CHAPTER 1

When their father killed himself he recorded the event, just as he recorded everything else of importance in his sad, ill-organized life. “I know what’s coming,” he said. “I know I can’t stop it. Can’t change. I’m sorry.”

When it happened Runaway was in deep space, drifting between singularity shots. Pasco, their father, hung in the air, weightless, in the computer compartment. Fat, ineffectual, his long grey hair and beard floating out around him, he looked like a weeping Father Christmas. Behind him, outside monitors showed a random, slowly rotating field of stars.

“We can’t survive,” he said. “Not the way we’re going.” He swallowed, hard. His hands were shaking as they drifted weightlessly by his sides. He was surrounded by his junk: old computer consoles, malfunctioning holo cameras, tangles of optic wire, battered microscopes, microsurgery and gene-splicing equipment, an old autowomb. All the stuff he’d gathered over the years, gathered as part of a superstition almost, as if all the little bits of equipment, the programs he’d stitched together and run, the sperm and ova he’d tinkered with, the incessant recordings of himself that he’d made, hours on hours, would somehow add up to a whole, would re-create the universe in a way that made sense to him. Would magic him away from the slow death which he, his children, his ship, were facing.

“I’m not adaptable enough,” he said. “Look. I’ve made you smart. You’re fast. Maybe you can figure a way out of this. I’d just be in your way.” A fastlearn cartridge, unnoticed, hung by his foot, making slow-motion pirouettes in the whispering stream of recirculated air.

“If I stay around, I’ll fail.” He shook his shaggy head. “I’ll go down, and you’ll just go down with me. I’m not strong enough. Not any more.” He was drifting closer to the camera now. His children could see the pouched eyes, the broken veins on his nose and cheeks, the saliva that clung to his lower lip. Eyes that were dilated and mad. A stream of red pills, unnoticed, was trailing out of a pocket, spinning into the compartment like drops of blood. “I’m going to get out of your way. An overdose. It won’t hurt. Kick my bod out the airlock when I’m gone.” He began to cry. “Take care of Kitten,” he wept. “I know she loves me.”

His children waited for him to say more but he just hung there, crying. His massive, rounded shoulders shook as he rotated slowly. His tears hovered in the compartment like jewels. One of the teardrops drifted to the camera lens and adhered to it, refracting motion, colors, a smear of bleeding madness. Their father gasped. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice a husky whisper, and around the splatter on the lens they could see him reaching for the camera to shut it off.

The screen went black. Ubu reached for the controls with his upper left hand, hesitated, looked at his sister. “You want to see it again?” he asked.

She looked at him with her wide, deep-space eyes. She stroked the white cat in her lap without looking at him. The cat’s purr seemed louder than her voice. “Erase it,” she said.

Ubu hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering above the Erase button. He wanted the message to contain something worth remembering, some knowledge that would be of use, a final dying piece of wisdom that would help put his father into place, into some synthesis in which his life, their lives, his dying could all be understood.

There was nothing. Nothing but the final sad crumbling of a mind run out of choices and no longer sane, backed into a corner it couldn’t see a way out of. That and the inane request about Kitten. Ubu understood this. But his longing made him hesitate.

There was an ache in his throat. He pressed the button. The little electric memory died without resistance, without a sound. The ache didn’t fade.

Beautiful Maria looked at him. “It wasn’t unexpected,” she said. She chewed a lip. “We knew he wouldn’t last. That...something... was going to happen with him.” She stood, gathered Maxim’s four dangling limbs. Her long blue-black hair fell forward, shrouded her face. “I’m going to my compartment,” she said.

Ubu was still staring at the screen, his brows knit. Wanting the wisdom to come. He turned to his sister.

“Do you want company?”

She shook her head. “Later, maybe.”

“Shall I call you? When I... put him out?”

Beautiful Maria’s hair shimmered like dark rain. “Yes. Please.”

Ubu watched as she slipped out of the command cage. Then he turned back to the comm board again.

A distant shudder came up from the floor, up the chair’s single metal pillar, through Ubu’s spine. A little misalignment in the ship’s centrifuge, the huge bearings burning slowly, metal being shorn away slice by slice. Not critical, not yet. There were years to go before he’d have to really worry about it.

The fuge droned around him. He’d have to fire his father out the airlock before the next singularity shoot.

He stood and walked to his cabin, a humming metal shell on the second level of the fuge. The walls and ceiling were covered, every inch, with pictures he’d pasted up. Holo star charts that brought constellations to within an inch of his nose, pictures of nebulae, of black holes, of ships. People suited for vacuum, combat, exploration. Phil Mendoza looking gallant; Michiko Tanaka holding a sizer guitar in one hand, a pistol in the other. Hype-people with painted eyes and lips like drops of bloody dew, gazing into the distance with unreachable longing. Alien creatures imagined or real. Pictures of death, of faceplates spattered with blood, of eyes gazing out in horror. Pictures of his father.

Ubu sat on his rack and stared up at the ceiling, at the chaos of fading plastic, the images that had once had meaning for him and that now seemed pointless, a ridiculous, childish display of fantasy and longing, no longer a mirror of his mind.

Suddenly his father was by him, sitting in a chair in the center of the compartment. Pasco was younger, his hair and beard neatly trimmed. Confident, fit. Like the father in the pictures Ubu had pasted to the ceiling.

“Is something bothering you, son?” his father asked. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Ubu looked at his father and narrowed his eyes. “Get lost, Pop,” he said. “You killed yourself, asshole.”

Pasco looked at him sadly for a moment. “I just wanted you to know that I’ll be around,” he said.

“Fuck that.” Ubu reached for the control panel and turned off the holo display. His father vanished. So did his chair.

Ubu’s skin felt hot. He stood on his rack and began tearing at the pictures on the ceiling. They were glued on thoroughly and he scarred them white with the tracks of his fingernails. A rain of plastic fell, a drifting snow of curling white foam. Sobs tried to break out of his chest. With difficulty he kept them down.

At the end he stood amid piles of ruined chaff. Captain of the Runaway, he thought. Maria didn’t want the job; it was his by default. Bossrider. Singularity shooter numero uno. Captain of all I survey.

Quietly, he began to laugh.

“I have a plan,” he said.

*

Beautiful Maria looked up at him, seeing his pale skin and fair hair spattered with flecks of foam. She and Ubu were in computer central, the brass nozzles and long black tubes of tempafoam sprayers in their hands. Two months after their father’s death, they had finally nerved themselves to deal with his belongings. They collected all the rubble, lashed it together, covered it with tempafoam until they could sell it for spare parts at Ascención, their next port of call. Probably the only thing that would bring money would be all the cameras that Pasco had set up throughout the ship to record his activities.

Maria hooked a stray strand of hair behind one ear. The rest of her black river of hair had been tied back until they returned to the fuge’s gravity.

“What plan?” she said.

Ubu grinned. “You know Dig Angel? The Long Reach subsidiary? They’ve got an open advert on the Ascención Station board wanting contracts for Kanto-compatible miners and comps for their new operation in Angelica.”

“Be wanting to shoot for whoever’s gonna pick up the contract?”

“Better than that, Maria. Better.”

Beautiful Maria rotated gently in midair, hooked one hand around a padded castoff bar on the command cage, then caught the battered old autowomb with her nimble feet. She drew it close, then let go of the bar and rotated, using the tension on the tempafoam hose as a pivot point. She pressed the trigger. The turbines of the portable compressor whined and foam spattered the clear plastic womb where Maria’s heart had taken its first beat, where her developing eyes first turned away from the light.

