The girl smiled. The pupils of her eyes were shrunk to small black pinpoints in a blue field. "You're cute," she said. With a deft movement she speared his glass. Tilting her head back, she drank deeply. Her throat worked as she drained the glass. Then she held it out very carefully beyond the railing of the stairway and dropped it down the center well. The polished glass winked with light as it tumbled through the air. The sound of its shattering was lost in the general noise below.
"I hate empty glasses," the girl said, laughing.
An arm dragged her away. The crowd closed around her like doors shutting. Then the escalator reached the bottom level and Hendley was carried through a wide archway into a much larger room. Here there was less heated discussion, less attention paid to the paintings lining the walls, more hilarity and shrill excitement. The computer band blared from the far end of the room. A group of Freemen milling around in the center turned out to be dancing couples—many pairing men. There were bars set up on either side of the entrance. Both were jammed. Most of the dancers and many of the others in the crowd wore strangely cut-out uniforms, their bare arms or chests or faces smeared, like the face of the girl on the stairway, with dabs and streaks of color.
Hendley eased past the naked, painted back of a girl locked in an embrace with a man whose encircling arms were striped with crimson paint. Suddenly Hendley wished that he were out in the cool evening air, away from the noise and heat and confusion. But his throat was painfully parched and his head was spinning. He needed another drink. He didn't want to think any more. He didn't want to hear the strident note in the merriment spilling around him. He didn't want to speculate on the meaning of the bizarrely painted bodies of free artists, whose lives seemed as desperate as their art.
He fought his way to the nearest bar, jabbed the first button within reach, and seized the drink that slid from a chute onto the counter. It was weaker than his previous drink, but it warmed his stomach. He ought really to be drunk by now, he reflected. Never in his life had he had so much alcohol in one day. And as a matter of fact he was dizzy. His eyes were not focusing well. Faces swam across his vision, jelly faces, without bones. One of them was....
Nik. The young Freeman was smiling his sardonic smile, but his eyes were speculative. He thinks I'm drunk, Hendley thought. It's all right for him to laugh. But he forgets that I have only one day. No. One night, what's left of it. Then I go back....
"—find it interesting?" Nik was talking to him.
"Very," Hendley said. His tongue struggled with the single simple word. "Don't understand," he muttered vaguely, not sure whether he meant the painted artists or their shapeless works or his clumsy tongue.
There was a commotion nearby. Briefly the crowd parted, falling back. A girl had crumpled to the floor. She tried to push up with her arms but didn't make it. Then she was rolling on her back, writhing in evident pain, her hands balled into fists that dug into her midriff. As helping hands reached down toward the girl, the crowd closed around her like a spider enveloping its prey, walling her off from Hendley's view once more.
"Know her," he said. "Funny...."