Nobody even saw the girl in the gutter. They were looking for lunch or a lift on a rhino cart or they were running late for the noon red rattler. Her prospects were worse than the birds’. You had to be proactive in the game. Still, she crouched there, her palm above her bowed head, begging for luck at rush hour.
I couldn’t remember her name, even though I’d spent my luck on her once. She’d been beautiful. Her eyes were silver like Elsa’s. I couldn’t see them now; they were downcast. How long had she been there with her painted sign, two white doves on her hunched, bare shoulders and not enough meat on them to rise out of their own droppings and into the permanent dark of the Kvivikian sky?
Long enough.
It had been a long time since I’d worked Svinoy Station. In those early days, I’d been trapped by a hideous equilibrium. The pain of being apart from Elsa had not yet overwhelmed my memories of the pain of being with her. Then I was knifed for refusing to pass on my luck to the locals. Paid security patrolled the piers of their employers. They didn’t protect the public.
Now that I was desperate to see Elsa, here I was back at Svinoy. It was safer on the other side of the island, but there just wasn’t enough foot traffic at Eye Station.
I would have saved the doves if I could, but from the look of them they were beyond saving. Not like me. I was getting out.
I felt light on my feet. Ready to go. This time, I’d make it count. I’d be back on Akranes with Elsa before eyeset.
I picked my mark from the crowd.
The nanny with the override pin in the skin of her neck wore fishskin and fine-stitched kelp. She carried two small harnesses for buckling children securely into the cross-island wagon, a bag of light and an infra-red parasol. Made trustworthy by the electronics that prevented her from deviating from her duties, and fiscally compensated enough for that indignity that she could afford the latest fashion, she would be picking up her employer’s children from the station after their summer holiday in Akranes. She didn’t need any luck of her own. She wasn’t going anywhere.
The nanny wore one half of a broken shell on a silver chain, which meant her husband was a skimmer, setting off into the sea after the Eye went out for the night and then trying to find his way back to Lone Island in the dark. The more dehydrated and the more desperate a skimmer became, the more bad luck built up in his chest, until his feet touched land and his luck line lit up in compensation like a grounded wire.
They died out there, all the time. It was the fastest way to accumulate luck, and a great deal of luck was required to transport a full tank of water to Akranes safely; twenty-eight or twenty-nine arms, depending on the time of year.
I used the tiniest pinch of luck to make the woman stumble and drop the harnesses as she was crossing the street. I’d promised myself I’d be stingy with it but this was a small investment for a big expected return. The traffic light changed and half a dozen rhinos jangled and snorted towards her, their drivers cursing in a dozen languages. Sometimes the bad-tempered beasts could be stopped. Other times, they couldn’t, but they were the only animal that could thrive on the local chemosynthetic seaweed. I dashed over to offer the nanny my help.
Her expression was difficult to make out in the gloom. False daylight from the Eye was weakest at the edges where Lone Island met the Clockwise Sea. Beneath her wide-brimmed, open-topped butterfly hat I saw rouge on her cheeks and strands of a brunette beehive that had been unseated by her tumble.
‘Thank you,’ she gasped.
‘Wish me luck?’ I replied shyly.
‘Of course.’ I took her arm and helped her up onto the kerb. ‘Good luck to you, young man.’
In the crease of her left palm, the blue glow receded until it barely reached her wrist. At the same time, I felt my luck line stretching out, an eager tendril, crossing my ribs and reaching for my shoulder. It was ten times the amount of luck I’d used to make her fall.
‘Thank you,’ I said, handing her the harnesses and turning away before I could feel bad. The girl with the doves had once made a withering comment about lies; I remembered it now. But I thought what she did with the animals was much worse.
Almost immediately, I spotted a farmer, waiting with an empty crate for a soil delivery, wearing a crucifix around his neck. There was soil here on Kvivik, dredged from under the salty sea, but it couldn’t be used for growing grain. The main trade with Kvivik’s waterless sister planet, Akranes, was Kvivikian water exchanged for Akranian batteries. They were charged by solar cells in the sandy deserts of Skogar and sent to Kvivik to power the Lone Island’s Eye. But if there was any extra luck left over at the end of a quarter, other things might be sent through.
Dirt. Tools. Machinery. Metals. All the things that were plentiful on a scorched rock sitting too near the sun.
Kvivik, though. Kvivik had water. Kvivik had life.
The Ninth Wave certainly thought Kvivik was their best chance for seeing the next resurrection.
