Walter Williams - The Praxis

“Whatever she took will wear off sooner or later.”

“What if it’s next week?” But he drove off anyway, heading for Maranic, while Gredel sat with Caro in the backseat and tried to rouse Caro. She woke long enough to murmur that she lived in the Volta Apartments. Lamey got lost on the way there, and wandered into a Torminel neighborhood. The nocturnal Torminel were in the middle of their active cycle, and Lamey got angry at the way they stared at him with their huge eyes as he wandered their streets.

Lamey was furious by the time he found the apartment building. He opened the passenger door and practically dragged Caro out of the car onto the sidewalk. Gredel scrambled out of the car and tried to get one of Caro’s arms over her shoulders so she could help her get to her feet.

A doorman came scrambling out of the building. “Has something happened to Lady Sula?” he demanded.

Lamey looked at him in surprise. The doorman stared at Gredel, then at Caro, astonished by the resemblance. But Gredel looked at Caro. Lady Sula? she thought.

Her twin was a Peer.

Ah,she thought.Ha.

The cold touch of the med injector.

Pressed to the throat.

Followed by the hiss…

Cadet Sula thrashed awake from the nightmare memory, only gradually prying its frozen talons from her mind. A light flashed on her instrument panel, accompanied by a soft tone.

Incoming transmission. Right.

“Display,” she said.

It was the lantern-jawed staff lieutenant, Martinez. “Cadet Sula,” he said, “I was wondering if you’re lonely.”

Surprise brought a savage laugh to Sula’s throat.Lonely? How could you think that?

“I’m sending you some entertainment,” Martinez said. “It’s all from my personal collection. I don’t know what sort of thing you like, so I’m sending a wide spectrum of stuff. If you’ll tell me what sort of thing you’d prefer, I’ll try to get it to you.”

He smiled “Enjoy.” Then he hesitated, and added. “I’m receiving requests from reporters who want to interview you in regard to the Blitsharts rescue. The lord commander’s given his permission, so it’s up to you. You’ve become sort of famous here.” And then he brightened again. “Let me know if you need anything. Aside from a hot bath, that is.”

The transmission ended. Sula looked at the comm display and saw the steadily winking light that indicated her communications buffer was being filled with compressed audiovisual files.

Entertainment?

Anything was better than lying here alone, with nothing but memories for company.

She watched Spate in the knockabout comedyExtrovert, enjoying his excellent timing, the sheer physicality of his movements. She absorbed Loralee Pang and the Lai-own Far-fraq in the melodramasDr. An-ku Investigates andDr. An-ku and the Mystery Skull. She watched Aimee Marchant in the sophisticated comedyFleet Exercises, with its totally unreal life aboard a battleship, and Cannonball Li in the frantic, classicCrazy Vacation, which she decided was overrated. She avoided the dramasRighteousness andLife of Evil — grim explorations of despair and violence were nothing she wanted to watch right now, despite the happy endings mandated by the censors.

“Send more Spate,” she sent in a private message to Martinez. “And tell the reporters to go eat rocks.”

Martinez proved to be quite a connoisseur of low comedy. In addition to more Spate vehicles, he sent the Deuces inHigh-Low Boys and Mary Cheung inWho’s on the Slab?

It was while watching Spate do his famous mushroom dance inSpitballs! that Sula felt the tide of sorrow begin to flow out of her, propelled by a wind of laughter. She laughed till cramp lay like a fist in her belly, till tears spilled from her eyes. She felt the sadness retreat and flow away until she could dam it up again, until it was safe behind its iron wall.

Thank you, Martinez,she thought.Thank you for saving me…from me.

There had been a party at the Ngeni Palace the night before, and the decorations were still coming down. Golden shay blossoms taller than a man were being lowered from the upper regions of the barrel-vaulted hall, ribbons of gold and white unwound from the columns that supported the long balconies, and a gang of servants under the direction of a Daimong in livery was scrubbing the dark red marble floor. Mingled scents of perfume and decay wafted from the hundreds of faded flowers dumped into a hopper near the front door.

Judging by its remnants, the party had been quite large, thronging the halls and corridors. Were Martinez the sort to pay attention to the society reports, he could probably have read rapturous descriptions that morning of the decorations, costumes, and guests that had filled the palace the previous night.

Perhaps hewould examine the society reports, at least as far as studying the guest list. It would be interesting to speculate who had rated an invitation and who hadn’t, and why.

Martinez, for example, hadn’t received an invitation, despite being one of Lord Ngeni’s clients. Ngeni and his clan represented the Martinez clan’s interests here in the capital.

But Lord Ngeni was absent. The Ngeni clan head had taken up the governorship of Paycah, leaving clan affairs in the hands of his son, Lord Pierre Ngeni. It had been Pierre’s party that filled the palace the previous night.

Martinez followed the palace majordomo through the courtyard—filled with orderly rows of greenery and larger-than-life statues of Ngeni ancestors—to Lord Pierre’s office. There were several individuals in the waiting room, not all of them human, not all of them respectable-looking. Martinez was not made to wait.

At least he ratedsome consideration.

Pierre Ngeni was a broad-shouldered, round-headed young man with a resonant baritone voice and the jaws of a mastiff. Like his father, he wore the dark red uniform that marked him as a convocate—a member of the Convocation, the body that provided the empire’s top administrators, and which was permitted to “petition” the Shaa. (When a petition was accepted by the Shaa, it changed its status to that of “law.”) The Convocation would have charge of the empire when the last of the Great Masters finally ended its life.

Lord Pierre’s uniform was well-tailored, but not the extreme epitome of style. At least he was not a glit. Quite the contrary, he was a serious man, dry, who always gave the impression of being busy. His desk was covered with orderly stacks of papers, and two secretaries sat in the room to take notes or dictation, as he required.

“My lord,” Pierre said, rising from behind his desk.

“Lord Convocate.” Martinez briefly braced himself military-style, tilting his chin high, a salute to the other man’s senior status.

“Please sit down.”

Martinez sat in a straight-backed chair clearly designed to discourage people from taking up too much of the lord convocate’s time. Lord Pierre’s chair was a more comfortable one, and its cushions sighed as it took his weight. Pierre tilted his chair back at a generous angle and evaluated Martinez with his mild brown eyes.

“I’ve seen you in the news,” he said. “That rescue you helped engineer—that’s been well spoken of.”

“Thank you, Lord Pierre.”

“A pity you couldn’t bring back Blitsharts alive, or at least the dog.” Zanshaa, or at least the Terran parts of it, were displaying extravagant mourning for the dog Orange, more than they seemed to show for his owner.

Martinez gave a shrug. “I’m afraid that wasn’t up to us,” he said.

“I suppose it wasn’t.” There was a moment’s pause, then Pierre, businesslike, inclined himself and his chair forward. “How may I help you this morning?”