But then there was the
selfish
decision, where some jackass kept the good stuff for himself, or swiped it from other people, as Ho had just done. And that was the dividing line, where goodness and indifference left off and something else began. Not evil per se—the reasons behind it were too clear and ordinary for that—but something. Not nice. And
spiteful
decisions, like throwing Bert into the fax, were worse than that, and worse still were the dangerous and malicious and harmful decisions, like marooning Peter on the ruined planette, with fire and rain and gods knew what else.
So Bascal hadn’t simply crossed the good/bad line in a moment of weakness; he’d leaped right over it, and loitered there for hours. Of course there were worse things,
much
worse things, that a person could do. There was murder; there was torture; there was genocide.... Conrad didn’t want to overreact—it wasn’t all or nothing, but a matter of degrees. Bascal had decided to be somewhat malicious in pursuit of his goals. Was that all? Was there more to it than that?
Certainly there was no grand design to it. No matter what Bascal said, he was just making it up along the way, doing what felt right. They all were. Peter felt like staying and Bascal felt like going, so that’s what happened. Ho felt like taking something from Preston, so that’s what he did. And nobody stopped it from happening, because nobody was planning that far ahead. And
that
was a critical point as well: could you simply outplan the petty evils of the universe? Surprise them, catch them off guard? Make sure the right thing was easier to do?
For some reason, this idea made him shiver. Then he decided it wasn’t so much the idea as the fact that it really was getting cold in here. So he got back up and went to his control panel and mirrorized the cabin’s wrapping, to reflect all their body heat back inside instead of letting it escape into cold Kuiper Belt space. This blocked the starlight entirely, forcing him to turn more night-lights on. He would have turned a heater on as well, but he didn’t have any idea how much energy this took, or how much was actually on board, or how exactly it was stored in the wellstone. Or where. And he suspected Bascal didn’t know either, and the last thing Conrad wanted to do was find out the answer in some dumbass way that froze or burned or starved them all to death.
It seemed like an egotistical thought, but also a true one: if there was to be any sanity on this insane voyage of theirs, Conrad’s own not-so-bright efforts would have to provide it.
chapter ten
winds of permutation
From the desk at her bedroom window, Xmary gazed eastward at the towers of Denver. Moping, because the sun was shining and there was happy trumpet music playing somewhere. Moping, because she wanted to
go
, to hang out and be raw and silly and fun. The Gravity Towers beckoned to her; the Cola Dome mocked. And the plain, bright colors of her desk—red and green and yellow and blue, tiles of fired ceramic mortared in place by the child she had been a decade ago—were the punchline of the joke. A handmade object, a hundred hours of labor. Indistinguishable from a fax-to-order design.
She wanted to snort love drugs and flirt, or rent a little car and just drive it around. She’d been cooped up all month—all summer, really—humoring her parents with chores and schoolwork, saving her allowance for that bright, fulfilling future they imagined she was building toward. As what? As whom?
She deserved an afternoon on the town. And a night, and maybe a morning. Gods, did she ever! But she was due at history class in fifteen minutes, and her absence would be noted and logged and forwarded to the attention of Mummy and Da.
By itself, this was not a problem. In the best of months, she faxed up an illicit copy of herself every week, and sneaked away to do her own bidding. In mediocre times she’d get by doing it every two or three weeks, but even in the driest, lamest of months—like this one, for example—she
always
gave herself the last Friday off. And today—today!—was the day.
There was nothing difficult about the procedure; the fax machine was right outside her bedroom door, and when she stepped into it she’d simply specify two simultaneous destinations: Childrens’ City College, and Market Street Station. Or maybe River Station, if she felt like hitting the kiddie cafés again.
