The Dreaming Void (16 page)

So I can afford to laze for a bit.

The second alarm spike jerked her awake again, vanquishing the weird dream. This spike was harsher than the first, deliberately so, as it was an urgent order to get the hell up—one she never needed. When she canceled the noise and light, she assumed she'd messed up the secondary routines, somehow switching the order of the spikes. Then she focused on the timer in her exoimages.

“Shit!”

It became a struggle to pull on her clothes while drinking the Assam tea and chewing some toast. A leisurely shower was replaced by spraying on some travel-clean, which never worked the way the ads promised, leaving busy glamorous people fresh and cleansed as they zipped between meetings and clubs. Instead she hurried out of the flat with her mouse-brown hair badly brushed, her eyes red-rimmed and stinging slightly from the travel-clean, and her skin smelling of pine bleach.

Great. That should earn me some big tips,
she thought grouchily as she hurried down to the big building's underground garage. Her trike pod purred its way out into Colwyn City's crowded streets and joined the morning rush of commuters. In theory the traffic should have been light; most people these days used regrav capsules, floating in serene comfort above the wheeled vehicles except when they touched down on dedicated parking slots along the side of the road or on a rooftop pad. But at this early hour the city's not so well off were all on their way to work, filling the concrete grid close to capacity with pods, cars, and bikes and jamming the public rail cabs.

Araminta was half an hour late when her pod pulled up at the back of Niks. She rushed in through the kitchen door and got filthy looks from the rest of the staff. “Sorry!” The restaurant was already full of the breakfast crowd, midlevel executives who liked their food natural, prepared by chefs rather than cuisine units and served by humans, not bots.

Tandra managed to lean in close as Araminta fastened her apron. She sniffed suspiciously and winked. “Travel-clean, huh. I guess you didn't get home last night.”

Araminta hung her head, wishing she did have an excuse like that. “I was up late last night; another design course.”

“Honey, you've got to start burning the candle at both ends. You're real young and a looker; get yourself out there again.”

“I know. I will.” Araminta took a deep breath and went over to Matthew, who was so disgusted that he didn't even rebuke her. She lifted three plates from the ready counter, checked the table number, cranked her mouth open to a smile, and pushed through the doors.

The breakfast session at Niks usually lasted about ninety minutes. There wasn't a time limit, but by a quarter to nine the last customers were heading for the office or store. Occasionally, a tourist or two would linger or a business meeting would run overtime. Today there were not many lagging behind. Araminta did her penance by supervising the cleaning bots as the tables were changed, ready to serve morning coffee to shoppers and visitors. Niks had a good position in the commercial district, five blocks from the docks down on the river.

Tables started to fill up again after ten o'clock. The restaurant had a curving front wall with a slim terrace running around it. Araminta went along the outside tables, adjusting the flowers in the small vases and taking orders for chocolettos and cappuccinos. It kept her out of Matthew's way. He still had not said anything to her, a bad sign.

Some time after eleven the woman appeared and started moving along the tables, talking to the customers. Araminta could see that several of them were annoyed, waving her away. Since Ethan had declared Pilgrimage ten days earlier, Living Dream disciples from the local fane had been coming in and pestering people. It was starting to be a problem.

“Can I help you?” Araminta asked, keeping the tone sharp; this was a chance to earn redemption points with Matthew. The woman was dressed in a charcoal-gray cashmere suit, old-fashioned but expensive, with a long flowing skirt, the kind of thing Araminta might have worn before the separation, back in the days when she had money. “We have several tables available.”

“I'm collecting signature certificates,” the woman said. She had a very determined look on her face. “We're trying to get the council to stop ingrav capsule use above Colwyn City.”

“Why?” It came out before Araminta really thought about it.

The woman narrowed her eyes. “Regrav is bad enough, but at least they're speed- and altitude-limited inside the city boundary. Have you ever thought what would happen if an ingrav drive failed? They fly semiballistic parabolas; that means they'd
plummet
down at half orbital velocity.”

