The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Caro looked dubious. “I’m not sure. My parents were caught in some kind of scheme to swindle government suppliers out of a lot of money, and they lost everything—estates, money”—she tapped her neck significantly—“everything. I got sent to live with Jacob Biswas in Blue Lakes.” This was an exclusive area outside of Maranic Town. “The Biswas clan were clients of the Sulas, and Dad got Biswas the job of assistant port administrator here. I’m not sure if the money is something Dad got to him, or whether it came from my dad’s clients or friends, but it’s in a bank on Spannan’s ring, and the interest comes to me here every month.”

  Caro went on to explain that her family was forbidden to be in the Civil Service for three generations, both as punishment for what her parents had done and to minimize the chance to steal. But as a Peer, she had an automatic ticket to one of the Fleet academies, and so it had been planned for her to go there.

  “I don’t know,” she went on, shaking her head. “I can’t see myself in the Fleet. Taking orders, wearing uniforms…under all that discipline. I think I’d go crazy in ten days.”

  The Fleet, Gredel thought. The Fleet could carry you away from Spannan, through the wormhole gates to the brilliant worlds beyond. Zanshaa, Esley, Earth…The vision was dazzling. For that, she could put up with uniforms. “I’d do it in a second,” she said.

  Caro gave her a look. “Why?”

  Gredel thought she may as well emphasize the practical advantages. “You get food and a place to sleep. Medical and dental care. And they pay you for it.”

  Caro gave a disdainful snort. “You do it, then.”

  “They wouldn’t let me in. My mother has a criminal record.”

  The Fleet had their pick of recruits: there were plenty of people who wanted those three free meals per day. They checked the background of everyone who applied.

  Unless, Gredel thought, someone she knew could pull strings. A Peer, say.

  They took a taxi back to Caro’s building, but when the driver approached it, Caro ducked into the backseat, pulled a bewildered Gredel down atop her and shouted at him to keep going.

  “What’s the matter?” Gredel asked.

  “A collector. Someone come to get money from me. The doorman usually chases them off, but this one’s really persistent.”

  Apparently, living on credit wasn’t as convenient as Caro let on.

  The driver let them off at a loading dock in the alley behind the building. Caro’s codes opened the door.

  There were little motorized carts in the entryway, for use when people moved furniture or other heavy belongings.

  They took the freight elevator to Caro’s floor and looked for something to eat. There wasn’t much, just biscuits and an old piece of cheese. “Have you got food at your place?” Caro asked.

  Gredel hesitated. “Yes,” she said, “but we’ve got Antony too.”

  “And who’s that?”

  Gredel told her.

  “He comes near me,” Caro said with a disgusted look, “I’ll kick him in the balls.”

  “That wouldn’t stop him for long,” Gredel said, and shivered. “He’d still slap your face off.”

  “We’ll see.” Caro’s lip curled again.

  “I’m serious. You don’t want to get Antony mad. I bet even Lamey’s boys would have a hard time with him.”

  Caro shook her head. “This is crazy,” she laughed. “You know anyone who could buy us some food?”

  “Well. There’s Lamey.”

  “He’s your boyfriend, right? The tall one?”

  “He carried you up here last night.”

  “So I already owe him.” Caro laughed. “Will he mind if I mooch dinner off him? I’ll pay him back, first of the month.”

  Gredel called Lamey on her phone. He was amused by their dilemma and said he’d be there soon.

  Gredel made coffee while they waited, and served it in the paper-thin cups.

  “So tell me about Lamey,” Caro said.

  Gredel told her about Lamey’s business. “He’s linked, you know? He knows people, and he moves stuff around. From the port, from other places. Makes it available to people at good prices. When people can’t get loans, he loans them money.”

  “Aren’t the clans’ patrons supposed to do that?”

  “Sometimes they will. But, you know, those mid-level clans, they’re in a lot of businesses themselves, or their friends and allies are. So they’re not going to loan money for someone to go into competition with them. And once the new businesses start, they have to be protected you know, against the people who are already in that business, so Lamey and his people do that too.”

  “It’s the Peers who are supposed to protect people,” Caro said.