But there exactly was the problem: she’d sent a copy of herself off to River Street on the last Friday of June, and said copy had met briefly with Cherry and Tom, in the upstairs balcony at Café 1551. And then the Unexplained Thing had happened—the building simply collapsing in a heap—and dearest Xmary had passed on into some new phase of existence. Not dead or injured as far as she knew, but simply not listed among the casualties. Simply not there. Covert messages on the network had failed to garner any response, and no friend or relation had yet admitted to seeing or hearing from her.
She feared the worst: raped and murdered out of sight of the world’s sensors and censors and sense. Dumped in a shallow grave, covered over with rocks and dirt, her memories rotting into the earth instead of coming home where they belonged. How melodramatic! How fitting an end for such a wayward and disobedient little girl! It was everything Mummy had warned her about: seeking out the vile haunts of sleaze—of
privacy
—and wiggling her assets for the leering eyes of the wrong sort of people.
But fitting or no, the idea terrified her. Shouldn’t it? Not simply because the same thing might happen again, but because Mummy’s being right would be the end of everything. No more life of her own. No more hopes or dreams or casual flings, no guilty pleasures that weren’t chosen for her from some carefully vetted menu! We know what’s best for you, dear. Having lived in a world much harder than yours, we know exactly what you should do next.
What did she want to be when she grew up? Anything. Anything but that. She put a shaky hand to the window, caressing the view. Her unrequited lover. If rape and murder were the price of freedom, she supposed she would just have to pay up.
Was that a decision? It surely felt like one, so she stood up, grabbed her sketchplate and purse, and threw open the bedroom door to face the world.
But just to be safe, she printed the copy first, and checked her over, and gave her a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. Xmary was dear to her, obviously, though they didn’t spend much time together. Being identical down to the slightest foible and follicle, she could be difficult and often snotty, and she had a remarkable talent for trouble. Last year she had even managed, during an otherwiseforgettable romp with a boy they barely knew, to play an elaborate and rather disgusting prank on herself.
How
does it taste, dear?
She was still amazed she’d pulled that off, concealing her intentions from herself and knowing all the while that there would not only be payback, but that she’d have to reconverge her copies in the fax at some point, winding up as the victim of both the original crime
and
its retaliation! In the face of that kind of determined mischief, there was only so much of her own company she could take.
“Be careful,” she told herself.
But Xmary—good old Xmary—just laughed. “Girl, you’re the one facing homework and dinner conversation.
My
mistakes can be swept under the rug.”
“Along with your carcass.”
“Hey, wow, I’m already more cheerful than you. Poor thing. Don’t wait up for me, eh?”
It wasn’t that her parents never let her out—they did—it was just that they would ask her where she was going, and whom she would be with. And they had their ways of verifying these things, or spot-checking anyway, and if they caught her lying the cost was high. So she went bowling and levitating and even boozing with their grudging consent, and for the most part enjoyed it well enough. But wayward girl that she was, she never felt truly alive or free with them peering over her shoulder that way.
Her private self might not exactly shock them—surely as mortal children they had raised their own share of hell. But they’d worry about her, and gently offer their advice, which was always right and always dull, and she just didn’t need that in her life right now. At nineteen, the age-of-consent laws were complex, but if she didn’t go looking for brutes or father figures she was basically free—finally!—to sample those worldly delights that interested her. And what the hell else was there?
So she went to the swimming pool to look at the boys, and to let the boys look at her in a Polynesian-styled two-piece that did, yes, show off her assets rather nicely. In the changing room fax, she even gave herself a set of good, old-fashioned tan lines underneath, just in case. And just so her intentions were not in doubt, she applied a bit of that illuminated red sparkle to her lips and toes and fingernails. Boy bait.
The pool itself was housed in a structure that could open and close and swivel and opaque in response to the sun and wind and the changing moods of its patrons. Right now, with clouds rolling in off the mountains and a hot, dusty breeze blowing up from the south, the walls were clear and closed, looking out on a dry summer meadow, with cottonwood trees and apartment buildings in the distance.
