Praxis

THREE

Acold weight lay on Sula’s heart. She knew what was inside.

She turned off the airlock alarm. “I’ll have to close and depressurize the lock,” she told her distant audience. “With the hatch shut, you won’t be receiving my transmissions, so I will record and transmit later.”

She closed the yacht’s hatch behind her and listened to the hiss of air flooding out into the vacuum, the hiss that grew fainter and fainter, until there was nothing left in the airlock to carry any sound. Sula braced her feet outward against the lock walls again and pulled the lever. The inner hatch opened inward in perfect silence, then caught half open.

Unlike that of the pinnace,Midnight Runner’s lock opened directly into the cockpit. With her helmet jammed against the hatch coaming, Sula could see the back of Blitsharts’s acceleration couch, with his helmet nestled in webbing. Blitsharts’s left hand floated above the thruster control, as if ready to pounce and initiate another chaotic maneuver.

Sula tilted her body to scan the cockpit with her helmet lamps, and her heart surged in shock.

The cabin interior was beautifully laid out and proportioned, custom-designed for Blitsharts himself, made for the reach of his arm, the comfort of his eye. The colors were cream accented with stripes of red, green, and yellow. But something had smashed the cockpit-it looked as if someone had gone over it with a sledgehammer. There were dents and scratches on the instrument panels and cabin walls, and even some of the readouts-built to resist heavy accelerations-had been smashed.

Worse, there was hair, and what looked like blood, smeared over the displays. Sula wondered in shock if someone had murdered Blitsharts. Chopped him up with-Withwhat? What could create such a horror?

She tried to shove open the hatch, felt increasing resistance. Something had broken loose and was caught behind it, preventing it from deploying.

Sula groped blindly behind the hatch door with a gloved hand. The obstacle was not within range at first, and she had to float in the airlock while sweeping her hand along the rim of the hatch. The movement was difficult and awkward in the vac suit, and her bruised muscles strained. Her breath rasped in her helmet, and she felt sweat prickling her forehead. Finally she found the trouble, something wet and bloody and hairy, and very, very dead.

The dog Orange. Not that he was recognizable as a dog; he was a battered mass of bloody meat, and had apparently been hurled like a missile around the cockpit as the boat tumbled, the erratic spin subjecting the poor animal to one ferocious acceleration after another.

It was the dog that had bludgeoned the interior of the cockpit, battering the instruments and smearing the compartment with his own blood. It was the dog that had hit the thruster controls and triggered the boat’s erratic tumble.

After seeing Orange, Sula had no hope for Blitsharts. She found the captain strapped into his acceleration couch with his faceplate up, open to the vacuum. It had been Orange who fired the maneuvering thrusters, not the captain. Blitsharts’s face, though smeared with dog’s blood, had been protected by the frame of the helmet and was undamaged. His expression was pinched and accusing. He had been dead for some time.

It was said that hypoxia was a good way to go, that as the brain slowly starved of oxygen, it gave way to euphoria, that the victim’s last moments were blissful.

Sula’s memories were different. She remembered the body twitching, the heels drumming, the diaphragm going into spasm as the lungs labored to breathe…

She remembered weeping onto the pillow as her friend fought for life. The feel of the pillow in her hand, soft as flesh. The pillow drawn over her friend’s face to finish her off.

Enderby called Martinez out of Operations Command at the beginning of the shift, but gave him permission to monitor the rescue mission when he wasn’t busy forwarding or filing the Fleet’s communications.

And so Martinez watched the displays as Sula braked her craft to match velocities withMidnight Runner, as she maneuvered closer for a better view of the tumbling yacht.

He halfway hoped she wouldn’t attempt it. He didn’t want his plan to kill anyone.

And then came the message, addressed specifically to him. Sula, her astonishing good looks unimpaired by the faceplate that closed her helmet, saying, “I haven’t ever screwed in quite this way before.” With an eyebrow tilted, and wicked amusement in her green eyes.

Martinez thought he’d smothered his burst of laughter, but he caught Enderby giving him a sharp look from his desk, and Martinez drew a solemn mask over his amusement.

Sula’s face faded from the display, and Martinez watched the telemetry signals as she began using her thrusters, matching her boat’s roll to that of the yacht. His hands twitched as they maneuvered imaginary controls. Martinez’s heart leaped into his throat whenRunner’s thrusters fired, whenMidnight Runner began to roll into Sula’s pinnace like a great whale breaching over a fishing boat…Get out, get out,he thought furiously, and fear shivered along his nerves as he saw the collision. He didn’t breathe until Sula had escaped and stabilized her craft.

