The dull, squat outworld buildings scattered among these elaborate towers were like basso roars, jerking the eye to a halt on broad planes of gray or buff or muted green. The rambling streets went suddenly straight each time they passed one of those structures. The contrasts were disturbing and reinforced the effects of the floating holoas. After a while the visitor had to get inside to rest his eyes and ears.
Out in the middle of The Strip, chain chairs clanked and shook in continuous circuits. Mover mats ambled along at a slow walk beside them, rubbery ovals about three meters wide and four long, with polychrome rails and leaning posts for the drunk or merely shaky. The area closest to the buildings was an ordinary walkway where the visitor could maneuver on his own feet without the pavement shifting under him.
Though it was still early afternoon, The Strip was filled with visitors. Shadith began to understand Digby’s warnings as she listened to the talk that swirled around her.
Phrase fragments from the Viewers-a mix of fascination and disgust, avidity, indignation, blasй boredom.
Talking about cannibalism, blood, exploding flesh and bone.
About stalking. Men stalking men like beasts.
A sense that the Viewers go back and back to this place and that, like a tongue worrying a sore tooth..
Pleasure and pain. Pleasure in pain.
Savoring horrors that made the speaker’s comfort more precious.
The Ptaks talked money.
Rolled the count of obols on the tongue.
Tallied the aliens like sheep in their fields, sheep to be sheared to the last curly hair.
Shadith wandered unnoticed among them, growing more depressed by the moment; it was a huge city not only in numbers but in area, difficult to hold in the mind because she didn’t yet understand Ptakkan patterning despite the weight of data Digby had provided.
Play the game, she thought.
Walk the edge.
Tsah! I’m on a job.
She sighed as she contemplated her sense of responsibility.
Bourgeois to the bone.
Edge. You’re as bad as this lot, wearing a safety tether, hunting carefully tamed thrills.
Ah-weh. Don’t be silly, woman. You do what you do. Playing head games with yourself wastes time and energy. Spla! You better get back in gear.
A group of offworlders came like a dark wave from one of the joy houses; chattering in Cobben-speak, moving with complete disregard for the others on the street, they took over a mover mat, continued their comments as they slumped against the supports.
Shadith swallowed hard and stepped onto another mat, careful to keep a somber Bawang between her and the group two mats ahead of her.
Nightcrawler Cobben? Digby didn’t mention there were Cobben involved. Assassins and mercenaries, yes. Maybe his sources didn’t know. Or they could be here on holiday. Do retail killers find wholesale slaughter a relaxing hobby?
She smoothed her fingers across the faux skin covering the hawk, checking to be sure it was firmly in place. The Cobben of Helvetia had more than one reason to be annoyed at her. She leaned against a post, found a birdmind, and eased into it enough to keep it circling above the Cobben while she watched through its eyes.
They reached the end of the mat’s route, stepped off, and strolled along a side street, too busy talking to notice a small fretting bird that flew in sweeping circles above them, uttering agitated twitters.
Eyes on the ground, only enough mind on what she was doing to keep from bumping into things and people, Shadith slouched along two streets, over, a rambling narrow way that ran roughly parallel to the one the Cobben was taking.
They passed through an area of blocky warehouses whose utilitarian forms were concealed behind hedges and thick ropy vines, emerged into what looked like the bedroom community for the imported laborers who did the unglamorous jobs of cleaning and repair, servants, waiters, translators, guides, all those who kept Lala Gemali running smoothly. There were small houses, duplexes, ottotels, transient lodging for all purses from scab joints to militantly respectable boardhouses.
The Cobben went into one of the ottotels, a gray-faced anonymous structure that sat among thick shrubbery and small trees almost as if it pulled a cloak around itself.
She turned her mindmount loose and ambled about the neighborhood, getting it set in her mind and looking for another ottotel where she could settle and keep an eye on the Cobben. If they were Ptak-hires, they knew things she needed to know-and sooner or later they’d be heading over to Impixol. She meant to hitch a ride on their transport.
There were no Ptak visible on these streets, only a mix of drab offworlders she decided were leaving for shifts on The Strip; here and there grifters of various sorts worked cons on the off-duty souls, a scatter of streetwalkers smiled with painted tenderness, while other furtive types scratched a living selling assorted and usually adulterated drugs.
The flocks thickened overhead, the cries became more raucous as waterbirds took over from the singers. She watched them a moment, smiled. Odd how on every world that had seas, birds that lived by the sea produced almost the same sound, as if there were a sort of optimum noise that carried across water.
It was mid-afternoon by the time she reached the lake-shore and there wasn’t much going on. The fishboats moored there were empty, waiting, their owners and crews gone home till it was time to leave for the next day’s catch, the tourist docks were mostly deserted, the brightly painted boats rocking empty and idle. Some distance along the shore she could see a few container ships still unloading grain and other supplies from the farms on the far side of the water and there were more such transports in view out on Lake Incunala.
She walked to the end of a deserted wharf and settled on a bitt, swinging her booted feet and lifting her head to the damp cool wind coming off the water.
“Haven’t seen you around before.”
She turned her head. The speaker was a bald old man with a face like polished teak and a body still hard but perhaps more brittle than it had been a few years back. He set his bait bucket down and eased himself to the planks beside it. She watched as he dipped a chunk of bait from the bucket, gave a dexterous twist to a hook, and sent it smoothly through the dark meat. With an equally dexterous flick of his wrists he sent the line swinging out, the weighted end dropping into the water with a quiet splash.
“Haven’t been around,” she said. “We just got here.”
“We?”
“My employer and me. Widow. She decided she wanted to spend her official mourning time watching folk slaughter each other and her kin provided the coin real fast.”
“Like that, hm?”
“I’m a woman of strong moral convictions, or I would have strangled the bitch two days into the flight. With a little luck she’ll fire me, that way she’ll have to cede me a severance.”
“You don’t want to get stranded here, young and juicy as you are. You’d be thinking that time with the widow was paradise.”
“Maybe.” She went silent as his line jerked, watched him reel in the fish, unhook it, and drop it into the bait bucket. When the line was out again, she pointed at the wooded island and the spray of rocky islets that trailed from its base. “What’s that called?”
“Graska Wysp. Government run for government business. The Ptaks can get real nasty if they think folk are sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”
“Hm.” She glanced at the buttonchron clipped to the breast pocket of her tunic. “Ti-ta, I need to be there when the Widow wakes. Good fishing, man.” She slid off the bitt and strolled away, stopping at the mouth of the alley to wave to him.