  “Caro,” Gredel said, “you’re the first Peer I’ve ever seen outside of a video. Peers don’t come to places like the Fabs.”

  Caro gave a cynical grin. “So Lamey just does good things, right? He’s never hurt anybody, he just helps people.”

  Gredel hesitated. They were entering an area she tried not to think about. She thought about the boy Moseley, the dreadful dull squelching thud as Lamey’s boot went into him. The way her own head rang after Lamey slapped her that time.

  “Sure,” she said finally, “he’s hurt people. People who stole from him, mostly. But he’s really not bad,” she added quickly. “He’s not one of the violent ones, he’s smart. He uses his intelligence.”

  “Uh-huh,” Caro said. “So has he used his…intelligence on you?”

  Gredel felt herself flush. “A few times,” she said quickly. “He’s got a temper. But he’s always sweet when he cools down, and buys me things.”

  “Uh-huh,” Caro said.

  Gredel tried not to bristle at Caro’s attitude. Hitting was what boyfriends did. It was normal. The point was whether they felt sorry afterward.

  “Do you love him?” Caro asked.

  Gredel hesitated again. “Maybe,” she said.

  “I hope at least he’s good in bed.”

  Gredel shrugged. “He’s all right.” Sex seemed to be expected of her, because she was thought to be beautiful and because she went with older boys who had money. It had never been as pleasurable as she’d been led to expect, but was nevertheless pleasurable enough so she didn’t want to quit.

  “Lamey’s too young to be good in bed,” Caro declared. “You need an older man to show you what sex is really about.” Her eyes sparkled and she gave a diabolical giggle. “Like my Sergei. He was really the best! He showed me everything about sex.”

  Gredel blinked. “Who was Sergei?”

  “Jake Biswas’s wife’s sister was married to Sergei. We were always sneaking away to be together. That’s what all the fighting in the family was about. That’s why I had to move to Maranic Town.”

  “How much older was he?”

  “In his forties somewhere.”

  Black, instant hatred descended on Gredel. She could have torn Sergei to ribbons with her nails, with her teeth. “That’s sick,” she said. “That man is disgusting.”

  Caro gave a cynical laugh. “I wouldn’t talk if I were you,” she said. “How old is Lamey? What kind of scenes does he get you into?”

  Gredel felt as if Caro’s words had slapped her across the face. Caro gave her a smirk.

  “Right,” she said. “We’re models of stability and mental health, we are.”

  Gredel decided to change the subject. “This is lovely,” she said, and held up the cup.

  Caro looked at it without expression. “I inherited that set. That’s the Sula family badge, those three crescents.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “They mean three crescents. If they mean any more than that, nobody told me.”

  Caro’s mood had sweetened by the time Lamey turned up. She thanked him for taking her home the previous night, and took them both to a restaurant so exclusive that Caro had to give a thumbprint in order to enter. There were no real dinners on the menu, just a variety of small plates that eve
ryone at the table shared. Gredel had never heard of some of the ingredients. Some of the dishes were wonderful, some weren’t. Some were simply incomprehensible.

  Caro and Lamey got along well, to Gredel’s relief. Caro filled the air with vivacious talk, and Lamey joked and deferred to her. Toward the end of the meal he reached into his pocket, and Gredel’s nerves tingled when she saw the med injector.

  “Panda asked me if you wanted any more of the endorphin,” Lamey said.

  “I don’t have any money, remember?” Caro said.

  Lamey gave an elaborate shrug. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

  Don’t, Gredel wanted to shout.

  But Caro gave a pleased, catlike smile and reached for the injector in Lamey’s hand.

  Gredel and Caro spent a lot of time together after that. Partly because Lamey wanted it, but also because Gredel found that she liked Caro, and liked learning from her. She studied how Caro dressed, how she talked, how she moved. And Caro enjoyed dressing Gredel up like one of her dolls, and teaching her to walk and talk as if she were Lady Margaux, the sister of a Peer. Gredel worked on her accent till her speech was a letter-perfect imitation of Caro’s. Caro couldn’t do voices the way Gredel could, and the Earthgirl voice always made Caro laugh.

