My test comes after two months of training my mind with Dancer. I do not memorize. I do not even really learn when with him. Instead, his training is designed to help my mind adapt to paradigm shifts. For instance, if a fish has 3,453 scales on its left side and 3,453 on its right side, which side of the fish has the most scales? The outside. They call it extrapolational thinking. It was how I knew that I should eat the scythe card when I first met Dancer. I am very good at it I find it ironic that Dancer and his friends can create a fake history for me, a fake family, a fake life, but they cannot fake my admittance test. So, three months after my training begins, I take the test in a bright room next to a noisy mouse of a Goldbrow girl who incessantly taps her stylus on a jade bracelet. She may be part of the test for all I know. When she's not looking, I snatch the stylus from her fingers and hide it down my sleeve. I am a Helldiver of Lykos. So yes, I can steal a stupid girl's stylus without her knowing anything about it. She gawks around as if magic has been done. Then she begins to whine. They don't give her another stylus, so she runs out in tears. Afterward, the Penny Proctor looks at his datapad and rewinds a video from a nanoCam- era. He looks at me and smiles. Such traits are ap- parently admirable. A Golden razor blade of a girl disagrees and sneers "Cutter" in my ear as she slices past me in the hall outside. Matteo told me not to speak to anyone because I am not yet ready to socialize so I barely bite back a very Red reply. Her words linger.Cutter.Cutthroat.Machiavellian.Ruth- less. They all describe what she thinks of me. Funny thing is, most Golds would see the term as an accolade. A musical voice addresses me. "I think she actually just paid you a compli- ment. So don't mind her. She's pretty as a peach, but she's all rotten inside. I took a bite once, if you catch my flow. Tasty, then putrid. Fantastic grab in there, by the by. I was about to rip that ninny's eyes from her skull myself. Damnable tapping!" The shining voice comes from a young man torn from Greek verse. Arrogance and beauty drip off of him. Impeccable breeding. I've never seen a smile so wide and white, skin so smooth and lustrous. He's all I despise. He claps me on the shoulder and grasps my hand in one of the several ways of semiformal in- troduction. I squeeze slightly. He has a firm grip too, but when he tries to establish dominance, I squeeze his hand till he jerks it back. A flash of worry in his eyes. "By God, your hand is like a vise!" He chuckles He calls himself Cassius very quickly, and I'm lucky he gives me little time to speak, because his brow wrinkles when I do. My accent is still not perfect. "Darrow," he repeats. "Well, that's quite the offColor name. Ah .." He looks at his datapad, pulling up my personal history. "Well, you come from no one at all. A farplanet hayseed. No won-der Antonia sneered your way. But listen, I'll for- give you for it if you tell me how you fared on the test." "Oh, you'll forgive me?" His brows knit together. "T'm trying to be kind here. We Bellonas aren't reformers, but we know that good men can come from low origins. Work with me, mate." Because of the way he looks, I feel a need to pro- voke him "Well, I daresay I expected the test to be more difficult. I might have missed the one about the candle, but besides that ..." Cassius watches me with a forgiving grin. His lively eyes dance over my face as I wonder if his mother coils his hair with golden irons in the morning "With hands like yours, you must be a terror with the razor," he says leadingly. "I'm fair,' I lie. Matteo won't let me touch the thing- "Modesty! Were you raised by the Whitecowls, man? Never mind, I'm off to Agea after the physical tests. Join me? I hear the Carvers have done some splendid work with the new ladies at Temptation. And they just had gravfloors in- stalled at Tryst; we can float about without gravBoots. What say you, man? Does that inter- est you?" He taps one of his wings and winks. "Plenty of peaches there. None of them rotten." "Unfortunately, I cannot." "Oh.'" He jumps as if just remembering I'm a farplanet hayseed. "Don't worry about it, my goodman, I'1l pay and all that." I politely decline, but he's already moving on. He taps my datapad before he leaves. The holoscreen cast over the inside of my left arm flickers. The dimensions of his face and infor- mation about our conversation are left behind --the address for the clubs he spoke of, the encyclopedic reference for Agea, and his family's information. Cassius au Bellona, it reads. Son of Praetor Tiberius au Bellona, Imperator of the So- ciety's Sixth Fleet and perhaps the only man on Mars to rival ArchGovernor Augustus in power. Apparently the families hate one another. Seems like they have a nasty habit of killing each other off. Baby pitvipers indeed.
