Cauldron of Ghosts (27 page)

Yuri had been about to finish his coffee. Now, he paused, looking a bit disconcerted. “Well . . .”

“Face it, Yuri,” said Sharon. “Cachat’s rubbing off on you.”

“Oh, God help me.”

Chapter 29

Andrew looked around the big room on the ground floor of the building they’d just purchased. “Well, this is going to take a fair amount of work. If you’re planning to set up a boutique down here, that is. How about we change the plan to running a day care center? Then all we have to do is coat the walls and put some sort of padding on the floor. As long as they’re bright colors, we’re fine. You know what kids are like.”

Steph ignored him. She and Andrew had been a couple for less than a year, but that was enough time for her to figure out that he was the sort of person who needed to maintain a patina of silly jabber in order to steady his nerves. It could be irritating, but as faults went she could live with it easily enough. Her daughter Nancy’s father had been a drunk who got violent at times.

Well, with her, only once. There were advantages to being a professional cook. Knives—big knives—were readily at hand and she was proficient in their use. She hadn’t even had to cut him much. When he sobered up he contemplated the wounds and decided to search for greener pastures elsewhere. Since Nancy had only been eight months old, she had no memory of her father—which suited Steph just fine.

She’d considered running a day care center, in fact. She’d even gone so far as to broach the idea to Anton and Victor. But after discussing the matter, they’d all agreed that the risks outweighed the benefits.

The problem with kids was that they tended to have parents. And while you could explain away the comings and goings of strange people easily enough to four- and five-year-olds, that was a lot harder to do with adults. All the more so when the adults in question would initially be a bit wary of the people running a new day care center and would be watching them closely.

No, better to stick with the boutique plan. No one would think anything of people entering and leaving such a shop, especially if they were women.

All of which Andrew knew perfectly well since he’d been part of the discussion. It was odd, really, how a man who was almost astonishingly resourceful in so many ways could have such childish habits. But Steph had long since come to terms with the fact that the universe was an imperfect place. Here was just further proof—and by no means the worst she’d ever encountered. Far from it.

“It’s mostly just putting up shelves,” she said. “And lots of racks, of course, but we can buy those.”

With the funds at their disposal, they could have easily afforded to pay contractors to do all the work of putting up the shelving as well. But from the viewpoint of spies—that was a neutral way of saying
professional paranoia
—the term “outside contractors” was synonymous with “potential informants.”

There was other construction they’d be doing beyond putting up shelves, after all. They’d also be creating a hiding place for people who needed to get out of sight of the authorities. To make such a hidey-hole effective they’d need more than just clever construction, too. They’d need to include scrambling and shielding equipment, some of which was fairly bulky. There would be no way to keep all that secret with contractors trooping in and out of the building.

So, Andrew would have to do all of it, with whatever (none-too-expert) help Steph could give him. But she wasn’t worried about it. This was the same man, after all, who’d jury-rigged a starship’s hyper generator.

* * *

The thing about Mesa’s capital city of Mendel that struck Thandi the most, as she maneuvered the air lorry along the crowded primary traffic lane, was how wealthy even the poorest neighborhoods were. To be sure, compared to the districts inhabited by Mesa’s full citizens, the seccy quarters were rundown—and very badly so, in some areas. They were more crowded, more cramped, much dirtier and showed signs of disrepair and even outright decay almost anywhere you looked.

Still, compared to her home planet of Ndebele and most worlds of the Verge, the seccies lived in relative luxury. Leaving aside buildings which were completely abandoned, everyone had power and climate control. The quarters might be overcrowded by Mesan standards but they were nothing like the teeming hovels she’d seen on many worlds—or the slum in which she’d grown up herself, for that matter.

It was an ancient pattern, she knew. The degree to which people were dissatisfied by their lot in life was determined by their relative position in a given society, not by some sort of absolute and external measure. From time immemorial, reactionaries had pointed out (quite correctly) that the less privileged in their own societies were veritable Midases compared to paleolithic hunters and gatherers. Never understanding—mostly because they didn’t want to understand—that such comparisons were pointless.

