CHAPTER 16

A pressure wave touched Beautiful Maria’s nape with cool, delicate claws. A slow reflexive moment rolled by while she waited to see if there had been decompression on board— there hadn’t been and never had; but still time seemed to suspend itself until she was certain, and then life resumed. Intruder alarms didn’t start ringing, either. Ubu had therefore returned. She glanced at the green letters of the holo clock above the comm board, saw it was almost noon.

He came down the ladder into the centrifuge and entered the command cage. His eyes were scarlet-rimmed, his hair straggled over his face. He smelled of liquor and expensive perfume.

“Some party,” said Maria.

“Yeah. Sorry if I— Maybe I should have called you.”

“Maybe.” She looked at him steadily. He turned away, scratched the bristles along one jaw.

“I don’t think we should both be gone from the ship at the same time,” Maria said. “We can’t have anyone near Twelve.”

“Okay. The guard on the door showed me how the security system works.” The issue didn’t seem to interest him. He sat heavily on the nav couch.

“So I get to go out today, right?”

“Uh—I gotta go out later and get a suit made. For our court appearance.”

“Tonight, then.”

“I made plans.” He looked at her, then looked away again. “I’ll cancel.”

“Good. And we’re both appearing in court, remember. I gotta get a suit myself.”

“Go now, if you like. Shuttle’s leaving for the station in ten.”

She turned back to the comm board. “I’ve been buying new hypes. New games, new music. If there’s anything you want, look at the list while I’ve got it up.”

“Okay.” He reached out to his board, called up the file. Began moving the cursor, punching in choices.

“I’ve looked at the money we’ve got left. Be enough to buy two new singularities and the ships to go with them, even after we buy the AIs. Ships as big as Runaway.”

He grinned. “Yeah. We can start a transport line. Runaway & Beloved Transport, Ltd.”

“Don’t forget Consolidation. Things still might come apart.”

He looked at her. Red gleams reflected off his eyes from the piloting board, where warning lights showed that cargo bay doors were open and autoloaders were engaged. “Come apart, shit,” Ubu said. “We’ve got nothing but money coming our way. Maybe forever.”

“They’ll figure it out sooner or later. The Navy investigators have already called, wanting to ask questions.”

“What’d you tell them.”

“Told ’em to call our lawyer.”

Ubu smiled, turned back to the vid list. Punched up another hype.

“They’ll find out,” Maria said. “We’ll lose our monopoly. What do you think is gonna happen to our action when the Multi-Pollies and the Hiliners start jacking their way in? We’re just gonna be another shooter line shut out of the real business.”

Ubu swung toward her, his face angry. “We could be a Hiliner company! You ever figured that?”

“Maybe.”

“Shooting’s what we know. Shooters are what we are! You got any better than the Now?”

“I’ve been thinking. We could build an excursion ship.”

“A what?”

“An excursion ship. Take rich people out to meet aliens. Let them try to talk business with Beloved.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

A fiery burning anger crackled in Maria’s heart. She sat up. “What’s wrong with it?”

Ubu gestured with three arms. “You and me, Maria? Taking a bunch of Mudvillers, rich fanners and Hiline execs and Multi-Pollies and all their stupid children off into something they can’t understand, wiping the dirt off their feet, picking off their lice, teaching them how to get into vac suits and shepherding them around in freefall so they don’t hit their precious heads and scramble what brains they’ve got, and serving them bland food, and—”

“We don’t have to do it in person, Ubu. We’re rich. We just build the ship and own it and take the profit, okay?”

“Jesus Rice.”

Anger clawed at Maria’s throat. Her words grated out, breath forced through bright steel bars. “We’re rich, Ubu! If we’re gonna stay rich we’ve got to learn how. You wanna be a Hiline company, better find out how Hiliners operate first. Spending our time with other rich people isn’t a bad place to start.”

He shook his head. “We’re into transport. It’s what we know.”

“Better learn something else. ’Cause we were into transport for years, and all we did was lose.”

“Be winning now.”

She stood, walked to the ladder, began to climb. Angry energy danced in her body, prickled the colorless hair on her arms. She paused on the ladder and looked down at him. “Things change,” she said. “That’s you, quoting me.”

