went back into her room to dress. When she finished putting on her clothes and her makeup, she brushed her hair for a long time, delaying the moment when she would leave her sanctum to face Antony, but when she realized what she was doing, she got angry at herself and put the brush down, then put her money in the pocket of her jacket and left the room.

  Antony sat on the sagging old sofa watching the game on the video wall. The remains of a sandwich sat on a plate next to him. He was a man of average height but built powerfully, with broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and long arms with big hands. He looked like a slab on legs. Iron-gray hair fringed his bald head, and his eyes were tiny and set in a permanent suspicious glare.

  He wasn’t drinking, Gredel saw, and felt some of her tension ease. “Hi, Antony,” she said as she walked toward the apartment door.

  He looked at her, his black eyes glaring. “Where you going dressed like that?”

  “To see a friend.”

  “The friend who bought you those clothes?”

  “No. Someone else.” She made herself stop walking and face him.

  His lips twitched in a sneer. “Nelda says you’re whoring now for some linkboy. Just like your mother.”

  Anger flamed along Gredel’s veins, but she clamped it down and said, “I’ve never whored. Never. Not once.”

  “Not for money, maybe,” Antony said. “But look at those clothes on you. And that jewelry.” Gredel felt herself flush. Antony returned his attention to the game. “Better you sell that tail of yours for money,” he muttered. “Then you could contribute to your upkeep around here.”

  So you could steal it, Gredel thought, but didn’t say it. She headed for the door, and just before it swung shut behind her she heard Antony’s parting shot. “You better not take out that implant! You get pregnant, you’re out of this place! I’m not looking after another kid that isn’t my own!”

  Like he’d ever looked after any kid.

  Gredel left the building with her fists clenched and a blaze of fury kindled in her eyes. Children playing in the front hall took one look at her and got out of her way.

  It wasn’t until the train was halfway to Maranic Town that the anger finally ebbed to a normal background buzz and Gredel began to wonder if Caro would be at home, if she would even remember meeting her the previous night.

  Gredel found the Volta Apartments quickly now that she knew where it was. The doorman—it was a different one this time—opened the door for her and showed her right to the elevator. Clearly he thought she was Caro. “Thank you,” Gredel smiled, trying to drawl out the words the way a Peer would.

  She had to knock loudly, several times, before Caro came to the door. Caro was still in her short dress from the previous night, and tights, and bare feet. Her hair was disordered, and there was a smear of mascara on one cheek. Her slitted eyes opened wide as she saw Gredel at the door.

  “Earthgirl,” she said. “Hi.”

  “The doorman thought I was you. I came over to see if you were all right.”

  Caro opened the door and flapped her arms, as if to say, I am as you see me. “Come in,” she said, and walked toward the kitchen.

  The apartment was still a mess, and the air smelled stale. Caro went to the sink in the little kitchen and poured herself a glass of water.

  “My mouth tastes like cheese,” she said. “The kind with the veins in it. I hate that kind of cheese.”

  She drank her water while Gredel walked around the disorderly apartment. She felt strangely reluctant to touch anything, as if it was a fantasy that might dissolve if she put a finger on it.

  “So,” she said finally. “You want to go and do something?”

  Caro finished her water and put down her glass on a counter already covered with dirty glasses. “I need some coffee first,” she said. “Would you mind going to the café on the corner and getting some for me while I change?”

  “What about the coffee maker?” Gredel asked.

  Caro blinked at the machine as if she were seeing it for the first time. “I don’t know how to work it,” she said.

  “I’ll show you.”

  “I never learned how to do kitchen stuff,” Caro said as she made way for Gredel in the kitchen. “Till I came here, we always had servants. I had servants here, but I called the last one a cow and threw her out.”

  “What’s a cow?” Gredel asked.

  “They’re ugly and fat and stupid. Like Berthe when I fired her.”

  Gredel found coffee in a cupboard and began preparing the coffee maker. “Do you eat cows, or what?” she asked.

  “Yeah, they give meat. And milk too.”

  “We have vashes for that. And zieges. And swine and bison, but they only give meat.”

  Gredel made coffee for them both. Caro’s coffee cups were paper thin and delicate, with a platinum ring around the inside and a design of three red crescents. Caro took her cup into the bathroom with her, and after a while Gredel heard the shower. She sipped her coffee as she wandered around the apartment—the rooms were nice, but not that nice. Lamey had places just as good, though not in such an exclusive building as this. There was a view of the Iola River two streets away, but it wasn’t that nice a view; there were buildings in the way, and the window glass was dirty.