  Gredel was learning the things that might get her out of the Fabs.

  Caro enjoyed teaching her. Maybe, Gredel thought, this was because Caro didn’t have much to do. She’d left school, because she was a Peer and would get into the academy whether she had good marks or not, and she didn’t seem to have any friends in Maranic Town. Sometimes friends from Blue Lakes came to visit her—usually a pack of girls all at once—but all their talk was about people and events in their school, and Gredel could tell that Caro got bored with that fast.

  “I wish Sergei would call,” Caro said. But he never did. And Caro refused to call him. “It’s his move, not mine,” she said, her eyes turning hard.

  Caro got bored easily. And that was dangerous, because when Caro got bored she wanted to change the music. Sometimes that not only meant shopping or going to a club, but drinking a couple bottles of wine or a bottle of brandy, or firing things into her carotid from the med injector. It was the endorphins she liked best, though.

  The drugs weren’t illegal, but the supply was controlled in various ways, and they were expensive. The black market provided pharmaceuticals at more reasonable prices, and without a paper or money trail. The drugs the linkboys sold weren’t just for fun, either: Nelda got Gredel black market antivirals when she was sick, and fast-healers once when she broke her leg, and saved herself the expense of supporting a doctor and a pharmacy.

  When Caro changed the music, she became a spiky, half-feral creature, a tangled ligature of taut-strung nerves and overpowering impulse. She would careen from one scene to the next, from party to club to bar, having a frenzied good time one minute, spitting out vicious insults at perfect strangers the next.

  At the first of the month, Gredel urged Caro to pay Lamey what she owed him. Caro just shrugged, but Gredel insisted. “This isn’t like the debts you run up at the boutique,” she told her.

  Caro gave Gredel a narrow-eyed look that made her nervous, because she recognized it as the prelude to fury. “What do you mean?”

  “When you don’t pay Lamey, things happen.”

  “Like what.” Contemptuously.

  “Like…” Gredel hesitated. “Like what happened to Moseley.”

  Her stomach turned over at the memory. “Moseley ran a couple of Lamey’s stores, you know, where he sells the stuff he gets. And Lamey found out that Moseley was skimming the profits…” She remembered the way Lamey screamed at Moseley, the way his boys held Moseley while Lamey smashed him in the face and body. The way Lamey kept kicking him even after Moseley fell unconscious to the floor. And the sound of his thudding boots.

  “So what happened to Moseley?” Caro asked.

  “I think he died.” Gredel spoke the words past the knot in her throat. “The boys won’t talk to me about it. No one ever saw him again. Panda runs those stores now.”

  “And Lamey would do that to me?” Caro asked. It clearly took an effort to wrap her mind around the idea of being vulnerable to someone like Lamey.

  Gredel hesitated again. “Maybe you just shouldn’t give him the chance. He’s unpredictable.”

  “Fine,” Caro said. “Give him the money then.” And she went to her computer and gave Gredel a credit foil for the money.

  Lamey gave the foil a bemused look—he was in a cash-only business—and asked Gredel to take it back to Caro and have it cashed. But when she returned to Caro’s apartment the next day, Caro was hung over and didn’t want to be bothered, so she gave Gredel the codes to her cash account.

  It was as easy as that.

  Gredel looked at the deposit made the previous day and took a breath. Eight hundred forty zeniths, enough to keep Nelda and her assortment of children for a year, with enough left over for Antony to get drunk every night. And Caro got this every month.

  Gredel started looking after Caro’s money, seeing that at least some of the creditors were appeased, that there was food in the kitchen. She cleaned the place too, tidied the clothes Caro scattered everywhere, saw that the laundry was sent out and, when it returned, was put away. Caro was amused by it all. “When I’m in the Fleet, you can join too,” she said. “I’ll make you a servant or something.”

  Hope burned in Gredel’s heart. “I hope so,” she said. “But you’ll have to pull some strings to get me in—I mean, with my mother’s record and everything.”

  “I’ll get you in,” Caro assured.