“I’m going to try once again.” Sula looked composed enough in her vacuum suit, but this time there was no mischievous twinkle in her eye-she’d learned well enough that this was no laughing matter. Admiration for her courage warred in Martinez with despair over her foolishness.

But he had to admit she did it beautifully-faster this time. She’d learned her lesson, her boat dancing in all three planes at once. And then the docking, the battle against the tumbling inertia of the yacht, and finally the great triumph in which the two boats flew, linked, through the silent glory of space.

Martinez wanted to shriek and dance. He even found himself looking at Enderby, as if for permission-but the lord commander sat silent at his desk, a slight frown on his face, absorbed in whatever he saw on his own displays. Dancing was not going to be a part of the program.

Sula’s next transmission showed a woman exhausted, limp in her couch, with locks of her golden hair pasted by sweat to her forehead. Martinez could imagine the battle she’d been through. But the gleam in her eye was back, and this time it was a gleam of conquest.

“I am going on board.”

The battle was over; now there was only the inspection of the prize.

When news came that there was no air in Blitsharts’s cockpit, Martinez’s heart sank only a little. Having had hours in which to think about it, he’d concluded that it was unlikely that the yachtsman was alive.

The next report came after the silence in which the airlock door cut off Sula’s transmissions.

“Blitsharts and the dog are dead.” She was back in the cockpit of her pinnace, floating within close range of the cockpit camera. “There was a leak somewhere in the cockpit, and his faceplate was up and he’d turned off most of the cabin alarms. I suppose you shut off a lot of alarms when racing-proximity alarms, acceleration alerts-and when the depressurization alarm went off, he probably shut it off without noticing what it was. At some point he released the dog from its acceleration couch, but I doubt he was in his right mind by then-he’d probably lost it just before that long acceleration burn.” She seemed to shrug inside her vacuum suit. “I will follow this transmission with the recording I made aboardMidnight Runner. This is Cadet Caroline Sula, concluding her report.”

Martinez watched in fascination. The Caroline Sula who uttered these words seemed neither the mischievous pilotcadet nor the weary, triumphant warrior, but someone somehow lost…almost misplaced in time, both older and younger than her actual age. Older, because she seemed timeworn, almost frail. Younger, because there was a helplessness in her glance, like that of a wounded child.

Had she counted so much on Blitsharts being alive? Martinez wondered. Or perhaps sheknew him, even loved him…

He was tempted to replay the transmission, so he could better understand why her reaction seemed so exaggerated.

“Lieutenant Martinez,” Enderby said.

Martinez gave a start. “Lord Commander?”

“Please convey to Cadet Sula my congratulations on her successful maneuver. It required both skill and courage.”

Surprise swam through Martinez’s brain. “Yes, my lord.”

“I have decided to award her the Medal of Merit-” Enderby hesitated. “-Second Class. Please have the necessary documents on my desk by the end of shift.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Enderby had been watching all along, Martinez realized. Watching the transmissions while he sat at his desk, expressionless as always.

Another idea occurred to the lord commander. Enderby continued, “Compose a document for release to the Fleet News Service, then send it to me for review.”

“Very good, my lord.”

“Oh-another thing.”

“Yes, my lord?”

“In your message, please admonish Cadet Sula for the inappropriate nature of one of her remarks. Official communications are not to be used for levity.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Martinez realized he would miss the old man when he was gone.

Enderby sent Martinez and Gupta home early so he could attend the football match between the crews ofThe Glory of the Praxis andThe Sublime Truth of the Praxis, two of the goliath Praxis-class battleships that formed the core of the Home Fleet.

Fleet commanders were often as fanatic about sport as any cadet. Sport was the closest anyone in the Fleet was ever likely to come to real combat.

Martinez had attended the games as often as not, but today he wanted nothing so much as a shower, a bed, and-come to think of it-a drink to help relax the kinks in his muscles. He stopped by the junior officers’ club on his way out of the Commandery and encountered Ari Abacha, fortifying himself before his shift at Operations Control. Abacha waved him over to the bar as he entered, and Martinez took a chair, wincing at the pain caused by that inhuman seat in Operations.

“Buy you a drink?”

“Thanks, Ari. I’ll have some of that Sellaree.”

