Conventions of War (26 page)

“That'll change when rationing starts.”

Oh.
She hadn't considered that.

She would have to get herself the proper vouchers when she went through the checkpoints. Another job for Casimir, damn it.

Sidney packed the rifle in a case, then took Sula to his workroom again to give her all the remaining ammunition and several spare laser diodes. “Perhaps you'd better leave by the back way,” he suggested. “Any Naxids might be interested in a Terran leaving a gun shop with a case.”

“I'll do that.”

Sidney pulled up the schematics of the rifle on his computer, then beamed them to Sula's arm display. “I've included a design for a sound suppressor,” he said. “You screw it onto the barrel, and it should be good for the first dozen shots or so before things get noisy again. I didn't have time to actually build it.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a pipe, and loaded it with a large chunk of hashish from a green leather box.

Sula looked down at two photo cubes attached to the wall above Sidney's desk. They showed a young man and young woman in the uniform of the Fleet.

“Your children?” he asked.

Sidney reached for his lighter. His tones were unnaturally even, as if he was suppressing every possible emotion. “Sonia died retaking the
Destiny,
on Zanshaa's ring the first day of the mutiny. Johannes was killed at Magaria on
The Glory of the Praxis
.”

“I'm sorry,” Sula said. “And your wife?”

He took a deep breath of smoke before he answered. “She left me years ago, before I had my accident and had to leave the Fleet. I was just getting to know the children again before—” He waved his pipe. “Before all this started.”

Love and hate.
He had given all his guns away to her group, not caring if they could be traced to him. Now she knew why.

Sula hoped she could give him a new job that he could love, something that would keep him alive and useful. All she had to do was promise to fulfill his hatred.

“Mr. Sidney,” she said, “shall we go to PJ's and cadge a lunch?”

He exhaled a deep blue cloud of smoke and nodded.

“Why not?” he said. “The caterers will be out of work when the rationing comes. We may as well let PJ give them some money.”

A
shimmering layer of afternoon heat stretched across the pavement like a layer of molasses, thick enough to distort the colorful canopies and displays of the Textile Market that set up in Sula's street every five days. Early in the morning vendors motored up with their trailers or their three-wheelers with the sheds built onto the back, and at dawn the sheds opened, canopies went up, and the merchandise went on sale. After sunset, as the heat began to dissipate and the purple shadows crept between the stalls, the vendors would break down their displays and motor away, to set up the next day in another part of the city.

As Sula walked past on her way to her apartment, the rifle in its case under one arm, vendors called her attention to cheap women's clothing, baby clothes, shoes, stockings, scarves, rubbery Bogo toys, inexpensive dolls, cheap puzzles and games. There were bolts of fabric, foils of music and entertainment, sun lotion and sun hats, and knit items—unseasonable in the heat—alleged to be made from the fleece of Yormak cattle, and sold at a surprisingly low price.

Despite the heat, the market was thronged. Tired and hot, Sula elbowed her way impatiently through the crowd to her doorstep. A glance to one side showed that One-Step wasn't in his accustomed place. She entered the building, then heard the chime of a hand comm through her apartment door and made haste to enter. She put the rifle case down, snatched up the comm from the table and answered, panting.

Casimir surveyed her from the display. She could watch his eyes travel insolently over her image as far as the frame would permit.

“Too bad,” he said. “I was hoping to catch you in the bath again.”

“Better luck next time.” Sula switched on the room coolers, and somewhere in the building a tired compressor began to wheeze and faint currents of air to stir. She dropped into a chair near the
ju yao
pot, and holding the comm in one hand, began to loosen her boots with the other.

“I want to see you tonight,” Casimir said. “I'll pick you up at 2101, all right?”

“Why don't I meet you at the club?”

“Nothing happens at the club that early.” He frowned. “Don't you want me to know where you live?”

“I don't have a place of my own,” Sula lied cheerfully. “I sort of bounce between friends.”

“Well.” Grudgingly. “I'll see you at the club then.”

She had time to bathe, get a bite to eat, and work for a while on the next issue of
Resistance,
the one with the schematics for Sidney's do-it-yourself rifle. Then she dressed, dabbed Sengra on her throat, and trotted out of the apartment, the rifle case still under her arm. The sun was low in the viridian sky and the heat rose in waves, but the Textile Market was still thronged. People felt safe in such numbers, she thought, even though if she were a Naxid looking for hostages, she'd think of a park or an open-air market first thing.

One-Step stood in his usual place, wearing baggy shorts and a scarred leather vest. “Hey One-Step,” Sula said.

A brilliant smile blossomed on his face. “Hello, beauteous lady. How are you this lovely evening?”

He smelled as if he hadn't bathed for a few long hot summer days, a fact she did her best to ignore. “Do you know a man named Julien? A friend of Casimir's?”

