“Then, abruptly, space traffic, which had been well-nigh unrestricted, was well-nigh banned in and out of Daedalus,” Shan U continued. “Poor Wo Lia found herself marooned in Aurea, while events held folk cemented to the newscasts, who might otherwise have come to see her performance. For a while she tried, but was near despair when I chanced to enter Ju Shao’s inn, where she was staying.”
Diana’s attention revived. Ju Shao—hadn’t she heard that name before? From Targovi? Memory was vague. “What’s that?”
“O-ai, a place in the slum quarter, with a miscellaneous clientele, since it is both cheap and tolerant. I suggested to Wo Lia that she invest what remained of her funds in passage with me. People at our ports of call will doubtless be glad to see her show, and in Lulach, amidst her own species, she can find work of some kind to tide her over.”
Diana hoped the skipper was not merely a glib salesbeing. Well, she’d inquire among his crew, and if the word was good—a riverboat trip should be all kinds of fun.
The train terminated at Central Station in Paz de la Frontera. That was some distance from the river. Diana started walking, under the guidance of Shan U, who skipped along with the gait of an arboreal. Meanwhile she looked around in wonderment.
The air was a steam bath, full of odors rank, smoky, sweet, indescribable. An overcast hung low, but as yet the rain was only an occasional heavy, spattering drop. For a space she threaded through a crowd between drab walls, but then suddenly she was out in the open. Bushes and thorny trees grew well apart across dusty ground. At a distance she spied farmland, food animals grazing on Terran grasses, grainfields a-ripple under a sullen wind. Closer at hand, on every side, were the clusters of habitation. Each group of houses, shops, public buildings had its distinctive style—here façades square and featureless, surrounding hidden courtyards; there domes and spires; yonder broad expanses of vitryl in metal frames; and on and on. None amounted to more than a few score units, most were less. Spaces between them varied from a roadway to some two hundred meters, but were always clearly that: boundaries, buffers. Traffic was sparse, mainly closed-up groundcars whose riders gave pedestrians wary glances. Children romped outside the settlements, always in distinct clutches. A band of men, in everyday subtropical garb but distinguished by scarlet brassards, tramped around a wooden stockade. Though they bore no firearms, simply knives and staves, they were plainly a kind of militia.
“Events, the upheaval, the uncertainty of everything, have made Paz tense,” Shan U observed. “Riots have happened. I will be glad to depart.”
Diana nodded. She knew the history of the area, in outline. It had been founded in early Imperial times as a colony of veterans who wished to stay on Daedalus with their families after discharge. Each household received help in establishing itself, especially in converting its grant of land to agricultural usefulness. The practice had continued to this day.
The trouble was, and worsened decade by decade, that the Empire recruited its defenders from an ever more motley set of human societies on Terra’s daughter and granddaughter planets. Like tended to settle down with like, and not to get along very well with unlike. The situation might have been happier, given more openings to the outside; but Daedalus, afar in a frontier region, was relatively isolated. Rivalries festered. Nonhumans had long since abandoned any thought of living in Paz.
She remembered her mother quoting a quip of her father’s: “The Terran Empire is a huge melting pot. However, what appears to be melting is the pot.”
After passing through a couple of hamlets where life seemed to go on about as usual, the road entered one whose walls were mortared stone underneath tile roofs. Nobody else was in sight. Doors stood barred, windows curtained or shuttered. Silence closed in, save for muttering thunder and the spat of raindrops on pavement. Shan U glanced around uneasily. “Best we make haste,” he counselled. “This section has suffered an outbreak of lawlessness, and peaceable people have withdrawn till the Navy can send a patrol.”