Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Macnamara searched the two men for weapons and produced a pair of pistols they had been too busy to draw. The café’s only two customers watched in wide-eyed alarm and looked uncertainly at their sleeve displays as if with the thought of calling the police. Sula took two steps behind the counter and grabbed the proprietor by the hair. She dragged him across his counter and said, “Who are these people you sold us to?”

  “They’re Virtue Street,” the man said, eyes wide. “I pay them tribute.”

  Sula clenched her teeth. “I don’t think I’m going to sell you any more coffee.”

  She picked up her Onamaka coffee and carried it to the truck, anger and adrenaline rendering the box as light as a pillow.

  “Fuck!” she said, furious at herself as they drove away. “Fuck! Fuck!” She beat a fist on the arm of her chair.

  “We came out of it all right,” Macnamara said, fingering a scrape on his cheek where the bodybuilder’s rings had marked him.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Sula snarled. “I forgot about the tax! Fuck!” She slapped herself on the forehead. “I should have known!” She pounded the seat again. “Damn it all anyway!”

  She canceled the morning’s remaining deliveries and raged her way home, spitting anger all the way. At the sight of One-Step, crouched on the pavement in the shade of her building’s porch, she felt the fury fade. One-Step straightened his long shanks and rose, a white smile brilliant on his face.

  “Beauteous lady!” he declaimed. “Here you come, glorious as the sun and delicate as a flower!”

  “I need to know something,” Sula said.

  “Anything!” One-Step threw out an arm. “Anything, beauteous lady!”

  “Tell me about the Virtue Street gang.”

  The delight faded from One-Step’s face. “Are you messing with them, lovely one?”

  “They’re messing with the company I work for.”

  Suddenly he was interested. “You have work? Real work?”

  “I deliver things. But tell me about the Virtue Street people.”

  One-Step threw out his hands. “What can I say? They’re one of the cliques here in the city. They collect the tribute on both sides of Virtue Street.”

  “Just in that area?”

  “More or less.”

  Virtue Street, fortunately, was in a fairly distant part of the city. Sula felt her anxiety ease. “Who collects the tribute in Riverside?” she asked.

  One-Step gave her a cautious look. “You want to stay away from them, lovely one.”

  “Just for my information.”

  His face turned stony. “The Riverside Clique. They don’t go in for fancy names. I have to buy things from them, just so I can stay in business.”

  “Are the Riversides worse than the others?” she asked. “Better?”

  The sound of pneumatic hammers rang down the street from Sim’s Boatyard. One-Step gave an uneasy shrug. “Depends on who you deal with.”

  “If I wanted to start a business, who would I talk to?”

  A suspicious look crossed One-Step’s face. “What kind of business?”

  “I don’t want to drive trucks all my life,” Sula said.

  “For a loan, beauteous lady, you go to your clan’s patron.”

  Sula gave a laugh. “My clan’s patron ran like hell when the Naxids came. So did his patron, and so on up the line.”

  “War is no time to start a new business.”

  “Depends on the business.”

  She looked at him until he shifted uneasily and broke the silence. “You could talk to Casimir,” he grudged. “He’s not as bad as the others.”

  “Casimir? Casimir who?”

  “They call him Little Casimir, because there was another Casimir who was older. But Big Casimir got executed.”

  Sula felt amusement touch the corners of her lips. “So I knock on his door and ask for Little Casimir?”

  “Casimir Massoud,” One-Step said. “He has an office in the Kalpeia Building on Cat Street, in that club they’ve got there, but he’s got good reason for not spending a lot of time in his office.”

  “Yes?”

  One-Step glanced left and right before answering in a lower voice. “The police get an order to take a certain number of hostages, right? They get shot if they don’t obey the Naxids, but everyone hates them if they succeed. So when they get the order they make a little calculation about who the neighborhood won’t miss, right? They take the people already in jail, and arrest all the bad sorts they can find—and with them they arrest the crazy people, and the ones living on the street—and that way they figure people won’t hate them so much.”

  Sula remembered the man arrested outside her window, and wondered if he was a clique bagman carried away in front of the people he dunned for protection.

  “But don’t people like Casimir buy protection from the police?” she asked.

  One-Step smiled and nodded. “You understand these things, beauteous lady,” he said. “Yes, there is protection for the leaders of the cliques, so the police arrest the lower-ranking members. The thieves, the hijackers, the collectors. But when that happens, money stops flowing. Eventually Casimir won’t be able to pay off the police any longer, and then he gets carried off to the Blue Hatches to be shot next time someone in the secret army sets off a bomb.”

  Fat, hot raindrops began to plummet from the sky. One-Step winced as one struck him in the eye. Sula ignored the rain as she thought hard.

  She had something Casimir wanted, she realized. There were a great many possibilities here, if she played him right.

  Sula needed the appropriate documents for her demonstration, so it was two days before she could approach Casimir. During that time there were a pair of bombings in different parts of the city, causing no fatalities though each explosion was big enough so that the Naxids felt they couldn’t suppress the news. Fifty-three hostages were shot.

  While she waited, she went to the Cat Street club with Spence and Macnamara—it was a huge place, with one dance band in the main room and another on the lower level, glass-walled courts for ball games, a long curved bar made of black ceramic and silver alloy, and a wide selection of computerized entertainments. Women in low-slung pantalettes, bottles in holsters on their hips, wandered from table to table pouring drinks straight into the open mouths of the clientele. Smoking was permitted, and a permanent fog of tobacco and hashish hung below the high ceiling.