Burying my past in foam, she thought. A distant sense of loss hummed in her mind. This wasn’t just Pasco’s gear, this was a part of her life as well. Artifacts of her existence were disappearing, smothering in layers of foam, dying.

“We pick up the contract ourselves,” Ubu said. His voice was insistent. “We get a loan, buy the miners from the Kanto rep, deliver them in our own holds. Our profit be increased at least a hundred percent.”

Beads of foam swelled over the womb’s control panel. Maria blinked bits of the stuff from her eyes. “Why isn’t Long Reach supplying their own operation?”

“Be too successful, that’s why. I checked the price of Long Reach stock. They’re expanding so far ahead of their programmed growth that they’re running short of supplies out here on the Edge.”

“It’s still funny.” Maria wiped sweat from her forehead. She looked at Ubu thoughtfully. “And who’s gonna give us a loan, anyway?”

“OttoBanque.”

“OttoBanque.” She repeated the word slowly, knowing what Ubu wanted. A new tension rose in her body, armored her against Ubu’s idea.

He looked at her defiantly. “We’ve got the miners for collateral. And the contract’s just sitting there.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Look at the figures.”

She looked away. She didn’t want to think about it. “What if it goes wrong?”

“What if it goes right?” He kicked off from the black padded shutters that they’d closed over the computer readouts while they were playing with the foam, came to her, took her shoulders in his upper set of hands.

Maria’s knuckles were white as they clutched the hose and sprayer. “I don’t know if I want to do this.”

“Let me show you the figures.”

She shook her head. A river of sorrow opened in her heart. Are we really this desperate? she thought. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll look.”

“You may not have to. They may give us the loan anyway.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Not believing it.

Knowing she couldn’t resist much longer.

*

“Words?” Ubu looked at his sister.

Her eyes reflected the light of the monitor, a cold gray glaze, like the glaze in Pasco’s eyes when Ubu had reached out to close them. She raised a hand to her throat. “He was old,” she said. “He tried hard and couldn’t make it. We didn’t know how to help him. He died.” She shrugged. “I can’t think of anything else.”

A good father? Ubu wanted to ask. He made us out of frozen sperm and ova that he’d bought somewhere, stitched together in a secondhand splicer he’d bought as junk. No genes in common, neither with ourselves nor Pasco, not a real brother and sister and father, just people living together. Gave us talents we’re not sure we know how to use. Jacked our growth with hormone boosters and fastlearn cartridges, machine maturity to go with prematurely adult bodies. He thought we had something to give him, something he was desperate for. We were looking to him for answers, and all the time it was Pasco who wanted the answers from us.

Ubu looked at the monitor, the heavy body zipped into its plastic tote bag. Good father or not, now a dead thing.

Ubu had put Pasco in an airlock, not in the trash ejector, wanting him to go like a person and not a piece of garbage. He touched the ship systems board, gave it an order. The hardwired safety codes tagged off alarms, red lights. Ubu overrode them. The lock door blew open, and in a blurred instant Pasco was gone, a plastic-wrapped projectile falling down a long cold curve toward galactic center. A harsh metallic alarm was his last epitaph. Ubu closed the lock and the alarm faded. Red lights changed to green. Tears fell down Beautiful Maria’s cheeks. She stood and turned away.

“I want to take us through the next shoot,” she said. Ubu could barely hear her soft voice. “Okay?”

“If you want.”

“I’ll set it up in the computer. I’ll let you know when it’s time.” She walked away. She was naked, the way they often were in the ship, and Ubu watched the way her long hair molded itself to the curve of her spine, a river of black contrasting with the warm milk-white skin. Warmth fluttered in his nerves, his stomach.

Why do I care more about that than Pasco? he wondered. Does it matter that I don’t care more than I do?

Ubu stared at the monitor for a moment, the gray flickering image of the empty airlock. He stood up, left the control cage, pulled open the door of a maintenance locker.

Time to deal with Kitten.

*

Two months after picking up the Dig Angel contract, Runaway whiteholed out of the Now within a few thousand kilometers of optimal, a week out of Angelica Station. After their radio signal reached the station and returned, Ubu discovered they were in trouble.

He sat bolt upright and looked at the newsfax coming in. Maxim, disturbed, leaped from his lap. “Dig Angel,” he said. “Gone under. Long Reach crashed.”

“We had a contract,” Beautiful Maria said. Her voice was jagged with the aftereffects of the singularity shoot, the pulse of the Now. The dreamy quality of it sent a pale blue color into Ubu’s head, contrasting with his own blazing frustration.

Ubu clenched his teeth. Anger poured up his spine. This was all his fault.

He cast a look at Beautiful Maria. She wasn’t looking at him, didn’t want to say I told you so.

“Well be on the tail end of a long list of creditors,” Ubu said. “We won’t get our money in years.”

“Another buyer?”

“No other small companies in this system. We’re way the hell out on the Edge—there’s only one big city on the planet, and the rest is mining in the asteroids. We’ll have to sell to a speculator. Maybe a rep from another mining company in another system, if we can find one.”

Ubu glared at the newsfax and ran sums in his head. “If we can get docking charges and transport, we can be happy.”

Beautiful Maria licked her lips as if trying to taste their options. “Maybe we can pick up a cargo to tide us over. Drugs or something, that doesn’t take up space in the cargo bay.”

“Better than dying right in Angelica.” He began flicking through the newsfax. “Let’s see who’s buying.” He felt sweat trickling down his nape. Data flickered on the screen. There had to be a buyer somewhere onstation. Had to be.

If there wasn’t, Angelica was the end.

The sound of finger exercises came from the upper lounge. Beautiful Maria was warming up on her sizer keyboard. Ubu walked along the smooth green centrifuge carpet and opened the screen. Maria looked up.

*

“Do you remember Cole Redwing?” Ubu said.

“Vaguely. He was on the Roland, yes?” Her fingers moved precisely over the keys.

“Used to be. Been watching the newsfax coming out of Angel. He killed his family, then himself.”

Maria looked at him in shock. Her left hand hung on one chord, shooting a bright yellow flare into Ubu’s mind. “When?” she said.

“Fifteen standard ago. Infix Station. The bank had just confiscated his drive.”

Maria looked down at her hand. The chord burned on.

Though Ubu and Redwing had only met once or twice, Ubu’s mind could sketch him perfectly. Black hair, pebble eyes, soft voice, large hands. He’d used a hammer, the newsfax said. Ubu thought about a hammer in those big hands.

“It used to be years before you’d ever hear of a murder on a shooter ship,” Ubu said. “Remember? And now there’s two or three a year.”

“Killed his family.”

And for a moment they looked away from one another while the sizer chord shimmered on, each thinking about Pasco, about how maybe they were lucky he’d chosen his particular form of self-destructive despair when his time ran out.

Maria lifted her hand from the keyboard and looked at it as if she’d never seen it before. “Get your guitar,” she said, “and play with me.”

“Yeah.” He opened the instrument locker and took out his old black Alfredo with the plastic triangular body and the genuine hardwood neck.

His mind was already buzzing, hard angry chords to call up Redwing and lay him to rest.

*

Wherever there were shooters and systers, wherever people lived in the Now, there lived also the zone with which they lived in symbiosis, where they were both fed and eaten. The neighborhood had many names: on Masquerade it was called the Road; on Bezel it was Port Town; here on Angelica Station, it was called the Fringe.