What mattered to a seccy mother tending her sick child was not that children in ancient times or on some far-off Verge worlds often died in infancy—and she should damn well be grateful that there was little chance her own child would actually perish. No, what mattered was that if she were a full citizen she’d be able to give her child the best possible medical care instead of the very sub-standard care she could actually afford.

Even knowing all that, Thandi still found the situation a little disorienting. Subconsciously, she’d been expecting to encounter conditions in Mesa’s seccy quarters that were similar to those she’d grown up in.

As she made her way through the canyonlike depths of the stacked traffic lanes between the tenement towers, though, Thandi began to realize that the differences were greater than they’d initially seemed—not just the differences with the well-to-do citizen quarters but even with those of her native Ndebele.

Victor and Anton had explained the history to her, and now she was seeing it for herself. The seccy districts of Mesa, unlike the hovels on Ndebele or many other Verge worlds, were built along recognizably modern principles. That meant building up, using the benefits of counter-grav, rather than sprawling outward. The advantages to that sort of hyperurban planning were manifold. High density populations had a much smaller ecological footprint than ones which sprawled into huge suburbs and exurbs. They were much more energy efficient, they were more economically productive, they invariably had a higher average educational level—the list went on and on.

But Mesa’s seccy districts had been built on the cheap, so to speak. The residential towers had almost all been built long after the initial colonization period and were something of an afterthought. And they’d been intended from the outset to warehouse the manumitted slaves who were growing in numbers that hadn’t originally been anticipated, which explained quite a bit about
how
they’d been built.

Because they were intended for poor folks—and for people in whom the full citizens of Mesa did not want to encourage any pretenses to equality—they were deliberately designed to be far more utilitarian and to have a generally second- or third-class quality of life. At the time they were initially constructed, they had decent amenities (heat, air conditioning, grav shafts, etc.), but they were barebones. They were also shorter—never more than three hundred stories tall, less than half the height of most “proper” residential towers. That was to insure that anyone living in them would be looking up at the “high castle” of their genetic and legal betters—in essence, subject to what you might call residential sumptuary laws.

The seccy districts had originally been designed to form a widely separated “ring ghetto” around the central portion of Mendel, with its green belts, parks, etc. Over the centuries, though, the inner core of Mendel had slowly expanded outward from its original size and enveloped most of the original seccy towers. Those had been demolished and replaced with “proper” towers, pushing the ghetto farther and farther out even as the number of seccies living in it got higher and higher.

Worse, from the seccies’ viewpoint, since the initial colonization the construction of those residential towers had been handed over to the local branch of one of the transstellars, Maidenstone Enterprises of Mesa. MEM hadn’t wasted a whole lot of time and effort on meeting code standards. To the credit of the Mendel city government, it had at least tried to see to it that code was observed at the time of construction, but this was no longer something which was put out for bids. Maidenstone’s construction had become increasingly slipshod, with serious maintenance issues which the slumlords who owned the towers didn’t work very hard to put right. Accordingly, the population density per square kilometer was far lower than in the “good parts” of Mendel, but the population density per building was much higher, with people packed into very restricted space.

The population of Mendel’s seccy areas was somewhere between ten and twelve million people. (The authorities made no attempt to take a rigorously accurate census. Why bother? Seccies couldn’t vote.) All told it covered a little under two hundred square kilometers—but a good third of that space was taken up by industrial sections and commercial spokes. Those, while functional and modern, were considered eyesores which the full citizens didn’t want in their landscaped parts of the city. Having them in the seccy areas made sense anyway because seccies provided the non-slave labor force. The managers and supervisors, at least above the level of shop foremen, were almost always full citizens.

