Free Between the Stars by John Maddox Roberts, Eric Kotani

certain course.
    Sometimes Valentina wondered whether her meticulous planning was worth the trouble. Chances were, nobody would notice her anyway, if she merely took the trouble to disguise her beauty. However, the urge to stay in persona had been drilled into her early, at a time when the Intelligence schools had hired the finest acting coaches to instruct the pupils. Now it was all but impossible for her to drop the character she had constructed. She could switch from one to another with facility, but acting naturally was all but unthinkable.
    She stopped at a booth that offered shrimp tempura. From the earliest days of self-sustaining life off-Earth, shrimp had been a principal source of protein. They grew in pestiferous abundance in the salt-water tanks throughout the Belt. Everywhere around her vegetation grew. In the tunnels, on the tiers, even on the catwalks, vines, bushes and dwarf trees grew from planters. They aided in atmosphere production, produced food and softened the harsh functionality of asteroid life.
    As she ate, Valentina watched the people around her. The Earth origins of spacers could be tricky to read, but most of those on Avalon seemed to be Caucasian or Asiatic in about equal numbers, with a sprinkling of people from everywhere else and innumerable mixtures. There were a few eccentrics who had chosen cosmetic treatments that gave them the appearance of no known race. Clothing was mostly functional, although there were some who wore very little of it. There seemed to be a fad for garish jewelry among the young.
    There was a lot of exuberant advertising in every possible medium. Most of it was holographic, but some used archaic lettering, a rarity on near-illiterate Earth. Chinese banners of scarlet cloth bearing gold calligraphy were stretched on the fronts of some shops, and one establishment had revived flashing neon in glass tubes. From what Valentina could make out, the lower levels of tiers were devoted to selling necessities and equipment, the middle range to luxuries and services, and the upper tiers to entertainment.
    It was nothing particularly enthralling to her, but she reminded herself to rubberneck. In her current persona, she was the Belt's equivalent of a hick in the big city. The brief preliminary scan told her that she should modify her persona to something more worldly. It had served its purpose.
    At intervals along the tiers, small side-tunnels led to public restroom facilities. Valentina located one and paid a small fee for a private booth. She maneuvered herself and her bag into it and found that it had sparse shower facilities and a holographic mirror. She switched on the mirror, undressed and went to work on her appearance. She unbound her hair and, with a few deft cosmetic touches, altered her appearance into something far more alluring. She did not bother with a full-strength vamp treatment, but now her eyes and lips were highlighted. The coverall she took from her bag was as functional as the other had been, but it had a shiny finish and was tailored to emphasize her figure rather than disguise it. When she left, she was the object of a good many appraising looks, not all of them from males.
    On the thirty-fourth tier, amid the entertainment section, she found a hotel in the middle price range. She chose it primarily because its hand-lettered sign listed the symbol for infonet services among its facilities. Instead of having a front wall, the tiny lobby was separated from the tier terrace by a living fence of close-planted bamboo. A tiny woman in a kimono came around the reception desk and bowed. In the primarily zero-gee Island Worlds, the custom of bowing had fallen out of use, so someone in this place was a traditionalist.
    "May I help you?" she asked, straightening.
    "I need a room with infonent services," Valentina said.
    "Of course. Please come this way." Behind the desk was a corridor. Sliding partitions lined the walls at intervals and the woman opened one. The room