The smile vanished at once. “One-Step advises you to stay away from such people, lovely one.”

“If I'm supposed to stay away from him, you'd better tell me why.”

One-Step scowled. “Julien's the son of Sergius Bakshi. And Sergius is the boss of the Riverside Clique. You don't get any worse than Sergius.”

Sula nodded, impressed. Sergius was not only a clique leader, he'd cheated the executioner long enough to have a grown son. Few of his kind stayed alive that long.

“Thanks, One-Step.”

One-Step looked bleak. “You're not going to follow One-Step's advice, are you? You're going out with Julien tonight.”

“He's not the one who asked me out. Good night, One-Step! Thanks!”

“You're making a mistake,” One-Step said darkly.

Sula negotiated the crowds at the Textile Market, then ducked down a sun-blasted side street, trying to keep on the shady side. The heat still took her breath away. She made another turn, then entered the delightfully cool air of a block-shaped storage building built in the shadow of the even larger Riverside Crematorium. She showed her false ID to the Cree at the desk, then took the elevator upstairs and opened one of Team 491's storage caches. There, she stowed the rifle case alongside the other rifle cases, the cases of ammunition and grenades and explosives and body armor.

For a moment she hesitated. Then she opened one of the cases, withdrew a small item and pocketed it.

Casimir waited by his car in front of the Cat Street club with an impatient scowl on his face and his walking stick in his hand. He wore a soft white shirt covered with minutely stitched braid. As she appeared, he stabbed the door button, and the glossy apricot-colored door rolled up into the car roof. “I
hate
being kept waiting,” he growled in his deep voice, and took her arm roughly to stuff her into the passenger compartment.

This too, Sula remembered, was what it was like to be a clique member's girlfriend.

Sula settled herself on apricot-colored plush across from Julien and Veronika, the latter in fluttery garb and a cloud of Sengra. Casimir thudded into the seat next to her and rolled down the door, Sula called up the chronometer on her sleeve display.

“I'm three minutes early,” she said primly, in what she trusted was a math teacher's voice. “I'm sorry if I spoiled your evening.”

Casimir gave an unsociable grunt. Veronika popped her blue eyes wide and said, “The boys are taking us shopping!”

Sula remembered that too.

“Where?” she said.

“It's a surprise,” Julien said, and slid open the door on the vehicle's bar. “Anyone want something to drink?”

The Torminel behind the controls slipped the car smoothly from the curb on its six tires. Sula had a Citrine Fling while the rest drank Kyowan. The vehicle passed through Grandview to the Petty Mount, a district in the shadow of the High City, beneath the Couch of Eternity where the ashes of the Shaa masters waited in their niches for the end of time. The area was lively, filled with boutiques, bars, cafés, and eccentric shops that sold folk crafts or antiques or old jewelry. Sula saw Cree and Lai-own on the streets as well as Terrans.

The car pulled to a smooth stop before a shop called Raiment by Chesko, and the apricot-colored doors rolled open. They stepped from the vehicle and were greeted at the door by a female Daimong whose gray body was wrapped in a kind of satin sheath that looked strangely attractive on her angular body with its matchstick arms. In a chiming voice she greeted Casimir by name.

“Gredel, this is Miss Chesko,” Casimir told Sula in a voice that suggested both her importance and his own.

“Pleased to meet you,” Sula said.

The shop was a three-level fantasy filled with sumptuous fabrics in brilliant colors, all set against neutral-colored walls of a translucent resinous substance that let in the fading light of the sun. Gossamer Cree music floated tastefully in the air.

A Daimong who designed clothes for Terrans was something new in Sula's experience. The shop must have had excellent air circulation, or Chesko wore something that suppressed the odor of her rotting flesh, because Sula didn't scent her even once.

Casimir's mood changed the instant he entered the shop. He walked from one rack to the next and heaved out clothing for Sula or Veronika to try on. He held garments critically to the light and ran his hands over the glossy, rich fabrics. Veronika's were soft and bright and shimmered; Sula's were satiny and tended to the darker shades, with light accents in the form of a scarf, lapel, or collar.

He's dressing me as a woman of mystery,
Sula thought.

His antennae were rather acute.

Sula looked at herself in the full-length video display and suspected his tastes were fairly good as well—though she was forced to admit that she couldn't be certain herself; her own dress sense was so undeveloped that she wasn't sure of her judgment.

She found that she enjoyed herself playing model, displaying one rich garment after another. Casimir offered informed comment as she changed outfits, twitched the clothing to a better drape, and sorted the clothing into piles of yesses, maybes, rejects. Chesko made respectful suggestions in her bell-like tones. Shop assistants ran back and forth with mountains of clothing in their arms.

It hadn't been like this with Lamey, Sula remembered. When he walked into a shop with Gredel, the assistants knew to bring out their flashiest, most expensive clothing, and he'd buy them with a wave of his hand and a pocket of cash.