‘A little spare luck?’ I asked the farmer. ‘A little spare luck, to get a man home?’
Luck was important. Luck would get me home. Not just because it was part of the fare, part of what made observational transport function, but because there was no free will, except in places where there was luck.
Maybe it was predetermined that I would be born too frightened and weak to find my way back to Elsa, but maybe that wasn’t fixed at all, maybe it was someone else’s luck, someone else’s wishes that had screwed up my fate.
I could wish myself stronger, with a bit of luck. I could wish myself the endurance to make it home.
‘Where’s home?’ the farmer asked.
‘Akranes. I’ve almost got the full fare.’
I held out my hand to show him the line lying across my palm. It was a false line, a string of phosphorescence scooped from the Clockwise Sea, but the farmer had the laughing crows-feet look of someone not habitually lied to. He wanted to believe me, and so he did.
‘Bless you,’ the farmer said. ‘The best of luck to you.’
I bowed my head over the shrinking line on his left hand and slipped away.
A pair of engineering students were next, followed by a fisherwoman with the smile that arrives with the cash infusion of the bronzefish shoals. After that, I came up against a temporary wall, with a string of cynical frequent flyers. Then, success with a departing dreamkeeper who gripped the chains of two jewel-collared baboons. He couldn’t take them with him into the red rattler.
‘Have them,’ he told me briskly, pressing the cold links into my hand and adjusting his black top hat. He strode into the station, coat tails flapping, removing the white glove on his left hand. I watched in silence as the conductor checked his palm and then squeezed the others back to make room in the carriage.
The capsule closed. The switch flare blinded me before I could look away. The baboons screamed and pulled on their chains. Everything inside the red rattler had been consumed by flame. The calculations were made on the principle that the act of observing changed the state of the minutely observed thing. As an unfortunate, momentarily agonising side effect, the energy required to make the observation was high enough to cause complete combustion.
But the dreamkeeper in the black top hat would be remade at Skogar Station once the signal reached Akranes in eight minutes time. Or perhaps the rattler had gone to sulphuric acid-soaked Haey, two and a half light-minutes away, or the moon around the gas giant, Tasiilaq, which was five.
I didn’t care where the man was going. Elsa was everything. Strangers were nothing. I’d got what I wanted from him. And I didn’t care if he got there or not. The computers weren’t perfect. There were probabilities involved. Where there were probabilities, luck came into play. Any one of those passengers could have been faking it out of desperation, and if they didn’t have enough luck between them, they simply wouldn’t arrive at the destination.
The baboons snarled at me.
I cared more about the baboons than I did about the man who had owned them. They were underfed, of course, a bit of income on the side. Animals birthed or brought into the system developed the lines and accumulated luck, just as humans did, but were unable to direct it deliberately.
I could sit in a gutter, as the silver-eyed girl did, and grow luck by the simple act of being ignored by passing people who could wish me luck if they felt like it. The girl’s doves grew luck with every packed lunch that passed them by. It was too slow, too ridiculously gradual, to amount to anything much, unless the doves were starving. Hunger accelerated the rate of accrual, until they involuntarily spat out their luck and the closest person felt compelled to throw them some crusts. The girl would eat the crusts and the famished doves would keep working until they died.
It was sickening.
If the baboons were birds or sea-dwelling creatures, I’d have set them free, but there was no space on Lone Island for feral animals; they would only be poisoned, shot or captured and used.
I left the station and headed down towards Pier Three. Never mind that I hadn’t got my day’s quota. There was still plenty of time. I wasn’t betraying her.
The farmer glared at me as I passed, realising his mistake. He’d been ripped off, but he couldn’t leave the queue where he stood in order to confront me.
Momentary shame darkened my cheeks. I ducked my head and pretended not to have seen him. I hadn’t ripped him off, not really. I was definitely leaving Kvivik today. If he knew that she was waiting for me, he wouldn’t mind that I’d lied to him.
The ten piers stretched into blackness, cold fingers pointing out to sea. Fishing boats and heavy purifying transports were moored at Four to Ten. Skimmers bobbed listlessly around One and Two.
Three was the sideshow. Three was a floating entertainment district. There were temples to worship the sea and tables at which to dine on its delights. There were daylight tents, glowing and overflowing with golden sand. There were brothels and bars and dreamkeeper pavilions. Neon lights hummed and coloured bulbs flashed. The movement and sound were especially disconcerting under the evening strobe of the Eye. Rather than simply switching it off at the proper interval, the Eye controllers signalled an Earth-hour’s warning before eyeset by transforming it into a giant, pulsing lighthouse.