  Sula confined her debauchery to sparkling water, but she found herself smiling as she glanced over the club. Gredel had spent a great many nights in places like this with her lover, Lamey, who had done much the same sort of work as Casimir. On Zanshaa they might be called clique members, but on Spannan they were linkboys. They were young, because few lived to be old before encountering the work farm or the garotte. Gredel’s father had been a linkboy who fled ahead of an indictment, and her mother spent years on an agricultural commune paying for her man’s misstep.

  Gredel had grown up in an environment where she was going to meet certain people and make certain decisions. She tried not to make the mistakes her mother had made, and instead invented mistakes all her own.

  The sound of the club, the music and laughter and electronic cries, rose around her. Sula had only just reached her majority at twenty-three, but somehow to her the Cat Street club seemed a younger person’s idea of fun. The club was a straightforward appeal to the flesh, to desire for sex or rhythm or companionship or oblivion. For a terrorist, who plotted death by gun or bomb, it was perhaps a little tame.

  One-Step looked at her reproachfully as Sula walked home reeking of other people’s vices. “One-Step would show you a better time,” he said.

  “One-Step—” Sula began, then sneezed. She wasn’t used to being around tobacco, and vowed she would wash her hair before bed, and stuff her clothing in an airtight laundry bag where she couldn’t smell it.

  “One-Step needs a job,” she said through her stuffed nose.

  “You get your m
oney from Casimir, maybe you’ll give One-Step some work.”

  “Maybe,” Sula smiled.

  The idea, she admitted, had a certain wayward appeal.

  “More hostages taken today,” One-Step said. “I need to get off the street.”

  Good point, Sula thought. “I’ll see what I can do,” she told him.

  Whatever else you could say about One-Step, he had better people skills than she did.

  Sula dressed in fine Riverside low style for her meeting with Casimir. The wide, floppy collar of her blouse overhung a bright tight-waisted jacket with fractal patterns. Pants belled out around platform shoes. Cheap colorful plastic and 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.

  Riverside was still, and the pavement radiated the heat of the day as if exhaling a long, hot breath. Between bars of light, the long shadows of buildings striped the street like prison bars. Sula saw no sign of Naxid or police patrols.

  The night was young and the Cat Street club was nearly deserted, inhabited only by a few people knocking back drinks on their way home from or to work. The hostess said that Casimir wasn’t in yet. Sula sat at a back table, ordered sparkling water, and transformed the tabletop into a video screen so she could watch a news program—the usual expressionless Daimong announcer with the usual bland tidings, all about the happy, content people of many species who worked productively for a peaceful future beneath the Naxids.

  She didn’t see Casimir come in: the hostess told her that he had arrived then escorted her 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.

  Inside, she saw a pair of Torminel guards, fierce in their gray fur and white fangs, and 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 her down—she’d 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.

  She entered a large suite 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 nonstructural, 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.

  Casimir came 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.

  “Were you watching me?” she asked, referring to the surveillance camera.

  “I hadn’t seen you around,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep and full of gravel, like a sudden flood over stony land. “I was curious.”

  She felt the heat of his dark eyes and knew at once that danger smoldered there, possibly for her, possibly for Casimir himself, possibly for the whole world. Possibly he didn’t know; he might strike out at first one, then the other, as the mood struck him.

  The chord of danger chimed 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.”

  “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,” she 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, 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. 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,” she 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, as 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.

  But first she’d have to figure out what to do with her platform shoes. They might be fashionable but they weren’t exactly intended for combat.

  “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 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,” she replied, “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 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, then he put his feet on the desk, one gleaming boot crossed over the other.

  “Can I see you again?” he said.

  “To do what? Ta
lk business? We can talk business now.”

  “Business, certainly,” he said with an nod. “But I was thinking we could mainly entertain ourselves.”

  “Do you still think I’m a provocateur?”

  He grinned and shook his head. “The police under the Naxids don’t have to bother with evidence anymore. Provocateurs are looking for work like everyone else.”

  “Yes,” Sula said.

  He blinked. “Yes what?”

  “Yes. You can see me.”

  His grin broadened. He had even teeth, brilliantly white. Sula thought his dentist was to be congratulated.

  “I’ll give you my comm code. Set your display to receive.”

  They activated their sleeve displays, and Sula broadcast her electronic address. It was one she’d created strictly for this meeting, along with another of what were proving to be a dizzying series of false identities.

  “See you then.” She walked toward the door, then stopped. “By the way,” she said. “I’m also in the delivery business. If you need something moved from one place to another, let me know.” She permitted herself a smile. “We have very good documents,” she said. “We can move things wherever you need them.”

  She left then, before glee got the better of her.

  Outside, in the facing light, she spotted Macnamara loitering across the street and raised a hand to scratch her neck, the signal that all had gone well.

  Even so, she used evasion procedures to make certain she wasn’t followed home.

  Casimir called after midnight. Sula groped her way from her bed to where she’d hung her blouse and told the sleeve to answer.

  The chameleon fabric showed him with a slapdash grin pasted to his face. There was blaring music in the background and the sound of laughter.

  “Hey Gredel!” he said. “Come have some fun!”

  Sula swiped sleep from her eyes. “I’m asleep. Call me tomorrow.”

  “Wake up! It’s still early!”

  “I work for a living! Call me tomorrow!”

  As she told the sleeve to end her transmission and made her way back to the bed, she reflected that she’d done a good job setting the hook.