Sparks in Cosmic Dust (7 page)

He jogged alongside her. “How much did Delaney give you?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Not a single clip.”

Even through his pragmatic armor the blow struck and resounded. Without her fortune, this was going to be a dicey game spent in hiding. They wouldn’t be able to afford their shuttle fare, and he’d spent a big chunk of his wages already. The majority of their fugitive fund, then, would be what Varinia had stashed away in El Oso Negro.

“How much have we got?”

She shook her head emphatically. “Less than I promised.”

“What does that—”

She threw her arms in the air. “How should
I
know? I never counted my tips.”

“You said you stayed here before? What were you…smogged?” Varinia pinched her nose as she approached what had to be the dingiest hotel she’d ever seen or smelled in her life. Formerly a multi-story freight hangar, it looked as though its top had been ripped off and the proprietor had simply thrown a tarpaulin roof over the thing and called it a hotel. Cody’s was everything Varinia had heard about it and much less besides.

“Man, and I thought it was a dive back
then
,” Solomon said. “Two years is a long time. At least the price hasn’t gotten worse. Half a clip a cot. Even we can ante up that much, can’t we?”

Not funny. She’d absconded from El Oso Negro with several thousand clips’ worth of tips—far more than they’d expected. But he was right—this was the last place Archie Delaney would look for her. She punched his arm playfully then nudged him ahead of her, saying, “Whatever happens to me, I want to see it happen to you first.”

“You’re welcome.” Deflecting ne’er-do-well glances from the indigenous foyer bums, Solomon dropped two half credits into the turnstile slot. Varinia glimpsed her reflection in the dirty kiosk window. Her tacky Mackintosh coat and hood and her baggy jeans made her look like a fat hiker, while the handfuls of soil Solomon had “borrowed” from the greenhouse now covered her face and jeans. She was every inch the grid-licker he’d wanted her to be. And it felt safe. Anonymous. Despite daubing his cheeks with soil, Solomon had only needed to wear his trusty orange mining jacket to fit right in. Oh, and she’d ruffled his hair a little as well.

He wagged two fingers in front of the old man in the kiosk, who fetched two folded-up blankets and pear-shaped pillows. Disgusting, ill-stained things. Better than nothing…barely.

“Come on,” Solomon whispered. “Keep your head down, stay right behind me. I’ll look out for you.”

“Deal.”

Moisture leaked though the tarp roof onto flaked-out guests who didn’t seem to care. Beds stood inches above the floor, which resembled a chalky subway station with acne. The disused monorail track running in a gulley through the center of the hotel had once carried freight to and from shuttles. Now the only thing it carried was a nauseating whiff of sick. Eight or nine metal sheets bridged the gap, though she reckoned half the regulars here wouldn’t be able to cross the Golden Gate Bridge with a compass. Umpteen hollow oil drums housed fires for the various garrulous cliques scattered about.

Two things surprised Varinia about the place: how full it was, north of four hundred souls, and how loud the chatter was. She’d expected loners, wasters, smoggers hogging two or three beds each. What she got was a teeming hive of quite startling variety. Tin men, tool-pushers, orcs, the obligatory smoggers euphoric in their own private funk, but also good-looking lads, haulers and war vets, vociferous, close-knit groups of women, trench-coat traders nipping from bed to bed peddling their wares, families, dying men and women receiving the last rites from dodgy-looking pastors wearing fingerless gloves. As overseer to the whole thing, a single, tough-looking black maitre d’, armed with an Enfield auto pulse gun and a holo-phone strapped around his neck like a lunchbox, received a blowjob under his kilt.

Solomon led Varinia across one of the center bridges to a pair of cots behind a half-eaten pillar. They set their pillows, blankets and carriers down, then she snuggled close to him on the edge of his cot, indulging a huge yawn. The crude shape of a white horse had been drawn in crayon on the pillar. A child’s artwork? How long ago since she’d seen anything so innocent? Spry memories of her riding lessons as a young teenager flickered in, each one sweet but cutting—soon her heart ached. From here to there, no bridge existed.

“I once knew a stud looked just like that,” a raspy voice called from the next aisle, several feet opposite.

Against her better judgment, Varinia spun to see who it was. An elderly woman glared back, her hawk eyes glistening with the amber from a nearby drum fire. She was lying on her side, wrapped in a Cody’s blanket and a few of her own besides. Her worn cream rucksack on the floor bulged, looked easily as big as her, and had more color.

“What was that? The drawing?” Varinia asked her, ignoring Solomon’s elbow in her side.

