Authors: Gregory Benford
First, he was in a mood to splash around in a shower—the natives here had tapped
Argo
into their own apparently plentiful supply—and get outside. The stubby city was more open than the ship’s helical corridors,
and he needed spaces, range. He got himself spruced up as fast as he could.
He had expected to be summoned to see the Cap’n, but his comm line was silent. As he strode through the sloped corridors,
fidgety from confinement and depressed in general, nobody seemed interested in talking to him. Teams worked to flush and fix
up
Argo
; even in port, ship work was never finished.
When he struck up a few conversations, crew members discovered pressing business elsewhere. Finally he decided to not call
Besen. She might not understand that he just wanted some distance for a while, a few hours.
As he approached the main lock something looked funny. There were a dozen of the dwarf natives talking to the watch under-officers,
haggling and trying to cull favors—and they all stopped abruptly as he came near. The Lieutenant in charge stiffly told Toby
that there was a hold on his movements. He wasn’t to leave the ship.
That got his back up, of course. He mulled over going to see Quath, to get the drift of what was happening, and then he remembered
the damaged farm domes. In the big balloon-shaped dome devoted to grain crops, he had once tried to fix a small personnel
vent that didn’t seal quite right. It probably still didn’t, but now there was positive pressure outside.
He got there without anybody paying any obvious attention. Sure enough, the vent popped free with just a little wrench work.
Somehow the docking fields held the ship delicately isolated from nearby decks. Soft, but firm if you pushed on them. They
brushed him gently aside, like a good-natured wind holding him aloft.
He slipped down, around the bulging slick skin of the dome, and dropped into shadows below
Argo
’s hovering hulk. Within moments he had made his way through the reception area, nodding to the bored attendants—and was out,
away, into the gray city.
It was a shock. Rather than the glum, sour streets he remembered, these thronged with life—stalls and shops and incessant
chattering that ricocheted from every avenue. This showed how stilted and planned their reception had been before, all part
of their bargaining strategy.
Toby wandered, stunned. He had spent days worrying and fretting, and now all that seemed to drop away. It had been many years
since he had simply let himself go, ambling aimlessly. Then it struck him—not since the Citadel. Not since the spring celebration
when his grandfather Abraham had financed a ball-throwing contest between the generations, at a sports booth in the Citadel
Square. Sweaty work, cheering and catcalls, itchy dust from many feet. And there had been hot, piping sweet-churns in paper
bags, cool drinks, laughter, grins.
The memories made him bite his lip, and he plunged into the busy crowds. A few people gave him startled looks, but most ignored
his size and strange jumpsuit. It took a while to get used to markets, deals, the quick calculus of value. What Toby thought
of as just plain things had a special word, making them somehow better—“goods.” You got “goods” with money, then had to make
some other “good” to replace the money you spent. He wondered how you got a “bad” or maybe a “better,” but nobody spoke of
such things.
He had credit, it seemed, from a first payment the judge had given all Bishops days before. He minded it wisely. This wasn’t
like the bartering between Families he had known back on Snowglade. There you could get a syntho-shirt in trade for two of
your self-made, gleaming carbon-steel knives, say. Then you had to find somebody who needed knives before you could get something
else. Money was easier, really—you just decided whether the “good” was worth so many of the little round coins, or not. Simple.
But the bustle this conjured up here! The place was aswarm to bursting with shopkeepers and hawkers, fortune-tellers, merchants,
the nimble-fingered and sadly wise, peddlers, grifters, senso artists, back-alley investment counselors, doxies of sullen
smiles, men and women with “goods” hidden in their shirtsleeves or ballooning pantaloons, and “bads” alike in their hearts.
You could buy anything, from a yellow powder that addicted you for life inside of two minutes, to a strange, luminous alien
glassware—which proved to be the alien itself, when he touched it.
Some had learned how to beg for ready cash, too. Sitting in a back alley eating a treat, he watched a one-eyed woman who saw
better than most could with two. She was getting dressed for her trade and, for a small coin, let Toby watch. Smooth-faced,
she daubed on makeup, adding hideous blue hollows under the eyes. A light, comfortable sheath slid over her calf, making her
spider-walk like a cripple.
Toby watched her set up shop on a busy corner. People threw her coins and looked away. Somehow the illogic of it—surely there
were treatments for such ailments?—didn’t rob the trade of a jot of its credibility. Toby couldn’t fathom why, but then glimpsed
a possibility. She was providing a form of ego-boosting entertainment. Looking at her miserable self, passersby could feel
a rush of gladness: troubled they might be, but not
that
badly. She was in show business.
These weren’t the demigods who made the Chandeliers, no.
There was a sprawling tangle of streets designed to separate people looking for amusement from their cash. Games, booths,
things to throw at for a prize—and others where somebody got to throw at you. Dance halls open eternally, fever-bright, with
syntho-music that wound around on a long loop, filming the air with prickly scents and startling pheromone-triggers. Toby
lingered in one, and then in a brief moment when the effects turned off (required by law), he saw what was happening to him
and his pocket change. He went back to wandering the streets, which was at least cheaper, though his nervous system kept trying
to make his feet circle back.
There were science games and events, operating right next to fortune-tellers, a tribute to humanity’s ability to believe two
contradictory things at once. Hawkers of wonders. Gambling. Feats of strength (care to try?). Dispensers of drugs and even
alcohol, all legal and heavily taxed to offset their probable social effects. Soft drink stands, one offering an ancient dark
bubbly fluid that Toby hated and threw away, shocking some kids. They seemed insulted that he hadn’t liked the authentic folk
treat, Koca-Koola, rich and true. But the paprika was enough to turn his tongue.
