CHAPTER THREE
Steward went through the heavy security in front of the condeco’s door and registered as a guest, a process that included thumbprinting an agreement to comply with the rules of the condecology’s constitution. As usual, this was based on the concept of “self-limiting options,” which so far as Steward could tell meant the inhabitants mutually agreed not to think about certain aspects of reality that might prove troubling. The rules here were fairly liberal, Steward saw, and forbade him to possess or distribute weapons, certain recreational drugs, named types of religious or political literature, proscribed software, and the more extreme forms of vidporn. Public nudity was forbidden, cohabitation was all right. Watching vid or headvid on channels not licensed by the condeco was grounds for expulsion. Steward was given a six weeks’ temporary pass, took the elevator to Ardala’s apartment. Once there, he walked among the small rooms, just orienting himself.
The apartment had all the signs of the upwardly mobile: tasteful furniture, small alloy-and-crystal tables, a flat liquid-crystal video display hung on the wall. Abstract wall paintings, all desert tones, that were careful not to make any kind of statement.
The intention of the decor—the careful abstraction of all hint of personality—was carelessly sabotaged by the artifacts of habitation: Ardala’s laundry scattered over the furniture, a few of her niece’s bright plastic toys sitting where her niece had left them, the jumble of filled ashtrays and cigarette lighters, the wineglasses misted with fingerprints, the cream blur of scansheet printouts, half-worked crosswords, and dogeared issues of magazines called Gals and Guys, which turned out to be weekly publications in which the unemployed advertised their talents. A turtle-shaped floor-cleaning robot wandered hopelessly among the ruins. The only place that was spotless was the kitchen, which she apparently never used. Steward looked in the refrigerator and found only wine and a few vegetables.
Steward remembered furnishing the apartment in Kingston he’d shared with Natalie—how they went to fifteen stores before they could agree on a kitchen table, a rectangular transparency supported by a single twisting column of orbital alloy, seeming too thin to support the weight of the glass…. It had been the first piece of furniture Steward had ever bought new.
Steward and Natalie had always kept their series of apartments spotless, the glass table shining. It had seemed a sort of military virtue to care for their equipment.
He hadn’t really noticed the litter the first time he’d come here. The lights had been off when they came in and never really got turned on. The second time, he’d been bothered. He was still thinking like an Icehawk.
Now he didn’t mind at all. He was something else now.
He paced across the carpet. Fabric scratched his bare feet. His mind hummed, a blur of ideas that hadn’t yet taken shape, flickering, assembling, dissolving without his conscious thought, moving against a background of stars.
His mind elsewhere, he stepped out for supplies. He bought the makings for salmon en croûte and, just because he felt like celebrating, two bottles of champagne. There weren’t any glasses, so he washed the dishes.
Ardala came home with perspiration smearing her butterfly-wing makeup and dark sweat stains under her arms. Steward poured her a glass of champagne while she cursed her boss, the heat wave that Steward hadn’t noticed, the crowds after work, the awfulness of the boring people she met in the elevator. She threw her clothes into the bedroom, drew a cool bath, and drank the champagne. Steward, carrying the bottle, followed her into the bathroom. It smelled of the scented oil she’d added to the bath. He watched Ardala as he poured champagne for her, the small tanned breasts with their nipples that bobbed in and out of the water, the knees rising like islets, the dark submerged pubic moss. He put the bottle down and began to pull off his shirt.
He remembered waves slapping at his shoulders as he lay atop Natalie on the shelving sand of Port Royal, partly hidden from view by pink and turquoise Jamaican boats bobbing in the warm bay…. About a hundred yards away a congregation of local Pentecostals was singing songs about rapture and redemption and the Glory of the Coming of the Lord, their high-pitched keening cries of praise echoing Natalie’s salt moans. Across the bay the Coherent Light ziggurat glowed in black self-contained hubris. Fish struck painlessly at their legs and thighs. The night had seemed full of certainty and love. Under them was the Port Royal of Henry Morgan, built on buccaneer pride and booty, which a backhand swipe of history had slid right into the warm welcoming sea, just as the whirlwind that was Sheol would sweep away Steward, Natalie, the certainty that was Coherent Light, the certainty and pride that had come from humanity’s sole possession of the vast universe….
