Nigel felt amused and comforted by the display. Genes tell, and this echo of Earth was welcome. He remembered pigeons in Trafalgar Square, chased by hounds out on a leash, and the momentary picture brought a dizzy sense of the immense perspectives in this life of his, so long and wearing.
“Ummm. You know anything about holies?” the purple woman asked, one finger held to her cheek, staring at her scroll as though it were a mirror.
Nikka said cautiously, “I know that esty Vortices are naturally occurring wormholes. No matter what size, they have fixed matter-throughput. But the bandwidth of information—
matter, data, anything—that can go through scales up with its radius. The Grey Mech hit us with something—”
“A Causality Polarizer,” the purple woman said, licking her lips with something like relish. “If I could only get one!”
“—and blew us into here. And now.”
“Our ‘now’ be quite a bit downstream of you,” the woman said. “You be several million year-kilometers distant.”
Nigel blinked. “That much?”
She shrugged. “A moderate traverse.”
“Can’t you break that up into distance and time?”
She laughed, lips stretched far back, but without real joy. “How old be you? The idea—splitting the esty!” A dry cackle.
Nigel felt both awkward and vexed. “Fair enough. We know in principle that space-time can’t be just sectioned out, leastwise not here.”
“Clocks and feet separate them out pretty well, but the esty knows what we can’t see.” There was a kind note in her voice as she asked, “You be old, yes?”
Nikka said plainly, “From Earth.”
The purple woman’s eyes flared with surprise, then anger. “I try be friendly with you, give you an honest deal. And you think you can play games!”
It was Nikka’s turn to laugh. “I’m telling the truth. What do you want, passports?”
The woman’s chip did not know the word—indeed, passports made no sense in a multiply connected esty with no true boundaries—and she waved them away, mouth askew with displeasure.
“You people shouldn’t be traders at all!”
Ito blurted, “We aren’t—can’t you get that straight?”
Her eyes blazed again. “You get this straight. You take the rate I offer you for your property—buildings, historicals, mech widgets and sensies, the lot—or you’ll be punished.”
Nigel bridled. “Punished for what?”
“For taking up space, air, time—anything I want!”
She stood with effort, waddling forward on huge feet—a purple wall unaccustomed to collisions. Nigel held his ground. She jutted a large palm out and shoved him. She was massive and surprisingly strong. He staggered back and made a mistake. Without thinking he punched her swiftly in the stomach.
In what seemed the same instant someone struck him from behind. A sharp jolt of electrical violence coursed up through him. Then he was lying on the floor, without any perceptible interval in between. Arms and legs numb. Sounds hollow, distant. Staring up at a cloudy bowl. In a city tipped on end, he recalled distantly.
The purple wall had gone back to her couch. Hissing in his inner ear, the mists around him fried away. He looked around and everything was as before.
Tonogan had shocked him with the rod she held easily in one hand. He let a long breath out and stood, wheezing and rickety at the knees. How to begin?
“And who the hell—” Nigel had an instant of caution, obviously far too late, still trying to size up this sizable lady—“are you?”
“The Chairwoman,” Tonogan said. All this time she had been standing at rigid attention, like the two stuffed men outside.
“Chairwoman of what?” Nikka demanded.
“Everything. Just about everything.”
“Oh.”
The Chairwoman wrapped up her calculator-scroll and glowered darkly. “Pleased to meet you.”
TEN
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Ito did his work, hooking up some multisocketed pipes, and all the while looked off into the distance without saying anything.
When he could wait no more Nigel asked, “All right, what’s wrong?”
“You got to ask that?”
“I’m not swift on the subtleties.”
“Subtleties? Best way to get your attention is with a stick.”
They had been working for weeks in menial labor, hauling this, cleaning that. Putting in penance time for the Chairwoman, Tonogan had called it. It was clear that in this Lane the purple woman ran everything with a hard hand, for reasons that remained to Nigel quite mysterious. And he had been forced to concede that she had solidly behind her the brunt of what passed for law here.