A glass of ruby wine was placed in front of Martinez. It was one of the Commandery’s special tulip glasses, rimmed with the same glossy white ceramic out of which the bar had been shaped, and with a stripe of the same pale green as the carpet, a color scheme intended to set off to advantage the darker green of the officers’ tunics.

“Isay. Gare…” Abacha’s words were unusually tentative.

Martinez looked at him. “Yes, Ari?”

Abacha gave a laugh. “I don’t know whether you’ll be annoyed by this or not-I think it’s amusing, actually-but it seems you’re famous.”

Martinez raised his heavy brows. “I? Famous?”

“I’m afraid so. Do you remember yesterday, when that fellow from All-Sports Network called Operations Control?”

Martinez scratched his two days’ beard. “Panjit something, wasn’t it?”

Abacha gave a nervous laugh. “Panjit Sesse, yes. Well-things were getting busy, you’ll recall-and I was going to cut the fellow off. But Ididn’t — hesuggested that I keep transmitting to him, and it appears that Idid. Without thinking about it. He heardeverything. ”

“Everything,” Martinez repeated, trying to remember if he’d said anything particularly embarrassing.

“Everything up till the time my shift ended and I left. Everything we did was broadcast on All-Sports Network.”

“And the censors didn’t…?”

“The censors seem to have taken the night off. Maybe they were watching the football match-it was Lodestone versus Andiron, you know.”

Martinez probed carefully, like a tongue exploring a painful tooth. “I-We-didn’t say anything that…”

“Oh no.” Abacha laughed. “Nothing that will haunt us. You were quite decisive, in fact-sent your message to Kandinski requesting a rescue mission before informing Lord Commander Enderby that a situation even existed.”

Martinez’s brittle laugh was a poor imitation of Abacha’s, and his head buzzed with calculation as he laughed.

Did Enderby know? If he didn’t, someone was sure to tell him. But of course Enderby knew thatsomeone must have requested a rescue mission from Kandinski.

If only Enderby’s informant wouldn’t rub his nose in it, wouldn’t jog him with an elbow at the football match and say, “By all the virtues, Enderby, you allow your aides a deal of latitude.”

But someone was bound to. The fleet sailed not so much in the starry void as on a sea of rumor, an incoherent mass of information, speculation, gossip, intrigue, interest, and collusion. Martinez, without seeking them out, was nevertheless privy to an outrageous number of secrets, some of which-if true-were blood-chilling. But it hardly mattered whether they were true or not, they were things that the Fleetknew. It wasknown that the Naxid Fleet Commander Toshueen, finding his son disappointing, had cut off the youngster’s head and eaten it; it wasknown that Squadron Commander Rafi had ordered cadets to tie and beat him, and as for Enderby’s wife…well, a lot wasknown about Enderby’s wife.

That Martinez had good, authoritative reasons to disbelieve all these stories scarcely mattered: the Fleet always told stories about itself, and the sort of stories it told were eternal. There was aneed in the Fleet for stories, and now there was a new story, how Lord Commander Enderby had been made a fool of by his aide.

Martinez had always hoped he would be the subject of one of these stories, but this wasn’t the sort he had in mind. He had the sense that his promotion, already slipping from his fingers, had just floated beyond his reach.

His sense of grievance, however, was only momentary. He was too tired to feel anything for very long.

He said good-bye to Abacha and took a cab to the apartment he kept in the High City, let his clothes fall on the floor for his orderly to pick up, and fell into bed.

His orderly woke him at the usual hour, and Martinez dragged himself to breakfast. Lieutenants were entitled to two servants, paid for by the Fleet-the service was nothing if not generous to its officers-but Martinez had never found duties enough for more than one. This was Khalid Alikhan, a master weaponer of more than thirty years’ service, a man Martinez saved from retirement when the oldCrisis was decommissioned. He was tall and grave, with iron-gray hair and the curling mustachios and goatee favored by senior warrant and petty officers.

As a servant, Alikhan was adequate: though he kept the place tidy and looked after Martinez’s uniforms, he was an indifferent cook, and both his manners and accent were rough. But that didn’t matter-Martinez knew he could always hire more polished servants if he wished to entertain. It was Alikhan’s thirty years spent in the Fleet weapons bays that Martinez found invaluable, the fund of Fleet wisdom and experience to which Alikhan gave him access.

Alikhan knew more of the Fleet’sstories than anyone Martinez had ever met.

