"You aren't responsible for the use your clients make of your work."
"No, of course not," he answered in a muffled voice. "But I like the work, you see. I like to make sharp things; I like to make things that love blood. I won't ever find another line of work I like as well."
"But...."
"No, I won't find a new job. I might as well cut out the middleman. Don't you think?"
In the morning he was gone again.
Two days after Genoaro left, she went to see Shinvel Dward.
She announced herself at the door to Dward's apartment, and a long time passed before the door slid up and a pretty bond servant motioned for her to enter.
Dward lounged on a curved divan, her muscular bulk swathed in magenta spidersilk. "Cayten Borlavinda. An interesting and delightful surprise. How may I help you?"
"Citizen Dward...," Cayten began.
Dward made an impatient gesture. "Please call me Shinvel. Let's not stand on ceremony; sit here beside me."
Cayten sat in the corner of the divan. Dward rolled to her belly, struck a grotesquely adolescent pose, chin in hand, bare feet waving in the air. "Tell me," she said in a chummy voice.
"Well... Shinvel. It's about Genoaro."
Dward raised her heavy eyebrows. "Who?"
"Genoaro Maryal. He runs with your pack. My lover."
Dward's broad face shifted through a quick cycle of emotion: recognition, disdain, withdrawal. "Your lover? I know him only vaguely. You're a novice on the Level; I can tell. Otherwise you'd know there is no 'pack.' Hyenas aren't true pack animals. They come together to hunt, but the alliance is loose and soon dissolved. Never love a hyena, dear; they're inconstant." Dward put a large hand on Cayten's thigh, smoothed a tiny wrinkle from the fabric of Cayten's bodysuit.
Cayten repressed a shudder, but Dward noticed and jerked her hand away. The big woman sat up abruptly, face hardening. "You're wasting your time," Dward said. "That one's lost." She snorted dismissively, and gestured for a bond servant. A wispy girl with short lavender hair and a silver-striped face ran forward, bearing a tray.
Dward took up a long-stemmed pipe, filled it with some pale green herb from a cloisonne humidor, lit it. She took a deep pull and offered the pipe to Cayten, who shook her head.
"What do you mean, he's 'lost'?" Cayten asked.
Dward released the fragrant cloud. "I mean, you don't want him anymore. He's past the edge. If he isn't in the Dark already, he soon will be. Change your locks and forget him."
Thendard had said much the same thing once, she remembered. This time she didn't attempt to hide the shudder. She dropped her face into her hands.
"Oh, for...." Dward was exasperated. "He was a weak man, and now he's not even that much. People like that have no business on the Level. They can't separate their pleasures from their responsibilities, and so they end up in the Dark. Look at me; I go up to the Level to play. It means more than that to your lover. A lot more; too much."
Cayten lifted her head. "He was a good man. Is a good man!"
Dward laughed and drew deeply on her pipe. "'Good' has nothing to do with it, Cayten. I'm not 'good,' but I can run the Level and take my pleasures there and come back to Bo'eme and do my work. I'll keep on doing that as long as it pleases me. Genoaro is different. He may have been a 'good' man once, but the Dark calls him too strongly. He belongs to the Dark now, not to you. Not even to himself."
Cayten shook her head, blinked back tears. "No. He loves me. I can bring him back."
The drug smoothed some of the scorn from Dward's face, but there was no sympathy there. "You're a good little artist," Dward said, her voice slurring slightly. "And you have pretty little breasts, which I'd like to touch. But you have no grasp of Genoaro's situation. The Dark has him now, and the Dark is a more satisfying lover than any human could be. For Genoaro."
As Cayten left, Dward laughed again.
She went up to the Level alone, too frantic to ask Thendard for his company and his help. She moved through the herds and brushed against the other predators, her skein idling.
She drifted toward the tween corridors, where the law still held, but where violence was a stronger possibility. Refugees from the Holding Arks squatted in these corridors, their skeinless presence tolerated. Though they lived unprotected by the laws that guarded the citizens of Dilvermoon, they were safer than in the jungle of the Dark. They survived any way they could, selling their bodies and their services, hoping to sell their contracts before chance or the whim of a citizen terminated their hopes.
The smells intensified, and the noises became more secretive, as she approached the tween corridors. Cayten saw no refugees; apparently they could hide quite successfully from a beaster operating at her minimal level. The light dropped off, until the corridors became shadowy places where silent forms moved.
She wandered for hours through that dim maze. Occasionally a pack of beasters would run past her, rolling crazy eyes at her. But apparently her possession of a skein marked her as a citizen, and none molested her, though many flung crude remarks at her in passing. All these she ignored. She began to think that Thendard was too cautious.
Finally she passed into a nexus that lay on the border between the tween corridors and the Dark. On the Dark side of the nexus, the deckhead had collapsed into a tangle of corroding conduit and cable.
She was at first not certain how she could be so sure that she had reached the border. But she was. The junk that blocked the far side of the nexus shouted danger to her; each shadow seemed to conceal a leopard; lions might skulk beneath the rusty canopy; crocodiles might burst from the puddles of seepage and oil that glimmered here and there. After a bit she understood that her skein was signaling a warning, using the appropriate imagery.
Several openings led into the Dark, illuminated only by the faint glow of emergency lightstrips. Cayten studied these openings with a sort of morbid fascination. Was Genoaro inside somewhere, doing hideous things, or, perhaps, the victim of some dire act?
The nexus was silent and empty; her steps echoed as she approached the center of the open space. A faint breeze blew from the Dark, and carried an unfamiliar scent. She could see a little way into the Dark, through the aisles cleared through the debris, but nothing moved. The Dark might be a steel jungle, but for the moment it seemed as uninhabited as any desert.
She turned away, back into the tween corridors. She was growing desperate; she might search for Genoaro for weeks without success, and surely he would be dead or irretrievably devolved long before that. Her unaugmented human senses were too dull.
She paused at the edge of the nexus, and her fingers touched the hard shell of the personaskein at the back of her neck. She toyed with it for a moment, then disengaged the interlock and cranked up the vernier, higher than she had set it before — though well below maximum intensity.
The world turned, and became a far more interesting place. She felt light, powerful, unnaturally alert. The scent that blew from the Dark resolved into a complex of distinct odors, each sharp and well-defined. There was the enticing sweetness of decaying protein, the harshness of corroding metal, the chemical tang of a thousand varieties of plastic. There were the scent-signatures of half a dozen predators who claimed territories in the near Dark. She turned away, a shudder twitching her hide, and ran into the tween corridors, head up, sniffing for Genoaro's scent.
The tween corridors seemed changed, dense with striving life, full of sounds and scents that she had not noticed before. She ran with an easy lolloping gait, tossing her head, occasionally voicing a high-pitched giggle, a sound that now seemed perfectly natural.
At the next corridor nexus, she surprised a group of wildebeests gathered around an algae-covered sump. They were, Cayten thought with the part of her mind that remained hers, a remarkably homely group of people with long, pendulous noses and awkward, rawboned bodies. They snorted, showed white eyes, but, evidently perceiving no threat in a solitary hyena, held their ground. She charged playfully around their flank, and they whirled to keep her in sight. Several children pressed back into the center of the herd, and Cayten was transiently horrified to find herself wondering if they could be separated from their parents.