Mara had forgotten
the smell of the hives, that deep sweaty reek of too many bodies in
too little space with nowhere near enough air filtration, topped with
rotting garbage tang floating up from the lower levels. After a
while you stopped smelling it, but after so many years away from
Elysium it was enough to make her long for her the rubbersweat odor
of her airmask.
The hives were
enormous cylindrical chambers cut into the ground by the Architects
millions of years ago, each hundreds of meters deep and wide and set
a few dozen meters below the surface, excavated for some inscrutable
alien purpose – storage tanks for something, the archeologists
thought. When Earth was lost and Elysium's population exploded with
refugees, they'd removed the roofs, installed transparent ceilings,
plugged the exits, pumped them full of air, and cut apartment blocks
into the side walls. Then when they ran out of room, they'd built
towers in the center, until only the top two dozen levels still
received any illumination from the windows in the ceiling. For 80%
of Elysium's population, they were home, in all their reeking
grandeur.
The Blue Marble
Tavern was on level 24 of hive 5, snuggled into the student housing
adjacent to the Academy, just close enough to the surface to catch
some of the sunlight. Mara and Dee took the elevator there from
their new lodgings in the bowels. The trip took a good twenty
minutes to go sixty meters, crammed with a hundred others into the
car; at one point Mara was swept out of the car and almost left
behind when a group behind her exited, and had to elbow her way back
in through the seething mass of humanity stuffed into the car. She
managed to get a space near the car wall, where she was less likely
to be pushed out, but which left her nose pressed to the
heavily-graffiti'd wall. Kill the Autarch, read one – a
good omen, she felt.
By the time they
reached 24/5 the last of the reflected sunlight from the upper levels
was disappearing. They walked along the catwalk overlooking the
central chamber, just about level with the tops of the residential
towers in the center of the hive, amidst crowds of students returning
from the Academy a few levels up. Graffiti was thick here, and
almost all of it political. This was supposed to be a surveilled
zone, but every camera lens she saw was covered with black spray
paint.
The Blue Marble lay
twenty meters down a hallway dug into the side of the hive. The
hall's lights were all out, but that only made the bright blue neon
disk more visible in the darkness.
The Tavern was
almost as dark as the hall outside, and still mostly empty. A few
students sipped simcaf and studied at tables under dim leds hanging
from the ceilings. A grizzled bartender, looking far too old for
his clientele, wiped ineffectually at the steel bar with a dirty rag.
He looked up when they entered, recognized them at once as out of
place. Mara and Dee walked over to him. “Can I help you?” he
asked, frowning, his tone half question, half threat.
“We're looking for
a man about a book,” Dee said, speaking each syllable of the
passphrase carefully and precisely.
The bartender's
frown deepened to a scowl. “And what book would this be?”
“It has a blue
cover.”
“He's giving a
lecture in one of the back rooms,” the man said. “He'll be done
in half an hour if you wanna wait.”
“Sounds good,”
Dee agreed.
“Let me put you in
one of the other back rooms. You two kind of stand out.” Which
was true. Compared to the well-fed students occupying the tavern,
they were obviously outsiders, scrawny and weather-beaten, their fur
bleached by the sun. “My name's Pir, by the way.”
Pir led them into a
tiny meeting room in the back, just big enough for a steel table and
a few steel chairs and a dim led hanging on a cord from the ceiling.
They could hear the faint rumble of the lecture next door,
periodically rising into a chorus of “yes!” or “no!” or
“Earth!” as the speaker made some particularly impressive point.
Pir brought them cups of bad simcaf, which they both drank greedily.
Finally they heard
the sounds of stomping feet and rattling chairs as the meeting broke
up. After a few minutes, the door to their room opened and a man
stepped in.
He was thin, gangly,
dressed in the sightly-too-nice black tunic and slacks of a slumming
noble, his hair tied in long, fashionable dreads. He had a
black-and-silver optical band tucked up above his eyes. His fur was
blond and showed a slight sheen of sweat from the effort he'd put
into working the crowd next door. He gave them a big smile showing
his teeth – pearly white and straight, Mara noted. She distrusted
him at once – no one that with teeth that clean could have ever
truly known struggle.
“Pir told me you
wanted to see me,” he said, taking a seat at the table. “I'm
Sev, Sev Redans.”
“You can call me
Kel,” Dee said. “We're out of Ferrograd – the snakes started
sniffing around, and we felt it best to be scarce. We got your name
from Sel Sinaki.” Lies, of course, but he'd expect nothing less.
“He said you were a man worth talking with, that you could
introduce us.”
“Welcome to
Elysium, then,” Sev said.
“They gave us some
docs to share,” Dee said, and handed him a bag of memory sticks.
“The latest from Ferrograd.”
“Much obliged.”
The bag quickly disappeared under the table. “There's a meeting
here, day after tomorrow. Most of the leading Zealots will be here.
If you tell the bartender you're here for the study group on
Confucius, he'll let you back.”
“How trustworthy
is he?” Mara asked.
Sev shrugged. “As
trustworthy as one can hope for, I suppose. If he was an IntSec man
they'd have rolled us all up by now.”
Unless they want
to know where you are, to keep an eye on you,
Mara thought, but did not say.
“You have a source
for blank sticks?” Dee asked.
“Yeah, I know a
guy.”
“I'd like to meet
your guy at some point.”
“Maybe.”
“What's the
situation like here? News always takes a while to reach us out in
the hinterlands.”
Sev shrugged again,
smoothed back his hair. “It's what it is. We keep the docs
circulating, put up posters. But mostly it's just talk in back
rooms like these. The snakes cracked down after they shut down the
observatory, arrested a bunch of people, but it's quieted down since
then.”
Dee grinned ferally.
“Maybe we can stir things up a bit.”
“I'd rather you
didn't,” Sev said flatly. “Look at what happened when MuniPrin
Lee got caught peeping at Earth. What did he accomplish? A few
hundred people arrested, what there was of the movement broken. And
the Leeites, running around the waste like bandits – they're the
biggest liability the movement has now, you talk to someone about
Earth and their first reaction is to wonder what you're planning to
steal.”
“Chill,” Dee
said. “I'm not talking about direct action. But let me ask you
something. How many of your crowd tonight were students?”
“All but three,”
Sev admitted. “And they were two tutors and a librarian.”
“You want a
revolution? You aren't going to get it from students, there's not
enough of them.”
“We've sent people
into the bowels and the factories. Didn't get anywhere. If you
think you can manage it, you're welcome to try.” His tone made
clear what he thought the odds they would succeed were.
“We just might.”
Dee stood, and Mara rose with her. “See you tomorrow.”
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