“Hey,” Ardala said. “This hurts my back.”
“Okay,” Steward said. “Let’s switch places.”
From his position Steward admired the arch of Ardala’s throat as she threw her head back, eyes closed, intent on her pleasure. Her sun-browned skin outlined the hollows of her clavicles, the bony points of her shoulders. When she came, she pushed her arm under his head and bent over him, her back arching, to make her choked whimpers right into his ear…. He put his arms around her, holding her close. The sensation of her breath on his ear, the sounds she was making, brought him to a sudden, unexpected climax. He heard, for a moment, the voice of the whirlwind.
They finished the bottle of champagne lying in the bath, Ardala half-lying on him, her arm still under his head. Little threads of sperm floated densely in the water amid rainbow dots of bath oil. Ardala stirred the sperm with a finger. “Might as well give the homunculi a ride,” she said. “One last thrill before they go down the drain.”
“The salmon should be ready,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“You should have saved your money,” Ardala said. “I know you don’t have much. From now on, have dinner on me.”
“I wanted to.”
“What am I going to do with all that wheat flour you bought? I never bake.”
She rose, water sliding in rainbow sheets down her flanks, and Steward kissed her, crawled out of the bath, and reached for a towel. He went to the kitchen, put their dinner on plates, and opened the other bottle of champagne. He brought the bottle back into the bathroom. Ardala had wrapped herself in one towel and was rubbing her hair with another. He poured champagne for her. She dropped the towel and took her glass. She drank, combed her hair, followed him to where he’d set dinner.
“I’m going to try to get a job in one of the policorps,” Steward said after they’d eaten.
Ardala looked up at him and crossed one leg over the other. Behind where she sat on a white plastic chair, a self-polarizing window resisted the sun, darkening the view of a bright aluminum-alloy expressway headed south to Phoenix.
“You don’t have the money to buy in, right?” she asked. “You could do okay on their exam, but your knowledge is fifteen years out of date and you won’t be in the two percent they take for free. What’s left is terran indentureship, and that takes years.”
“An Outward Policorps. Starbright seems like a good one. Into transportation. I think I’d like to travel.”
Ardala frowned and reached across the table for a Xanadu, a blend of marijuana and mentholated tobacco. She flicked on a lighter. “You haven’t been listening.”
“Yeah, I have. But I just want to get into space. I’ll figure out a way.”
She drew on her cigarette and looked moodily out the window, where the brilliant serpent writhed its way to the Valley of the Sun. With her thumb, she rubbed an invisible smudge between her eyebrows. “Is space all that great?” she asked. She held out her cigarette.
“It’s where things are.” Where, he thought, the answers are.
She looked at him. “Where Natalie is?”
Steward didn’t answer. He took the cigarette and drew on it deeply, welcoming the invasion of THC and carcinogens. Xanadus were one of the worst things in the world to smoke, since holding in the marijuana smoke gave the tobacco time to poison lung tissue. The Canards, being what they were, had loved Xanadus for just that reason.
Ardala sighed. “Okay,” she said, “I’ve got some material in my office. It’ll help you study for the tests. Maybe you’ll get lucky and qualify for waste disposal tech on Ricot.”
The name of the artificial planetoid sent a cool thrill through Steward’s nerves.
“Ricot’s all right,” he said. There were answers there.
*
The next morning, after Ardala left, Steward worked the weights in the condeco’s health club, showered, dressed, decided he didn’t want to breakfast alone. He didn’t like the look of the coffee shops in the condeco: too much stained wood, soundproofing, tasteful music, conservatively dressed professionals reading the type of scansheets that weren’t forbidden by the constitution. He headed north into the old city and found a coffee shop with a broken holographic sign that read friendl es rest rant in tow . The booths were upholstered in bright orange Jovian plastic, and the waitress was an overweight woman who greeted him with a scowl.