*

She looked up a clothing store in the station directory, left Modular Dock C for the station, danced through clamoring Port Town. She bought ginger beef at a tempafoam kiosk and ate it on the gauss shuttle downstation.

The store was called Hong’s and was three levels up from the shuttle station, a brightly lit foam-padded place behind black graphite walls. Overdressed people walked by, but didn’t seem to find her as worth staring at as the crowd in the Klub had— Maria figured they were more used to shooters on this level. She entered the store and looked at the white-haired Asian man who approached her. She could see herself in his sad black eyes, a tall pale exotic in halter and shorts, her bare feet dirty. She held up her credit counter.

“I need to be in court tomorrow, and I need to look good.”

The Asian man cocked his head, considered. “No problem,” he said.

Maria smiled.

Fast bright lasers danced over her body, read its contours. Maria chose material and style, and machines in the back of the store sliced fabric, folded, and used expensive stitching on the seams instead of simply melting them together. It took less than an hour.

And all she ended up with, at the end, was The Uniform: short-sleeved light blue shirt with standing dark blue collar, collarless jacket with velcro flaps on the pockets, black velvet slippers, pipestem trousers striped in two shades of grey. Mudville clothing adapted to orbit, with all the zippers and buttonholes taken off so nothing would snag in freefall. She looked at herself in the mirror and flashed on herself walking, in more or less the same clothes, through the door of the Monte Carlo, her nerves humming in terror as her mind fumbled with the rules to rouge-et-noir. Entering a life she’d only seen in hype.

And now she would enter the same world again.

The Asian man seemed disappointed when she decided not to wear the new clothes out of the store. He folded them neatly in a box of pale green recycled plastic.

Beautiful Maria carried the box back to Runaway. Twelve was playing dolores music in his room, absorbing Melange lyrics; Ubu, she discovered, was asleep in his cabin. She stored the box under her rack and went to the lounge. Maybe, she thought, she’d watch one of the new hypes.

Abrazo will be here soon, she thought. The memory came suddenly, without warning. She wondered if Kit was still angry with her.

She called up a hype, began watching it. The characters all lived in Mudville and seemed opaque, and the motivation for their action was obscure. Is it a bad hype, she wondered, or was it that she just didn’t understand it?

The phone link gave a beep and Maria told the hype to pause. She reached behind her, swung the control board down from its slot in the wall, accessed the comm, told the link to feed into the lounge holos and speakers.

“Is Ubu there?”

So that’s what she looks like, Maria thought.

A black woman, long hair drawn back severely behind the head, bushed out behind. Dull eyes. Strange pierced earlobes that looped almost to her shoulders, dangling empty and twisted like loose string. A sullen, pampered look. Clearly displeased that someone other than Ubu had answered.

She was the expensive perfume type, all right. Maybe she didn’t even carry lice.

“The bossrider is unavailable right now,” Maria said.

“Tell him that Magda called. I remembered the name of the place. It’s called the Surat. Can you tell him that?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet him there at sixteen hundred.”

“Recorded.”

Maria routed the call to Ubu’s cabin. He could view it when he woke. She wondered if she’d be spending the night on Runaway again, waiting for Ubu’s return, waiting for her party.

Laser interference danced in the air. Maria’s heart lurched. She turned her eyes away.

“Where’s Kitten? Where’d she go?”

Pasco’s voice. She knew from his tone that he was close to the end, that the recording had frozen his mind in the final moments of shambling toward its personal precipice.

Hatred exploded deep inside her, rose hot in her throat like bile. Her fists clenched. She looked up at the hesitant, trembling parody of her father.

“You’ve had it,” she said.

He was looking at her with a puzzled expression. “I had something I wanted to say, but I forgot. Have you seen her? I was just looking.”

Fury stormed in her mind. “I’m getting rid of you. You’re not my pop. I don’t give a fuck what Ubu thinks.”

She seized the control board and began working.

He had to be in there somewhere.