The Fringe lived in perpetual twilight. It curved gently upward from where Maria and Ubu stood, dark storefronts full of bustle, holograms moving in explosive colors, a population in perpetual transit.

The main street had no name, being the only one, the long metal road that circled the rim of wheel-shaped Angelica Station. Crowded against it were the small operators that made their living from the commerce of shooters and systers: margin banks, trading companies, gene banks, small casinos, hotels, bars, hookshops, missions for Jesus Rice or the Mahayana Buddha, eateries, cosmetic surgeries, pawnshops... the usual bright, noisy gamut of shops, most facing the street, some turned into little dark side-alleys that curled off the main road, like appendices off some primitive intestine.

Ubu and Beautiful Maria walked the length of the Fringe, savoring the bright colors, the smells, the exotic flavor of the traffic. Maria bought some chips and fried chicken from a vendor. Ubu bought a recyclable plastic bulb of Kolodny beer.

Maria had two arms and two legs, not entirely the norm for full-time tide riders. Ubu had an extra pair of arms. Their father had bred them for adaptability, not specialization. Ubu was thirteen years old and six feet four inches tall. The prevailing fashion was for androgyny and he dressed against it, wearing cutoff jeans, sandals, a silver vest hacked out of an old piece of reflec and held together with orange tape. His fair hair was shaggy over his ears. His upper body, massive with overlapping arm muscle, was powerful, a shooter typicality. He moved fast when he wanted to.

Beautiful Maria was eleven years old and an inch shorter than her brother. She wore a long robe of the same smoky color as her eyes. Her pale face glowed, like cream poured in sable glass, from its soft aureole of blue-black hair. Her voice was soft, her hands moved white in the air like doves. The long hair was unusual in a shooter, but appropriate on Maria. Her name was not inappropriate, either.

A four-armed shooter, a mutanto, slid by on his easicart, waved an arm that rotated on a hip socket. There was pain in his eyes, distorting a seamless face unworn by gravity. A desperate man, Maria knew, to come all the way to the rim to do business, when he could stay at the hub where his weight wouldn’t crush him and do his business through the phone.

Desperate. Like the crew of the Runaway.

At least, she thought, she and Ubu had more choices. If the mutanto lost his livelihood, he’d have little choice but a long-term indentureship to some company like Biagra-Exeter. A contract on their terms, the mutanto being a beggar.

Maria swallowed a piece of chicken, cayenne pepper burning her palate, then took a shot of Ubu’s beer. Saw the edge of the Fringe ahead, where the twilight turned into the bright white corridors of the Outside Life. A coldness touched her. “Uniquip,” she said. “It’s gone. Look. The Fringe’s got smaller.”

“Jesus Rice. It’s only been a few months.” He licked his lips. “Where we gonna sell our cargo? Hiliners won’t want it.”

There wasn’t a line drawn at the edge of the Fringe, or a sheet of transparent glass set up where the Fringe turned away from the Now, toward the Outside, but there might as well have been. The Fringe was dark, crowded, alive with the pulse of people cutting deals, the whisper of small commerce, the sharp smell of sweat and adrenaline from those who were operating on the margin. Beyond the twilight the metal street had been paved with razor-thin slices of the marble encased in plastic and laid down in big rolls, like toilet tissue. Along the bright street were the big companies, the concerns that stretched all the way across human space, operating their fleets of haulers, stations, liners, their centers of finance and investment... the Outsiders who had the ear of the Multi-Pollies in the center of human space, who wanted the entire universe to be nothing but a succession of white humming corridors, filled with orderly humanity busy accumulating capital, making investments in the safest places, giving it to the Outsiders to finance the Multi-Pollies’ policy of Consolidation, denying the Edge, the margin, expansion.

Ubu hawked and spat, his saliva arcing out of the twilight, toward the cold fluorescent life of Outside humanity. “Fuck that,” he said.

“It’s smaller,” Maria said again. Sadly.

“Maybe they’ll keep part of the Fringe open,” Ubu said. “Clean it up a little, then keep it as a place for Mudville tourists. So they can get drunk and gamble away their souls to the Hiline companies.”

“Consolidation,” said Beautiful Maria. It was the foulest word she could think of.

Ubu turned away from the Mainstream. A whore’s metallic laughter floated toward him from the Fringe.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve gotta do some business.”

*

Ubu heard the locker close behind him. His right hands held a charged silver glitch rod, two feet in length. There were faded red warning labels pasted on it. A red LED blinked urgently by his hand, telling him it was armed. His finger was near its trigger.

He felt his arms tremble. His tool chest banged against his left knee. His breath was quick. He paused outside Pasco’s door and wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.

He stepped in. The front half of the compartment was empty. Full of disordered junk, fastlearn cartridges tossed on furniture, pictures of the family Pasco had lost in the airlock explosion, printouts lying under a light tracing of dust, unlooked at for years, computer consoles pulled apart and never put back together ... all levels of Pasco’s madness, receding into the years, awaiting excavation like some old desert mound on Earth. Ubu put down the tool chest. His heart pounded. He wiped his face again, stretched out his left lower arm, opened the door into the bedroom.

It isn’t murder, he told himself.

The android sex toy was sitting on Pasco’s rack. She looked up at Ubu as he came in. Ubu knew he would remember that forever, the toss of the short blond curls, the flash of the silver-and-lapis stud in her left nostril, the look in the wide green eyes. Seeing the glitch rod, and knowing. Kitten was naked, as Ubu had more or less expected, wearing only the jewelry that Pasco, in his senile passion, had given her. Rings flickered on her fingers, bangles danced from her wrists. A sapphire hung between her breasts.

Ubu stopped in the doorway. Just go in and do it, he told himself.

“Pop’s dead,” he said.

“I know,” said Kitten. Her eyes glittered with artificial tears. “He left me a message. He said he loved me.”

“He would.” The glitch rod at the end of his upper right arm seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He shifted it to the other right hand.

Kitten had been three years on the ship. Pasco had kept her in his cabin for a week before Ubu found out about her. He’d heard her tinkling, idiot laugh from his father’s double cabin as he passed by, then heard his father’s answering laughter. Somehow he’d known it wasn’t a hype.

He had just got his growth then, shooting up a foot in the space of a year, and the spurt had left him clumsy. His muscles ached from the onset of mones that stressed him like stellar tides. Passions swept through him like fever: hatred, resentment, lust, fury ... He worked like a demon to exorcize them and did his best to avoid Pasco and Maria, spending his onstation time alone, a solo shooter.

At the sound of the laughter Ubu stopped in the corridor, turned... and somehow his feet got tangled and he had to throw out his four arms for balance. Unknowing laughter mocked him, leaving a scattering burnt-orange color in his mind, a sour taste on his tongue. Anger rose unbidden. He opened Pasco’s door.

Kitten stood on a small table, her arms raised, her legs apart for balance. Little-girl laughter tinkled from her throat. Her green eyes looked into his. The laughter continued.

Pasco was crouched in front of her among a scatter of pills, black and red. His slack furry body was marked with blue and ochre. He was painting her, the spray gun in his hand. Violent colors gleamed wetly across her body. The room smelled of sex. There was something in Pasco’s laughter Ubu had never heard, something that made sharp metallic colors dance in his skull.

Pasco made a sound in his throat and rose from his crouch. He put his arms around her, pressing himself to her color, smearing himself against her. He reached a hand up behind her back to grasp her hair, pulling her head back as he pressed his head between her breasts. Her laughter never stopped, never changed its tone. Ubu could see the programmed puppet-sounds vibrating in her taut throat.

