Burning Bright

There were more bicycles in evidence on this stretch of road, and on the high-arched bridge, as well as cabs and three-wheeled cycles and a handful of the motorized denki-bikes. Most of the cabs and human-powered vehicles turned right or left onto the street that paralleled the as-yet-invisible river. As the driver stood on his pedals again to coax the cab up the steep rise, Lioe began to understand the reason. She could guess why there didn’t seem to be many fully motorized craft on Burning Bright—fossil resources were scarce and inaccessible, electrics were still impractical for heavy loads, and solar was even less practical on something as small as a velocab—but it was still strange to feel the cab wavering from side to side as the driver added his muscle power to the engine’s whining output. Strange, and somehow improper. Lioe was glad when the cab reached the top of the arch, and started the long glide down.

Across the bridge, the streets were quieter. The buildings turned blind faces to the road, and there were few pedestrians. Once or twice the cab crossed a wider street, both times with trees or flowers growing in a center island, framed by soft lights, and Lioe caught a glimpse of figures moving in that pastel radiance. More often, the cab flashed over the low hump of a bridge, and she saw shards of light reflected from the canal water less than two meters below. The driver—he had caught his breath, after the bridge—said, “This is Dock Road—Dock Road District, that is.”

“Mmm.” Lioe glanced from side to side, staring at the blank-walled buildings. Most of them seemed to be four or five stories high, made of something dark that might have been poured stone. Nearly all of them had lighter inclusions: a band across the front, or outlining a door, or defining the corners of the building, but there were no windows, or at least nothing she recognized as a window. She had thought the on-line guides had said that Dock Road was primarily a residential district, but these looked more like factories or warehouses than any house she had ever seen. And then the cab swept past a building with all its windows open, shutters folded back against the empty dark stone of the facade, a gate open too into a courtyard where people swarmed around a blue-lit fountain, and music spilled out into the quiet street. She craned her head as they slid past, and out of the corner of her eye saw the driver smile briefly over his shoulder.

They pulled up outside Shadows a little before the nineteenth hour. The club was a more ordinary building, three stories high with bricked-in windows and a brightly lit sign over the door, in a neighborhood full of buildings that had visible windows and doors that locked with metal grills. There was a food bar on the nearest corner—and a heavyset bouncer leaning his chair against the wall outside the entrance, so she shouldn’t have to worry too much—and some kind of shop across the street, its display windows shut down for the night. She paid the driver what he asked and added the tip the guides had said was appropriate, then turned toward the club’s well-marked door. The cab’s motor whined behind her as the driver pulled away, but she did not look back.

After the glittering strangeness of the rest of the city, Shadows was refreshingly ordinary, another Gaming club like a hundred others she’d seen on other worlds. The door was painted with the images from hundreds of Gaming pins—conferences, competitions, specific sessions and scenarios, most of the Grand Types and even a few faces that had to be local favorites—but before Lioe could study them more closely, the door swung open onto a narrow hall.

The carpet was worn, with a few squares of a brighter shade of moss to show where the worst damage had been replaced. The white-painted walls were mostly empty, except for a few display boards and a Gameboard under glass. The displays were of sessions that had attracted attention on the intersystems nets, and Lioe gave a mental nod of approval. There weren’t many—there couldn’t be many, if Shadows was as new as the steward Vere had said, and it was a good sign that the club hadn’t tried to inflate its reputation by adding displays of merely local interest. The Gameboard, the gleaming screen below it said, had belonged to the club’s founder, Davvi Medard-Yasine. Lioe didn’t recognize the name.