  Lamey was disappointed when Gredel told him about Caro’s finances. “Eight hundred forty,” he muttered, “it’s hardly worth stealing.” He rolled onto his back in the bed—they were in one of his apartments—and frowned at the ceiling.

  “People have been killed for a lot less than that,” Gredel said. “For the price of a bottle of cheap wine.”

  Lamey’s blue eyes gave her a sharp look. “I’m not talking about killing anybody,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s not worth getting killed over, because that’s what’s likely to happen if you steal from a Peer. It won’t be worth trying until she’s twenty-two, when she gets the whole inheritance, and by then she’ll be in the Fleet.” He sighed. “I wish she were in the Fleet now, assigned to the port. We might be able to make use of her, get some Fleet supplies.”

  “I don’t want to steal from her,” Gredel said.

  Lamey fingered his chin thoughtfully and went on as if he hadn’t heard. “What you do, see, is get a bank account in her name, but with your thumbprint. Then you transfer Caro’s money over to your account, and from there you turn it into cash and walk off into the night.” He smiled. “Should be easy.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t worth it,” Gredel said.

  “Not for eight hundred it isn’t,” Lamey said. He gave a laugh. “I’m just trying to work out a way of getting my investment back.”

  Gredel felt relief that Lamey wasn’t intending to steal Caro’s money. She didn’t want to be a thief, and she especially didn’t want to steal from a friend like Caro.

  “She doesn’t seem to have any useful contacts here.” Lamey continued thinking aloud. “Find out about these Biswas people she lived with. They might be good for something.”

  Gredel agreed. The request seemed harmless enough.

  She spent most of her nights away from Nelda’s now, either with Lamey or sleeping at Caro’s place. That was good, because things at Nelda’s were grim. Antony looked as if he was settling in for a long stay. He was sick, something about his liver, and he couldn’t get work. Sometimes Nelda had fresh bruises or cuts on her face. Sometimes the other kids did. And sometimes when Gredel came home at night, Antony was there, passed out on the sofa, a bottle of gin in his hand. She’d take off her shoes and walk past him quietly, glaring her hatred, and it occurred to her how easy it would be to hurt Antony t
hen, to pick up the bottle and smash him in the face with it, smash him until he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.

  Once, she came home and found Nelda in tears. Antony had slapped her around and taken the rent money, for the second time in a row. “We’re going to be evicted,” Nelda whispered hoarsely. “They’re going to throw us all out.”

  “No they’re not,” Gredel said firmly. She went to Lamey and explained the situation and begged him for the money. “I’ll never ask you for anything ever again,” she promised.

  Lamey listened thoughtfully, then reached into his wallet and handed her a hundred zenith note. “This take care of it?” he asked.

  Gredel reached for the note, hesitated. “More than enough,” she said. “I don’t want to take that much.”

  Lamey took her hand and put the note into it. His blue eyes looked into hers. “Take it and welcome,” he said. “Buy yourself something nice with the rest.”

  Gratitude flooded Gredel’s eyes. Tears fell down her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said. “I know I don’t deserve it.”

  “Of course you do,” Lamey said. “You deserve the best, Earthgirl.” He kissed her, his lips coming away salty. “Now you take this to the building agent, right? You don’t give it to Nelda, because she might give it away again.”

  “I’ll do that right away,” Gredel said.

  “And—” His eyes turned solemn. “Does Antony need taking care of? Or need encouragement to leave? You know what I mean.”

  Gredel shrank from the idea. “No,” she said. “No—he won’t stay long.”

  “You remember it’s an option, right?”

  She made herself nod in answer.

  Gredel took the money to the agent, a scowling little woman who had an office in the building and who smelled of cabbage and onions. She insisted on a receipt for the two months’ rent, which the woman gave grudgingly, and as Gredel walked away, she thought about Lamey and how this meant that he loved her.

  Too bad he’s going to die. The thought formed in her mind unbidden.

  The worst part was, she knew it was true.

  People like Lamey didn’t survive for long. There weren’t many old linkboys—that’s why they weren’t called linkmen. Sooner or later they were caught and killed. And the people they loved—their wives, their lovers, their children—paid as well, like Ava, with a term on the labor farms, or with their own execution.