Geosynchron (33 page)

Hard price to pay for an hour of Chomp. Ah, Chomp the magnificent, Chomp the trickster, Chomp the high of many colors and flavors.

Rodrigo could see the line of hustlers in the avenue outside the
bodegas now, slouching against the wall. They were all trying to find
that optimal facial expression that showed a willingness to be picked
up without showing desperation. Rodrigo knew many of these people
by face, though their names had mostly been engulfed by the Chomp.

The avenue itself, like all the streets in 49th Heaven, was a pure,
smooth cylinder, with buildings propped up against its lower arcs.
Such lighting as there was came from the half-shuttered windows of
these buildings. In the heavily trafficked portions of the colony, the
cylinder's walls were painted over with artistry that ranged from the
exquisite to the psychedelic to the grotesque. Near the dock on Seventh Ring, tens of thousands of angels frolicked in a sky filled with
five-pointed stars; outside the sex emporiums on Second Ring, a profusion of colors swirled in patterns that ventured near the profound.
But here outside the bodegas of Sixth Ring, the old murals had long
since chipped away into pointillist incoherence.

Rodrigo strolled up to a dull-eyed boy he knew from Grub Town.
They had shared the wall outside the bodegas many times before, but
all Rodrigo could remember about him was that he was an ardent fan
of the Patronell Lightning soccer team.

"How's it going?" he greeted the boy, taking up a position
alongside.

"A little over, a little under," replied Patronell without looking up from his shoes. Rodrigo had never understood what the phrase meant,
but he supposed he knew the gist of it well enough. "You shouldn't be
out here," continued the dull-eyed boy. "Molloy looking for you, man."

"Nothing new."

"Says he gonna kill you this time."

Rodrigo shrugged. "Been saying that for weeks. Let's see him get busy."

The other abandoned this line of conversation with a shrug of his
own. "New OrbiCo freighter just docked."

"Tourists?" said Rodrigo hopefully.

"Mostly freight, what Cisco says." Patronell snapped his head
abruptly towards a slack-jawed teenager across the way. The boy had
just hooked his arm into that of a middle-aged woman who was trying
unsuccessfully to hide the purple and maroon lining of her coat. Royal
purple and maroon, Creed Elan colors.

"Gotta be some dockworkers though," said Rodrigo. OrbiCo dockworkers weren't nearly as generous as tourists-and not as plentiful as
politicians-but if you caught them straight off a long shift to Furtoid
with a nice bonus in their Vault account, they made easy marks.

"Yeah, sure, dockworkers," said the other boy. "But not enough to
go around."

The conversation withered and died at that point, and the boy who
was a fan of the Patronell Lightning wandered away without comment
a few minutes later. Rodrigo was starting to really suffer from the
pangs of Chomp withdrawal. Shaky hands, blurred vision, deep rumbles of hunger. He reached in his coat pocket for a slim silver canister,
flipped open the cap with his thumb, and rubbed the moist tip on his
wrists with a single practiced motion. Within seconds, the code-laden
OCHREs had penetrated the skin and tweaked his neural systems into
a frenzy. This was low-quality stuff, hardly worthy of the Chomp
moniker, but it made a serviceable substitute in a pinch. Besides
which, it was all he had left. Rodrigo closed his eyes and leaned back
against the cool flexible glass wall.

Lights danced. Molecules thrummed. Time twisted itself in knots
around him, and while caught in those bonds, he wanted for nothing.

When Rodrigo emerged back into sentience, he was alone on the
wall. All the other hustlers had either found marks for the night or
given up. Rodrigo discovered that he had slouched down onto his right
knee during the black code high with his left arm folded painfully
behind his back. He was in the process of straightening himself out
when a figure slid in front of him.

It was a dockworker with a downcast face, perhaps in his late twenties. Hair dark, body lean. Eyes a vivid sea green. "Interested in a
drink?" muttered the man.

Rodrigo studied the shadowed face for a moment, looking for signs
of craziness. He desperately needed a real fix, but he didn't know if he
would survive another night like last night. Hours clutching bruised
thighs in a mirrored hotel room, and only a few miserable canisters to
show for it. "You got Chomp?"

The man reached into his canvas bag and withdrew a handful of
thin silver canisters like the one Rodrigo had just tapped dry. "Of
course."

They started down the avenue towards the gate that led to the
inner rings. Rodrigo knew a guard there who would let him through,
in exchange for the occasional ... favor. "You don't look like a dockworker, man," said Rodrigo to the handsome stranger, trying to come
up with friendly banter that would keep him from walking away.

"Wasn't always one," replied the man laconically.

Try as he might, Rodrigo couldn't keep his eyes off the stranger's
canvas bag. "What'd you do before you sign up with OrbiCo?" he said
after a few minutes. Rodrigo tried to summon a list of professions that
respectable people engaged in, but he could only come up with two.
"Capitalman? Drama producer?"

The stranger shook his head. "Entrepreneur."

