Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) (13 page)

"Let's get a table
anyway," Warreven said, and she gave a snort of laughter.

"Sure, but which side
of the hall?"

Warreven looked again.
He was used to Shinbone and the other, newer clubs down by the
Harbor, where the wry-abed and trade mingled easily. Here the tables
were divided, the wry-abed to the left of the band platform,
trade--easily distinguished by the mix of off-worlders and
indigenes--to the right. He sighed--the mixed bars were easier;
trade tended to want him as a herm, and the wry-abed too often wanted
actual men--but there really wasn't much of a choice. "Trade, I
suppose."

Folhare nodded. "You
find a table, I'll get drinks."

"Let me get this
round," Warreven said, and reached into his pocket. Folhare
hesitated only for a moment, then took the proffered
assignats
.

"All right. But the
next one's on me."

"No offense,"
Warreven said, "but I hope we've both found someone else before
the next round."

Folhare flashed him
another quick smile and turned away toward the nearest bar. Warreven
made his way through the first row of tables--it wasn't that
crowded, but the empty tables tended to be toward the walls, where
the lights were dimmer and the customers could see each other less
clearly--aware of eyes scanning and dismissing him. He was old for
this, certainly, but hoped it was less that than that he wasn't
dressed for trade tonight. The music was ending, the lines of dancers
spinning toward the conclusion of the dance, and he picked a table
quickly, seating himself with his back to the wall, so he could watch
the dance floor. The dance ended with a rattle of quick, high notes
from the contre drum, and the lines broke apart as the individual
dancers began to move back toward their tables. The noise of
conversation was suddenly louder. Warreven smiled at a broad-built
indigene with the speckled hair of a sailor, but got only a polite
smile in return. The man moved purposefully past him, seated himself
at a table of off-worlders, three women and a man, all in drably
expensive clothes.

"No luck?" Folhare
asked, and set a bottle and a handful of cheap pottery glasses on the
table in front of him. Warreven frowned--there were four glasses,
not two--and then realized that the men behind her were coming to
join them. "You know my clan-cousin Bonnard, I think."

Warreven nodded. He
knew Bonand Stane, all right, and, de-spite their both being of the
same Watch, had never been fully sure that he could trust the man.
There was no denying that Bonand was a Modernist and wry-abed, but
they hadn't had much else in common.

"This is Alex,"
Bonand said, and nodded to the man behind him.

Warreven nodded again,
studying the stranger. He was an off-worlder, unmistakably, and as
unmistakably new to the planet, fair skin not yet marred by the sun.
Classic trade, he thought, and held out his hand in the off-world
greeting. "I'm Warreven."

There was no need to
give clan or Watch, not yet--and not ever, given that the man was
from another world, no possible kin--but he saw Bonand's quick,
malicious smile and wished he'd given his full name. Alex accepted
the handshake with a nod and a quick, flickering glance, interest
visibly flaring and then vanishing before Warreven could be quite
sure what had gone wrong.

"I need to talk to
you, Raven," Bonand said, and pulled one of the chairs away from
the table.

"Sit down, why don't
you," Warreven answered flatly, and Bonand smiled again.

"I will. I hear I
should congratulate you--Stiller
seraaliste
is nothing to sneeze at."

He had spoken in
franca
, and
Warreven answered in creole, earning a quick look of thanks from
Alex. "Nothing's been decided yet. I may not remain on the
ballot."

"Temelathe'll have
something to say about that," Bonand said, switching to creole. His
accent was less clear, Warreven noticed, and was meanly pleased.
Alex--any trade--was fair game, and he was good-looking. Bonand
grimaced, and switched back to
franca
. "You do know what's
going on, don't you, Raven? He wants to
keep you off his back, and he doesn't want anyone pushing trade
this season. Plus he doesn't want any clan changing brokers this
season. So who better to promote for
seraaliste
than a man who doesn't know how to make a bargain?"

Warreven swallowed his
first, furious response. "And where'd you hear this bit of
gossip?"

"I'm in the White
Watch House now, for my sins," Bonand answered. "In the
secretarial pool. It's not common talk, but it's what the
Important Men are saying. And Temelathe is very pleased with himself
for the idea."

Folhare leaned forward,
planting both elbows on the table, all thought of trade, her own
business, forgotten for the moment. "That's pretty baroque,
Bonand."