After eating, he smoked a Xanadu with his coffee and watched the scowling waitress cope with a Chinese visitor who thought her chicken fried steak was supposed to have something to do with chicken. The Chinese woman thought she was being cheated, but her English wasn’t up to expressing her outrage.
Steward leaned back in his booth and grinned. He’d made the same mistake the first time he’d visited the United States.
The problem resolved itself with the appearance of the manager, and Steward finished his coffee. He strolled around the old town, watching the battered old storefronts, the people, old men selling lottery tickets and scansheets, young hustlers wearing T-shirts with liquid-crystal displays that advertised their product: software, literature you couldn’t get in condecos, drugs. Steward remembered scenes from Marseilles, the way the street had seemed more intense there, the dealing more critical—even the colors had seemed brighter. He sensed that these people were just going through the motions—it didn’t matter to them. America hadn’t had a war in 100 years. These people hadn’t been on the edge of starvation for months at a time; they hadn’t had to deal to survive. They hadn’t been through Petit Galop.
America was getting old, he thought. Like the rest of Earth. Absorbing fashions brought down from space, ways of life—condecologies, ideologies—that were imitations of the way people lived in a vacuum. Steward’s olive skin was fashionable because olive skin had a more interesting texture to those who lived in cultures that never saw sunlight, and heavy makeup was fashionable for the same reason. Earth had shot its bolt. Space was where things mattered now, like it or not.
He bought a scansheet and walked into one of the wilderness parks that cut the city and sat on a grassy slope. In the bright cloudless sky he could see a pattern of fixed stars, orbital factories, and habitats. One of them, he knew, was the orbital complex where Natalie lived now. He wondered which star was hers, what she looked like now, after fifteen years had passed, years that he hadn’t known. He felt the brightening pain in his throat and nose, and lowered his eyes to the street. Sadness fell on him like rain.
*
“So how did you end up in Canard Chronique?” Ardala asked later.
“Canards Chronique,” he corrected. They were stretched out in bed, Ardala on her stomach, propped up on her elbows while reading this week’s copy of Guys and taking notes. He was reading some of the study material she’d brought with her. “It has a double meaning, either Chronic Ducks or Chronic Hoaxes. Which had a lot to do with their ethic.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“How I got in? It’s all the fault of my African grandmother.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Steward,” Ardala said.
He put a marker in the book and put it down. “Okay. My African grandmother got educated in Canada and fell in love with cold climates, so she became an arctic geologist. Then she fell in love with this Scotsman she met in Novaya Zemlya, who was also in love with the arctic, et cetera. Their second son hated snow and permafrost, which was all he ever saw when he was a kid, so he moved to the Mediterranean, where he married my mother, who was from Marseilles. He had himself a good job in Nice, working as an indentured economist for Far Jewel while my mother was going to school.” Steward frowned at the opposite wall. He was trying to decide what attitude to take, which personality to use for this. “He got killed during Petit Galop,” he said.
“I’ve heard of that.”
Heard of it, Steward thought. Europe’s collapse into anarchy following a failed attempt to remodel its sociology along the lines suggested by a space-dwelling policorp. Earth had larger populations than the policorps and less fragile ecological systems; sometimes the policorps ran programs down the gravity well to see if they’d work, before going to the trouble of restructuring themselves along similar patterns. The possibilities inherent in such tampering were one of the reasons the policorps bothered with Earth at all.
But the thing had gone wrong, Europe being more fragile than anyone knew, and people—policorp people, and citizens, and a lot of presumable innocents—all had paid the penalty.