It was flashing already. I had to hurry up and get rid of the baboons; get back to the station and take up where I’d left off.
Lady Adelaide’s Eartharium was the most luxuriously appointed of the buildings. It consumed the end section of the jetty with its smoky glass and steel in the shape of the Taj Mahal. It had anchors to keep it firm when the wind blew and pipes to bring in the saltwater.
‘Half an arm for admittance,’ played the rough-up robot’s recording.
‘I’d like to see Lady Adelaide,’ I said, enunciating clearly. The things understood a hundred languages, none of them very well. ‘I want to trade.’
The robot went silent. I assumed it was communicating somehow with the Lady and stepped back to allow a young couple to pay the fare and enter through a shadowy, vine-etched crystal arch.
The dreamkeepers could give you a holiday inside your own mind, but they could only work with what you had actually experienced. To gain those experiences, you needed a ticket to an Eartharium, where the flora and fauna of Earth could rouse the limbic system of any human, no matter how many generations separated from the mother planet, awakening undreamed-of primal terrors and delights.
‘She will see you,’ the robot said. ‘Enter.’
There were no security guards to check me for weapons, which was strange. Inside, the arch was blocked by an incandescently lit carriage, a red rattler replica, with the words ‘Welcome To Earth!’ emblazoned over the automatic doorway.
I had to drag the crazed baboons over the threshold. They were afraid of the light. The door slammed shut once we were inside, and there seemed no opening on the opposite wall of the carriage.
‘What—’ I had time to say before the light increased in intensity and I had to fling my arm up to cover my eyes. It was too hot. Too bright. The baboons had climbed the walls in their terror. Their chains hung down from the ceiling.
‘I’m out of luck,’ I shrieked. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be a real rattler. There were no privately owned ones, and if there were, they couldn’t work without thirty full luck lines. Why would the old witch want to murder her clients?
Sudden dark.
Coolness.
Little baboon hands, holding onto my legs.
The back wall of the carriage fell flat away, forming a ramp. We walked down it into a cavernous atrium to the sound of falling water.
A little, shrivelled woman in pearly-scaled sea-dragon and false spiderlace sat waiting. I’d seen her picture before.
‘What was that about?’ I asked, rubbing my eyes.
‘Special effects. Don’t you feel like you’ve travelled to Earth?’
I held up the chains. ‘No.’
Her eyes turned to the nervous animals.
‘Got no room for baboons,’ Lady Adelaide said. ‘Nobody wants to fantasise about monkeys. Don’t want ’em. Can’t feed ’em. Go sell ’em on the street.’
‘No.’
‘No? Use ’em up yourself, then, hazybones. Or eat ’em. You look hungry enough.’
‘I’m not an addict,’ I said coldly. ‘I’m going home today. I can’t take them with me and they deserve better than a slow, painful death. You’ve got a rainforest. I’ve seen the brochure. I can hear the waterfall.’
She grimaced, her teeth stained with coffee, the ultimate status symbol on lightless Kvivik.
‘Baboons don’t live in rainforests. Don’t know much about Earth, do you?’
‘I was born there. And I know you keep lions in your savannah biome. I didn’t bring them here to be fresh meat.’
We’d been marine biologists, Elsa and I; freedom lovers with too much salt on our skin. Before we knew each others’ names, we’d made love beneath the research boat, naked but for the breathers at our throats, barely knowing where our bodies ended and blood-warm water began.
The water was not warm on Kvivik.
‘No wonder you’re having so much trouble holding onto your luck,’ Lady Adelaide said, but I saw her curiosity was piqued. ‘Tell me one thing that made you afraid, on Earth, that Kvivik doesn’t have, and I’ll take those baboons off your hands and set them free in my jungle.’
‘Heights,’ I said. ‘You’ve got trees here, but there the trees are taller than the Eye. I was afraid of falling, on Earth. Everyone’s afraid of falling.’
There was nothing on Kvivik taller than two or three stories, except for the Eye, and nobody was allowed to climb that. Lone Island had no rugged cliffs. It had no inland peaks. It was an artifice built big enough to protrude from the ocean, to supply Akranes with water. That was all.
‘Wish me luck,’ she said.
She would use luck to grow animals and plants from her antique, damaged genebank; without luck, she might unfreeze a hundred embryos and not have a single one start to divide.
‘No,’ I said.
Lady Adelaide took the baboons, grinning.
I walked briskly back along the pier. Enough time wasted. I had to get back to the station.
