“Right,” said Venera, “And I’m betting that this book wasn’t designed for a world like Virga, was it? Isn’t this a set of rules for people who live on a flat-world—a ‘planet’? The legend says that’s why the emergent systems were lost—because their rules didn’t apply here.”
“Not the old ratios, it’s true,” he admitted. “But the core bills… they’re sound. You can at least use them to minimize your institutions even if you can’t eliminate them completely. We intend to prove it, starting here.”
“Well, that’s very ambitious.” Venera suddenly noticed the way he was looking at her. She was tied with her arms back and her breasts thrust at this young man and he was obviously enjoying her predicament. For the first time since being brought down here, she found herself genuinely off balance.
She struggled to regain her line of thought. “Anyway, this is all beside the point. Which is, that I am in a greater position to help you as a free woman than as a social pariah—or dead. After all, this civil war of yours probably won’t happen. As you say, the great nations have too big a stake in stability. And if it doesn’t happen, then what? It’s back to the drawing board, minus one hideout for you. Back to bombing and other ineffectual terrorist tactics.”
Bryce closed the book and restored it to his jacket. “What of it? We’ve already lost this place. If the war doesn’t happen there’s no downside.”
“But consider what you could do if you had an ally—a patroness—with wealth and resources, and more experience than you in covert activities?” She looked him straight in the eye. “I’ve killed a number of men in my time. I’ve built and run my own spy organization—no, I’m not Amandera Thrace-Guiles. I’m someone infinitely more capable than a mere heir to a backwards nation on this backwards little wheel. And with power, and wealth, and influence… I can help you.”
“No deal.” He stood up and gestured to the others to follow him as he walked to the metal door.
“A printing press!” she called after him. He looked back, puzzled. “In order for that money to work,” she continued, “don’t you need to mint thousands of copies of the bills and put them into circulation? It has to be used by everybody to work, right? So where’s your printing press?”
He glanced at his people. “It’ll happen.”
“Oh? What if I offered you your own mint—delivery of the presses in a month—as well as a solid budget to print your money?”
Bryce appeared to think about it, then reached for the door handle.
“And what if you had an impregnable place to house the press?” she called, frantically reaching for the only other thing she could think to offer. “What if Buridan tower was yours?”
One of his lieutenants put a hand on Bryce’s arm. He glared at the man, then made a sour face and turned. “Why on Spyre would we trust you to keep your end of the bargain?”
“The tower contains proof that I’m an imposter,” she said quickly. “The council is going to want to visit it, I’m sure of it—but how can I clean it up and make it presentable? None of my new servants could be trusted with the secret. But you could—and you could take photographs, do what you need to do to assemble proof that I’m not the heir. So you’ll have that to hold over me. You’ll have the tower, you’ll have money, and as much influence as I can spare for you.”
He was thinking about it, she could tell—and the others were impressed as well. “Best of all,” she added before he could change his mind, “if my deception is ultimately revealed, you may get your civil war anyway. What could be better?”
Bryce walked slowly back to her. “Again I say, why should we trust you? If there’s proof as you say in Buridan tower… if you’d even let us get there before the police descended on us… Too many ifs, Ms. Thrace-Guiles.”
“I’ll draft you a note right now,” she said. “Made out to the night watch at the elevators, to let your people ride the elevator down to Buridan Tower. You can do it right now, and release me after you’re sure I’m right.”
“And be trapped there when your charade is exposed?”
That was just too much for Venera. “Then forget it, you bastard!” she yelled at him. “Go on, get out! I’m sure you’re far too busy playing the romantic revolutionary leader. Go and sacrifice the lives of a few more of your friends to convince the rest of them that you’re actually doing something. Oh, and blow up a few women and babies for good measure, I’m sure that’ll make you feel better—or start your damned war and kill ten thousand innocents, I don’t care! Just get out of my sight!”
Bryce’s face darkened with anger, but he didn’t move. Finally he stalked over and scowled at her. Venera glared back.
“Bring this woman some paper,” he said. “You’ll write that note,” he said in a low voice, “and we’ll see what we can find in Buridan Tower.”
The streets had not changed since his childhood. Garth Diamandis strode familiar ways, but after such a long absence it was as if he saw them with new eyes. His town-wheel, officially known as Wheel 3, had been called Hammerlong for centuries. Its riveted iron diameter spanned nearly a mile, and the inside surface on which the buildings were set was nearly half that wide. It had spun for five hundred years. In that time, the layout of Hammerlong’s gargoyled buildings had been rearranged—or not where they accommodated stubborn holdouts—dozens of times. New edifices had hiked their buttresses over the shoulders of older ones as the population grew, then shrank, then grew again. The wheel had been fixed, reinforced, rejigged, and thrown out of whack by weight imbalances so often that its constant creaking and groaning was like background music to the citizens who lived there. The smell of rust permeated everything.
With finite space, the citizens of the wheel had jammed new buildings in between existing ones; corkscrewed them inward and outward from the rim; overgrown what was original with the new. Streamlined towers hung like knife blades below the rim, their bottom-most floors straining under nearly two gravities while the stacked apartments overhead converged to shadow the streets and a second layer of avenues, then a third, were built up where weight diminished. Yin-yang stairs, elevator cables, ancient rust-dribbling spokes, and leaking pipes all knotted together at the smoke-wreathed axis. Ships and shuttles clustered there like grazing flies.
Hammerlong seemed designed for skulking and the population did just that. Most were citizens of nations based on Greater Spyre, after all, so they brought the paranoia of that realm with them to the city. Those born and raised in Hammerlong and the other wheels were more open, but they formed a separate class and had fewer rights in their own towns. Left to their own devices, they cultivated a second economy and culture in the alleys, air-shafts and crawlspaces of the layered city.
Garth was on a third-level street when the full force of nostalgia hit him. He had to stop, his imagination filling in gaps in the crowds that scurried to and fro like so many black-clad ants. He saw the young dandies of his youth, swaggering and hipshot to display their pistols; the ingenues leaning on their balconies high above, their attention apparently elsewhere. He had walked or run or fled down these ways dozens of times.
Some of his old compatriots were dead, he knew, some had moved on to build prosperous families and deny their youths. Others… the prisons were still full, one of Venera Fanning’s new carpenters had told him this morning. And, if one knew where to look, and how to read… there, yes he saw a thin scrawl of graffiti on a wall ten feet beyond the parapet. Made with chalk, it was barely visible unless you knew to look for it. Repeal Edict 1, said the spiky letters.