The old woman stopped turning away, rested her glare on Varinia once again. “I said I once knew a stud looked just like that. He asked me to marry him, so I put him out to grass.”

Varinia faked a quick grin. To her surprise, the old woman sat up, cocked her head to one side as if studying the woman inside the urchin. It made Varinia shudder. She poked Solomon’s arm, whispered, “God, I think she
knows
me.”

“Who?”

“That old woman. Say something to her.”

By the time he leaned over, the woman was snug in bed again, facing the other way, busy talking with another couple, a pale, not unattractive man, early thirties, with longish black hair and a voluptuous, even younger woman who looked like the worst sort of vamp.

“Just ignore her.” Solomon dragged their beds together, then spread his blanket. “Now don’t worry about anything. I’m a light sleeper, and we’ll keep the carriers between us, right here.” He tapped his knuckles on the plastic bed rims.

“We’ll be fine.” She turned back to the conversation across the aisle. Words like
gold, capital
and
farther into space
piqued her curiosity. The old woman seemed to be doing most of the talking between coughs, her sharp-tongued rasp drawing snickers from the other couple.

“Yeah, you might not think it to look at me but I’ve dug pretty much everywhere anyone’s raised a flag or a beer out here. Course, it’s tough luck when you pick your way to a fortune only for some high-falutin’ satellite to give your position away. The trick isn’t in the finding and the getting of it—it’s in the hiding and the getting
away
with it. Prospectors have to be sly, they need a flair for misdirection. Being handy with a gun doesn’t hurt either. I’ve lost more goods to ambush parties than a virgin eel has wet dreams. Trust me, it might be an adventure at the start, but by the end of month one you’re at each others’ throats, and if you hurdle the first quarter, God help you when the pile gets too big to camouflage. Every suck-bait down to their G-strings becomes Sherlock Holmes—suspecting every shape in the sky, figuring out new places or new ways to hide their earnings. It all takes its toll.

“Then we’re talking alien atmospheres, unpredictable weather, different lengths of day and night. Either no sex or grudge sex for half a year, maybe more. A married couple might sound like a good idea—you know, for stability—but I’ve never yet known one that came out smelling of roses. It’s the gold, the lust in the luster. You get funny ideas when your mind’s bent on the swing of your pick. It’s addictive, like the turn of a card, only a thousand times more potent because there’s no banker or croupier or casino fat-cat between your axe and the honey pot. The harder you work, the richer you get. Catnip for any living thing with a pulse, I’m telling you. Wild dogs couldn’t drag you away from a rich vein of psammeticum. I can vouch for that.”

“Sounds like you struck it rich, old timer.” The young vamp’s eyes glittered wider than the elderly woman’s. “What are you doing in here with the rest of us, a grid-licker?”

“Good question. But that’s my story, Maleficent. You go fuck up your own life, come tell me about it someday. Looks of it, you’ve already hit the ground running.”

“Easy.” The girl chuckled. “We were just curious, that’s all. Some gobshites in here the other night were talking about deep-space prospecting, a snatch and grab before they’re forced to up sticks for good.”

“Hmm, they might strike. Can’t blame them for trying. I’d go in a second if a spot opened up. Three or four semi-gobshites with a time limit…dig like blazes and bounce back to port…could do well. And if they augured in, least they’d be doing it on their own terms, not waiting for ISPA to whisper the big
adios.
”

Picturing Solomon swinging a pick, and the piles of gold mounting all around them, pricked Varinia’s sluggish mind into gear. “How much would they need?” She slapped a hand over her mouth and couldn’t believe she’d said that out loud.

“You again?” The old woman sprang up, reached to the floor at the head of her bed and retrieved a flask. She looked at Varinia before pouring her a cup of something black and tepid. “Here. Get some McCormick’s down you.” She handed the cup over and then took a swig directly from the flask. “How much would they need? Depends on how far they’re going. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Ha. That’s exactly what my two friends here keep saying. Don’t stand on ceremony, chick. Speak your mind, by all means.”

Solomon leaned over Varinia’s shoulder, draped a blanket over her. “What are you folks selling?”

“The stuff that sells itself, sunshine.” The old woman belched into the side of her fist. “Where are you two headed?”

“We’re still figuring that out.” Solomon kept the conversation light, and Varinia appreciated his tact. There was something infectious about the old woman’s honesty. Her prospecting stories, doom-laden though they were, smacked of reality
and
enthusiasm, a difficult combination to achieve in this grim day and age.