"So's Temelathe,"
Bonand answered, and laughed nervously, looking over his shoulder.
"Well, it explains it, doesn't it? Why else would he nominate
Warreven, they're not exactly best friends anymore. But if he gets
Warreven out of dealing with trade, then that just leaves Malemayn
and Haliday to make trouble. And at the same time, with Warreven as
seraaliste
, he
can pretty much count on Stiller staying with--who is it, Raven,
Kerendach?"

Warreven nodded.

"As long as you stay
with Kerendach, Temelathe gets his cut, Kerendach makes a nice
profit, and nothing changes." Folhare reached for the wine bottle. "And
in the meantime, you're having to play catch-up just to
figure out who's who among the druggists." She glanced at Alex,
made a face. "Sorry. Pharmaceutical companies. But you know what I
mean."

Warreven reached for
the wine himself. The Stiller contract with Kerendach had been a
matter of debate for nearly seven local years. Previous
seraalistes
had proposed changing both it and the brokers, but had never been
able to come up with an acceptable alternative, though the margin of
the Traditionalists' victories had been getting smaller and
smaller. The more radical Modernists--and the conservative
Traditionalists, like the Red Watch Feranes--swore that the largest
pharmaceuticals were in collusion, had banded together to make sure
that each of them got its share of the twice-yearly harvests at a
bargain price. Warreven himself doubted that: the way the Big Six,
and the Lesser Twenty, for that matter, bickered over labor and the
special individual contracts for the harvest surpluses, made him
fairly confident that they wouldn't be able to work together on
anything bigger. It was more likely--if Bonand was right--that
Temelathe had quietly passed the word, through the Stanes in the
Licensing Office and in Trade Service and Export Control, that the
Most Important Man would frown on a new contract with Stiller. "Are
you with a pharmaceutical?" he said, to Alex, meaning,
or
are you just trade?

The off-worlders
blinked. "Well, yeah. Not Kerendach, though."

"Good," Folhare
said, with a smile, and poured him a glass of wine.

"He's with DTS,"
Bonand said impatiently, and Alex flicked a glance at him.

"That's right."

Warreven nodded. DTS
was one of the thirty-odd midsize companies that did business on
Hara, specializing in the sea-harvest from Casnot and Newcomen--not
a big company at all, not even one of the Lesser Twenty--but large
enough to afford to pay Stiller's prices. And small enough,
specialized enough, he thought, to be less dependent on the Stane and
Maychilder harvests than the larger companies. Always assuming, of
course, that he ended up with the job. "Do you find yourself
dealing much with Temelathe and Stane?" he asked, and Alex gave him
a wary look.

"Not much, really."

"Some," Bonand said
in the same moment, and the off-worlder sighed.

"DTS pays
its--fees--like everybody does. What do you want me to say, that I
think it sucks? I'm not in marketing, I'm a tech. I'm just
passing through."

Bonand lifted his
eyebrows, caught between annoyance and not wanting to alienate his
date, and Warreven said, "Sorry, I wasn't being clear--or
meaning to insult you. It's more ... I was curious, really. I know
the Big Six have to be careful of Stane--they get most of their
goods from them, right?--but I didn't know if that was true for
companies your size."

Alex looked away. Even
in the dim light, Warreven could see that he was blushing. "I'm--just
a technician," he said again, and Warreven felt himself blushing in
turn. Alex was trade, a player, though maybe not by the off-worlder's
own definition. If he was a technician, of course he wouldn't know
DTS's real policies.

"Would you like to
dance?"

Alex blinked again and
glanced toward the dance floor. "Sorry. I've no idea how to dance
to this."

"It's not that
hard," Warreven began, and Bonand pushed back his chair.

"I'll dance with
you, Warreven. Keep you honest."

There was no graceful
way to refuse. Warreven followed him onto the worn floor, took their
place in the nearer of the lines, linking arms with Bonand and a thin
woman who took the place to his left. The drums were already well
into the
entrait
,
the twisting rhythm signaling a cross-step dance, and Warreven
sighed. He was not a terribly good dancer, for all that he enjoyed
it; he would have preferred not to screw up the complicated patterns
in front of Bonand, or Alex. The lead drum sounded, and the line
moved forward into the first figure in ragged unison, the stuttering,
high-pitched contre calling the changes. Warreven kept his head down,
concentrating on the steps, until he was sure he had settled into the
pattern of the movements. The woman at his left dropped his arm and
began adding the dipping spins of an expert; he spared her an
admiring glance, but knew better than to try to imitate her.