Her eyes never left him. Even as he closed the door he could see her watching him through slitted lids. He stared at the face of the closed door, wishing it were possible to forget.

Kitten’s eyes were open now, watching Ubu standing in the door with the glitch rod in his hands. Tears ran down her face.

“I loved him, Ubu,” she said. “I’m programmed that way. Programmed to love what my partner loves, a kind of feedback.”

Did he teach you to cry? Ubu wondered. Or did that come in standard programming? “I know,” he said.

He knew she was an idiot by most standards, a puppet. Good enough for sex, if your taste went that way, useless for anything else. Even conversation was highly limited, mostly parroting what she’d been told, that and the laughter that sprayed from her whenever her small mind told her the time might be appropriate. A parasite on the ship, unable to contribute even to her small upkeep. Pasco had bought a rich man’s toy and put Runaway in hock to do it.

She was smart enough, though, to want to survive. Kitten gazed up at him. Licked her lips.

Do it, Ubu thought. It’s not killing.

“I could learn to love someone else,” she said. “It’s an easy operation. You don’t have to... use that for it. Just a little adjustment. I could be whatever you want.”

And have me senile by the time I’m fifteen, Ubu thought. Dancing on the end of her robot’s strings while she laughs her idiot laugh. He stepped forward, shifted the rod to his upper set of hands. Kitten flinched back against the wall.

He pushed the rod out. Remembered paint gleaming on her synthetic flesh, the smell of sex, the sound of Pasco’s laughter.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said quickly. “I’ll stay out of your way.” Her voice rose to a wail. “Why don’t you like me?”

Ubu closed his eyes, not wanting to see. A fist seemed to tighten in his throat. He pushed the glitch rod forward blindly, swept it left and right with his finger on the trigger.

A crack of electricity. The fall of something heavy onto pillows. The smell of burning.

Ubu opened his eyes. Kitten lay crumpled on the rack, a scorch mark on her flank where the glitch rod had touched. She was wiped, her programming erased. Her eyes were open. There was a tremor in her thigh. Her fingers twitched randomly. Already the scorch mark on the synthetic skin was beginning to heal.

If he’d had the oral codes that controlled her, he wouldn’t have had to do it this way. But only Pasco had the codes. He hadn’t trusted anyone else around his blonde obsession.

Ubu dropped the rod to the padded floor. He turned and went back to the front compartment for his toolbox. Brought it in, put it on the rack, opened it.

The smell of burning was still in his throat, unforgettable. He reached out to Kitten’s shoulder, feeling the warm touch of perfect skin. He turned her over. Her limbs splayed over the rack. Ubu took out a knife, cut the skin between the shoulder blades, parted it before it healed. Revealed the control switch. He inserted a screwdriver and shut off the android’s automatic systems.

“Ubu.” Maria’s voice, grating in the ship intercom. “Fifteen minutes to shoot.”

Ubu took the jewelry from the cooling body. Turned the head, pulled the silver stud from the nose, felt the flesh resist and then tear, knew the small brutal act would be in his mind forever—far longer than the wound he’d just made, which would heal when Kitten was reconnected.

He put the jewelry in a pillowcase. Sell this stuff, he thought. It would look nice on Maria, but he didn’t want to see it again.

The sheet under Kitten’s head was turning wet. Her tear reservoir, draining.

Ubu knew that he was not going to be able to forget this, that he would relive it, the smell, the anger, that final electric snap and the draining of ionized tears ... it would come back to him. He stood up and walked blindly out of the compartment to find another plastic bag. Stuff ’er in, he thought, sell her once we reach Caliban Station.

He was trying hard not to feel like a murderer.

*

“Your play?” The bouncer leered at Beautiful Maria from behind his window of glass. Teeth gleamed below a mustache sharp as an icepick. Black eyes stared stonily from behind the perfect round metal frames of a black-ribboned pince-nez.

Beautiful Maria gazed at the double reflections of herself. “Blackhole,” she said. Red Nine was moving through her veins. Her nerves jittered, flared.

“Stakes? You got, or just looking?” The steel smile came again. “Mudviller inside, looking for a shooter femme, maybe. Has that yearning gaze anyway. You could be his good luck.”

“Ten-twenty,” Maria said. She held up a black credit counter. The smile broadened.

“Be my guest, shooter femme. Take my word. Tide riders be lucky at blackhole.”

Especially me, Maria thought. There was an electric buzz as the bolt locked back. She pressed the doorplate and it swung in. The door sighed shut behind her, the lock snapping closed.

The place was called Stellar City, a deliberately old-fashioned name, a self-mockery. It was on the third level of a ramshackle collection of eateries, a cheap hotel, a used-clothing boutique. Maria had to climb a narrow foam ramp to get here. The walls were made of tempafoam: the place had recently moved from somewhere else on the Fringe, would probably move again before long. The casino was dark, spotlights picking out the active tables. Fringe people, systers, shooters. The room was silent with concentration, sweat, and thought.

The Mudviller was obvious, overdressed like he was expecting weather here, a middle-aged man staring hopelessly at the naked brown breasts of the woman who was dealing vingt-et-un. Beautiful Maria grinned. Nobody was going to be his luck tonight, not as long as he kept gazing at the distractions the house was throwing in his face.

Red Nine pulsed in her nerves. The people in the room seemed to move through the smoky room in slow motion. Maria moved to the back, to the blackhole booth. She stepped inside, closed the transparent door. When she sat on the padded chair, the long metal projectors, each topped by a delicate web of stimulus antennae, eased out of the walls with a slow hiss, each pointed at her head. She put the credit counter in the slot. Pressed the button. Black diamond space exploded in her head, filled with burning singularities, the radio cry of dying matter.

Maria was in a silver metal sphere called a pinball. She floated in the dark vacuum. Distantly, unspeakable gravities tugged at her. The object of the game was to navigate from place to place by dipping into the singularities’ gravity wells, flinging the pinball in and out of the black holes’ embrace. There was a time limit to provide a sense of urgency, and the computer would try to glitch up the ride, introducing random variations: making singularities appear in the path of the pinball after it had accelerated too fast to avoid them, running variations on the stars’ densities, causing fuel shortages, announcing shutdowns of various parts of her navigation aids and simulation screens. She could opt for an easy ride or a hard one, the payoff rising with the difficulty. It was enough like a regular singularity shoot to produce a sense of familiarity, but enough unlike one so that she couldn’t trust her shooter’s reflexes.

Red Nine burned at her, urging her to choose the maximum. She overrode the impulse and chose a medium level, deciding to stretch her nerves a little first. She placed her bet.

Numbers spun in the lower right corner of her field of vision, the seconds ticking away. There were cash bonuses if she made her ride in less than seventy-five percent of her allotted time. A destination star glowed briefly, along with the number of black holes she would have to play tag with along the way.

“Okay,” she murmured, and began her acceleration. Red Nine fired her neurotransmitters and sparked in her brain as she chose a path, as she felt a gravity well reaching out to touch her. She looked into the black negation before her. Smiled. And felt the pinball moan, torn by the tides of gravity.

Reflex handled the pinball, its burns and course corrections, its dives into the pulsing wells of gravity. Another part of her mind plotted strategy. And, as she played, as the time counters ran in the lower corner of her vision and the pinball spun along its track, she felt another level of awareness arise, slow and sure, a sense of the electronic world that was the complex computer simulation ... an intuition of the bits of energy that flew at the speed of light and formed the illusion of space, interacted with the decisions that flickered from her mind. The electron world hovered at the back of her awareness, a constant presence.

