“Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?”

“Ssh, shut up. Listen.”

“Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—”

“And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,” I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.

“Sssh.”

“—so she squinted and squinted but, well.” The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. “Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—”

A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.

“You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.”

The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.

“And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.

“But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman, and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.”

For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display.

Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.