23

Natch has ceased to exist.

The person who once inhabited that set of characteristics-the
name, the apartment, the Vault account, the various holdings and relationships and defining traits-that person reached his terminus the
instant Frederic Patel's decapitating sword stroke landed on his neck.
Or perhaps his final moments evaporated in a haze of erased memory on
the streets of Old Chicago. Whatever the instant of Natch's demise, he
has indeed sloughed off his old identity like a snake's skin. The apartment and the Vault account: abandoned. The profile in the public directory: wiped clean. The obsessions with Primo's ratings and MultiReal,
the fear of Brone and the Defense and Wellness Council: discarded.

Yet if Natch cannot countenance a life in that old skin, neither can
he contemplate taking up residence in a new one. Assuming a new
identity means pointing himself in a new direction. It means taking on
a whole new set of desires and anxieties, and Natch would rather hurl
himself through an airlock than do that right now.

But he can't have Len Borda or Magan Kai Lee tracking him down
either. He can't have libertarians like Khann Frejohr hounding him for
access to MultiReal or drudges pressing for exclusives. Most important, he can't have Brone locating him and trying to pick up where he
left off.

Keep moving, that is his imperative.

So Natch finds himself walking into a small storefront that he
knows in the twisted alleyways of Angelos. At the counter stands a ferrety man with a squint of suspicion for the entire world. The sign over
his head reads simply Fix. No preceding article, no trailing object.
Natch can't tell whether "Fix" is supposed to be the man's name, the
name of his business, the service he provides, or perhaps all three.

"Name?" grunts Fix after the short dance of solicitation and negotiation ends with a service to be provided and a fair price.

Natch knows he is being asked for a new name. Nobody working
in a place like this would be so gauche as to ask for his existing name.
"Nohwan," replies Natch after a moment's reflection.

"No One?" says Fix, slitting his eyes into a state of concentrated
mistrust.

"Nohwan," Natch corrects him. He spells it out as a single word
without patronymic, in the style preferred by so many Westerners of
his generation.

Fix opens his eyes just wide enough to roll them. Spare me the pre-
tention and self-importance of the young, his expression says. Then he
reaches for his satchel of bio/logic programming bars and gets to work.

Not three hours later, Natch emerges on the muggy streets of
Angelos with a new profile in the public directory and a new Vault
account. He has a new set of physical traits designed to make him
unrecognizable to the casual observer, yet not so unrecognizable that a
clever image-analysis routine can single him out. His hair is darker
with a slightly closer cut, and his skin has taken on the bronzed pigment of a well-tanned beachgoer. His blue eyes have migrated to a
deep green. A cocktail of biochemical programs will serve to confuse
most common DNA-screening routines.

Natch's next step is to find a bio/logic workbench for rent. He needs
a bench that does not log its transactions, a bench that will allow him
to flit in and out of his own systems without leaving a trace. He finds
this not half a kilometer away from Fix, in a similarly disreputable shop
on a similarly disreputable street. He tries to recall Petrucio Patel's
instructions for taming the black code tremors, half expecting the
memory to be gone. But it's not. Soon Natch is executing Petrucio's
instructions with a pair of greasy rented bio/logic programming bars.
He sweats away in a MindSpace bubble for three hours until the
shaking from Margaret's code has almost completely subsided.

Two or three months of tremor-free existence, this is what Petrucio
has promised him.

Finally, Natch recalls Patel's commands for disabling the MultiReal-D code inside his OCHREs. It's a simple process, really, the
virtual equivalent of flipping a switch. He hesitates for a moment
with programming bars held aloft, the parabolic shape of the MultiReal-D trigger floating before him. Does he really want to disable
such a potent defense mechanism? Does he really want to give up that
sixty-second advantage and make himself vulnerable to the world's
caprices?

Yes, he decides firmly. I don't need trickery. I don't need random memory
erasure. I need my feet on solid ground. I need control.

Natch disables the MultiReal-D code. He waits for some visceral
signal that he has resumed life in real time, that he is no longer a
minute ahead of the world. There is none. Time seems to flow around
and through him the same as it always has.

He throws down the bio/logic programming bars, shuts down the
MindSpace workbench. The transformation is complete. Natch is
gone; he does not exist. In his place there is only Nohwan.

Keep moving.

Seventy-two hours later, "Nohwan" has accepted an engineering position aboard the OrbiCo ship Practical, bound for the lonely orbital
colony of Furtoid.

Natch's job is insanely simple. He wanders the labyrinths of
machinery, performing rote maintenance chores that could easily be
handled by mechanicals. But out here between planets, the economics
are topsy-turvy; the bottom line is that it's much cheaper for OrbiCo
to use human labor than to waste precious ship's power. Natch feels
like he's back on the assembly-line programming floor in Texas terri tory, watching a herd of his peers bang away on repetitive tasks with
bio/logic programming bars.

But such a job suits him now. He wants quiet. He wants to be out
of the way. He wants to be a ghost.