Casimir wasn't doing this to impress anyone, or at least not in the way Lamey had. He was demonstrating his taste, not his power and money.

“You should have Chesko's job,” she told him.

“Maybe. I seem to have got the wrong training though.”

“Your mama didn't give you enough dolls to play with,” Julien said. He sat in a chair in a corner, out of everyone's way. He had a tolerant smile on his pointed face and a glass of mig brandy, brought by the staff, in one hand.

“I'm hungry,” Julien said after an hour and a half.

Casimir looked a little put out, but he shrugged and then looked again through the piles of clothing, making a final sorting. Julien rose from his chair, put down his glass and addressed one of the assistants.

“
That
pile,” he said. “Total it up.”

Veronika gave a whoop of joy and ran to embrace him. “Better add this,” Casimir said, adding a vest to the yes pile. He picked up an embroidered jacket from another heap and held it out to Sula. “What do you think of this?” he asked. “Should I add it to your pile?”

Sula considered the jacket. “I think you should pick out the single very nicest thing out of the stack and give it to me.”

His dark eyes flashed and his gravel voice was suddenly full of anger. “You don't want my presents?” he asked.

Sula was aware that Veronika was staring at her as if she were insane.

“I'll take
a
present,” Sula said. “You don't know me well enough to buy me a whole wardrobe.”

For a moment she sensed thwarted rage boiling off of him, and then he thought about it and decided to be amused. His mouth twisted in a tight-lipped smile. “Very well,” he said. He considered the pile for a moment, then reached in and pulled out a suit, velvet black, with satin braid and silver beadwork on the lapels and down the seams of the loose trousers.

“Will this do?” he said.

“It's very nice. Thank you.” Sula noted that it wasn't the most expensive item in the pile, and that fact pleased her. If he wasn't buying her expensive trash, it probably meant he didn't think she was trash either.

“Will you wear it tonight?” He hesitated, then looked at Chesko. “It didn't need fitting, did it?”

“No, sir.” Her pale, expressionless Daimong face, set in a permanent caricature of wide-eyed alarm, gave no sign of disappointment in losing sales worth hundreds of zeniths.

“Happy to,” Sula said. She took the suit to the changing room, changed, and looked at herself in the old-fashioned silver-backed mirrors. The suit probably
was
the nicest thing in the pile.

Her old clothes were wrapped in a package, and she stepped out to a look of appreciation from Julien and the more critical gaze of Casimir. He gestured with a finger as if stirring a pot.

“Turn around,” he said.

She made a pirouette, and he nodded, more to himself than to anyone else. “That works,” he said. The deep voice sounded pleased.

“Can we eat now?” Julien asked.

Outside, the white marble of the Couch of Eternity glowed a pale green in twilight. The streets exhaled summer heat into the sky like an overtaxed athlete panting at the end of his run.

They ate in a café, a place of bright red and white tiles and shiny chrome. The café was packed and noisy, as if people wanted to pack in as much food and good times as possible before rationing began. Casimir and Julien were in a lighthearted mood, chattering and laughing, but every so often Sula caught Casimir looking at her with a thoughtful expression, as if he was approving his choice of outfit.

He had made her into something he admired.

Afterward they went to a bar, equally crowded, with a live band and dancing. The other night Casimir had danced with a kind of gravity, but now he was exuberant, laughing as he led her into athletic kicks, spins, and twirls. Before, he had been pleasing himself with a show of his power and control, but now it was as if he wanted all Zanshaa to share his joy.

He was taking me for granted the other night,
Sula thought.
Now he's not.

It was well past midnight when they left the bar. Outside, in the starlit darkness, a pair of odd colossi moved in the night. Leather creaked. A strange barnyard smell floated to Sula's nostrils.

Casimir gave a laugh. “Right,” he said. “Get in.”

He launched himself into some kind of box that, dimly perceived, seemed to float above the street. There was a creak, a shuffle, more barnyard smell. His long pale hand appeared out of the night.

“Come on,” he said.

Sula took the hand and let him draw her forward. A step, a box, a seat. She seated herself next to him before she understood where she was, and amazement flooded her.

“Is this a pai-car chariot?” she asked.

“That's right!” Casimir let a laugh float off into the night. “We hired a pair for tonight.” He thumped the leather-padded rim of the cockpit and called to the driver, “Let's go!”

There was a hiss from the driver, a flap of reins, and the carriage lurched into movement. The vehicle was pulled by a pai-car, a tall flightless bird, a carnivorous, unintelligent cousin to the Lai-own driver that perched on the front of the carriage. There were two big silver alloy wheels, ornamented with cutouts, and a boat-shaped body made out of leather, boiled, treated, sculpted, and ornamented with bright metal badges of a pattern unique to each driver. Mounted on either side were some cell-powered lamps, not very powerful, which the driver now switched on.