Beautiful Maria finished her run in sixty percent of the time allotted. Credit was added to her counter. The illusion of space faded from her mind and she found herself in the close-smelling booth. The sense of the subatomic world was nearer now, without the distractions of the game. She leaned her head back and found it swirling around her. She raised a finger, tracing its patterns in the control panel in front of her ... it seemed almost tangible.

Red Nine was still urging her. She lowered her finger and pressed the button.

She felt the pulse through the electron world before the simulation appeared in her optical centers. There was space, filled with bottomless wells. She laughed, placed her bet, and asked the machine for maximum odds.

Maria would have to orbit each of the singularities at least once, and do it all in the scant space of time allocated ... no room for mistakes. She used the full time allowed for plotting her strategies, the way the pinball would weave its way between stars, then, alarms whooping in her mind, she pushed the pinball forward, maximum acceleration...

The pinball flattened, stretched, was plucked by fingers of tidal energy. Maria burned fuel, whipped around a singularity, dove for another dark sun. She could feel the electron world surrounding her, and somehow sensed from its pattern that the singularity toward which she was heading would increase its gravity... she plotted a wider orbit, felt gravity slam down hard, put in a burst of power, burst free, true on the course she wanted... the computer’s attacks were supposed to be random, but they weren’t, as no machine’s behavior is truly random, just a part of a large, complex pattern, too vast and too swift, supposedly, for human comprehension.

The pinball moaned with tidal stresses, Maria was burning fuel at a fantastic rate, cutting down on her margin of safety. Singularities spun by, tried to snatch her. She could feel an alteration in the electronic pattern that meant something about to happen, a singularity about to appear, too close to her path. Fire shot through her veins. She threw her head back, her teeth clenched, thrust up her hands, waved, the tension making her arms tremble...

She felt her glitch take shape, fly from her fingertips. The pattern altered. The singularity appeared a half second late, after her pinball had already passed.

She finished in seventy-three percent of her allotted time. The machine paid off at more than thirty-to-one.

Maria gasped for breath, her heart racing. She could taste sweat on her upper lip.

She asked the machine for another ride. She laid her bet down. It was the most the law allowed for a game of this type. She was left with her original stake and about half her winnings. She picked maximum odds. She felt the electron world, once again, welling up around her, filled with the black flame of invisible stars.

*

Pasco’s hologram walked across the room confidently. He appeared to be lecturing one of the wall monitors. “Expansion. Contraction. Inflation. Deflation. A flexible subject, describing metals subjected to variation in temperature, wave phenomena subjected to variation in energy, economic systems subject to variation in wealth.”

“Shut up, Pop,” Ubu said. “I’m trying to plot the next shoot.” He was hunched over a terminal and a set of keyboards he’d folded out of the green metal wall of the upper lounge. Holographic models flickered in front of his face. He tapped on keyboards with both sets of ambidextrous hands.

“It is the latter phenomenon which we are addressing,” Pasco continued, unperturbed. “Observe.” The plot Ubu was working on disappeared, replaced by a complex three-dimensional model. A globe of stars, varying colors, burned before his eyes.

“Pop,” Ubu said, “I’m trying to—” He remembered this was a recording and clamped his mouth shut.

A red LED glowed on the terminal, signifying that Ubu’s plot was being automatically saved into nav memory.

“Human space,” Pasco said. He was still speaking to the wall monitor. He approached it, walking through a chair, his holographic image blurring as it encountered matter. Movement began in the hologram, brightness shifting. “In the model, wealth is represented by brightness in the pattern. The brighter, the richer. Notice that the wealth distributes itself through the model as a wave front. Brightness moving toward the center. Observe the action at the center of the model when random sources of wealth are created at the borders of the model, propagating toward the core. Chaos, right?” Pasco’s voice was smug. “The chaos at the center grows even worse if the model is allowed to expand its perimeters. The waves form a muddle. The economic seas are choppy, to use a nautical metaphor with which you are probably unfamiliar.”

Grief clawed at Ubu’s throat. He shook his head wearily. “Go away,” he said dully. “You’re dead. You killed yourself.”

“People invest in sources of wealth,” Pasco said. He put his weight back on one leg and threw his shoulders back, declaiming like a ham actor. He was still delivering his lines to the wall. “What becomes of their investment when a new, larger source of wealth is discovered and floods the market like a spring tide? Their own investment loses its value. Destroyed by inflation.” He cocked an eye at the monitor.

“The classical example—”

“Kiddyshit.”

“—is Europe following Spain’s conquest of the New World. Importation to Europe of enormous quantities of American bullion resulted in the inflation of all European currencies. The inflation spread through Europe, beginning with Iberia, then spreading to the east like a wave, eventually causing a fiscal crisis in Poland, the Ukraine, and the Near East fifty years later. Peasants found themselves without the means to buy bread, or land. The pennies they’d been hoarding had lost their value. The result was a century of religious wars that killed millions of people, destroyed the vigor of the Spanish empire, ended the ideal of Christendom as a unifying European concept, and almost plunged Europe into a new dark age.”

Ubu’s mind swam. “What’s Iberia?” he asked. “What’s Christendom? And which new world are you talking about?” He wanted to bang his head on the metal wall. “When are you gonna start making sense? Jesus Rice.” He began tapping the keys of the computer deck again. His holograph plot was in there somewhere— he’d seen the computer save it— all he had to do was find out where Pasco’s raider program had hidden it.

“A similar time of troubles has been plaguing human economies in the last century,” Pasco went on, “albeit with less drastic results. No one has to worry about buying bread these days. But the unlimited expansion of human space via the simple means of singularity mechanics has nevertheless had an unpredictable result upon core economies. Waves of wealth generated at the frontier were impacting on the center of human space with a suddenness and force that had been undreamt-of in previous centuries.”

Pasco threw out his arms. “Billions thrown out of work! Lives disrupted! Investments made worthless overnight!” He waggled his finger at the monitor. “And what did all those unhappy people want?”

“They wanted to eat shit and die,” said Ubu.

Pasco slammed a fist into his palm. It made no sound. “That’s right!” he said, grinning. “They wanted stability. Continuity. Consolidation.”

Ubu looked up sharply from his keyboard. “Yeah?” he said.

“Not an end to expansion, mind you,” Pasco said, “just an end to the uncontrolled growth that was wrecking their lives. A planned expansion, guaranteed not to stress the system. Those at the center of the human sphere outnumbered the population of the frontier by tens of billions. Eventually their weight told, and the Multiparty-Politicals heard them.” He turned to Ubu, peering at him owlishly, and a chill brushed up Ubu’s bare back. This is just a recording, he told himself.

Pasco’s voice had lost its rhetorical tone. “But what did Consolidation do to the Edge economies, when they were based on unlimited growth? When the best economic units for carrying out what growth was permitted were the large stable corporate haulers rather than the small entrepreneurial shooter families?”

“Who cares? I thought you were gonna make sense there for a minute.”

Pasco straightened. There was sadness in his eyes. Ubu felt a brush of fear touching his nerves. “We die,” Pasco said. “We die a slow death.” Suddenly he seemed older. His image began to deresolve, interference patterns running through it.

“Where’s Kitten?” he asked in a trembling voice. “I miss Kitten.”