How, Steward wondered, to tell Ardala about it? A Canard would just shrug. Everybody in Marseilles had it bad; everybody had a father or mother who was dead, or a sister or brother or at least an uncle or aunt. That attitude might seem callous to an American, though. Stewart decided just to tell it straight out. “It was bad, particularly down south. Some of the rioters were up on the tall policorp ecodromes, dropping big plate-glass windows on the people below. They explode like grenades, you know? That’s how my father died, he and a couple thousand others, all in one afternoon. Not that it’s likely he would have survived anyway—he had biological implants, a hand modified for microcircuitry work and head sockets to take a DNA-computer interface. He hadn’t had his skull capacity increased or the extra brain tissue, but he’d had the superchargers put into his neck for an expanded brain. Anyone with that kind of hardware wouldn’t get past the gangs’ metal detectors and would end up in front of a firing squad.”
“Jesus. People here have been taking implants for a hundred years. What was so bad about it?”
This time Steward couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “It was part of Far Jewel’s program, so it was evil. The modified people were the only ones the mob could find…the decision-makers were living in the asteroid belt and out of reach. Far Jewel’s facilities in France were gutted, so suddenly there wasn’t employment for all their people or for their survivors. Far Jewel washed its hands of the whole experiment once things went bad. The French government got chased to Portugal, so there wasn’t any help for people like my mother and me. We ended up moving to Marseilles, to live with my aunt. And even then we almost starved.” Steward looked at her. “You got any Xanadus left?”
“In my shirt pocket. I heard some people ate each other. That true?”
Steward frowned. “I’d believe it,” he said. “None of that was going down where I was living, though. The gangs kept things going.”
“The Canards came to the rescue?”
“Yes.” Steward stood, moved toward the chair where Ardala had thrown her shirt. He found the last Xanadu and began looking for the ashtray. “The teen gangs were running the city, more or less,” he said. “The Old Quarter, anyway. Keeping power and water running for people who weren’t living in ecodromes. But most of them had all sorts of funny French ideas about honor and turf and ideology—Jesus, half the gang fights weren’t even fights, just a bunch of kids screaming political slogans at one another. Issuing manifestos over the public datanets. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Société Bijoux or the New Rejuve Movement or Genetic Behaviorism. The Canards weren’t asking for that kind of loyalty. They just wanted to survive and get rich and have a few laughs at the expense of the kids who were taking it all so seriously.”
He found the ashtray and brought it back to bed with him. He lit the cigarette and leaned back against the pillows.
“Did you get rich?” Ardala asked.
He put the lighter on the bedside table. “I was a good boy and gave it all to my mother. She bought her way into an ecodrome about the time I enlisted in CL.”
“Sort of rich, then.”
Steward inhaled, closed his eyes. “The Canards wanted to be middlemen. They figured that’s where the money was. Tried to know who was putting moves in certain directions, what the policorps were up to, where to find certain commodities. Acted as brokers, collected a percentage. Never allied with any of the other gangs. And we’d sabotage the others, too, just for fun. Issue funny absurdist manifestos over other gangs’ signatures, that kind of thing.”
“What happened to them?”
“Mostly they got killed. The gangs had a war. Being in the middle, the Canards were right in the crossfire. They’d never made any friends, so they were nothing but stationary targets. I took what I’d made and split for Coherent Light.” He grinned. “The other Canards would have approved, I think. They always tried to do the smart thing.”
“And CL actually let you in.”
“I fit the profile.”
“A profile for an extinct policorp. Great.” She closed the issue of Guys and threw the magazine off the bed. “I can’t imagine you being in a gang. When you lived next door to me you were such a good soldier. Such a”—she shrugged her shoulders—“such a straight arrow. You know. Everything was always tidy and in its place. You were always full of Coherent Light’s programs for this and that. Making the galaxy a safer, brighter place.”
“After what I saw in Nice and Marseilles, Coherent Light made a lot of sense. Seemed to, anyway. Besides,” he added, “there’s not so much between a good soldier and a good gang member. A matter of style, mostly.”
“Huh.” She reached out for the cigarette and took it from his fingers. “What were you like, back then?”
“Skinny. Intense.”
“You’re still skinny and intense. If it weren’t for the muscles, you’d be just a wisp.”