At least Bonand was no
better: at the first tempo change, he shook his head, and dropped
back out of the line, pulling Warreven with him. Warreven went
willingly enough; they stood with the others who had given up on the
change, watching as the triple line swept the length of the hall and
retreated again. The woman who had been next to him was very good,
Warreven saw, and he watched her with remote envy. She was at the
center of her line now, thin face a mask of concentration, her skirt
flying out in an almost constant circle as she added spin on spin and
still kept her place with the others. The tempo changed again, slowed
abruptly, and most of the dancers slowed with it, glad of the break,
gliding through the basic pattern at half their previous speed. The
woman kept spinning, riding the quicker beat implicit in the lead
drum's call. And then the counterpoint came in again, faster still,
and she flung back her head and matched it step for step.

"She is good,"
Warreven said, to no one in particular, and Bonand looked at him.

"Yes. Do me a favor,
Raven, leave Alex alone."

"I'm not serious,"
Warreven answered. "And if he is, that's not my problem."

"It's not that,"
Bonand said. "He's gay, Warreven."

"So?" Warreven
began, and only then did the foreign word, the Creole word, register.
"What do you mean, exactly? He's trade."

Intense distaste and a
deepening anger flickered across Bonand's face, and then he had
himself under control again. "Yeah, he's trade, but he does work
for DTS--he really is a tech, he hasn't just bought a permit--and
he's still gay. Off-world gay--that means he wants another man,
not a
halving
like you."

Warreven felt a
familiar fury rising in him, at the name, at the exclusion, at the
whole incomprehensible system of off-world sexuality, with its
finicking distinctions that were no distinctions a tall as far as he
himself could see. "He's still trade," he began, and the drums
stopped, silencing him. He clapped automatically with the rest of the
crowd, biting hard on the rest of what he would have said--
he's
still trade, and what trade wants, what they come here for, is sex
with us outside that system, so I've as good a chance with him as
you do
--and Bonand looked aside, sorrow chasing hope
across his mobile features.

"I suppose he's
trade," he said softly, voice barely audible in the sudden rush of
conversation. "I know he's trade. But he is gay, and he does
really work for DTS--he's different, Raven."

Warreven looked at him
again, the situation rearranging itself into a new pattern in his
mind. Alex might not be trade after all, might just be one of the
temps who came through the system and decided to try Hara's
well-known delights, but Alex wasn't what mattered. Bonand was in
love with him, or had convinced himself he was in love with him, and
Warreven didn't need the rest of that dream spelled out for him.
He'd felt it himself a few times, the heady combination of sex and
desire and something like friendship that he'd allowed to grow into
the hope that maybe this one off-worlder would fall in love with him
and take him with him when he left Hara. It had never happened to
him, almost never happened to any Harans; IDCA almost never gave
emigration permits to even part-time prostitutes. He remembered the
case waiting on his desk: if Destany Casnot couldn't get a permit
without a fight--Destany who had half a dozen friends willing to
swear he, 3e, had been out
of trade and 'Aukai's lover for seven years, there was no chance
that Bonand would get one. And even less chance that Alex would make
the effort for him. "He's your--" he began, and broke off
because
franca
didn't have an inoffensive word for what Alex was to Bonand, "--yours.
I wasn't poaching, not seriously. I'll leave him
alone."

Bonand nodded, visibly
regretting the confidence. "Thanks," he muttered, and turned back
to the table. Warreven glanced over his shoulder and saw Folhare
leaning back in her chair to talk to an off-worlder who seemed to
know both her and Alex. The drums were starting again, and one of the
middle drummers abandoned her drum for a reed-whistle, signaling a
ring-dance. Those were courting dances in the
mesnie
s,
served the same purpose even in the
wrangwys
bars, and Warreven took his place in the outer circle, nodding to the
short, fair-skinned man opposite him. By the time he'd made his way
around the circle, he should surely have found someone. ... At the
very least, Folhare would have had the chance to finalize her
arrangements. As he moved through the first figure, the fair man's
hands hot in his own, he caught a glimpse of the table: Folhare still
laughing, practiced and easy; Bonand leaning on the back of Alex's
chair, one hand draped, unobtrusively possessive, over the
off-worlder's shoulder. Only Alex himself looked uncertain, as
though he didn't understand the rules. Then he swept on to the next
partner, and when he looked again, only Folhare and her
jackamie
were left at the table.