City Without End Read Online Free

how.
    Grotesque, yes. But who else could fight the monstrous Tarig, if not equally ferocious humans? These were Lamar’s usual ruminations, forestalling the guilt that threatened to inundate his days.
    But a new thought was forming. Perhaps—just perhaps—he didn’t have to leave the boy behind. Lamar Gelde might, for example, bend the rules a bit. Given his exemplary service to the new renaissance, hadn’t he earned some privileges?
    Of course he’d have to face Helice, and she was fierce on the topic. But the hell with Helice, the little rat-bitch. He’d never liked her, and she wasn’t in charge from across the universe. Furthermore, Quinn would appreciate the out-of-the-box thinking. Quinn would goddamn well owe him big time.
    Lamar watched Caitlin as he sipped his drink. By damn, I’m poised to do something good and decent. By damn.
    Mateo was going to get his numbers changed. Caitlin was going to retest, too. Her numbers would come up strong, as well. Rob—well, no one would miss him. He was out of the equation. Lamar would have to pull off a bit of backroom manipulation, and normally such a switch could never escape the scrutiny of the mSap . . . but the thing was, he didn’t need to fool the machine sapient that ran the Standard Test. He only needed to confuse the bureaucrats for a few days. By then, it would be too late.
    Lamar murmured into his drink, hardly believing what he was saying to Caitlin: “I can get you in on something. You and your family.” Now that he had said it, it filled him with a vast relief. In the midst of the coming storm, amid the colossal suffering to come, someone would have a reprieve.
    Caitlin looked at him, waiting.
    “I can’t tell you what it is. Something’s coming. Not a word to Rob or anybody, not even Mateo.” He noted Caitlin’s growing confusion. “It won’t matter about the test. Very soon, it won’t matter at all.”
    “What are you talking about? Are they coming up with a new test?”
    “No, no tests. That’s behind us now.”
    She scrunched her lips in thought. “It might be behind you, Lamar, but it’s not behind us .”
    He fixed her with a pointed look as Rob, draped in a towel, ambled over from his swim. “I can’t say more. Don’t push right now. We’ll talk, but privately.”
    She started to protest, but he shook his head as Rob joined them.
    Poor Rob. He was a dead man. It made him feel like hell to know so much, while simple people enjoyed their barbeques and swims. But he couldn’t let himself worry about Rob. He’s holding the race back. Propagating, watering down the neurons. Rob wouldn’t have a place in the future. Not like Lamar. Not like Titus Quinn. Men with the requisite IQ.
    It was all based on merit.
    And in the case of Mateo and Caitlin, on who you knew.

CHAPTER ONE

    The most exalted of habitations is the Ascendancy. But the longest is Rim City.
    —from The Radiant Way
    I N THE NEVER-ENDING CITY, Ji Anzi and Titus Quinn finally found a magistrate willing to marry them. In this city of one hundred billion people, they had few friends. One, to be exact: Zhiya. And she was a despised godder, though appearances could be misleading. Anzi knew that Zhiya’s network of contacts sent tendrils throughout Rim City, throughout the Entire.
    One of Zhiya’s contacts was this resin-addicted magistrate who lay before them. He was barely conscious, an impoverished legate who lived on the never-ending wharf in a hovel almost too small to hold the three-person wedding party. It wouldn’t do to engage a fully conscious magistrate to officiate. The whole city was looking for Titus and Anzi, backed up by legions of Tarig, and perhaps Titus’s enemies in the Rose as well. He was a man well hated, but beloved of Ji Anzi.
    She held his hand now, ready to join their lives. It must be done quickly. With so many searching for them, they might be discovered at any moment. Titus said that marriage was a thing that would bind them now and forever,