He began to get the sense of a city again, after years on the move. Citadel Bishop had been a rambling, dusty pueblo on a
canyon floor. It had water-starved gardens and one broad plaza—nothing compared with this. He had seen ruins of a lesser Arcology
at a distance—the mechs were stripping it for materials at the time—and this place resembled that.
The brisk order reminded him of how restful it was to cook a meal, knowing that lamp oil or salt was just around a corner,
available. Of how a girl, crossing a street, never paused but swung her head both ways before stepping off the curb. Of how
hypnotizing it had been, as a boy, to sit at an upstairs window and watch the people parade past on a sidewalk, oblivious
that they were passing actors in his imaginary dramas. Cities—a magical compression of humanity, a vessel he could learn.
Toby imagined that his new language-chip must be glowing white-hot, with all the use he was giving it. No set of rigid digital
rules can blanket a sprawling, living language, any more than a fine silk handkerchief can cover a slattern. Most of what
Toby heard was quick, vivid, direct. Fine for bargaining, but not nuances. He knew as little of those as a dog does of doggerel.
Tradeswomen gave him an eye and tried to guess his birthplace from his vowels, thinking he had come from places named Ragpicker,
or Avalon, or Tuscaloosa. From his size alone they knew he was from the Hunker Down Families, shaped by mech war and gravity,
but they guessed Jacks or Queens, not Bishops or Knights.
There was a band of kids his own age that showed passing, mild interest in where he was from, what he had seen—and then quickly
focused back on their own amusements. Their talk was quick, amusing, slangy, hard to follow. Mostly they just lounged around
scruffy back alleys, absorbed, tinkering with gadgets.
They wore padded goggles, headphones, gloves and boots, curiously heavy things. Toby tried them on while they snickered knowingly,
and found himself immersed in a sensorium of a forest. Big animals came charging out of the thickets, roaring and flashing
huge teeth. A fierce cat-creature with tawny fur bowled Toby over—an odd sensation, because he also could feel himself still
standing upright, while his eyes and ears told him that he was tumbling head over heels.
After a few minutes he got the knack of this game, though, and started shooting at the animals. They were pretty easy to hit.
He tired of that and so tossed aside the weapon he had found in his pseudo-hand. He wrestled the next animal, a big lizard
with hot red eyes. It pseudo-scratched and bit him, painful, slashing—all real enough impressions, but somehow disconnected
because Toby knew they weren’t anything more than electrical stimuli from a machine, blurred and oddly hollow.
Then it struck him—his own in-built systems did this, but finer-grained. His eyes could ratchet through the spectrum, pick
up Dopplered targets, fix ranges and calibrations with the blink of an eyelid, a touch of a tongue to the right tooth. His
servos cut in without prompting. All specialized survival gear, added to him before he could do more than squall and fill
his diapers.
But here, such skills were exotic, down-wonder stuff. Other uses of the same tech were playthings.
He threw the big scabby lizard a few times and it threw him, until he got tired of the putrid reek of the leathery green skin,
a stench of the rotting meat wedged in its teeth. The kids were there in the jungle around him, shooting and laughing and
running around—all without having to do anything for real, or even move their own legs or arms.
They liked Toby’s idea of wrestling the animals, and one of them got mock-crushed by a huge leprous rat with purple whiskers.
But then Toby tired of that, too, and took his helmet off. The kids stayed in the game, though, their arms and legs jerking
with fake hits and kicks, fingers tightening around imaginary triggers, killing ghost-creatures that seethed before their
blinded eyes. He sat and watched them for a while, slumped into doorways, clasped in momentary action, thrilling to pseudo-lives
they could lead as an amusement.
They were fun kids, but to them the world was just a bunch of signs and symbols and electronic fakery. They had elaborate,
hip reasons why their world was better than the crude press of slow-witted reality—a philosophy, Toby thought, for people
who spent too much time indoors. He wandered off and went for a real walk through a real park and though there were no exciting
big green lizards, he liked it better.
That was where Quath found him. The hulking mass did not need to fight the crowds; they got out of the way. And Toby knew
she was coming before he even saw her. Into his sensonium pushed a brooding, anxious curtain. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
“By you, anyway, big-bug,” Toby said to cover his surprise. “People give you any trouble getting here?”
“That big, I guess you can not notice whatever you like. Then too, I don’t think the devil himself on red stilts would turn
many heads here.”
Quath clanked and squeaked and many-legged her way into a sitting posture, which Toby knew
was a sign that she was serious. Her great head lowered to get under a willowy tree limb. you in your cell.>
“You couldn’t have gotten in the door,” Toby said with a lightness he didn’t feel.
“What’d they want to know? I mean, after they’d read our Legacies?” Toby asked bitterly.
“You told them?”
“Mechs get in here much?”
“They’d better be pretty fine ones.” Toby liked the lush greenery of this park, but it missed a quiet, slumbering ambience
of Citadel Bisbop’s—at least, in boyhood memory. Neither did this city equal those lost, charming avenues he had toddled along,
led by his mother’s hand. And he knew that nothing ever could.
“Aunt who?”
Quath made a metallic
rrrrrttttt
that might be something like laughter, though Toby had never been able to tell. She made the same sound at times that weren’t
remotely funny, at least to Toby. When the
rrrrrttttt
stopped, she told Toby about how ordinary matter had an opposite kind, and if they met, both kinds disappeared in a flash
of light.
“Seems dangerous stuff to tinker with,” Toby mused.
Toby shook his head. “I want to understand
this
place, Quath—don’t trouble my head with tales of stars.”
“
That’s
small talk?” Toby paced in the little grove, listening to the mutter of people and commerce only a block away. Even this
scrap of the natural world, a few trees and bushes, was enough to make him realize how much he had missed it. “I think I know
what you’re working up to, though. My dad wants me back, tail between my legs—right?”