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.
Warreven
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.
~
Rana, ranas, also rana band, rana dancers: (Hara) a group of men and women who use traditional drum-dances to express a political opinion; rana performances are traditionally protected by the Trickster, and by custom cannot be stopped unless the ranas make an explicit request for their audience to take political action. Ranas traditionally wear multicolored ribbons, a mark of the Trickster, as a sign of their special status.
6
Warreven
Warreven had been drinking since the polls opened at noon—sweetrum and water, cut one-and-two so that he could barely taste the alcohol—but even so, he’d nearly finished the bottle. He glanced again at the media screen, lit but with sound muted, and turned away as soon as the count for seraaliste crawled along the bottom of the display. He was still winning—had already won, if he was honest with himself, and that meant that the clan’s profits were his responsibility for the next year, until Midsummer came round again. One local year, twelve kilohours by the off-worlders’ reckoning—twelve thousand and ninety-seven hours, to be precise—before he would be free again. But the harvest surplus was squarely in his hands, to sell where he pleased. Daithef wouldn’t approve of that, anymore than he’d approved of Warreven’s candidacy, and had spent the last few days of the campaign telling anyone who would listen that it would be a full year before Stiller’s profits would be safe again.
Warreven made a face—he wasn’t that incompetent, and in any case a barrel-back clam would do a better job than Daithef—but admitted that any deal with NAPD would have to be handled cautiously. The price would have to be to NAPD’s advantage if there was any hope of using the sale to force Tatian to allow Reiss to bear witness, but it couldn’t be too good, or he himself would lose credibility with the Stiller mesnies. His plan was beginning to seem more complicated than he’d anticipated; he grimaced again, putting the worry aside, and poured the last of the sweetrum into his cup. There wasn’t much left, and he added water to bring the mixed liquid almost to the rim of the cup.
In the screen, the image shifted, showing the Glassmarket cleared for the first night of the Stiller baanket. The major celebrations would take place tomorrow and the next day, over the two days of the Midsummer holiday, but tonight Stiller would welcome the clan and introduce the new officers to their people. He would have to attend, of course, but not for the full night. Once he had shown himself on the platform, along with the other officials, he would be free to do as he pleased, to celebrate like another Stiller. And what I please… not Reiss’s company, this time, but someone like me, another indigene. He reached for the monophone and punched in the codes before he could change his mind.