He stopped at a corner to watch a garishly dressed group dancing frenziedly under some kind of intoxication to mindless, crashing music blaring from inside an open doorway, where others appeared to have collapsed. Somebody was shouting obscenities at them from a window nearby. Hunt stood and watched disconsolately, trying to form some idea of what he intended doing with the remainder of the day.
There was a light tug on his sleeve. He turned his head. It was Nixie.
“I say have go work now, so can catch Vie,” she said. “We go someplace now, yes?” At least she had put a wrap over her top.
Hunt sighed. “Nixie, don’t you ever give up? No thanks. Not today.”
“Is okay. I know good place.” She pulled insistently.
Hunt shook his head. “No. No fuck, understand? Nice girl, but fuck off.”
“You not understand. We just talk. Go place where is speak machine, Jevlen talk Terran.”
“Oh.” Hunt drew back and looked at her. She was serious for once, unsmiling. He nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
She slipped her arm through his as they began walking. “This way. I show. Place I use lots time.”
They entered a corridor of doors and display windows, many of them shuttered, leading off the street. From the other end of it, they crossed a trash—strewn plaza to another passage flanked by a couple of bars, an amusement gallery of some kind, and assorted other .doorways. Two more corners brought them to a wider concourse, on one side of which was an entrance into what looked like the lobby of a cheap hotel. There was a desk on one side, and doors off to left and right of the dingy hall beyond, where two or three people were sitting on faded chairs among oddments of furniture. Several elevator doors lined the wall at the rear. Somehow the reception machine even managed to convey an air of sneering disdain as the john drew up at the desk with his hooker.
“Look wrong if I pay,” Nixie murmured. Hunt gave her the card that he had been issued at PAC to cover incidental expenses. She flipped open a cover on the machine and passed the card across a read head. Nothing happened. Nixie muttered something that sounded like an oath and pressed a button. After waiting perhaps half a minute, she called out a stream of Jevlenese in an abusive voice and jabbed at the button repeatedly. A clerk in need of a shave and a clean shirt emerged, grumbling, from a door near the desk. Nixie gave him the card, and an irascible exchange continued between them while the card was read into a different device, a transaction record copied out, and the card returned. Finally the clerk extracted a small disk— presumably a coded room key—from the innards of the nonfunctioning reception machine, said something to Nixie that sounded sarcastic and which Hunt had a feeling referred to him, and stumped back through the door he had come out of.
They took one of the elevators up several floors and found the room around a corner farther along a corridor. Nixie touched the disk against a plate, and they entered. The room was indifferent, in keeping with the rest of the place. There was a fake window with a
graphics simulation of an unusual landscape scene, part of it nonfunctioning and blacked out. Nixie crossed over to the COM panel above the fitted unit opposite the queen-size bed, activated it, and gave an instruction in Jevlenese to switch on the translator.
“Like a drink?” she asked Hunt. “The first one comes with the room, anyhow.”
“Why not?”
“Anything in particular?”
“I’ll leave it to you.”
“House, a couple of colantas with tangy ice, unfizzed,” Nixie said. Rattles and grinding sounds came from the dispenser unit by the chef as she walked over to it. “Don’t get mad at Murray for being cautious,” she said over her shoulder. “The people that Baumer is mixed up with don’t like noses being poked into their business. And they can be nasty.”
“So you do know him,” Hunt said.
“You get to know what’s going on. And there aren’t that many Terrans in Shiban. People talk.”