“There are quite a few messages, my lord,” Alikhan said as he poured the first coffee of the day. “They started coming in yesterday morning.”

Alikhan’s words brought the day’s first cloud of despair: Martinez felt his head sinking between his shoulders. “Reporters, I suppose?” he said.

“Yes, my lord.”

Alikhan offered Martinez his breakfast of porridge and pickled mayfish. The jellylike mayfish, splayed across the plate’s Martinez crest, trembled greenly in the morning light.

“I saw the broadcasts, my lord,” Alikhan said. “When you didn’t turn up the other night, I checked the video to see if some crisis might be detaining you.”

“Was it exciting?” Martinez shoved porridge into his mouth. He was rarely awake enough in the mornings to care what his breakfasts tasted like, and this one, so far as he could tell, tasted more or less like the others.

“Well,” Alikhan said, “the broadcasters really didn’t know what to make of it, but to anyone with real experience,” by which he meant the Fleet, “to anyone who knew what was happening, it was…” He made an affirmative movement with one shovel-fingered hand. “It was suspenseful, my lord. Very interesting.”

“Let’s hope the lord commander isn’t toointerested, ” Martinez said savagely.

“He might decide that you’re a credit to the service, my lord,” Alikhan offered, though he sounded dubious.

“He might,” Martinez agreed, then added, “He’s decorating that cadet, Sula…nothing was said about decoratingme. ”

The pickled mayfish oozed over Martinez’s palate. He washed it down with coffee, and Alikhan topped up his cup.

“Peopleare interested in you,” he said. “There’s that.”

“That’s nice, I suppose. But that’s not going to matter in the service.”

“But those people could be, I don’t know…useful.”

Something in Alikhan’s manner made Martinez straighten. “How do you mean?”

“Well,” Alikhan began, “I recall a lieutenant on the oldRenown, name of Salazar. There was a problem with one of the missile launchers during an exercise-the missile ran hot in the tube, was spraying gamma rays all through the bay, could have blown up…Salazar was the officer in command, took charge and got the missile out of the tube-those were the old Mark 17 launchers, my lord, very unreliable unless they were maintained properly, and these weren’t. That’s what the board of inquiry determined-there were two officers cashiered over that one, and a master weaponer and two weaponers first class were broken in the ranks.”

“They took it seriously, then,” Martinez said. Weaponers were broken in rank often enough, he supposed, but if they cashiered a couple of Peers instead of shifting them to some meaningless duty, then their dereliction must have been serious.

“It spoiled a very large fleet exercise,” Alikhan said. “Lord Commander Fanaghee-that’s the clan-elder of the Fanaghee that’s got the Naxid squadron at Magaria-he was humiliated in front of Senior Fleet Commander El-kay. And of course we could have lost theRenown. The destruction of theQuest had already been blamed on the Mark 17, and cautions sent around the Fleet.”

“I see,” Martinez said. “So how did Salazar make out?”

“Well, he was decorated, of course-the hero of the hour. Very popular. But it was what he didwith his celebrity that caught my attention.”

Martinez had forgotten the existence of his breakfast. “And what was that?” he asked.

“He was interviewed. And in the interviews, he stressed the discipline of the Fleet under Lord Commander Fanaghee, the inspiring example of his seniors, the capability of the instructors who had taught him how to manage the missile launchers.”

“He flattered everybody,” Martinez said.

“He turned what had been a black eye for the Fleet into something that reflected well on the service. Fanaghee ordered him promoted to lieutenant captain, even though he’d only passed for lieutenant nine months before.”

Martinez decided that Salazar’s example was certainly worth pondering. He cocked an eye up at Alikhan. “What became of Salazar? I never heard of him.”

“He died, my lord, a few months later. Too many gamma rays flooding that missile bay.”

At least there were no gamma rays in Martinez’s case. “I can’t talk to reporters without clearing it with the lord commander,” he said.

“I would advise obtaining permission, my lord,” Alikhan agreed.

“Damn Abacha, anyway!” Martinez said. “This is all his fault.”

Alikhan refrained from comment.

Martinez concentrated on his breakfast. The taste, he reflected, wasn’t bad at all.

Enderby granted Martinez permission to talk to reporters, comforted perhaps by the fact that Fleet censors would have the final say in what finally reached the public. Martinez found his opportunity when Enderby was called to meeting. Gupta went along to take notes, but Martinez had nothing to do but monitor signals traffic.

