Walter Jon Wiliams
Solidarity
Sula dressed in fine Riverside low style for her meeting with Casimir. A bright tight-waisted jacket with fractal patterns, overhung by the wide, floppy collar of her blouse. Pants belled out around platform shoes. Cheap colorful plastic or ceramic jewelry. A tall velvet hat, crushed just so, with one side of the brim held up by a gold pin with an artificial diamond the size of a walnut.
"I don't like this," Macnamara said.
Sula peered at herself in the mirror, flipped her fingers through her dyed black hair.
"I wish there were other choices," she said, "but there aren't."
"My lady – " he began.
She turned to him.
"I'm going," she said. "We need allies."
And, because he was under military discipline, he said nothing more, just glowered in his petulant way.
The neighborhood known as Riverside was still, and the pavement radiated the heat of the day as if it were exhaling a long, hot breath. Between bars of light, the long shadows of buildings striped the street like prison bars. She saw no sign of Naxid or police patrols.
The Cat Street club was nearly deserted, inhabited only by a few people knocking back drinks on their way home from, or on their way to, their work. The hostess said that Casimir wasn't in yet. Sula sat at a back table and ordered sparkling water and transformed the table top into a video screen so that she could watch a news program, the usual expressionless Daimong announcer with the usual bland tidings, all about the happy, contented people of many species who worked productively and happily under their new Naxid overlords.
She didn't see Casimir arrive: there was only the hostess coming to her and saying that he was in. The hostess escorted Sula to the back of the club, up a staircase of black iron, and to a door glossy with polished black ceramic. Sula looked at her reflection in the door's lustrous surface and adjusted the tilt of her hat.
The next room featured a pair of Torminel guards, fierce in their gray fur and white fangs, and Sula concluded that Casimir must be nervous. Lamey had never gone around with guards, not until the very end, when the Legion of Diligence was after him.
The guards patted Sula down – she had left her pistol at home -and scanned her with a matte-black polycarbon wand intended to detect any listening devices. Then they waved her through another polished door to Casimir in his suite.
The suite was large and decorated in black and white, from the diamond-shaped floor tiles to the onyx pillars that supported a series of white marble Romanesque arches, impressive but non-structural, intended purely for decoration. The chairs featured cushions so soft they might tempt a sitter to sprawl. There was a video wall that enabled Casimir to watch the interior of the club, and several different scenes played there in silence. Sula saw that one of the cameras was focused on the table she'd just left.
"Were you watching me?" she asked.
"I hadn't seen you around," Casimir said. "I was curious."
He had come around his desk to greet her. He was a plain-featured young man a few years older than Sula, with longish dark hair combed across his forehead and tangled down his collar behind. He wore a charcoal-gray velvet jacket over a purple silk shirt, with gleaming black boots beneath fashionably wide-bottomed trousers. His hands were long and pale and delicate, with fragile-seeming wrists; the hands were posed self-consciously in front of his chest, the fingers tangled in a kind of knot. His voice was surprisingly deep and full of gravel, like a sudden flood over stony land.
She felt the heat of his dark eyes and knew at once that danger smoldered there, possibly for Sula, possibly for himself, possibly for the whole world. Possibly he himself didn't know; he would strike out at first one, then the other, as the mood struck him.
Sula felt a chord of danger chime deep in her nerves, and it was all she could do to keep her blood from thundering an answer.
"I'm new," she said. "I came down from the ring a few months ago, before they blew it up."
"Are you looking for work?" He tilted his head and affected to consider her. "For someone as attractive as you, I suppose something could be found."
"I already have work," Sula said. "What I'd like is steady pay." She took from an inner pocket of her vest a pair of identity cards, and offered them.
"What's this?" Casimir approached and took the cards. His eyes widened as he saw his own picture on both cards, each of which identified him as "Michael Saltillo."
"One's the primary identity," Sula said, "and the other's the special card that gets you up to the High City."
Casimir frowned, took the cards back to his desk, and held them up to the light. "Good work," he said. "Did you do these?"
"The government did them," Sula said. "They're genuine."
He pursed his lips and nodded. "You work in the Records Office?"
"No," Sula lied. "But I know someone who does."
He gave her a heavy-lidded look. "You'll have to tell me who that is."
Sula shook her head. "No. I can't."
He glided toward her. Menace flowed off him like an inky rain. "I'll need that name," he said.
She looked up at him and willed her muscles not to tremble beneath the tide of adrenaline that flooded her veins. "First," Sula said, speaking softly to keep a tremor from her voice, "she wouldn't work with you. Second – "
"I'm_ very persuasive,"_ Casimir said. The deep, grating words seemed to rise from the earth. His humid breath warmed her cheek.
"Second," Sula continued, calmly as she could, "she doesn't live in Zanshaa, and if you turn up on her doorstep she'll call the police and turn you in. You don't have any protection where she is, no leverage at all."
A muscle pulsed in one half-lowered eyelid: Casimir didn't like being contradicted. Sula prepared herself for violence and wondered how she would deal with the Torminel.
"I don't believe I got your name," Casimir said.
She looked into the half-lidded eyes. "Gredel," she said.
He turned, took a step away, then swung back and with an abrupt motion thrust out the identity cards.
"Take these," he said. "I'm not going to have them off someone I don't know. I could be killed for having them in my office."
Sula made certain her fingers weren't trembling before she took the cards. "You'll need them sooner or later," she said, "the way things are going under the Naxids."
She could see that he didn't like hearing that, either. He turned again and walked to the far side of his desk and stood there with his head down, his long fingers tidying papers.
"There's nothing I can do about the Naxids," he said.
"You can kill them," Sula said, "before they kill you."
He kept his eyes on his papers, but a smile touched his lips. "There are a lot more Naxids than there are of me."
"Start at the top and work your way down," Sula advised. "Sooner or later you'll reach equilibrium."
The smile still played about his lips. "You're quite the provocateur, aren't you?" he said.
"It's fifty for primary ID. Two hundred for the special pass to the High City."
He looked up at her in surprise. "Two hundred?"
"Most people won't need it. But the ones who'll need it will really need it."
His lips gave a sardonic twist. "Who would want to go to the High City now?"
"People who want to work for Naxids. Or steal from Naxids. Or kill Naxids." She smiled. "Actually, that last category gets the cards free."
He turned his head slightly to hide a grin. "You're a pistol, aren't you?"
Sula said nothing. Casimir stood for a moment in thought, then suddenly threw himself into his chair in a whoof of deflating cushions and surprised hydraulics. He put his feet on his desk, one gleaming boot crossed over the other.
"Can I see you again?" he said.
"To do what? Talk business? We can talk business now."
"Business, certainly," he said with an nod. "But I was thinking we could mainly entertain ourselves."