*

Working in driven white-lipped anger, Beautiful Maria nailed Pasco after two hours’ intense work. Located him, glitched the program that hid and relocated him after each random appearance, unraveled his software like a skein of wool, stuffed him in a file piled high with security. The galaxy’s first holographic ghost had been cornered and slammed into a cage.

If Beautiful Maria had anything to say about it, he wasn’t coming out again.

In the meantime Ubu went out, came back with a different, more expensive, variant of The Uniform. Surat turned out to be a clothing store. Magda didn’t come back with him, nor did the smell of her perfume.

Associating with rich people, she thought. That’s what she’d wanted him to do, right?

She dressed for Port Town in a one-piece dark grey leotard with subtle lighter stitches bleached into the fabric by laser, an almost subliminal, stripe that started at her right hip and rose diagonally across her left breast to the shoulder. She dusted her cheekbones and shoulders with glitter, put on a pair of fringed mocs, kicked off.

Once in Port Town she bounded down the short metal street that circled the narrow end of Bezel Station like a silver ring set on a finger. She moved from bar to bar, club to club. Ate, danced, sometimes sat in with the usual inept shooter band. Ran into a few old friends and shared their table, their food and drink and raucous hospitality. She shrugged off friendly, faintly envious questions about the origin of Runaway’s cargo, shrugged off also a few more direct propositions.

Noise and laughter and shouts boiled up around her. Beautiful Maria drank, danced, laughed on cue, but for some reason her mind was touched with frost. She found her companions just a little strange, a little foreign. Port Town, and other shooter neighborhoods on every other station and habitat, had always seemed like home before. She had drifted through one habitat after another, merging into the boisterous life without thought. But now she was looking at it, at least partly, through someone else’s eyes— Twelve’s? Mahadaji’s? And the shooters looked strange to her: happy, promiscuous, profane, dressed in scraps and rags worn bravely, like flags. Superbly capable at everything they did, so efficient the Multi-Pollies perceived them as a threat and set out to destroy them. Insular, knowing nothing but their own world, their own business, caring nothing about anything outside the burning reality of the Now.

Dying. In another generation, dead.

Because they didn’t understand? she wondered. Because they were so confident in their own abilities, the necessity and rightness of their way of life, they never cared to find out why others, the sort who lived and worked in bronze-fronted palaces like the Pan-Development Klub, decided to wipe them away like a sysop erasing an old file he no longer needed. The shooters didn’t know why, Maria thought, didn’t understand, didn’t think it worth their while to find out. Shooting’s what we know, Ubu had said. Shooters are what we are. You got any better than the Now?

Her heart turned cold. The striff cry seemed raucous, its joy artificial. This was all going to be destroyed, she knew, destroyed as totally as if it were sucked into a singularity on the wrong tangent and crushed into black condensed matter where nothing, not even the tiniest particle, had room to breathe.

She wondered if this was where Pasco had been, if he had looked into that same great swallowing singularity until he could see nothing else, until he had no option but madness...

Her drink left the taste of cold iron in her mouth. She stood, excused herself, left the bar for the alloy street outside. Cooking smells and the sound of music rained upon her as she walked the street, circling the station.

She and Ubu would survive, she thought. They had the reserves now, the financial cushion. Almost everything else would disappear or be transformed. The systers would survive longest, shipping raw materials from asteroids or barren moons, living on fringe economies the Hiliners weren’t interested in; but they weren’t shooters, would never feel the crackling electricity of the Now as they conned a ship into the depthless screaming heart of a black hole and out again... Any shooters that survived would be swallowed into Hiline culture, knowing the Now but unable to live it.

Tears blinded her. She staggered off the street, leaned against an upright surface composed of tempafoam recently layered in fresh black paint. Pain twisted in her chest.

Why now? Maria thought. Stupid to mourn now, when you’ve known all along.

Then she realized it was because she was outside it now. When she and Ubu were dying along with all the rest, it was pointless to mourn. Who mourns their own death? But now Runaway was saved, but could not keep its own context alive.

“Live sex show, shooter femme. Twenty. Fucky-fuck, all live. Fifteen for you.”