“Ah, yes, I see.” She also could see Matthew giving them a wary look.

“Suppose one crashed onto a school at that speed. Or a hospital. There's just no need for them. It's blatant consumerism without any form of responsibility. People are buying them only to show off. And there are studies that suggest the ingrav effect puts a strain on deep geological faults. We could have an earthquake.”

Araminta was proud she did not laugh out loud. “I see.”

“The city traffic network wasn't designed with those sorts of speeds in mind, either. The number of near-miss incidents logged is rising steadily. Will you add your certificate? Help us keep our lives safe.”

A file was presented to Araminta's u-shadow. “Yes, of course. But you'll have to order a tea or coffee; my boss is already cross with me this morning.” She flicked her gaze toward Matthew as she added her signature certificate to the petition, confirming she was a Colwyn City resident.

“Typical,” the woman grunted. “They never think of anything but themselves and their profit.” But she sat down and ordered a peppermint tea.

“What's her problem?” Matthew asked as Araminta collected the tea.

“The universe is a bad place; she just needs to unwind a little.” She gave him a sunny smile. “Which is why we're here.”

Before he could say anything else, she skipped back to the terrace.

At half past eleven Araminta's u-shadow collated the morning property search it had run through the city's estate agencies and shunted the results into one of her storage lacunae. She was on her break in the little staff lounge beside the kitchen. It did not take long to review them all; she was looking for a suitable flat or even a small house somewhere in the city. There were not many that fit her criteria: cheap, in need of renovation, near the center. She tagged three agency files as possibles and checked on how the previous day's possibles were doing. Half of them already had been snapped up. One really had to be quick in today's market, she reflected wistfully.
And have money or at least some decent credit.
A renovation was her dream project: buying a small property and refurbishing it in order to sell it at a profit. She knew she could be good at it. She had taken five development and design courses in the last eight months since separating from Laril, as well as studying every interior decorating text her u-shadow could pull out of the unisphere. Property development was a risky proposition, but every case she had accessed showed that the true key was dedication and hard work as well as a lot of market research. And from her point of view she could do it by herself; she wouldn't depend on anyone. But first she needed money.

Araminta was back in the restaurant at twelve, getting the table settings ready for lunch, learning the specials the chef was working on. The anti-ingrav crusader had gone, leaving a good tip, and Matthew was treating her humanely again. Cressida walked in at ten past twelve. She was Araminta's cousin on her mother's side of the family, a partner in a midsize law firm, one hundred twenty-three years old and spectacularly beautiful with flaming red hair and skin maintained to silky perfection by expensive cosmetic scales. She was wearing a two-thousand-Vpound emerald and platinum toga suit. Just by walking in to Niks she was raising the whole tone of the place. She was also Araminta's lawyer.

“Darling.” Cressida waved and came over for a big hug; air kissing had never been part of her style. “Well, have I got news for you,” she said breathlessly. “Your boss won't mind if I steal you for a second, will he?” Without bothering to check, she grabbed Araminta's hand and pulled her over to a corner table.

Araminta winced as she imagined Matthew's stare drilling laser holes in her back. “What's happened?”

Cressida's grinned broadly, her liquid scarlet lip gloss flowing to accommodate the big stretch. “Dear old Laril has skipped planet.”

“What?”
Araminta could not quite believe that. Laril was her ex-husband in a marriage that had lasted eighteen utterly miserable months. Everyone in her immediate family had objected to Laril from the moment she had met him. They had had cause. She could admit that now; she'd been twenty-one while he was three hundred seven. At the time she'd thought him suave, sophisticated, rich, and her ticket out of boring, small and small-minded, agricultural Langham, a town over on the Suvorov continent, seven thousand miles away. They thought he was just another filthy Punk Skunk; there were enough of them kicking around the Commonwealth, especially on the relatively unsophisticated planets that made up the outer fringes of the External worlds, jaded old folks who had the money to look flawlessly adolescent but still envied the genuinely youthful for their spirit and exuberance. Every partner they snagged was centuries younger in a futile hope that the brio would transfer over magically. That was not quite the case with Laril. Close, though.