The commercial spokes with their industrial nodes also served the purpose of dividing the seccy ghetto into distinct districts. The spokes and nodes were well lit and patrolled by private security forces as well as the city’s own police, which both protected the facilities they held and discouraged seccies from taking “shortcuts” across them anywhere except at the duly authorized transit points. In effect, they served as social breakwaters, helping to prevent the seccies from organizing on a city-wide scale.

These were modern industries, though, based on modern technology. They did not produce much in the way of pollution and environmental contamination, so they had little impact on the citizenry itself. But for the seccies and slaves working in those industries and commercial zones, they were still bleak, hard areas. Hectare after hectare of stark manufacturing facilities, transportation systems—and pavement everywhere else. The trees and shrubs that adorned the citizen districts were not to be found here. The most you’d see in the way of gardens were flowerboxes suspended from the windows of cheap restaurants and diners catering to the seccy workforce.

It wasn’t the smoky hell of a pre-Diaspora industrial slum, and the poverty wasn’t as bad as it was on many Verge worlds. There were even a few parks, zoos and museums scattered about. But the most striking aspect of the seccy ghetto, to Thandi, was the apparent absence of law. More precisely, the absence of official authority. That had not been true on Ndebele. Granted, the law had been corrupt and often brutal. But it had still been present.

Here . . .

True enough, the technical features seemed to be under official control—such things as traffic governors and boundaries, which were readily visible, and she presumed such things as waste disposal and power distribution, which were not. Those were the sort of things that
had
to be regulated or chaos would result and would inevitably spread to the citizen areas.

But beyond such matters, Mesa’s powers-that-be didn’t seem to care much how the seccies regulated their own affairs. After she’d left Zilwicki’s ship with the load she was carrying and passed through the starport’s entry and customs gate, she’d seen only one police vehicle—and that had been within the first kilometer of travel. Shortly thereafter she’d entered the seccy districts and from that time since, so far as she could tell, there was no police presence at all.

On Ndebele, in contrast, police had been visible everywhere. Granted, the term “police” was something of a misnomer since they’d behaved much more like an occupying army. They often ignored crimes committed against the poor and powerless—and when they didn’t, invariably responded slowly—but they were nonetheless an ever-present reality.

Here . . . nothing. Thandi felt something almost like relief as she headed down the access ramp into the labyrinth of underground service ways and away from the aerial traffic lanes between the dreary canyons of seccy residential towers.

She knew what she was encountering, because Victor had described it to her. She now realized, though, that on some level she simply hadn’t believed him. After all, how can you run a huge city without law enforcement? This side of the pearly gates of heaven, at least, that was simply impossible.

Of course, there
was
law enforcement—it just wasn’t the formal law, and the enforcers were more or less self-appointed. When it came to this issue, at least, the seccy quarters of Mesa were as close as humanity had ever gotten to untrammeled libertarianism. And if that state of affairs was impossible to distinguish from one in which crime lords ran the show, so much the worse for libertarianism.

Being fair—so Victor had told her, anyway—in some of the seccy districts the crime bosses probably did a better job of maintaining order and dispensing justice than the authorities would. Certainly Mesan authorities. Disorder and dissatisfaction were bad for business, after all, including illegal businesses. And the cut that the crime bosses took from every legitimate business was probably no worse than taxes would have been.

More than legal scholars liked to admit, the concept of a protection racket was often hard to distinguish on the ground floor from what people got from legal authorities. To a crime boss, you turned over a portion of the proceeds of your business or profession and in return you got protection, stability, stable supplies and prices—even, in the best run areas, a measure of social welfare. To a legitimate government, you turned over a portion of the proceeds of your business and profession and in return you got . . .

About the same results. Superior results, to be sure, in well-run societies like Beowulf and Manticore—even much superior ones. But in many of the Verge worlds—certainly on Thandi’s native Mfecane planets—most people would have been better off with a well-run crime syndicate in charge than the “legitimate” thugs and thieves they actually got.