She blinked and brushed her hair back, scanned at head height, then down. The barker was an old mutanto shooter with another set of arms set into his hip sockets, the lower arms folded with the elbows in the upper set of armpits. His knotted fingers splayed on the metal street.

The mutanto was so wasted he couldn’t even stand up— the club’s management had propped him in the doorway. Whatever he had taken to burn his balance and coordination had messed up his vision as well; he was looking somewhere off to her right.

“Good stuff,” he said. “The real thing. Live fucky-fuck.” His face assumed a more hopeful expression. “Pills. Real stuff, shooter femme. Blue Heaven, magic Seven. Got it straight, Red Eight. Chaks, tablets, whatever. Hits you fine, number Nine. Cheaper than wholesale.”

Beautiful Maria turned and walked away. Sorrow sang a resonant mourning ballad in her head.

So much for the party, she thought.

*

Days droned by. The Admiralty Court took about ten minutes to dispose of their case. It took a lot longer for Ubu and Maria to get rid of the newsfax reporters who clustered around them as they tried to leave. While they were absent someone tried to gain access to Runaway, sneaking past the loaders to enter the ship through the cargo bay access. The intruder must have known right away that he’d set off an alarm, because when the alerted guard jumped from the personnel access into the cargo bay, he met the other leaping out on an opposite trajectory. The guard tried to hit him with an autohomer, but the bullet plowed into a container of Orange Seventeen instead, releasing shimmering transparent balloons of the hormone into the dock’s atmosphere. The intelligence of the workers running the autoloaders must have gone up ten points before it was all cleaned up. The intruder got away in a stolen repair capsule he’d parked at a station lock.

A few days later the autoloaders on 17 A fell silent as the last of the pharmaceuticals rolled into storage. Runaway left the modular dock, hung in its assigned place two miles from Bezel Station with its red warning lights blinking in a personalized coded pattern. A rented warehouse on the station held a growing collection of AIs. Ubu and Beautiful Maria donned vac suits to visit Port Town, traveling alone unless business required them both onstation.

Deposits were placed on the next two black holes to be captured and brought to Bezel. The PDK dockyards, orbiting Bezel a precise sixty degrees in advance of the station, would build ships around the singularities once they were delivered. Big transports, as Ubu wanted. Bigger than Beloved’s ship.

Abrazo drew closer to the station, its torch a cold fire in the empty darkness.

Maria never heard of Magda again. Whatever function she’d served for Ubu had been made obsolete. He seemed less edgy now, more relaxed. Whatever it was he did on his excursions to Port Town, he kept to himself.

Maria’s visits were quiet, subdued. She was mourning the place. She found a fellow mourner eventually, a gentle, balding older man named Mitaguchi. Just after he’d got his master’s certificate, years ago, his shooter family had been broken up, shattered under the first blow of Consolidation, and he’d got a job in a Kompanie transport. He was first officer now, waiting for a vacancy to be promoted captain and finally get a chance to use the master’s certificate he’d earned when he was eleven years old. He was married to a shipping executive back in Doranes; they had three children, almost grown. Mitaguchi still wore shooter clothing when he visited Port Town, looking for old friends, singing old songs. He didn’t wear the clothes with much conviction.

Something in his lost quality appealed to Maria— in Port Town the two of them could live in a dream in which neither, any longer, could quite believe. They drifted along the metal ring together, sampling its pleasures, enjoying its rude and bustling life, making grave, balletic love within its tempafoam and laminate walls. She learned about his shooter family, all the memories he treasured. He hadn’t seen any of them in years.

Two days before he was scheduled to blow station, Mitaguchi convinced himself he was madly in love with her. Eyes burning, he cornered her in their shacktube, spoke in bright, fervid tones of resigning his post, abandoning wife and children and seniority, coming aboard Runaway to live with the femme who had returned his life to him, brought back everything he’d lost... His weird intensity, the violence of his desperation, stunned her. For a brief moment of claustrophobic horror she was afraid of him. She stared at him for a long, terrified moment; but he saw his answer in her eyes and Mitaguchi seemed to collapse, the steel tension in his limbs melting as if under a fusion torch. He did not argue when Beautiful Maria, sorrow burning in her throat, sent him away.

