“Oh, don’t. I’m sure you have something else to do this evening. I’m off to La Lune.”

“On your own card, silly brother.”

“It’s just money. I have plenty.”

“Mysterious, always mysterious. Are you actually going to the parentals tomorrow?”

“I’m hard to catch. I’m sure there’s a gruesome dinner in the works, tomorrow off shift. I intend to disappear for at least six hours. Overtime at the office.”

Slow, wicked smile. “Do they think of me often?”

“The parentals? They always ask how you are. I lie and say I see you often. I tell the truth and say you’re doing fine.”

“I’ll bet she prays over me.”

“Not such an unloving thing to do, midge.”

“You’re so brave, to go there.”

“Oh, not that brave. I sometimes miss vegetables boiled to mush.” Sometimes he longed for a parental voice. He was human. He experienced nostalgia. He wasn’t that sure about Ardath. She had had yet to grow into her emotional adulthood when she fled a career in the plastics plant, and something in her had never ticked over to love for her origins, only roused a rebellion more bitter and more lasting than his. If she didn’t cure that anger, she’d carry a lasting scar that nothing could cure—a part of her, he feared, that never would grow up. Lately, too, he detected a troubling chill, a remoteness he didn’t like in her, and he suspected a first twist around that deep scar: he might be the only one who could talk to her that knew what her growing up should be. So he didn’t give up the battle.

But no one took up an inordinate amount of Ardath’s time. Her fans were hovering. It was time to get out of the way.

“I feel the urgent need for dessert. I’ll leave now. Have a wonderful time, sis.”

“So déclassé.” She kissed him on the cheek. The whole restaurant must notice. The old warmth was there, and his sister was there, not yet warped by the anger or the changes, and that pleased him. “Why don’t you just get a tap like every other reasonable person in the universe? Your department won’t know. They can’t rule your whole life.”

“Government rules, government restrictions. A third time, government restrictions, and, trust me, they would know, darling sister. I know I’m not convenient. But my job’s how I afford to go into these trendy places to see my dear sister. And you always manage to know when I’m looking for you. So somber today. You so clearlydressed to match me.”

No one else would dare that impertinence. Her lips parted a second time in shock, her eyes flashed. And being his sister, she laughed aloud and hit him on the arm. “Silly Procyon. Go entertain yourself.” Her skinlights curled closer and closer to her features, well controlled, now—over lips, tip of nose. Eyes lingered last, changing subtly from dull native green to pale, gas-fire azure. “Be good.”

“I’m always good,” he said solemnly. “Virtuous is another matter.”

He left half his glass. He walked out among the reflective columns, out toward the street, the cynosure of every eye in the Plane. He was an encounter he was sure Ardath would have to live down tonight, oh, at least for two minutes; but she had the personal force to do it with complete aplomb: it was why he dared needle her.

Not exactly what Brazis liked, his skirting through the kind of attention that surrounded his sister, but on the PO staff’s advice, he wore that public notice like a mantle, just another camouflage. Noone high in government service sought public attention—so perhaps it made him less suspect. He walked out into the normal neon light of Grozny and down the street, momentarily enveloped in a string of dancers that melted past him, then stepping around a band of preteens clustered around a bench, kids likely not going home tonight and maybe not going home for the next number of nights—until the police rounded them up, asked them where they did belong, and billed the parents.

Most teens out at this hour were simple sessions-dodgers or young half-day factory workers on off shift, plus the more or less honest daylighters, who studied their hours or worked their hours and then played as hard as their finance let them, no one at home caring. They weren’t generally a problem, but you didn’t lay a credit card down on a counter and turn your head when that sort was about.

A few Freethinkers congregated at the corner—you could tell the type by the grimy, threadbare casuals, their own statement of style, their contempt of money. He didn’t know the faces: those had all seemed to change in the years since his sojourn there…but then, he’d been transitory in that group. He’d attended only two meetings, long enough for disillusionment to set in; he’d quit them in three months, seeing nothing that interested him there.

And he’d made a full confession of his former associations in his government résumé, so he wasn’t open to blackmail. Brazis reportedly didn’t take his admission for a problem. Intellectual flirtation, he’d called it, in his interview. The rest who’d shared those grimy rooms at Michaelangelo’s claimed they wanted to change the universe, but they spent their meetings nitpicking their own election rules and taking up collections for legal fees for extremist idiots. Mostly they sat around swilling cheap beer, complaining that everything the government touched was corrupt, and proposing no societal fix that could survive their own personal habits.

Well, so now he was working for the corrupt government himself, well, working inside it, on a critical job, and he had a very different view of how much actually did get done by officialdom, hour by hour, day by day, to keep the station running, never mind the corruption that threaded its way through human affairs in every endeavor—including Freethinker elections.

Maybe Freethinkers were leaven in the societal loaf, and shoved public opinion into progressing a healthy few degrees a century, in a society otherwise far out of time with the rest of the speeding cosmos, but otherwise they had no power, and Chairman Brazis just did as he did, and moved society in his own, far more powerful way. A former Freethinker strongly suspected Brazis had his own shadowy spots; but Brazis made the Project work, and did his job, and was, meanwhile, fair to his staff. A former Freethinker held a niggling suspicion that purity of life and purpose was the most suspicious thing in a public official. A former Freethinker began to think that the real world had far more layers than he’d once thought.

Well, but he was growing layers, himself. Secrets. Things he didn’t admit. Ardath grew more and more apart from him. He worried about her, but as yet thought of nothing he could do but live within her reach, and wait, and keep to his own venues except on rare occasions of purpose. Like the parental anniversary.

La Lune Noir wasn’t on his sister’s list. Too near Blunt for high fashion, but sitting on Grozny, purveying its fancy food at a modest price that didn’t upset his old Freethinker sense of economy. It had that kind of clientele, not quite in the Style, rubbing elbows with the fringe of the Trend.

And it had that beautiful showcase of desserts, right in the window.

He walked in and, being as he was a regular, his regular waitress nabbed him and showed him right to his table, his preferred place near the vid screen. “The usual?”

“Everything.”

He loved not having to think much on his off shift. He liked La Lune for leaving their patrons music-free and vibration-free, to bring in their private choices on their taps, or not.

It meant the place was hushed, except the noise of adjacent conversations, the clink of glasses, and the occasional crash of a dish.

“Damn!” from the kitchen. He laughed.

Thatwas La Lune.

A trio came in during his supper, danced on the transparent floor, to music the lot of them shared, and he recognized in that set three of his old Freethinker friends, who’d likewise left the den and prospered obscenely, by Freethinker standards. Marcus Liebermann was a medtech and Danny Casper was a paralegal. And Angie Wu, who’d recently married Danny, had become that archenemy of Freethinkers and terror of every marginal shop on the street—a customs cop.