Martinez spoke to several reporters from his comm station in Enderby’s office. He told them that it was the example of Fleet Commander Enderby and his other seniors that had inspired him during the rescue mission. Enderby saw that the Home Fleet was trained and disciplined and brought up to the mark. It was thanks to Enderby that the Home Fleet was ready for anything.

“It is one of the glories of the Praxis that lines of responsibility are clearly defined,” he said. “I have my job and I’m responsible to my lord commander, just as others are responsible to me. When I undertake a task, I know that my lord commander has entrusted me with it, and I do my best to ensure that it will be performed up to his expectations.”

The reporters listened and took dutiful notes, if only because it was the sort of thing the censors would like to see in their reports. They asked questions about Martinez’s history, his family. They seemed equally interested in Cadet Caroline Sula, however, and the fate of the dog Orange. They wanted to know if it were possible to interview Sula.

“I’ll ask,” Martinez said. “But I have to remind you that she’s still some distance out. It’s not going to be a sparkling dialogue, with her answers taking an hour to get back to you.”

He sent the reporters as much information about Sula as he felt appropriate for them to know, with no mention of the miserable fate of her parents. He sent them her picture, which he was sure would pique their interest, if not their lust.

And then, looking at the picture, that glorious face, he began to think about Cadet Sula himself. She was out there alone, hours beyond reach of even the simplest message, and in a tiny vessel with no comforts. Her nearest neighbor was a corpse.

What was she thinking about? he wondered. Her last message, the shocking picture of the fragile, strangely aged Sula, had suggested that her thoughts were not comfortable ones.

If she were to think about anything, he decided, perhaps it ought to be Gareth Martinez.

He reached for his comm to send her a message.

Sula lay in the darkness of the cockpit, afraid to sleep. She had managed to function throughout her evaluation of the situation onMidnight Runner, the return to her own pinnace through the airlock, and her brief report to Operations Control. She had done well as she ungrappled, shifted the pinnace to provide a better purchase on the yacht, engaged the grapples again, and fired the main engine.

Midnight Runner, out of control and with its crew dead, had been boarded by a Fleet vessel. That made it salvage, Fleet property. Her duty was to bring it to Zanshaa, where it would be sold, or-very possibly-turned into personal transportation for some high-ranking Fleet commander.

Sula began with a very gentle acceleration while monitoring the magnetic grapples carefully, and was pleased to discover that two vessels could maintain an acceleration of half a gravity before any strain on the grapples became apparent.

Half a gravity was something she could maintain very well, easy on the bruised bones and kinked muscles that still ached from her earlier, more brutal accelerations. So she plotted her course with half a gravity in mind and began the long, long burn.

It would be thirteen and a half days to the halfway point, where she’d turn and begin a half-gravity deceleration burn for another thirteen and a half days. Twenty-seven days altogether, alone, in this little room.

Once everything was plotted on the computer and the torch began to fire, she had nothing to do. It was then that the cold, slow, nightmare tentacles of memory began to enfold her mind.

The worst part was that she knew what was happening. She knew that the asphyxiated body of Blitsharts had brought forward the memories she most dreaded, the past she’d tried her best to bury, bury deep in the innermost frozen ground of her self…bury there like a corpse.

It would be twenty-seven days to Zanshaa. Days spent in the night of space, alone with a dead man and live memories. Of the two, the dead man was preferable company.

Sula considered giving herself something to help her sleep, but she dreaded the moment before the drug would take her, the darkness enfolding her consciousness in its dark wings, followed by the surrender to the tide of night…

It was too much like smothering.

She ran ship diagnostics over and over, finding nothing wrong but hoping the repetition would lull her to dreamless sleep. It didn’t help, of course. She was condemned to the memories.

Memories of the girl called Gredel.

Gredel’s earliest memories were of cowering in the darkness while violence raged on the other side of the flimsy door. Antony screaming at Nelda, the sound of his slaps on Nelda’s flesh, the crash of furniture as it was broken against other furniture or against the walls.

Antony was very hard on furniture.

Unlike many of the children she knew, Gredel had actually met her father, and her father was not Antony. She’d met her father twice, when he passed through the Fabs on his way to somewhere else. On both occasions he’d given Nelda money, and Nelda used some of it to buy her a frozen treat at Bonifacio’s in Maranic Town.

Nelda looked after Gredel because her mother, Ava, was usually away. When Ava came, she usually brought Nelda money, but Nelda didn’t seem to mind when Ava didn’t.

