“Oh, certainly!” she said, in charmingly thick Aphalone. “We talk about it always. We’d bundle our debts together, and sell them to a proper bank.” Meaning they would promise to pay off their debts to the bank, rather than to their creditors (who would get a fee from the bank). “We’d pool our incomes to pay them all off together, you see? If one woman came up short another could take up her slack. And since the bank would trust a lot of us to pay our debts more than one or two alone, we could get some credit, use it to hire doctors, a barrister, some nicer rooms…”

“Good idea,” Baru said, and she sent for the madams.

By midnight Baru was dealing bundles of prostitutes’ indentures to local banks in batches of fifty. Two of the Oriati had beaten each other silly with baking pins for the right to woo her. She had written so many sell orders and contracts that she could not remember them: she was nursing a nervous suspicion that she had not even been aware of some of the things her right hand recorded.

A woman in a sealskin jacket approached her table.

Baru looked up from the sprawl she’d been reduced to (the prostitutes gave wonderful back massages). “Oh,” she said. “You’re finally here.”

The spy said, expressionlessly, “I have been asked to beg you to stop. I have been asked to tell you that you have no idea what you risk provoking.”

“Tell your case officer,” Baru said, enunciating in clear Aphalone, “that I want to meet with them. Understand? I want to talk to your Oriati case officer on neutral ground. Find a way.”

The spy departed. Baru looked at the party she had invented. The Family elders were dancing with the privateers, and the privateers with the prostitutes; the ruined were weeping and the fortunate glowed with euphoria. An old woman comforted her sister. Two laughing daughters (each of a different family) reclined with linked arms and watched the dance. The severely dressed prostitute who’d suggested the indentures trade looked at Baru over the shoulder of her dance partner, bright-eyed and curious, and Baru was suddenly terrified and sick with grief.

She slipped out the back of the restaurant. The moon was high and bright; the air had grown wet and charged, and the southern horizon boiled with ramparts of stormcloud.

North a ways, plain as the teeth of a striking shark, the red sails of the Imperial Navy’s frigate Sulane swayed on high waves.

*   *   *

SHE dreamt that night of Itinerant’s utopia.