"See you there, buddy." Thomas rang off.
Hershie folded his comm, wedged it in his belt, and stroked his parents' crypt, once more, for luck.
#
Hershie loved the commute home. Starting at the Arctic Circle, he flew up and up and up above the highest clouds, then flattened out his body and rode the currents home, eeling around the wet frozen cloudmasses, slaloming through thunderheads, his critical faculties switched off, flying at speed on blind instinct alone.
He usually made visual contact with the surface around Barrie, just outside of Toronto, and he wasn't such a goodiegoodie that he didn't feel a thrill of superiority as he flew over the cottage-country commuters stuck in the end-of-weekend traffic, skis and snowmobiles strapped to their roofs.
#
The Belquees had the best Ethiopian food and the worst Ethiopian decor in town. Successive generations of managers had added their own touches — tiki-lanterns, textured wallpaper, framed photos of Haile Selassie, tribal spears and grass dolls — and they'd accreted in layers, until the net effect was of an African rummage sale. But man, the food was good.
Downstairs was a banquet room whose decor consisted of material too ugly to be shown upstairs, with a stage and a disco ball. It had been a regular meeting place for Toronto's radicals for more than fifty years, the chairs worn smooth by generations of left-wing buttocks.
Tonight, it was packed. At least fifty people were crammed around the tables, tearing off hunks of tangy rice-pancake and scooping up vegetarian curry with them. Even before he saw Thomas, his super-hearing had already picked his voice out of the din and located it. Hershie made a beeline for Thomas's table, not making eye-contact with the others — old-guard activists who still saw him as a tool of the war-machine.
Thomas licked his fingers clean and shook his hand. "Supe! Glad you could make it! Sit, sit." There was a general shuffling of coats and chairs as the other people at the table cleared a space for him. Thomas was already pouring him a beer out of one of the pitchers on the table.