  Then, because she couldn’t stand the mess any longer, Gredel began to pick up the scattered clothes and fold them. She finished that and was putting the dirty dishes in the washer when Caro appeared, dressed casually in soft wool pantaloons, a high-necked blouse, and a little vest with gold buttons and lots of pockets slashed one on top of the other. Caro looked around in surprise.

  “You cleaned up!”

  “A little.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I didn’t have anything else to do.” Gredel came into the front room. She looked down at one of the piles of clothing, put her hand down on the soft pile of a sweater she had just folded and placed neatly on the back of a sofa. “You have some nice things,” she said.

  “That’s from Yormak cattle. They have wonderful wool.” She eyed Gredel’s clothing. “What you’re wearing, that’s—that’s all right.”

  “Lamey bought it for me.”

  Caro laughed. “Might have known a man picked that.”

  What’s wrong with it? Gredel wanted to ask. It was what everyone was wearing, only top quality. These weren’t clothes hijacked at Maranic Port, they were bought in a store.

  Caro took Gredel’s arm. “Let’s get some breakfast,” she said, “and then I’ll take you shopping.”

  The doorman stared comically as Caro and Gredel stepped out of the elevator. Caro introduced Gredel as her twin sister Margaux from Earth, and Gredel greeted the doorman in her Earth accent. The doorman bowed deeply as they swept out.

  An hour later in the restaurant, Gredel was surprised when Caro asked her to pay for their meal. “My allowance comes first of the month,” she said. “And this month’s money supply is gone. This café won’t run a tab for me.”

  “Weren’t we going shopping?”

  Caro grinned. “Clothes I can buy on credit.”

  They went to one of the arcades where exclusive shops sheltered under a long series of graceful arches of polymerous resin, the arches translucent but grown in different colors, so that the vaulted ceiling of each glowed with subtle tones that merged and flowed and blended. Caro introduced Gredel as her sister, and laughed when Gredel used her Earth accent. Gredel was called Lady Margaux and surrounded by swarms of clerks and floorwalkers, and she was both surprised and flattered by the attention. This is what it was like to be a Peer.

  If she’d been merely Gredel, the staff would have been there all right, but following her around to make sure she didn’t steal.

  The arcades didn’t serve just Terrans, so there were Torminel there, and Naxids, and
some pleasure-loving Cree who wandered through the shops burbling in their musical voices. It was unusual for Gredel to see so many nonhumans in one place, since she rarely had any reason to leave the Terran parts of the Fabs. But the Peers, Gredel concluded, were almost a species of their own. They had more in common with each other than they had with other folk.

  Caro bought an outfit for herself and two for Gredel, first a luxurious gown with a cape so long it dragged on the floor, and next a pajamalike lounging outfit. Gredel had no idea where she would ever wear such things. Caro nodded at the lounging suit. “Made of worm spit,” she said.

  “Sorry?” Gredel said, startled.

  “Worm spit. They call it ‘silk.’ ”

  Gredel had heard of silk—she’d read about it in her researches on Earth history—and she touched the fabric with a new respect. “Do you think it came from Earth?” she asked.

  “I doubt it.” Dismissively. “Earth’s a hole. My mother was there on government service, and she told me.”

  Caro bought everything on credit. Gredel noticed that she signed only Sula, leaving out her first name and the honorific Lady. She seemed to carry a tab at every store in the arcade. When Gredel thanked her for the presents, Caro said, “You can pay me back by buying dinner.”

  “I don’t think I can afford that,” Gredel said doubtfully.

  Caro laughed. “Guess we better learn to eat worm spit,” she said.

  Gredel was intrigued by the way everyone lined up to give Caro credit. “They know I’m good for it,” Caro explained. “They know I’ll have the money eventually.”

  “When?”

  “When I’m twenty-three. That’s when the funds mature.” She laughed again. “But those people still won’t get paid. I’ll be off the planet by then, in the Fleet, and they can chase me through space if they like.”

  Gredel was intrigued by this too. There tended to be serious consequences in the Fabs for people who didn’t pay their debts. Maybe this too was different for Peers.

  “So is this money your parents left you?” Gredel asked.