Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) by Melissa Scott Page A

This was a bad time to
try to get through the harbor district--the market there was still
open, the day-boats would just be docking, and the shopkeepers and
brokers and the occasional pharmaceutical's factor would be
crowding the quay to inspect the day's take--and Warreven leaned
forward to flip the intercom switch.
    "Why aren't we
taking Stanehope Street?"
    The driver looked up,
fixing the younger man's face in his mirror. "Sorry, mir, but
there's been some trouble at the Souk, rana dancers. The baas told me to come this way."
    Warreven nodded, and
leaned back in his seat, resigning himself to a long, slow ride. The
rana groups were always active around the Midsummer holiday, their
riot presaging the overthrow of the year; lately, the radical
political groups, Modernists like himself and the fringe groups even
further to the left, had taken over the ranas' tactics, and staged
their own protests with dance and drumming. Not that the ranas had
ever really been apolitical, of course, but the Modernists had honed
and focused the protests, trying to say new things in an old voice.
The Centennial Meeting would begin at Midwinter, and the Modernists
had already announced that they wanted to put the question of Hara's
joining the Concord to an open vote. That meant bringing a lot of
other issues into the Meeting--the question of the pharmaceutical
contracts, of Temelathe's control of the government, and the
existence of trade and the whole question of gender law--and
Tendlathe and the Traditionalists vehemently opposed the idea. A
number of the old-style ranas supported their position, and there had
already been fights between the two groups.
    Traffic slowed around
them, and the couplelet's engine moaned as the driver geared down
yet again. Warreven leaned sideways, trying to see around the
driver's head and the shays and runabouts that hemmed them in.
Ahead, Consign Wharf jutted into the main harbor, and there was a
crowd gathered at its foot, spilling out into the roadway, completely
blocking one of the four lanes.
    "Someone's made a
good haul," he said, but even before he heard the driver's
noncommittal grunt, he realized that he was wrong: There were too
many runabouts in the knotted traffic, not enough shays and
three-ups--too many people altogether, he thought, to be a buying
crowd. The coupelet lurched forward, gained another fifty meters
before it ground to a halt, and he could hear the noise of drums and
the shrill note of a dancer's whistle even through the coupelet's
heavy shell. Three people--ordinary people, sailors and dockworkers
by their clothes, without the usual tattered ribbons that marked a
rana group--were standing on a platform balanced precariously on a
cluster of fuel drums, arms around one another's shoulders,
chanting and swaying to the drums. He couldn't hear the words yet,
or much more than the dull rhythm, but he could see the defiance in
their faces, and the tension in the movements of the listening crowd.
The driver reached across his pod to flip a security switch, locking
the coupelet's doors.
    They inched forward,
into the fringes of the crowd, and Warreven leaned back in the seat,
making himself as unobtrusive as possible. Most of the attention was
directed toward the people--two women and a man--on the platform,
but there was no point in attracting trouble. And trouble was already
present: to the left of the car, on the edge of the concrete mole
that marked the end of the buyers' lot, a man in a traditional vest
and docker's trousers banged an ironwood wrench against a wooden
pot. His hand rose and fell in an insistent counter beat, but any
sound was drowned in the noise from the platform. He knew it as well
as anyone, turned his fierce scowl on the people around him,
exhorting them to join in disrupting the singers' chant. He had
painted red-and-white flames, the mark of the Captain, the spirit
that Tendlathe was trying to make the Traditionalists' patron,
across each cheek. Most of them ignored