Movement in a tank stopped me in my tracks.
It was another Eartharium; this one a little less scrupulous than Lady Adelaide’s.
The animal on display had the lower half of a dugong and the upper half of a young woman. Her luck line was full. Silver eyes in a face which was a younger echo of Elsa’s. A mirror studded with diamonds lay abandoned on the bottom of the tank. I shook my head, trying to clear away the fog. Those silver eyes were vacant and enormous. She would have a dugong brain, and dugong eyes by extension. The law said that it was a human brain that made a thing human. This was not Elsa, not by a long stretch.
But the hair floated, as Elsa’s hair had floated. As it floated in my dreams, when I lay strapped in the dreamkeeper’s chair. Money was required by dreamkeepers, yes, to purchase the gas, but it was luck that brought the desired hallucination.
A little luck was all it would take to find her again in my waking dreams, healthy and whole.
I stared at the dugong until the robot rolled over to tell me the price.
‘I don’t want an hour in a private tank with her,’ I said, staring at the bot for a while, not wanting to understand what it had offered. Sex with animals was illegal, which meant that the dugong-girl was human. I pushed my face against the glass.
‘Did your husband abandon you, too?’ I murmured to that vacant-looking face. ‘You’ll get out, with a bit of luck. I’m getting out. I’m going home.’
Three hours later, they threw me out of Sir Kick’s dreamkeeper’s pavilion, all my luck utterly spent. The Eye was out. Kvivik’s sun, a cold, distant star, glittered in darkness. It rose and set a dozen times in each nightfall period. Sometimes a speck appeared against it; that speck was Akranes, where Elsa waited for me.
I wouldn’t see her tonight.
Clutching my thin knees, I stared at the water. Water that had seemed soft, until it broke Elsa’s back. We’d moved to Akranes, the desert planet, so that we’d never have to look at another ocean.
Only, one morning my hand faltered as it reached to catch her urine in the water recycler. I saw myself, a worker bee, fanning air to an immobile queen, and wondered at my existence. I looked down and saw that my luck line was full; that’s how long it had been since I’d taken any notice of myself, because you can always find a use for luck, when it’s there.
I took a six week contract with a dive outfit on Kvivik, leaving Elsa in respite care. Six weeks without using any of my luck would give me exactly enough for the home journey.
That was before the dreamkeepers tempted me. Before six weeks turned into six years, and by the time I pulled it together enough to try and get back, I looked like a hazybones, smelled like a sewer, and no security guard would lift a hand to help me when other street rats took my luck. Still, it was six years with the Elsa who had first come to me, in that warm, warm ocean back on Earth.
I lifted my shirt away from my chest and shivered. My luck line was nothing but a glowing blue pinprick in the skin directly over my heart. The well wishes of the nanny with the override pin and the harnesses, the farmer, the students and the fisherwoman had all been utterly wasted.
‘Tomorrow,’ I whispered.
Tomorrow, I was going to save every little scrap of luck. I was going to make it count. I’d be back on Akranes before eyeset.
Elsa was waiting for me. I was definitely leaving tomorrow.
Behind me, glass shattered.
I leaped to my feet and ran back down the pier. The neon glare of Lady Adelaide’s behind me stretched the shadows of my legs long enough to touch the wrecked tank. The dugong-woman had carved a great arc in the glass with the diamonds in her mirror, hit the weakened section with her weight and fallen through onto the wooden slats of the pier. The tank water, dark with blood, drained quickly through the gaps, melding with the global Kvivikian sea.
The bot should have flashed. Alarms should have jangled. Security guards should have rushed in from all directions.
‘Don’t have a husband,’ the dugong-girl gurgled, raising her face to me, ‘but I wished you would come back this way. I wished for the rush of water to wreck the robot.’
Her voice was like Elsa’s, a sound like drowning in air. I didn’t want to hear it. Not after my visit to Sir Kick’s, where Elsa’s voice had been pure and undamaged in my dreams.
I didn’t want the dugong-girl. She wasn’t mine to save. But she’d got out, just like I’d told her.
There was nothing for it but to take her to Lady Adelaide.
I hesitated. Steam still rose from the boards where the warm water had soaked them. Warm like an Earth sea, like the Kvivikian sea reportedly was down on the sea floor near the hydrothermal vents, but not here at the lightless, barely-liquid surface. I doubted the dugong-girl would survive if I just rolled her off the pier and into the ocean.
‘I’m bleeding,’ she said. ‘The glass.’
