the Belquees for 18h?"

Hershie checked his comm. It was 1702h. "I can make it."

"See you there, buddy." Thomas rang off.

Hershie folded his comm, wedged it in his belt, and stroked his parents' crypt,
once more, for luck.

#

Hershie loved the commute home. Starting at the Arctic Circle, he flew up and up
and up above the highest clouds, then flattened out his body and rode the
currents home, eeling around the wet frozen cloudmasses, slaloming through
thunderheads, his critical faculties switched off, flying at speed on blind
instinct alone.

He usually made visual contact with the surface around Barrie, just outside of
Toronto, and he wasn't such a goodiegoodie that he didn't feel a thrill of
superiority as he flew over the cottage-country commuters stuck in the
end-of-weekend traffic, skis and snowmobiles strapped to their roofs.

#

The Belquees had the best Ethiopian food and the worst Ethiopian decor in town.
Successive generations of managers had added their own touches -- tiki-lanterns,
textured wallpaper, framed photos of Haile Selassie, tribal spears and grass
dolls -- and they'd accreted in layers, until the net effect was of an African
rummage sale. But man, the food was good.

Downstairs was a banquet room whose decor consisted of material too ugly to be
shown upstairs, with a stage and a disco ball. It had been a regular meeting
place for Toronto's radicals for more than fifty years, the chairs worn smooth
by generations of left-wing buttocks.

Tonight, it was packed. At least fifty people were crammed around the tables,
tearing off hunks of tangy rice-pancake and scooping up vegetarian curry with
them. Even before he saw Thomas, his super-hearing had already picked his voice
out of the din and located it. Hershie made a beeline for Thomas's table, not
making eye-contact with the others -- old-guard activists who still saw him as a
tool of the war-machine.

Thomas licked his fingers clean and shook his hand. "Supe! Glad you could make
it! Sit, sit." There was a general shuffling of coats and chairs as the other
people at the table cleared a space for him. Thomas was already pouring him a
beer out of one of the pitchers on the table.

"Geez, how many people did you invite?"

Tina, a tiny Chinese woman who could rhyme "Hey hey, ho ho" and "One, two,
three, four" with amazing facility said, "Everyone's here. The Quakers, the
commies, a couple of councilors, the vets, anyone we could think of.