“Go away, Pop.” Kitten had been sold, two months ago, to a hookshop owner at Caliban. The money had gone into Ubu’s gamble, the mining equipment destined for Dig Angel.

“Kitten? Where are you, girl?” He began walking across the worn grey carpet. His footsteps made no sound. Ubu kept his eyes on his keyboard. His eyes smarted. He swallowed hard.

His father deresolved with a hissing interference pattern. The navigation plot reappeared. Ubu stared into it hopelessly, grief tearing at his heart with tempered steel claws.

*

The Mudviller was still playing vingt-et-un, still wearing that strange glassy smile. Still losing and telling himself he was having a good time. Maria took a breath of smoky air, then another. She leaned back against the blackhole booth. Her legs didn’t want to support her.

She’d made two runs at maximum odds, winning both at odds of over forty-to-one. The machine had thrown half a dozen obstacles at her the second time, and each time she’d felt its decision in time to react, alter the flow, and guarantee a win. But the interaction with the electron world had drained her. The Red Nine was still crackling along her nerves, urging her back into the booth; but her mind was revolving among a world of phantoms, electrons rocketing along their courses, throbbing in her mind like a strange weighty light. . . her concentration was gone, tangled up in the layers of her perception.

Beautiful Maria took a breath, reached into the pocket of her gown. Took a pair of Blue Seven capsules, the kind called “Blue Heaven,” and swallowed them dry. They’d suppress the Red Nine jitters.

It was time for someplace cool and quiet. She retrieved her credit counter and walked through the spotlit tables. Electric spikes jabbed her from every table.

The bouncer turned his head as she neared the door, looking at her over the fussy pince-nez. “Bad luck, shooter femme?” he said, misreading her shaky walk. “Need some credit? I buy you dinner, introduce you to some friends. Tourists. I know they like you, shooter femme.”

“I won,” Maria said, pressed the doorplate.

The bouncer flashed his metal teeth. “I tell you, hey? Shooters be lucky at blackhole. You want dinner, hey?”

“Pimp.” Maria pushed out of Stellar City, bare feet tramping down the nonstick surface of the narrow foam ramp. As her feet struck the street she smelled vat-grown lamb cooking on a skewer, heard a cry of striff music as the door to a nearby bar swung open. Red Nine ran up and down her spine. Colors seemed to swim on the peripherals of her vision. She bought some of the lamb from the kiosk, wrapped it in a chapati, ate it as she walked down the long dark metal ribbon street...

An hour later, the Blue Seven soothing her, she was sitting in a bar drinking pomegranate juice that had been spiked with electrolyte replacement while she listened to a glassy-eyed shooter play lick piano with the aid of an extra pair of arms. The man wasn’t bad, but his interpretations were too conventional for Maria’s taste, too safe. Maria found her fingers itching to touch the keyboards.

“Buy you a drink?”

He was a shooter, she figured, or a syster who dressed like one. He didn’t have the angular, sharp-edged look of someone who had grown up on mones; he seemed a little softer. Two arms and two legs. Two inches shorter than she. Olive skin, curly dark hair cut short. Fifteen, maybe, or sixteen, if he wasn’t moned. A bottle of Lark in his hand.

“I don’t drink alcohol much,” she said.

“Compounds, then?”

Maria lolled her head back and laughed. He got the message: already high.

“Whatever it is you’re drinking?”

“I got. But you can talk to me if you like.”

The lick piano was wandering off into a pair of interpretations meant to be daring, a harmony line played on each keyboard that was supposed to complement the melody line the sizer memory was repeating, but the result was a jaw-clenching mess that made Maria want to throw something. She could do better than this with just one pair of hands.

The shooter took the stool next to her. She looked at him.

“You a de Suarez?”

“Yeah. Name’s Christopher, off the Abrazo. How’d you know?”

“You have the look. It’s an inbred line. They call you Chris?”

“My friends call me Kit.” He frowned. “Mostly the family calls me ‘boy.’ ”

Maria sipped her juice. “Is there a reason for that?” she asked. “Or do they just enjoy insulting family?”

He seemed a little taken aback. “I haven’t bossed a shoot yet,” he said. “In my family we don’t reckon you’re grown till you do.”

“Jesus Rice,” said Maria. “I’ve been riding tides since I was seven.”

“You’re moned.”

“That doesn’t make any difference. You can fastlearn it in a few weeks.” She looked at him, speculating. “Unless you’re just not good at it.”

“I’m good enough in the simulations. My family just...” He shrugged. “We do it by generations. I’m the youngest of my generation. I don’t do anything important till Marco dies, then we all move up a notch.”

“Marco is the big daddy?”

The lick player staggered back, all four hands, into the melody line. Maria wanted to cry out in relief. Some drunks in the back of the room began to bang their hands together loudly.

Kit nodded and took a drink of his Lark. “Marco’s my great-uncle. Bossrider of the Abrazo, head of the family.” He stared at his reflection in the forcebulb. “My father be Second on the Familia. I wish I was with him. But Marco needed a new apprentice.”

“Marco’s not planning on dying anytime soon, right?”

“He’ll live forever. He’s got this deal with God, I think.” He gave an apologetic grin. “He’s a serious Old Catholic. Got a shrine to Our Lady in the fuge, next to his office. He’s in there a lot, cutting deals with the angels.” Kit sipped his Lark again. His dark eyes rose uncertainly to hers. “I heard about your father. I’m sorry.”

“The best thing,” she said. “I guess.”

“Marco says he was a genius who could never finish anything.”

Sorrow wafted through her on waves of Blue Heaven. “I suppose he was.” Kit finished his Lark and signaled for another.

An idea occurred to Maria. “I haven’t met you, have I?” she asked. “How did you know who I was?”

Kit looked at her carefully. “Marco has us study the other shooters. He’s got files and things. He says he wants us to know the competition.”

Maria felt the waves of sorrow increase and steepen. Once, before Consolidation had taken hold, shooters were something like a huge, promiscuous family. “It’s come to that, has it?” she asked.

His eyes reflected her sorrow. “Yeah,” he said. “Looks like it has.”

*

Pasco had reached late middle age before his paternal instincts began to reassert themselves, the first of any number of suppressed urges to do so. When he decided to become a father he assembled his children out of bits and pieces purchased at a geneware storehouse, assigned each an assortment of talents and abilities he was, at that moment, interested in. In addition to high intelligence, Pasco gave Ubu a number of traits he felt that he, himself, personally lacked. Insofar as he was slow, fat, and more forgetful than he wanted to be, he gave Ubu fast reflexes, a hard body, and the kind of eidetic memory associated with acute senses and synaesthesia. The extra arms were an afterthought.

When he decided to augment his family, Pasco was more ambitious. He’d just had his fortune told by a professional psychic on Carter’s Rim, and some of it had come true. His fastlearn cartridge on genetics informed him that certain genes, in certain locations, had been thought, by a minority of specialists, to be associated with precognition, telekinesis, and extrasensory abilities in general. His assemblage of Beautiful Maria was marked by a kind of overkill: he jammed every ESP-related gene into place on the helix with the intention of producing a genuine witch.

By the time Maria’s abilities began to emerge, Pasco had lost interest in extrasensory phenomena. Repeat visits to the Carter’s Rim psychic had proved disappointing. That Maria was incredibly successful at electronic games had just been put down to fast reflexes, and that she proved surprisingly good at field repair of equipment was put down to good memory retention. It wasn’t until she began running through singularity shots on the simulator, and a substantial percentage of the difficulties that Pasco had programmed for her either failed to appear or suffered mysterious delay, that Pasco began to realize something was up.