There was nobody around. Perhaps it had been part of her wish. By the time I dragged her to the crystal arch, there were more cuts and splinters in her tail and the torpedo-shape of her torso.
Again, the bot told me the price.
Again, I told it I wanted to trade, my arms numb from the weight of the girl.
‘I can’t see,’ she said, her silver eyes vacant.
‘Me neither,’ I cried as the heat and light of the rattler seemed to consume us.
I opened my eyes when I sensed the wall of the carriage falling. Lady Adelaide stood there, her mouth puckered angrily. Four tall women in pale green tunics and silent shoes prowled behind her.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I said.
‘And perhaps nobody can undo it,’ Adelaide said sourly, ‘but I intend to try. Take her.’
The tall women took the dugong-girl from me and carried her down a covert, black-tiled tunnel, while Lady Adelaide’s dismissive wave sent me in the opposite direction, into the depths of the Eartharium.
I hated it.
It was hateful being reminded of Earth. That was why we had moved to Akranes. In the waterfall room, a great, glittering ceiling screened cottony clouds sailing through aquamarine skies. The outstretched green of jungle trees brushed the screens in places. Other trees were heavy with colourful fruit. Monkeys played and butterflies flew.
I overcame my loathing enough to realise my baboons weren’t there.
‘We had a bargain, old witch!’ I whispered, and went into the next room to search them out.
There were no baboons in the mock savannah with its locked-in pride of yellow-eyed lions. There were none in the city street, the car race room or the cathedral. No baboons played in the meadow with its poppies and haystacks, nor the birch grove with its moss and grazing reindeer.
I gritted my teeth and checked the room with the tropical island surrounded by tame coral reef. Then I checked it again, hating it, hating it, until I was completely certain there were no baboons hidden anywhere.
I marched down the black tiled corridor.
At the end of it, a treatment room with weigh scales and a bolted pharmacy gave way to a white laboratory where the four women in pale green washed the half-submerged, anaesthetised dugong-girl’s wounds.
‘Why are you still here?’ Lady Adelaide snapped without looking away from a sequencer screen.
‘The baboons,’ I said.
‘What baboons?’
‘The two baboons I brought here today. You said you’d care for them and now they’re gone. I can’t trust you to look after her. I’m taking her back to the other Eartharium.’
The four women narrowed their eyes at me, but Lady Adelaide still didn’t look up.
‘The whorehouse, you mean.’
‘What did you do with them?’ I shouted. I was stupid, so stupid to have handed them over. Stupid as well as frightened and weak. ‘Fed them to the lions after all?’
‘The baboons are in the waterfall room.’
‘They’re not!’
‘Not here. In that same waterfall room that’s in my Eartharium on another Kvivik. One parallel to this one. One that’s not so crowded. I sent them in my rattler.’
‘You can’t send baboons anywhere. You can’t use a rattler without luck!’
At last, she looked directly at me. Her sour mouth was even more puckered than it had been before.
‘What do you think luck is, hazybones? Why do you think we have luck in this system and nowhere else? It’s made by the red rattlers.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. How can they make luck and use luck at the same time?’
‘Luck is conserved like energy. Don’t they teach you anything on Earth?’
‘They don’t teach us about luck. Why would they?’
‘Yet you never thought to wonder how you were able to first leave the Earth system by red rattler, with no luck of your own, before your luck line had even appeared?’
Stupid. ‘No. All I knew was that it only worked when travelling to or from Akranes system.’
‘When you wish for the kindness of strangers, you’re not making them kinder, you’re dragging through a kinder version of that person from a parallel world, just for an instant.’
‘You’re lying. That can’t be true. Otherwise I’d be able to wish a healed version of my Elsa through from another world and she’d be able to walk and breathe by herself—’
‘Your Elsa, is it?’ Adelaide said derisively.
I straightened my shoulders. I wished myself to be strong, even though I had no luck to spend.
‘Yes.’
‘Interesting. Well, the truth is, you could wish for a well version of her, but she’d only be superposed for a fraction of a second before springing back again to the place she belongs. That’s long enough to make a decision, change her mind, but not for her to stand or speak.’
‘But the baboons. They’re staying where you put them.’
She waved her hand in the air as though swatting him away.
‘I didn’t put them there by wishing. I’ve made a few adjustments to my personal red rattler. Instead of having the brain of some condemned criminal embedded into it to fill the role of the intelligent observer, I’ve embedded a replica of my own brain, which is linked to me for as long as I myself am not observed, that is, so long as I do not use the machine myself.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, but hope was brimming up in me. The gist of what she was saying was starting to sink in. All this time, I’d been saving luck to try to get home, when one of Kvivik’s most reclusive and despised inhabitants was sitting on a way for me to get somewhere even better.