Mitaguchi sent her a note through the station net just before his ship left, thanking Beautiful Maria for her decision. His courtesy made her feel better about it all.

Abrazo completed its rendezvous with Modular Dock A. For the next few days, in her intermittent journeys around Port Town, Maria felt in her mind a hum of interest, of anticipation. Maybe she’d see Kit. But the days went by and there was no chance meeting, no message on the net. Her anticipation faded.

When the chance meeting finally occurred, it was at the wrong time. Beautiful Maria was in a club called Now and Forever, a tempafoam-over-wire bookshop annex devoted chiefly to efficiently relieving shooters and systers of their money at near light speed. With waiters aggressively pushing drinks at her and whores of both sexes actively soliciting custom, Now and Forever wasn’t Maria’s sort of place, but she had been taken there by Wu and Pet’s Rae, a shooter couple who had “been carrying a small shipment for the bar’s owner, and who had business there.

Wu and Pet’s Rae were friends and contemporaries of Pasco, and they and their family had actually prospered during Consolidation thanks to an exclusive contract with Portfire for delivery of pharmaceuticals from Bezel Station to partly developed Edge systems like Angelica, the same kind of deal De Suarez Expressways had with PDK. Sometimes they passed on extra duties to Runaway, and now Runaway had probably just given them some more work. Wu and Pet’s Rae had known Ubu and Maria since birth, and Ubu and Maria saw them and their five children more often than most other shooters working this part of the arm.

Now and Forever was their fourth stop for the evening. While Pet’s Rae propped her gangly brown arms on the bar and talked business with the owner, Wu bought the tray of watery beer shoved at him by the first waiter and handed the bulbs to Maria and his kids. Yawning whores danced under pink and violet spots in the back, their desultory movements bearing little relationship to the furious pounding striff that bounced off the metal floor. Android sex toys would have danced with more conviction, but in the latter days of Consolidation human material was cheaper.

By the time Wu and party finished the first round they were singing along with the striff, much to the annoyance of the hairy-chested waiter. Customers who spent their time singing were not spending money with proper efficiency. While Wu and the waiter negotiated this matter, Maria kicked off toward the toilet, bounded over the next table, landed in the clear, skipped on. She reached over her head to seize a castoff bar and alter her trajectory, and out of the corner of her eye, in the purple reflection of a dancer’s spotlight, saw the highlighted cheek and forehead of Kit de Suarez.

Maria’s hand reflexively clamped down on the bar. Momentum tugged at her shoulder muscles, bounced her like a ball at the end of an elastic string. Kit was walking toward her. Maria kicked out, dropped lightly to the floor, and in a short bounce hopped next to him.

He gave a start. She said hello and he mumbled a reply.

“Runaway’s out of trouble,” Maria said.

He seemed to be searching the room for someone. Maybe he didn’t want to look at her. “I’m not,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Marco found out.” He turned to her for the first time. Frozen anger lay behind his eyes. “Don’t ask me for any more favors, okay?”

“Sorry.” She ventured a smile. “I’m with some friends. Wanna join us?”

Kit shook his head. “See you around.” He turned and kicked off.

“Sorry,” Maria called after him. He didn’t react. Probably, Maria thought, hadn’t heard.

The toilet smelled of sharp disinfectant and the whores’ overwhelming perfume. It wasn’t until Maria was drying her hands that she looked up at her reflection in the smudged steel mirror and realized that she’d dropped in on Kit as he was leaving the hookshop, that he’d just had a woman back there and probably wasn’t very proud of it.

Bad timing.

The waiter’s argument with Wu had been cut short by the arrival of a Buddhist missionary, who entered to drop tracts on each table and whose ejection, once he proved to be an expert staff fighter, occupied the full attention of the bar’s employees. By the time Maria returned, Wu and family were singing again, their voices defiant, their grins wide.

Shooters could make music whenever they liked.

Maria joined in. Her mind stayed on Kit, his unsettled manner, his cold eyes.

*

Drumbeats spun a complex rhythm in Twelve’s mind. Alien thoughts fought fevered wars in his blood. Floating in auxcontrol, he turned off his recorder and let the hurricane of humanity whirl within him.