“Intense maybe. But this body’s been fed. My former body was on the edge of starvation for a lot of years. I was fond of big shades and raw silk jackets and high-topped sneakers with little red balls on the sides. I had a nice home comp with all the latest in stolen software. I chain-smoked Xanadus and traveled on a matte-black fuel-cell scooter. The usual hustler stuff.”
Odd to think of that as being over twenty years ago. In memory it wasn’t so long. A past that hadn’t even got fuzzy.
“Hell. Motherfucker.” The Xanadu had burned her fingers. She squashed it in the ashtray, too fast, spilling ashes on the bed. Then she was cursing on her hands and knees, bent over, brushing the ashes off the bed onto the floor. Steward watched the way her spine flexed along her supple back, how her haunches moved as she shifted her weight, the muscles in each thigh tautening alternately, a play of shadow and motion.
He remembered Natalie, the way she moved, sure of herself, graceful, remembering how she used to slide between the covers as if they were a lover’s arms…. Hell, he thought, if I was as smart as I think I am, I wouldn’t have lost her.
Stupidity’s something you learn to live with, he thought, just like everything else.
*
Morning, next day. Steward sat in the friendl es rest rant, working on his second cup of coffee. It seemed to Steward that he could feel the caffeine moving through his body, switching on first one system, then another. Little bits of his consciousness reawakening, blinking on like a row of little green lights giving a GO signal. A half-eaten sweet roll sat on a plate in front of him. Around him the midmorning coffee-shop crowd lazed over scansheet printouts, read the news, yawned, stretched.
Steward raised his head to signal the waitress for another cup of coffee, saw a profile moving along the distant aisle between the waitress’s station and his window booth, and suddenly the little row of GO lights in his mind was flashing on and off in hot synchrony, green, yellow, red. His nerves burned. He turned in his seat to watch the man as he walked down the aisle and sat in a corner booth, followed by the waitress with a coffeepot. Steward craned his neck for a view of the man’s face. The waitress was standing in the way, pouring coffee. Steward began to feel foolish. A stranger in an out-of-the-way coffee shop, a chance resemblance, and he was beginning to see ghosts.
The waitress moved out of the way. Steward looked at the man’s face and felt his mouth go dry. He turned, finished his coffee in a gulp, and stood. He swayed. His balance seemed a little off. He walked down the long aisle, seeing the man’s face foreshortening toward him. Nerves leaped in Steward’s hands, his legs.
The man looked up as he raised his coffee cup. He was a dark-skinned European with medium-length hair, dressed tidily in a dark short-sleeved suit over a collarless light blue shirt. His arms were gaunt, wiry. His skin was parchment stretched over bone, tied in place with the blue ropes of veins. He wore a graying mustache that was unfamiliar. Steward felt a touch of uncertainty. His memory was of another man, younger, well-muscled, smiling. Then he saw a white splash on a biceps where a tattoo had been removed, and uncertainty was over.
He felt himself teetering on the edge of something, as if the ground under him was about to spill away, dropping him into a new place, somewhere uncertain, where the rules were different and he would have to learn them as he moved.
“Griffith,” Steward said.
The coffee cup stopped halfway to the man’s mouth. His wet eyes glistened, surrounded by dark lines. New eyes. Ghost eyes.
“Steward,” he muttered, apparently to himself. He put the cup down without moving his glance. His voice was harsh, grating. Steward remembered him singing, a baritone voice that rang from the metal walls of Steward’s apartment in the Coherent Light Mars Orbital Complex. Half the songs were in Welsh and sounded like hymns, the other half were filthy rugby songs. The voice was different now.
“Jesus,” Griffith said. A grin began moving across his face, moving in an odd way, not all at once but jerkily, invading Griffith’s face zone by zone. “You caught me by surprise. You look good, Captain. Sit down.”
Captain? Steward thought.
Griffith’s smile faded. His face clouded over at the cold touch of memory. “I haven’t seen you since the Icehawks,” he said. “Not since we came back from Sheol.”