‘I don’t expect you to. I have no security guards here because anyone with ill-intent gets sent by my entryway rattler to a version of the Eartharium where the lions are not tethered. It’s impossible for someone to be observed down to their constituent parts and not have their motives completely exposed. Unfortunately, it means I have no lackeys to eject you. I do wish you would go away all by yourself.’
And she turned her attention back to the screen.
I should have gone without another word, but the possibility that my dreamkeeper’s delusions might become real hung before me, too tantalising to turn away from.
‘How much would I have to pay,’ I asked, ‘for you to send me to the place where Elsa is okay?’
‘You’d have to work for me, every day for the rest of your life, to be able to afford it. And it wouldn’t even be you, it would be your unlucky sod of a swap.’
‘My swap? What’s that?’
‘If you want to go to a world where she is both alive and will recognise you, you can’t go to one where you’re dead or never born, and so to avoid superposition, another version of you would be swapped through. Would you want that unsuspecting, previously happy man working off your debt?’
‘Yes!’
‘Get out,’ she roared. ‘I won’t have slavery here. Not for this girl and not for the alternate you that you’re willing to sell. Go!’
Leaving the Eartharium was like coming out of a dream. My fading hope kicked and struggled, all but extinguished. Security guards buzzed around the broken glass of the dugong-girl’s tank, but I couldn’t concentrate on them.
I looked at the crystal arch again and thought: If I went into that rattler again with intent to kill Lady Adelaide, it would send me to another world. I’d get away from the lions. I’d get out and I’d go home and Elsa would be healthy. Everything would be right again. Assuming Elsa was healthy in that world.
It was worth the risk, wasn’t it?
Working up a murderous rage wasn’t natural to me. I summoned all my anger at her refusal to help me. I tried to picture what I’d hit her with. Fists would be enough. She was just an old woman. I didn’t have the entry fee so I pushed past the robot, ignoring the alarm, and stormed into the rattler, white-knuckled.
Overpowering light. Overpowering heat.
When the ramp dropped down, there was nobody waiting. I pressed myself against the wall of the rattler, waiting for my eyes to adjust, wary of lions.
I peered into the atrium and Lady Adelaide was there, in false spiderlace and pearly-scaled sea-dragon, tapping her foot impatiently.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘You’re late. Bring it.’
Bewildered, I followed her down the black-tiled corridor.
In the white laboratory, Elsa lay on her side, anaesthetised and partially-submerged, the water taking her weight while Lady Adelaide and her assistants reconstructed her spinal cord.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ the old woman said. ‘Wish me luck.’
I pulled up my shirt. My luck line was empty.
‘You’re so predictable,’ she said. ‘You’ve been to a dreamkeeper pavilion. It’s as though you don’t have any free will at all. As though you don’t have any luck at all. How are you going to pay me back if you keep doing this?’
I stared at her, horrified. Something had gone wrong. This wasn’t the world with the lions. I must not be capable of murdering Lady Adelaide, after all. And now some other of my selves had sold me into slavery. It was exactly what I’d been prepared to do to one of them.
‘Pay you back?’ I stammered.
Her mouth puckered in consternation.
‘Another swap, is it, then? You’re all so selfish. Yes, pay me back! You brought your disabled wife to me and begged me to cure her, luck knows how you found out I was capable. I told you I would still need a lot of luck to be successful and you agreed to go skimming. To bring me a full luck line every day.’
I looked down, astonished to find myself wearing skimmer’s gear. There was a broken seashell on a chain around my neck. The other half was on the table beside the surgical tank, resting on top of Elsa’s folded clothes.
‘Skimming,’ I stammered.
‘Yes, skimming. It’s what you do every day. And then you waste it on dreams before you can walk from Pier One to here. This will not do.’
‘I’ll do better,’ I said, backing away from her. ‘I’m not weak. Someone else’s wishes—’
But there was a sharp sting in the back of my neck, and I turned to see one of the assistants in a pale pink tunic withdrawing the disposable applicator of an override pin.
‘You give me no choice,’ Adelaide said grimly. ‘The surgery cannot succeed without luck.’
‘I don’t need this,’ I said, fumbling at the head of the pin.
But maybe I did. Maybe I just wished that I didn’t.
I stumbled back out into the pitch darkness, the pin urging me on in search of good fortune.