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that again?”

The bartender poured the remaining juice into the cup, holding up the used carton. “You wouldn’t get upset if you lost an empty container, would you? Same with this place. Within an hour there won’t be anything here worth capturing.” He crushed the carton, discarding it. “Squeezed dry.”

“But it’s not equivalent, is it?” asked Elliot. “This place must be worth a fortune.”

The bartender shook his head. “Built for under a quintal and was paid for within a year of completion. Rental space on the trading floor went for twelve grams per centare year—you savvy ‘centare’?”

“One square meter. But what’s a quintal?”

“Defined metrically as one hundred kilograms. As I was saying, Aurora Proper had eighty-five hundred rentable centares. Fully subscribed before a gram was spent. Operated thirty-three months after earning back her investment. Cleared about two-and-a-half times her original capital expenditure.”

The bartender took a sip of his screwdriver and added, “The Cadre hotel operation was even more profitable.”

Lorimer asked, “What about all the stuff on sale downstairs?”

He shrugged. “Anything crucial is being evacuated. The rest—risk of loss calculated into operating overhead.”

“You seem to know a lot about all this,” said Elliot.

“I should. I built Aurora, and several of her sister undergrounds.” He wiped his right hand on a towel, extending the former. “Jack Guerdon, Guerdon Construction.”

Elliot took the hand, wide-eyed. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

Lorimer also shook hands, then asked, “Mr. Guerdon, how could so huge a complex—with hundreds of people coming and going—be kept secret for four years? Longer, if you count construction time.”

Guerdon grinned. “Well, I’m not about to reveal any trade secrets, but I can answer abstractly; countereconomic theory 130

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is freely available. To keep any secret, you divide it into data segments—perhaps ‘modules’ would be closer—and spread these modules among a few trusted persons—the fewer the better. An underground agora is a machine—a social structure—based on that principle. Access to the machine is freely available to many; knowledge of its location is its most closely guarded secret, in this operation known to almost no one except those directly involved in transporting goods and people—

a few Cadre.”

“But what about your construction workers?” Elliot asked.

“They were recruited from construction sites all over the world, were transported here secretly, worked only inside, and never knew where they were. If you think security is tight now, you should have been here during construction; a mosquito couldn’t have gotten in or out.”

“But spies must get inside, no?”

“Probably dozens—maybe hundreds,” said Guerdon, “but what difference does it make? The Cadre make sure that anyone coming in isn’t being traced from the outside—and you can be certain that they are technologically quite sophisticated in their methods—then once inside, you play by the Cadre’s rules, which are set up to make sure nobody finds out anything they shouldn’t or interferes with operations. But it’s not a major problem; even the security guards don’t know all the gimmicks built into this place—much less visitors—and this puts any potential spy at a tremendous disadvantage. If he causes any trouble, where can he go? The Cadre are controlling access, and nobody leaves until they say it’s okay.”

“Pretty totalitarian,” Lorimer said.

“That’s precisely why nobody gets in here until they’ve signed a contract agreeing to security procedures; nobody is forced to come here, but if they do, it’s according to the Cadre’s rules. However, the Cadre are not free agents, either; they are even more restricted by contract than are the visitors: a visitor Alongside Night

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here can do anything except disrupt operations or violate security; the Cadre are not permitted to do anything except maintain those freedoms. It’s not just in theory, either; social structures created on paper are translated into balances of power in practice. The original agreements by which the agoras were set up dictated the forms used to enforce them.”

“But still,” said Elliot, “all this sounds tremendously expensive.”

“Expense is a relative term. The initial capitalization and overhead were high-priced—and so are they with any office building, for that matter—but it was cost-effective to the Cadre’s clients compared to the costs of doing business in the Statecontrolled economy.”