“Grace Peters.” The old woman approached them with a canny smirk and shook their hands. Then she pointed behind her. “This is Clay and…what was your name, Maleficent? Lemon? Liffy?”

“
Lyssa.
”

“Sorry, chick. Lyssa.”

Varinia didn’t want to come across as too ingratiating. After all, she didn’t know anything about them. “I’m Dixie. This is Solomon.”

“So you’re interested in prospecting, eh?” Grace tested all four of them at once, rubbing her neck. “But you’re reluctant to reveal too much about yourselves? You each have a little something stashed away, only it isn’t enough to make a hundred zee, and you’re intrigued by the verisimilitude in my yarn-spinning?”

“Say what?” Lyssa frowned.

“Verisimilitude—reality in the details.” Clay’s long yawn reminded Varinia how long she’d gone without sleep—almost two days.

“Uh-huh.” Grace swigged a last mouthful of McCormick’s from her flask and then poured the slimy residue onto the floor. “Okay, y’all, how about a quick once-around before I waste any more breath. Who’s of a mind to go digging for a fortune before the boom falls?” She held up the middle three fingers of her right hand, boy scout style. “I’m in. It’ll be dangerous, but what worthwhile adventure isn’t? Two more of you would be do-able. Three’s company. The four of you together would be best. I can’t promise you we’ll strike it rich, but let’s just say I’ve got rather more than an inkling. Who’s interested?”

The dark duo across, egged on by Lyssa’s vociferous whisperings, soon assented. “Sniff the gold dust out, we’re there,” the girl said with an arrogance that made Clay roll his eyes.

He pointed his thumb at her. “What she said.”

All gazes turned to Varinia and Solomon.

“Count us in.” Solomon gripped her shoulders.

What?
“But—” Varinia’s protest relented when he pressed a finger to her lips. What was he thinking? Signing them up for a wild-goose chase with Ma Peters and the two Goths? What a great way to waste the tips she’d earned this year.

“Okey-cokey.” Rubbing her veined, bony hands together, Grace shot them each a kind of neglectful maternal look, as though she’d hatched a plan to palm her kids off onto a babysitter for the weekend and was thrilled about getting some hot nookie instead. The idea turned Varinia’s stomach. “I’ll need you all to drag your cots together,” the old-timer said. “What I have to say is for your ears only. Come on, come on. Don’t be shy. I don’t bite on a first date. That’s it. Close as you can.

“Lyssa, Clay, Dixie, Solomon. You all have trustworthy faces, did anyone ever tell you? No? Good, ’cause I’m full of shit. But that’s all right. The main thing to remember in prospecting is you’re not
supposed
to trust the folks you’re digging with. They’re not supposed to trust you. Not really. Because trust, like all valuable commodities, is bought and leased on the day you ship out.

“Let me explain. Say you go off rigging derricks on a new moon. The money is great, but the other tool-pushers are complete suck-baits and you get paid every day on the job rather than when you make it back to civilization. Tricky. You’re trusting your life every day, teetering a hundred feet up, when you don’t know how competent those other guys are. You have to find a hiding place for your clips, but you know for a fact most of these border riggers have serious criminal records. Let me ask you—what’s keeping you aloft on that derrick instead of guarding your clips every hour of the day?”

“Your contract,” Solomon replied confidently. “You do what you signed on for because you want the whole wages.”

“True. But I can sum it up in one word, sunshine. Greed. You stay up there, trusting your colleagues’ handiwork, because you’re a greedy son of a bitch who’s taken a job without knowing who the fuck you’re really working with. You’re fairly sure no one will steal your clips because you’re all on a fucking moon with nowhere to go, and if word got out, the thief would be strung up by his scrotum. Greed keeps everyone working and everyone happy. Greed sits on trust’s face and doesn’t let up ’til it’s time to skedaddle.”

“What a load of crap,” Varinia butted in, a little annoyed at the old woman’s gleeful nihilism. “You need
some
real trust, or else it’ll be a free-for-all on the shuttle home.”

“Agreed. No expedition lasts purely on greed. What about friendships formed along the way?” Clay’s furrowed brow beneath his untidy, too-long fringe restored a smidgeon of Varinia’s faith in humanity. At least she wasn’t the only one who saw through Grace Peters’s misanthropy.

Lyssa clasped her hand over Clay’s—perhaps to make it clear to other interested female parties that he was hers. “I think we come to trust some of those we work with. Greed might keep everyone working, but you can kiss my ass, old timer, if you think I’d ever give up my friendship—” she dealt Clay a slow-motion fist to the chin, “—for a few sacks of rocks.”