Changer of Worlds (woh-3) by David Weber & Eric Flint

Author:David Weber & Eric Flint [Weber, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
ISBN: 0743435206
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2002-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

Victor spent the remaining minutes of their trek simply studying his surroundings. Chicago’s Old Quarter—or “the Loop,” as it was sometimes called, for no reason that anyone understood—was famous from one end of the Solarian League to the other.

Notorious, rather, in the way that such largely-immigrant neighborhoods have been throughout history. Dens of vice and iniquity, of course. You can buy anything in the Loop. But there was also a glamorous aura surrounding the place. Artists, writers and musicians abounded, filling the Old Quarter’s multitude of taverns and coffeehouses. (Real coffee—the true Terran strain. Victor had tried some once, but found he didn’t like it. In this, as in many things, the earnest young revolutionary from the slums of Nouveau Paris was more conservative than any decadent elitist.) The artists were invariably “avant-garde” and had the poverty to prove it. The writers were mostly poets and enjoyed a similar income. The musicians, on the other hand, often did quite well. Except for opera, the Loop was the center of Chicago’s musical night life.

Rich or poor, the culturally inclined habitues of the megametropolis’ Old Quarter rubbed elbows with their more dangerous brethren. Over the centuries, the Loop had become the center of the Solarian League’s criminal elite as well as every brand of political radical.

Chicago drew all of them like a magnet, from everywhere in the huge and sprawling Solarian League. But since respectable Solarian society generally refused to acknowledge the existence of such things as widespread poverty and crime, the bureaucrats who were the real political power in the League saw to it that the unwelcome riffraff was kept out of sight and, and much as possible, out of mind. As long as the immigrants stayed in the Loop, except for those who worked as servants, they were generally left alone by the authorities. Within limits, the Loop was almost a nation unto itself. Chicago’s police only patrolled the main thoroughfares and those sectors which served as entertainment centers for the League’s “proper” citizens. For the rest—let them rot.

In some ways—poverty, danger, congestion—the Loop reminded Victor of the squalid Dolist slums which had grown like a cancer during the long reign of Haven’s Legislaturalist regime. But only up to a point. The Dolist slums in which Victor had been born and spent his entire life until he volunteered to join State Security were grim, gray and sullen places. That was beginning to change, as popular fervor for the Revolution and the war against the Manticoran elitists swelled and Victor’s class of people began to accept the necessity for discipline. Still, the Dolist quarters of the People’s Republic of Haven were slums.

Victor suspected that the Loop was even more dangerous than the slums of Haven. Yet, there was a key difference. The Loop was a ghetto, not simply a collection of tenements. And, like many ghettoes throughout history, there was a real vibrancy to its life. Beneath the grime and the poverty and the sneers of respectable society, the Loop possessed a certain genuine verve and elan.

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