He remained interested, this time, for a couple months, which by then was as long as his dwindling attention span could keep him interested in anything. He devised a number of tests to gauge her ability, then a number of exercises to expand it and make it more reliable. By the time his interest faded, Maria and Ubu were able to expand on his ideas and make her abilities more reliable.

By the time Pasco killed himself, Maria’s ability was keeping Runaway alive.

*

Marco de Suarez was strapped to his table, floating weightless while he drank espresso from a forcebulb. The pale rose light of the mutanto bar softened the lines in his gaunt face. He seemed oblivious to the complex interweave of mutanto dancers rocketing off the walls in time to the striff band just behind him, a five-piece mutanto group who poured out a white-hot assault that sounded like armies of robots engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Marco was an old man, his elbows standing out like knots in his thin, fleshless arms. His white hair was cropped to half an inch, his cheeks bristled with a three-day stubble. He wore platinum earrings, sandals, an old white cotton jacket that hung to mid-thigh with the sigil of De Suarez Expressways, Ltd., on its shoulder. There was a silver crucifix around his neck on a tight thong. Ubu hated him.

“Bossrider,” he said.

The old man’s deep eyes turned up to him. Marco raised his bulb, fired espresso past his lips. Making a production of it.

“Bossrider,” he said finally. “Ubu Roy. Sit.”

“Maybe we can help each other,” Ubu said.

“I don’t think that’s very likely.”

Marco was a tyrant— even his own family admitted that. De Suarez Expressways, his trading company, had been molded in his own peculiar image, much as Runaway’s had in Pasco’s. De Suarez femmes were permitted to have only male children. Marco thought things were easier if each ship had only an all-male cadre, a family united not only by genetics but by sexual attitudes. All women on de Suarez ships came originally from the outside.

Ubu thought Marco was probably as crazy as Pasco, just not as disorganized.

Still, there was no one else to turn to. Ubu had been up and down Angel’s rim all day, looking for buyers for Runaway’s hold full of mining equipment. “See Marco” was all he’d been told. “Marco’s the only one who’s got mining contracts since Long Reach folded. Marco’s made a deal with PDK. He’s running Kompanie supplies to Seven Systems Mining on Trincheras. Marco’s in a zero-gee bar in the hub. Called the Bahía. Doing business with a mutanto family.”

Yeah, okay, Ubu thought. Might as well give in to the inevitable. Long Reach was locked in an extended self-destruction ceremony, tangled up with creditors, revenue agents, confused lines of corporate responsibility, half-completed contracts and takeover attempts. Half the board of directors had scattered for parts unknown, the Navy had to mount a rescue mission to starving citizens in one of Long Reach’s new settlements, and a lot of company records were missing. The only thing that was clear at this point was that no one was getting paid.

There were no buyers in the Angelica market. Besides the defunct Long Reach operation, only Biagra-Exeter was involved in Angelica System, and Biagra planned years in advance for this sort of thing: they were a self-contained company, keeping major supply purchases entirely in-house, and weren’t interested in picking up independent contracts even at a profit.

Ubu avoided filing a claim against Dig Angel for the present: that would have made his difficulty part of the public record, let everyone onstation know that Runaway was in trouble and that he was desperate for a sale. So Beautiful Maria was sent off to earn some credit in a Fringe casino, and Ubu took his act up to the hub.

He didn’t want to deal with Marco. He wanted either a fellow shooter, who could be trusted to sympathize, or maybe a disinterested Hiliner rep who collected a nice salary whether or not he squeezed the competition. He didn’t trust an in-between like Marco, not someone who was shooter enough to understand Ubu’s difficulties and Hiliner enough to take advantage of them.

But Marco it was. De Suarez Expressways, Ltd., owned five ships and quite possibly had the capital to take on a venture of this sort, and if they didn’t have capital they had access to PDK’s. On his way to the Bahía, Ubu fired up some neurotransmitter multiplier, Red Eight, more for superstitious reasons than for any real belief it would do him any good. If you didn’t have the smarts to be a bossrider in the first place, he’d always figured, messing with your brain chemistry wasn’t going to help.

“Maybe we can’t help each other that much,” Ubu said, strapping himself to the table opposite the old man. “But let’s talk anyway.”

Marco inclined his head. Pale rose highlights shone off his white hair. “Be listening, Ubu Roy.”

Behind him, the mutanto guitarist, playing with his upper arms while hanging by his lower from a castoff bar, was attacking each note as if it was personally responsible for the death of his way of life. Every striff cry was a marching tune; the question was where this particular parade was headed.

Ubu stared into Marco’s deep yellow eyes. “You have a contract with Seven Systems,” he said. “I’ve got some of Dig Angel’s equipment in my hold. I’d like to lay off some of Dig Angel’s debts. Maybe you’d like to buy it for resale.”

The old man sniffed. Ubu could see a shine of green mucus smearing Marco’s upper lip: he’d been sitting in his corner of the bar all day, doing his deals, inhaling so much neurobooster the stuff was running out his nostrils.

Marco looked at Ubu from out of his death’s head. “Why not take it outsystem and sell it to Seven Systems yourself?”

“I’ve got a contract to pick up a hold full of pharmaceuticals at China Light for delivery to Salvador and Ascención. China Light doesn’t need mining equipment. I’d hate to pay storage or let the contract go just to make a run to Seven Systems, not when I could sell to Seven Systems by selling to you.”

All of which was a lie, though Ubu figured Marco would have no way to know for sure. The truth was he’d only got the OttoBanque loan in the first place because he’d talked Maria into glitching their system. The loan was coming due in less than a week and the only way to extend it was to glitch the OttoBanque here, doubling the chance the bank’s comps would notice the fact they’d been fiddled with.

Unless he could sell his cargo, Ubu wouldn’t be able to pay the new taxes and docking charges here at Angel Station, charges raised by the Multi-Pollies as part of their Consolidation policy.

Ubu looked coolly into Marco’s whiskered face and gave him his best shot. “Besides,” he said, “I hear you’ve got an exclusive contract with PDK and Seven Systems. I don’t know what kind of terms you have with them, but PDK might reconsider the deal if I sold to them direct and they realized they could get another supplier out here.”

The striff cry came to an end in a rolling barrage of percussion and broken guitar arpeggios. Mutantos banged four hands, cheered.

Marco’s expression didn’t change, but he reached down to his lap, came up with a chak of neurotransmitter juice, and fired one round up each nostril. Which meant he was thinking real hard.

Behind his expressionless face, Ubu smiled.

*

The hype was called Renewal. It was made on a planet where people spoke mostly Mandarin, but there were subtitles in Melange as well as the new-style ideograms for those who spoke other Asian dialects. Before the story was very old, Ubu was thankful he couldn’t hear what the people were saying.

The hype had been widely praised, and the story was supposedly true. It was about dispossessed shooters, people who through their irresponsibility and fecklessness had lost everything, and how a brave few were rehabilitated and turned to useful work by the caring people of a groundling community.

The story didn’t mention how the shooters had lost their livelihood. It said nothing about how the groundlings had voted for a government who had sent Multi-Pollies to the human core who then in turn decided to implement Consolidation and destroy a way of life.

Whoever made it had probably never met any shooters, never been out of a planetary well in their life. The hype’s shooter life was wildly exaggerated, all madness and drug-induced brutality, though among all the decadence were a few pure-hearted young people longing for a better way of life.

