Foundation And Chaos by Greg Bear Page A

casually. “I deliver, you pay. My day boss won't take it well if you-”
    “Word here is your day boss is in the sinks, ” the boy said, staring at her boldly. “And
     so's every other day or night boss who used you. Even Kindril Nashak! Word is he's been
     threatened with Rikerian, held with no charges! A free warning, girlie. No more!”
    The noose was closing. “What do I do with this?” Klia asked, lifting the thin box under
     her arm.
    “I take nothing and pay nothing, that's the word. Now slink!”
    Klia glanced at him for less than a second. The boy shook his head as if touched by a
     buzzing insect, then looked right through her. He would not report having seen her.
    If everybody wanted her to vanish, and there was no longer any work or reason to stay, it
     really was time to vanish. The
    thought scared her; she had never been outside Dahl for more than a few hours. She had
     less than two weeks' living in credits, a lot of those black-market exchanges good only
     for local merchants-who might shun her business now anyway.
    Klia walked up the street to a less prosperous neighborhood, known euphemistically as
     Softer Fleshplay, and ducked through a fractured plastic front into an abandoned food
     stall. There, among scattered old wrappers and broken sticks of furniture, she cut the
     security seal on her package and opened it, to see if it contained anything valuable
     outside Dahl.
    Papers and a bookfilm. She leafed through them and examined the seal on the bookfilm;
     personal stuff, in code, nothing she could decipher or sell anywhere. She had known that
     before she opened the package. She was handling only cut-rate deliveries anyway, often
     enough backup deliveries, information too tricky to risk being sent where security eyes
     could intercept it, yet not so tricky anyone wanted to pay large sums for better
     couriers...
    And once she had been the very best of couriers, one of the highest paid in Dahl,
     inheritor of a tradition thousands of years old, as convoluted and ornate with language
     and ritual as any religious commerce off Trantor. Sometimes, even official and public
     papers were handed to the Dahlite couriers by legitimate day bosses, just to ensure faster
     delivery now that other communications systems were so often stalled or subject to
     surveillance by the Commission.
    For her, it had all come to nothing, in just a few days!
    With a jerk, she realized she was crying, silently, but nevertheless crying.
    She wiped her face and blew her nose on a reasonably clean if dusty wrapper, dropped the
     package in the litter, and took to the street again.
    Once outside, she crossed the street and waited for a few minutes. Soon enough Klia saw
     her tail, the one she expected would be after her if the delivery failed. It was a small,
     thin girl
    only a few years younger than she, pretending to play in the streets, dressed in a
     scaled-down version of a black heatsink work jumper. Klia was too far away to exert any
     persuasion, or learn anything; but she did not need to.
    The girl darted into the abandoned stall and emerged a few seconds later with the shredded
     wrappings and contents of the package.
    Klia had tailed couriers at the very beginning, sometimes cleaning up after failed
     deliveries. Now, it was being done to her. This was the last slap in the face, the final
     insult.
    The street traffic was increasing. With the darkening ceil, the lights on the marquees
     above the streets would become brighter and more frantic, the crowds would jam shoulder to
     shoulder, looking for a moment's relief from dreary lives. For a hunted person, such a
     crush could be fatal. Anything could happen in a crowd, and she would be hard-pressed to
     persuade, hide, make the masses forget, or even just get away quickly; she might be found
     and killed.
    She thought of the man in dusty green. The memory of him did not make her scalp itch, but
     she would have to fall much