Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

“What’s NAPD’s problem with trade?” he said aloud, and Malemayn glared at him.

“What in all hells does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Bear with me, would you?”

Haliday grinned, showing sharp, feral teeth. “Raven’s the only one with an idea so far, Mal.”

Malemayn threw up his hands. “Fine.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Warreven began, then shook his head. “Have a drink, Mal. I think I have an idea.”

Malemayn made a face, but the anger was fading. He reached for the nightwake pitcher, gesturing with his other hand for Reiss to proceed.

“The Old Dame—Lolya Masani, %e owns the company—doesn’t approve,” Reiss said. “Partly it’s %e doesn’t want us getting in bad with either Customs or IDCA—there’s some stuff, semi-recreational, that we export that’s strictly controlled in the Concord, and Customs could make life very hard for us if they wanted—and partly %e just doesn’t like the idea.” He grinned suddenly, “%e’s got this tape %e gives to every newcomer, where %e lays down the law to them. No new drugs unless %e clears them, and absolutely no trade, %e’ll fire anyone who sells a permit or a residency. And %e’s done it, too.”

“So Tatian isn’t opposed to trade per se,” Warreven said slowly. “He just has to make it look good for Masani?”

“I don’t know about that,” Reiss said. “I mean, he doesn’t approve of the players—I don’t think he’d sell permits even if the Old Dame didn’t say he couldn’t.”

Warreven waved that away. “But a case like this, where the trade was well in the past, and it’s just two people who love each other and want to be together—if we offered him some incentive, some reason to change his mind, do you think he would?”

“He wasn’t exactly happy when he told me I had to pull out,” Reiss said. “Basically, IDCA made him do it.”

Malemayn said, “We don’t have anything to offer.”

“Besides money, of course,” Haliday said, “and that would be a little crude, for dealing with an off-worlder.”

Warreven smiled. “But in four days, assuming the elections go the way Temelathe wants them, I’m the Stiller seraaliste . I control the sea-harvest, the land-harvest, and everything that’s surplus to the present contracts is mine to sell where I please. Would that be sufficient incentive, do you think?”

“It’s pretty crude,” Malemayn said. “You won’t be part of the group legally, but still…”

“I think it’s clean enough,” Haliday said. “But would this Tatian buy it?”

“I don’t know,” Reiss said, sounding dubious. “IDCA won’t be pleased.”

“I would imagine it would depend on what you offered him,” ’Aukai said. For the first time since they’d come to the dancehouse, she sounded like the woman Warreven remembered, strong, decisive, and just a little contemptuous of the world around her. “Make the price high enough, and any druggist will stand up to the IDCA.”

“We can’t do anything until after the elections,” Malemayn said thoughtfully, and looked at Warreven. “But that still leaves us time. I think this’ll work, Raven. I think it will.”

Warreven grinned, enjoying the praise. If he had to leave the courts, he could at least use his new position to benefit his partners. Temelathe would expect no less—and besides, he admitted silently, it would be a pleasure to annoy the Most Important Man.

Omni: (Concord) one of the nine sexual preferences generally recognized by Concord culture; denotes a person who prefers to be intimate with persons of all genders. Considered somewhat disreputable, or at best indecisive.

The room was cold, the cooling unit turned to its highest power, rattling in its corner. Warreven shivered and reached for a corner of the topmost quilt, pulling it half over his naked body. Behind him, Reiss stirred, shifted so that he was free of the quilts. Warreven could feel him sweating still, not just from the exertion of sex, and wondered again if all of the Concord Worlds were cold planets. It had seemed the thing to do, to invite Reiss home with him, when they were both flushed with the power of Warreven’s idea, but now, lying in the cold bedroom, the moonlight through the thin fabric of the shutters warring with the fitful light of the luciole in the corner, he wondered if he’d made a mistake after all. It had been months since he’d even seen Reiss, longer since he’d slept with him; the sex had been good—Reiss was always good—but it had somehow reminded him of his days as trade.

“The light,” Reiss said sleepily, and Warreven rolled to look at him.

“You want it off?”

“No, I’m going to have to go home in a while,” Reiss answered, sounding a little more awake. “I was wondering, is that one of the bug lights?”

They had been speaking franca , and Warreven blinked at the unfamiliar term. “The luciole ?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t still have the bugs in it, does it?”

Warreven grinned. “Not in the city, it doesn’t. It was my grandfather’s, my mother had it fitted for grid power a few years before she died.” He looked at the softly flickering lamp, a ceramic sphere shaped like a knot of arbre vines, standing in a base like a shallow bowl. None of the holes was bigger than his thumb: the light had originally been the home of a colony of luci , the luminescent sea-flies of the peninsular coast. In the old days, before Rediscovery, you made a lamp like that by digging up a colony of luci . The queens would be confined to the center of the sphere, while the drones roamed freely, feeding them; each new generation added new light. “I’ve never seen a real luciole myself, not one that wasn’t converted. One of my great-aunts said they were noisy, always buzzing, the drones all over the place, and the shelf would get all sticky from the sugar water they used to feed them.”

“Sounds disgusting,” Reiss said, and ran a hand along Warreven’s side. His hand slipped further, cupped Warreven’s breast, and Warreven turned away, shrugging his shoulder to dislodge him. There was an instant of tension, a stillness between them like a silence, and then Reiss stroked the other’s back instead, running his fingers along Warreven’s spine in mute apology. Warreven relaxed into that touch and, after a moment, pulled his hair forward over his shoulder, out of the way.

“I should go,” Reiss said, but made no move.

“Suit yourself,” Warreven answered. “You’re welcome to stay.” The neighbors would talk, of course—they always did; he sometimes wondered what they had gossiped about before the advocacy group had bought the building—but then, they would talk anyway, once he brought the quilts to the laundress.

“Thanks,” Reiss said, and sighed, rolling onto his back. “No, I have to be in early tomorrow—I’m driving Tatian to Lissom to look at a possible surplus contract—and I don’t really want to show up in the same clothes I wore yesterday.”

He kicked himself free of the last top quilt and sat up, the sweat still a faint sheen on his back. Warreven rolled over to watch him dress, drawing the quilt up over his shoulders, glad of its warmth. Reiss was surprisingly fair where his clothes protected him from the sun; the hair of his chest and groin was unexpectedly dark against that pallor. Tatian was even paler skinned, and golden-haired, Warreven thought, like a spirit in a babee-story, and he wondered suddenly if that meant Tatian would be blond all over. It was an arresting thought; he caught himself smiling and shook the image away. It was a mistake to let himself think of the off-worlder in those terms, no matter how handsome he was, or how good his body had felt in that momentary contact. Tatian was just the man he had to bargain with for Reiss’s statement, and Destany’s freedom—nothing more, not even an object of fantasy, not if he, Warreven, wanted to win.