There was so much missing, Ubu thought. The sense of community, the ways families actually work out here. The music: not a musical instrument to be seen.

“Fuck them,” Ubu said, and reached for the holo controls. He knew already how it was going to end. The hero was going to rehabilitate himself and end up with the farm girl; the hero’s best friend would die tragically as a result of his chronic drug use; the six-year-old blond orphan girl would be rescued from her brute of a father; and every remaining shooter over the age of sixteen would go to hell by the shortest possible route.

As far as Ubu could see, hell seemed the way to go.

He hammered at the controls. The hype’s sudden disappearance from the lounge’s threedee screen seemed to leave a yawning gap in Ubu’s heart. Is that how they really see us? he wondered.

Anger rattled through him aimlessly, like stones thrown in a bucket. Billions had seen the hype. Billions now knew that the shooter families were dying because of their own inherent character flaws, and were confident that civilization could no longer afford such barbarians on its fringes. What the hell could Ubu possibly do to change their minds?

He pulled the lounge control board in front of him, called up the hype directory, scanned the list of available recordings. Nothing he came up with seemed to fit his particular mood of aggressive longing.

A title scrolled past. He stopped the scrolling, reversed, gave a grin.

His theme hype. He hadn’t seen it in years.

He’d come across it by accident six or seven years ago, just scrolling through the list looking for something to do. The hype had been in computer memory since its installation a century before, one of a whole series of lectures and classic hype given away free with the old Torvald. Most weren’t interesting to Ubu, though Pasco had watched a lot of them, but for some reason—maybe the weird title— Ubu had found one of them interesting enough to sample it.

The hype was animated, but the animation looked as if it had been done by a brain-damaged six-year-old armed with crayons: crude figures with big heads that never seemed to stay the same shape, backgrounds sketched in lightly if at all, objects appearing and disappearing without rhyme or reason. Even day and night seemed to change from moment to moment, without any break in the scene— though Ubu, whose concept of day and night was entirely the result of seeing hypes set in Mudville, didn’t even consider this odd until he stopped to think about it. The main character was a potbellied little king who wore a crown shaped like a jagged mountain range and clutched in his hand what looked like a toilet brush. He careened about the story at breakneck velocity, stealing money, gobbling food, chopping off heads, and running away from battles.

Ubu loved it. It was as if the little king were some mainline to the primal Id, a creature of pure undirected impulse. The madcap, bloody anarchy of it rang in his mind for days.

Ubu, whom Pasco had originally named Xavier, decided to change his name to that of the crazed king. The mutable terrain depicted, with all its crudity and weird variability, seemed somehow navigable to him, seemed to make more sense than the human interface with which he was normally expected to interact. Certainly, even with all the violence, it seemed more safe.

He tapped the computer deck and called the hype from the files. The king roared in and began barking out his plots. Heads started falling left and right with sounds like bladders breaking wind.

He thought of the people who made Renewal, and wished he could unleash King Ubu on them all.

*

Enclosed in the silken curtains of Blue Heaven, Beautiful Maria felt she wanted to be in motion. She took Kit’s hand and glided down the rim, her feet almost weightless. A thorny plant with pink blossoms, planted in the street’s centerline, gave off a sweet pheromone smell. She laughed.

“You want to go dancing?” Kit asked.

“Maybe later. Right now I’d like to walk.” She skimmed over the surface, walked through a hologram advertising custom genetics, saw green laser burn holo helixes on her skin. Electronic awareness hummed in the back of her head.

She looked at Kit. “Your family won’t let you shoot, right?” she asked.

He looked at the floor with a stubborn frown. “Yeah. I said.”

“You want some experience? We can apprentice you to Runaway.”

Kit stopped moving in surprise, hung on to her fingertips. The green hologram turned orange as it crossed his features. “I— yeah, I’d like that.”

“For a consideration,” Maria said. “Your family would have to pay for your training.”

He swallowed. “I don’t know if they’d go along with that.”

“It’s something to think about. You’d be more valuable to them. On Runaway you’d get experience handling cargo, station approach, everything.”

The hologram moved down the street. “I’d like that,” Kit said again.

Maria tugged him down the rim. She felt as if she was floating, with only Kit holding her to the alloy floor. She passed a male-model android toy dancing under blue lights in a window, a Fringe barker with a synthetic smile running a game on a pair of Mudville tourists. “Sure it’s real,” he said. Maria felt a wave of uneasiness. The android had a male body, but Kitten’s face. She tried to shrug the feeling away.

“How’d you like to pimp for androids?” Maria asked Kit. “Jesus Rice.”

“Mudvillers don’t know the difference.”

“I guess you’d get to keep a hundred percent of the take,” Maria said, still dubious about the idea.

“I like your hair. Can I touch it?”

She tossed her head, smiled. “If you like.”

Kit moved his grip on her fingers from his left hand to his right, began to stroke her hair with his left hand. She could feel his gentle touch on her spine, her neck. As caressing as Blue Heaven. The flurried electronic traffic of the rim flickered on the edge of her perceptions. Maria steered down an alley. Twilight bordered onto night. She turned and kissed him. A touch, chemical or possibly Kit, trickled down her ribs. A sad dolores ballad moaned distantly from a bar. He raised a hand to lift a long silk riverlet of her hair, and his head dipped to burrow between it and her neck. His lips brushed her throat.

“Let’s go someplace,” Maria said.

“Too many people on Abrazo.” Warm breath fluttered against her skin. “How about Runaway?”

She thought about Pasco, his holographic ghost frozen somehow in the macroatomic heart of Runaway’s main computer. She shook her head. “Same problem.” She felt a hand touching her moned breast. Warmth filled her heart. She kissed his ear. “How about a hotel? I’ve earned some credit today.”

He stepped back for a moment, looked at her with solemn eyes. “I’d like it to be in a nice place. You know. Not just a shacktube.”

Beautiful Maria smiled at him. His dark skin seemed to reflect her glow. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Don’t worry. I’ve got enough.”

*

Ubu swam out of the Bahía on a growing wave of adrenaline and fear. He’d cut as close a deal with Marco as he dared, and he was still far from out of debt. If he couldn’t find some outbound cargo in a few days OttoBanque was going to foreclose on him and Beautiful Maria, sell Runaway’s singularity drive to clear the debt, and leave them high and dry on Angel Station. Without its drive Runaway was only useful as scrap— hundred-year-old spare parts weren’t worth much on today’s market. If they were lucky they’d find work as riggers on a syster ship, confined forever to the reaches of this one system. If not— Mudville.

The computers were what had soiled the deal. Dig Angel had been starting operations in this system and had wanted everything, mining robots, tools, parts, and the custom-tooled Kanto computers to control them. Any established mining op, like Seven Systems, would already have enough comp capacity to run their operations. Marco had only bought the robots and parts.

His mind numb, Ubu dropped to the rim, where there was gravity. The bright lights of the Outside Life gleamed around him. The holographic deity in front of the Laughing God Casino boomed out his hearty amusement. People dressed in grey and brown glanced at him as he strode up the pale marble deck, their eyes lingering a shade too long, just long enough to let him know he was out of place. People in Hiliner uniforms refused even to look at him.

He went to station central and filed his claim against Dig Angel and Long Reach. Maybe OttoBanque would extend the loan, with the Dig Angel claim as collateral.

Maybe Mudvillers would learn how to fly. Ubu figured the odds were about the same.