“Well, of course that’s private sector,” the guide said with a sniff as he led Lacey toward the long queue for the buses.
“Sure,” agreed Lacey. “Well, if they won’t give their people tools to do their jobs right, they needn’t be surprised when the jobs get done half-assed. But it’s not my City.”
The sprawling crowds were an emotional shock to Lacey, though intellectually he had known what to expect and had tried to prepare for it. His suit of red-orange covered him throat to digits in high style. He liked the color, though it was too blatant for him to have worn it while working. Lacey had stopped working the moment he boarded the airliner in Greater Greensboro, answering a summons relayed through his superiors.
But more than the color, Lacey liked the fact that the suit left only his face bare to a woman’s touch. For fifteen years, physical contact with a woman was all that it took to crumple Lacey as effectively as a kidney punch could; and in the crowded City, he knew he could not avoid such contact.
When the third bus hissed up to their stop, Barbee called, “Quick now!” and swung aboard without further warning. Lacey followed the yellow-clad man, using his locked fists as a prow to split the would-be passengers who had pushed ahead of him. He ignored the yelps, the elbows chopping at his ribs and the boot-spikes gouging his shin armor. He had tried to ignore the other people, because half of them were women; and if he even let himself think of that for a moment, he would collapse in uncontrollable nausea. Though his suit kept him from actual contact, Lacey’s real problem was a psychic one: a repulsion implanted in his mind by a Psycomp after his conviction for rape.
The bus moved off slowly. A dozen people gripped the door jambs with all but their fingers and toes outside the vehicle. “It’s an express,” the guide shouted to Lacey over the babble. The powerplant itself keened through a hole in its condenser tubing. “It’ll take us straight to the City Complex.”
Lacey muttered something under his breath.
Actually, they were still a kilometer from the Complex when the bus halted in a traffic jam the like of which Lacey had never imagined. “Well,” Barbee said with a bright smile, “I guess we’ll just walk from here.”
“This happen often?” Lacey asked as he jumped to the sidewalk. The buildings glowered down at him. They had been too massive to demolish and rebuild at heights which could be served by stairs. Though the cost of power for elevators was almost prohibitive, there were people who would pay it for the privilege of living and working in this giant replica of a termite colony.
“Well, it happens,” the guide replied ambiguously. He set off at a rapid pace.
They climbed over and scraped between the vehicles which had mounted the sidewalks in vain attempts to clear the jam. At last Lacey saw what the trouble was. An entire block was covered, building-front to building-front, by a roiling party of more than 5,000 people. They were dressed and undressed in a multiplicity of styles. Banners shaded the gathering with slogans which were meaningless to the Southerner. As he began to thread his way through the celebrants, Lacey realized that they were homosexuals.
The squat field agent bumped a man whose nude body was tattooed in a pair of polychromatic starbursts. The man turned and raised a cup of something amber and alcoholic. “Join us, love,” he offered.
“Thanks anyway, friend,” Lacey said and moved on by. When he had caught up with Barbee—the local was far more adept at slipping through the dense crowd—Lacey demanded, “Where the hell are your cops?”
The guide looked back with distaste. “You’d better get rid of your provincial sexual attitudes fast,” he said with a sniff.
Lacey snorted back. “Look, if they’re out of my subregion, I don’t care what they do to who with what. I just mean I’d expect your Red Teams to pay some attention to people blocking a street—in the middle of town, in the middle of the bleeding day!”