Conventions of War Read Free Page A

hadn’t let Spence leave the apartment, even though she could have walked through the neighborhood with only a minimum of discomfort. Sula didn’t want Spence seen outside until she could walk normally. A limp attracted attention, struck the eye as a wrongness. In fact, she didn’t want anyone on her team to attract attention, not when the situation was so unsettled, not when the attention might come from the Urban Patrol or from an informer.
    Why is the stranger limping? That was a question Sula never wanted her neighbors to ask each other, not when the news broadcasts were full of the Naxid triumph in a pitched battle on the Axtattle Parkway, and even an ordinary person might think of flying bullets and wounds.
    She knew that it was perhaps irrational to take these precautions, but she had survived the Naxid occupation so far by taking precautions that others had thought irrational.
    â€œHow’s the leg?” Sula asked Spence.
    â€œBetter, my la—Lucy.” She made a turn about the room and gave a wistful look at the street beyond the window. “Pity I can’t leave, on a lovely day like this.”
    â€œWork on your walking and your stretching, and you will,” Sula said.
    Human warmth is not my specialty, she thought.
    â€œDidn’t you like your squid?”
    Sula looked in surprise at her supper, bits of squid grilled on a skewer, which had sat untouched by her elbow for the last hour.
    â€œI forgot to eat,” she said.
    â€œLet me warm it,” Spence said, and took the skewer—and the other skewer with mushrooms and vegetables—to the kitchen.
    Sula heard the hum of the convection oven as Spence returned to take another turn around the floor.
    â€œYou must be working hard on something,” Spence said.
    â€œI’d be a lot happier if I could work on it,” Sula said. She looked down at the displays on the glossy surface of her desk and touched the pad to disconnect her desk from the Records Office computer. “I was trying to think of a way to communicate with people in the city, let them know it’s not all over. Replace The Loyalist somehow.”
    Spence considered this, her pug nose wrinkled in thought, then shook her straw-colored hair. “I don’t see how. It took all of us several days to distribute those papers last time.” An idea struck her. “But Lucy, you’ve got access to the Records Office computer. Can’t you use that to send electronic copies?”
    â€œOnly if I want the security forces to go through every line of programming on that computer until they find me,” Sula said. “There are invisible tags on every piece of mail that tells you where it came from—and of course a duplicate of every mail goes to the Office of the Censor, and you can imagine what would happen if ten thousand copies of The Loyalist turned up in their buffer.”
    Spence paused in her pacing, a thoughtful frown twitching at her lips. “Lucy,” she said, “you’ve got high access. Couldn’t you just tell the computer to lie about all that?”
    Sula opened her lips to make a scornful reply, then hesitated. A subtle chime came from the kitchen, and Spence limped there to take Sula’s supper from the oven. When she returned, Sula had turned to her desk and was connecting once more to the Records Office computer.
    â€œEat your supper,” Spence said as she dropped the plate on Sula’s desk, over the flashing symbols that were appearing in its glowing depths. Juices sizzled faintly in Sula’s ear. She picked up the nearest skewer and ate a piece of squid. Reheating had turned the cuttlefish rubbery, but its texture, or for that matter its taste, were by now of little interest. She pushed the plate to one side as the Records Office directory appeared onscreen.
    â€œMake good use of the help files,” Spence advised.
    As Sula ate her supper, and later drank the sweetened coffee