Her branch of the family on her father's side had a business supplying and maintaining agricultural cybernetics, an enterprise that was the largest in the county and one in which Araminta was expected to work for at least the first fifty years of her life. After that apprenticeship, family members were considered adult and wealthy enough to take off for new pastures (a depressing number set up subsidiaries of the main business across Suvorov), leaving gaps for the latest batch of youngsters to fill, turning the cycle. It was a prospect Araminta considered so soul-crushing, she would have hired out as a love slave to a Prime motile to escape it. Meeting Laril, an independent businessman with an Andribot franchise among other successful commercial concerns, was like being discovered by Prince Charming. And given that these days an individual's age was not a physical quantity, her family's objection to the three-century difference was
so
bourgeois. It certainly guaranteed the outcome of the affair.

The fact that they had been more or less right about him using her only made her postseparation life worse. She could never go back to Langham now. Fortunately, Cressida was not judgmental, considering Araminta's colossal mistake as part of life's rich experience. “If you don't screw up,” she had told a weeping Araminta at their first meeting, “you haven't got a base to launch your improvement from. Now, what does the separation clause in the marriage contract entitle you to?”

Araminta, who had overcome a mountain of shame even to go to a family member, however distant, for legal help at the start of the divorce, had to admit theirs had been an old fashioned wedding of the till-death-do-us-part variety. They'd even sworn that to the licensed priest in the Langham chapel. It was all very romantic at the time.

“No contract?” an amazed and horrified Cressida had asked. “Gosh, darling, you are headed for a Mount Herculaneum of improvement, aren't you?”

It was a mountain that Laril's lawyers were doing their very best to prevent her from ever setting foot on; their countersuit had frozen Araminta's own assets, all seven hundred thirty-two Vpounds she had in her savings account. Even Cressida with all her firm's resources was finding it hard to break through Laril's legal protection, and as for his commercial activities, they had proved even more elusive to pin down. All his early talk of being the center of a dynasty-like network of profitable companies was either a lie or a cover-up for some astonishing financial irregularities. Intriguingly, Viota's National Revenue Service had no record of his paying tax at any time in the last hundred years and was showing a healthy interest in his activities.

“Skipped. Departed. Left this world. Gone vertical. Uprooted.” Cressida grasped Araminta's hands and gave them a nearly painful squeeze. “He didn't even pay his lawyers.” Her happiness at that eventuality was indecent. “And now they're just another name on the list of fifty creditors after his ass.”

Araminta's brief moment of delight suddenly darkened. “So I get nothing?”

“On the contrary. His remaining solid assets—that's his town house and the stadium food franchise, which we did manage to freeze right at the start—are rightfully yours. Admittedly, they don't quite add up to the kind of assets that will sway a naive young girl's head.”

Araminta blushed furiously.

“But not to be sneered at. Unfortunately, there is the question of back taxes, which I'm afraid amounts to three hundred thirty-seven thousand Viotia pounds. And if the NRS could ever prove half of Laril's ventures that you told me about, they'd claim the rest, too. Bloodsucking fiends. However, they can't prove a damn thing thanks to the excellent encryption and strange lack of records your slippery ex has muddled his life with. Then there's my fee, which is ten percent seeing as how you're family and I admire your late-found pride. So the rest is yours, clear and free.”

“How much?”

“Eighty-three thousand.”

Araminta could not speak. It was a fortune. Agreed, nothing like the corporate megastructure Laril had claimed he owned and controlled, but more than she had expected and asked for in the divorce petition. Ever since she had walked into Cressida's office, she had allowed herself to dream that she might, just might, come out of this with thirty or forty thousand, that Laril would pay just to be rid of her. “Oh, great Ozzie, you are kidding,” she whispered.