Passion. The humans were so improbably passionate, so impetuous in their assertion of the primacy of their emotions. Their entertainments were almost always brassy declarations of passion, usually of love or longing, sometimes of thoughts more complex, but still stated with forthright vehemence.

Some of the music, striff and some dross, was usually fairly straightforward, riding along a thundering avalanche of simple, driving rhythm. These were like the patterns Beloved used for hard labor or combat, simple, overwhelming expressions of urgent necessity. The subject matter was different, but Twelve understood the intent.

Some dross was more complicated, the subject matter less focused, more subtle— more poetic, as Twelve gathered. Poetry was a concept that Twelve found, in turns, either hopelessly opaque or vaguely subversive, designed as it was to elicit response by a crafted appeal to levels of awareness that were not in themselves overt or easy to understand... Such approaches, Twelve thought, could be used by a cunning intelligence to infect the thought of her enemies.

The worst was the ballad forms used by the dolores music. The tunes were almost always mournful, the subject matter simple and direct— usually love or the loss thereof— but the concentrated human passion was overwhelming, and always laced with poetic terms. This was made far worse when the steady dolores rhythm was contaminated by a style identified by Maria as “ladino,“ something Twelve was beginning to think of as evil. The patterns were subtle, the rhythm breaking, one pattern infused by another... any clear rhythmic statement was subverted before its meaning could be absorbed by the listener. Some of the rhythms were indeed Beloved’s, but should she ever transmit such a shattered pattern to her servants, the meaning would never be clear and it would cause only confusion and grief.

And any of Beloved’s servants exposed to such a concentrated dose of passion would be driven mad. Twelve himself was only able to distance himself from the process by concentrating on Beloved’s instructions to learn, to stay objective and gather data... Were he compelled to act within the whirlwind context of humanity instead of simply to witness, he would have been helpless.

The concentration upon passion he found unseemly. The passions themselves were often inappropriate even in what Twelve understood of the human context, and the singers’ insistence on the importance of their own emotions was egotistical beyond rationality.

Somewhere in their past, Twelve thought, humanity had been shattered. Each individual had become a fragment, without a Beloved to arrange their lives to an appropriate pattern. Some humans believed there were gods, others did not. Ubu and Maria had never met one. It was inconceivable that humanity could have arisen to their present level with their lives and emotions in such chaos... Had it been their gods who had brought them this far, and then abandoned them for reasons of their own?

The thought struck Twelve like a savage clap of thunder. Would Beloved ever evolve to the point where she would no longer need her servants, then abandon them to stagger along in isolation while she concerned herself with higher matters? Twelve cringed with fear at the thought.

But no. His task was to trust Beloved, to be her witness here on Runaway. He must not panic, must not apply his speculations concerning humanity to the holy perfection that was his own heart, his own center.

But the thought of human gods, like a delicate strand of dolores imagery, rose unbidden in his mind. His own visitation had been fraught with difficulties. Though the second part of the god’s message had been clear enough, the first part of the message had been confused. Apparently the god assumed that Twelve knew more about humanity than in fact he did.

The god blamed himself for some disaster, that much was clear. The nature of the disaster had been unspecified— there had been talk of “parties” and “shipments”— but the god’s warning about the de Suarez family had been intended as a partial remedy.

But perhaps the opacity was deliberate. Perhaps the god’s statement had been a kind of poetry, an attempt to speak to Twelve’s mind somewhere below his level of conscious awareness. Perhaps, Twelve thought in sudden horror, his mind had been subverted by the crafty human god.

The thought was too disturbing. Twelve let go of his red recorder as if it burned him.

He swam across the room to the sizer, programmed Beloved’s most soothing rhythm, then strapped himself into an acceleration couch and withdrew his eyes, concentrating entirely on Beloved’s tranquilizing, throbbing statement of defined purpose.

Subliminal human patterns still crept into his awareness. The dry, horrid air still drew moisture from his palps, infected his senses with the scent of humanity.

Human rhythms rattled in his brain like debris falling down a long, dark, endless tunnel.