Ava and Nelda had been to school together. “Your ma was the beautiful one,” Nelda told her. “Everyone loved her.” She looked at Gredel and sighed, her hand thoughtfully stroking Gredel’s smooth cheek. “And you’re going to have that trouble too. Too many people are going to love you, and none for the right reasons.”

Nelda lived in the Fabs, the many streets of prefabricated apartment buildings, all alike, down the Iola River from Maranic Town. Poor people lived in the Fabs, though everyone at least had money for rent. People with no money at all slept in the street until the Patrol picked them up and shipped them off to the agrarian communes that covered most of the land surface of Spannan-though the Patrol didn’t sweep through the Fabs very often, and sometimes people lived on the streets for years.

Gredel’s mother Ava had spent time in an agrarian commune-not because she had no money, but because she was involved in some business of Gredel’s father. He wasn’t arrested, but he had to leave the Fabs for a long time. Nelda explained to Gredel that her father had “linkages” that kept the Patrol from arresting him, though the linkages hadn’t worked for Ava. “Someone had to pay,” Nelda said, “and people decided that person was your ma.”

Gredel wondered who decided such things. Nelda said it was all very complicated and she didn’t know the whole story anyway.

Nelda worked as an electrician, which paid well when she was working. Usually, however, there was no work, and she earned money by hooking people illegally to the electric mains.

Antony, the man who bellowed and roared and hit Nelda, was her husband. He wasn’t around much because he wandered from town to town and job to job. When he returned to the Fabs, it was because he didn’t have work and needed Nelda’s money to pay for liquor. And when he was drinking, it was wise to stay out of his sight.

When Ava returned to the Fabs from her sentence in the country, it didn’t look as if she had suffered very much-she was beautiful, with the same golden hair and creamy skin as her daughter, and with large blue-gray eyes. She was dressed wonderfully-a blue blouse, with the upswept collar that turned into a glittering, gem-encrusted net for her hair, and a skirt that wrapped around her twice and showed her figure. Her hands had long, curved nails painted a glossy shade of blue-gray, to match her eyes. The scent she wore made Gredel want to stop and just inhale. Ava had already found someone to take care of her.

She took Gredel on her lap, smothered her with kisses, told Gredel what she did in the country. “I processed food,” Ava said. “I roasted grain for Naxids, and I processed soy curd for Terrans. It wasn’t hard work. It was just boring.”

Most of the work on the farms was automated, Ava said. Not many people were needed in the country, which was why most of the countryside was empty and all the people were packed into the cities, most of them in places like the Fabs.

Gredel adored her mother, but never had the chance to live with her. The men who took care of Ava-and there were several over the years, all “linked” in some way-didn’t want children around, and when Ava was without a man, she didn’t want Gredel with her because it would make a man harder to get.

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 hadlots 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 almostalways 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 wineglasses. “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 likequiet.”

“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 Apartments. 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.”

The transmission ended. Sula looked at the comm display and saw the steadily winking light that indicated her communications buffer was being filled with compressed audiovisual files.

Entertainment?

Anything was better than lying here alone, with nothing but memories for company.

She watched Spate in the knockabout comedyExtrovert, enjoying his excellent timing, the sheer physicality of his movements. She absorbed Loralee Pang and the Lai-own Far-fraq in the melodramasDr. An-ku Investigates andDr. An-ku and the Mystery Skull. She watched Aimee Marchant in the sophisticated comedyFleet Exercises, with its totally unreal life aboard a battleship, and Cannonball Li in the frantic, classicCrazy Vacation, which she decided was overrated. She avoided the dramasRighteousness andLife of Evil — grim explorations of despair and violence were nothing she wanted to watch right now, despite the happy endings mandated by the censors.

“Send more Spate,” she sent in a private message to Martinez. “And tell the reporters to go eat rocks.”

Martinez proved to be quite a connoisseur of low comedy. In addition to more Spate vehicles, he sent the Deuces inHigh-Low Boys and Mary Cheung inWho’s on the Slab?

It was while watching Spate do his famous mushroom dance inSpitballs! that Sula felt the tide of sorrow begin to flow out of her, propelled by a wind of laughter. She laughed till cramp lay like a fist in her belly, till tears spilled from her eyes. She felt the sadness retreat and flow away until she could dam it up again, until it was safe behind its iron wall.

Thank you, Martinez,she thought.Thank you for saving me…from me.