She sent fifty thousand copies before her nerve finally gave out. There were no alarms flashing in the Records Office, but she had begun to feel exposed, and she decided that the experiment had run enough risks for the day.
She shut down her desk computer and rose. Spence was working on assembling the bomb with Macnamara’s help.
Sula walked across the room and leaned out the window with her hands braced on the sill. The street swarmed below her, and the air was scented with the aroma of cilantro, garlic, and hot pavement. Her muscles tingled with the release of tension. She searched the crowd carefully, but nobody seemed to be reading their displays. She wanted to demand of the crowds below,Did I just change the world or not?
She turned to the rest of her team. “I declare a holiday,” she said.
Spence and Macnamara stared at her. “Are you sure?” Spence asked, in a tone that meantAre you sure you’re feeling all right?
Sula had never showed an interest in holidays before.
“Yes. Absolutely.” Sula shut the window and moved the spider plant to the right-hand side of the windowsill, the position that meantNo one’s here, approach with caution. “Clean up your homework, get on the streets, have some fun.” She reached in an inner pocket and handed them each a few zeniths. “Call it a reconnaissance. I want you to take the pulse of the city.”
Spence seemed dubious. “Can I leave as well? Because—”
“You walk well enough until you get tired. So see that you don’t get tired—take cabs everywhere.”
Spence gave a yelp of joy and leaped to her feet. Bomb components vanished into hidden compartments that Macnamara had built into the furniture, and everyone changed into clothing more suitable to a night on the town. At the door to the apartment, they separated like the flying fragments of one of their own explosive devices.
They had been in the same small room far too long.
Sula went toward the entertainment district along the old canals below the High City. She visited a series of clubs and cafés, sitting at the bar where she could encounter people, or at a table where she could overhear others. A number of men wanted to buy her drinks. She sipped mineral water, let them talk, and tried to steer the conversation toward the Naxids.
All showed prudent caution about the topic—one never knew who might be listening—but alcohol eventually loosened their tongues. Several had new Naxid supervisors, but said it was too early to know how that would change things. One man had been demoted, his place in the Transportation Ministry taken by a Naxid: he was on his sixth or seventh drink and in the midst of a deep melancholy. Most were eventually willing to admit they were furious that the Naxids had taken hostages.
“But what can we do?” one said. “We’ve got to cooperate. The whole planet is hostage now.”
None seemed to have encountered the first issue ofResistance, let alone absorbed the wisdom Sula had so hopefully packed into it. By now she herself was depressed, and her steps brought her to a derivoo club, where she could be comforted by the existence of folk with worse problems than hers.
The derivoo singer, face and hands whitened, stood straight beneath her spotlight and sang songs of sorrow. Betrayal, shattered hearts, death, violence, accident, suicide, horror—the derivoo’s palate was cast entirely in dark colors. The point was not so much that these griefs existed as that the derivoo was still able to sing about them. Oppressed by every imaginable catastrophe, weighted down by every fearful memory, the derivoo still stood straight and broadcast a message of defiance to the universe.I am beaten, I am bloody, but still I stand…
Watching the performance was like observing an unforgiving war between passion and control. Too much passion, and the work would tip into melodrama and become absurd. Too much control, and the songs became soulless. The singer tonight was able to walk perfectly the knife-edge between fire and ice, and Sula felt her blood surge in response. She had seen the Home Fleet burn at Magaria, torn to ions by Naxid antimatter. She had brought her team out of the wreckage of the Axtattle ambush as Naxid bullets chewed the building to bits around them. She had watched her comrades die by torture.
Sula had inflicted tragedy as well as endured it. She had killed five Naxid ships at Magaria along with all their crews. “It was Sula who did this!” she had called to the Naxids at Magaria.“Remember my name!”
She had claimed the Sula name then, made it her own, even though Sula had not always been her name. Once, when she was very young—when her name had been Gredel—she’d pressed a pillow to the face of Caroline, Lady Sula, and afterward claimed the dead girl’s name, her title, and her small fortune.
It was not clear in Sula’s mind whether that was a tragedy or not. Probably it was for Caro Sula, though it wasn’t likely Caro would have survived much longer anyway. She had already overdosed once, and would have again.
Whether any of this was a tragedy for her was as yet unclear to Sula. She was inclined to think not. If there were tragedy involved, she intended that it would be a tragedy for the Naxids.
She left the club feeling as if she had gained possession of some primal fact of the universe, something both despairing and joyous, and the elation carried her all the way home. Not to the apartment where she met with her team to plan assassinations and to plunder the resources of the Records Office—that was intended to be used only for meetings—but to a one-room place she’d acquired for herself.
Life on the street was fading quickly in the dim, rationed light. The last food-seller waited only to sell his last few ears of roasted maize before packing up his grill and leaving, and Sula helped him by buying an ear, enjoying its sweetness along with the smoky taste of the charcoal and the coarse sprinkling of salt.
With only a few streetlights burning, it was dark enough so that she was totally surprised by the figure that rose from the shadows next to the stairs. As her heart leaped, she stepped automatically into a strong stance, the corncob held in her fist like a knife…
“Is that you, beauteous lady?”
Sula recognized the voice and relaxed out of her stance. She spoke over the hammering of her heart. “One-Step? What are you doing here this late?”
One-Step replied with dignity. “You never know when someone will want to see me here in my office.”
One-Step’s office was the patch of pavement next to the apartment steps, and whatever business he conducted there remained obscure. Sula forgave him this and other flaws for the sake of his extraordinary black eyes, which were brilliant and liquid and beautiful, and on this night unfortunately invisible in the darkness.
One-Step’s voice turned reproachful. “You haven’t been home, beauteous lady. I’ve been desolated.”
“A friend got me a bit of work in another part of town.”
“Work?” His voice brightened. “What kind?”
“Inventory. But it was temporary, and now it’s over.”
The voice turned accusing. “You’ve been off spending the money, haven’t you? Spending it without One-Step.”
“I went to see a derivoo,” Sula said.
“Derivoo!” One-Step scorned. “That’s all so depressing! You should let One-Step show you agood time. I’ll treat you like you deserve, like the highest Peer of the High City. Like a queen. You’ll never regret a night with One-Step.”
“Maybe some other time. I want to get some sleep tonight.”
“Sleep is a treacherous object. Here’s something that may keep you awake for a while.”
He handed her a plastic flimsy, and she squinted at it as she held it to the dim yellow light of her apartment vestibule.
Resistance,she read.