Treading barefoot across the wet, sticky tiles of the floor, Xmary staked out a lounge chair next to the windows but facing away from them, looking out over the kiddie pools and hot tubs where everyone she knew actually swam and played. Through an archway she could see the edge of the “adult swim” area, where people went for hard exercise and competition—two activities that struck her as ridiculous in a world where your physical fitness was determined by the fax. She’d played water polo and bottom-hockey a few times there, just for fun, but otherwise had never been in it.
The kiddie area was something else again: a play-ground of rivers and tunnels, wave machines and water-falls, slippery slides and rickety pontoon bridges. There was so much screechy laughter in the air that you could barely hear anything else. She’d learned a few years back that natural humans, unmodified by the fax, could hold their breaths for only a minute or so, if that. A place like this would probably kill them, which was a sad thought considering how short and miserable their lives were to begin with! But Xmary, with no training and only infrequent practice, could stay underwater for three minutes with heavy exertion, and almost six without. It made life bearable, playing porpoise in the kiddie pool, groping through whirlpools in a darkened cavern.... In the unlikely event she ever managed to grow up, this would be one of the things she’d truly miss.
But even more important than the swimming itself was the survey of the crowd. There were maybe a hundred people here—not bad for a Friday afternoon on the hot side of the summer solstice—and the majority were under thirty. Since there were only a few thousand children in the whole of Denver, this meant—as always—that there was a pretty good chance of running into someone she knew. And yes, sure enough, she spotted a few almost immediately. None of her inner circle, or even her outer one, but there was Hacienda deFlores over there by the fountains, and Chad Breck a few meters farther on, looking Hacienda over from a covert angle.
Chad was actually a walking advertisement for the sexual politics of the age: he was cute enough—who wasn’t?—and he had that winning smile. But he didn’t know a damn thing about anything, and he liked it that way, and if you got buzzed enough to fall into bed with him then you had some hard decisions to make.
If you took him home, your house would log the fact and your parents would know everything. If you went to his place then at least his parents wouldn’t care—score one more for their precious sonny boy—but you had to know there were a hundred and fifty sensors recording you in every imaginable detail, and likely as not he’d be sharing these with his friends the next day. Illegally, yes, but if they were even a little bit careful about it there was no good way to catch them. Of course, those same images could be faked by any decent hypercomputer, but in an age of nearly perfect lie detection they’d be hard to fool your friends with. Which of course made even better trophies of the real thing.
And hotel rooms were expensive and left a money trail, and rented cars and aircraft were too damned cramped. So inevitably you ended up in a park or basement somewhere—with a blanket if you were lucky—and the magic of it all wore off pretty quickly. The holy grail was for one of your friends to get an apartment of their own that you could use, but of course the moment they did, that care-free spirit would begin to wither under the pressures of worldly responsibility. Theirs was a different Denver altogether: coldly competitive, and filled to bursting with bitches and bastards too selfish and fearful to die or retire or move somewhere else, or even step out to enjoy a day in the sun.
“Meritocracy can be cruel,” her Da was fond of saying. “It takes a hundred years to build a life, and six months to ruin it if you play your hand badly.”
You had forever to recover from your mistakes, true enough, but who wanted to risk another hundred years of numbing labor? For that matter, who wanted to start the process in the first place? Moving out to the planets wouldn’t help. Frontier, schmontier—if you didn’t have money it was just like everywhere else. Worse, really, because even the “outside” was artificial and owned. There was no place to escape to.
She spotted another familiar face, attached to a boy standing knee-deep in the Figure Eights and looking right at her. She couldn’t put a name to him—she wasn’t sure they’d ever spoken—but she had seen him around the campus this month, and in a few other places where people their age were found. Actually, he looked a few years younger than she was—sixteen or maybe seventeen—but to the extent that she cared at all, that was potentially a plus. What she really needed was a project.
She favored him with a smile and a wave, and he looked nervous for a moment before steeling himself and wading over in her direction.
“So you survived, eh?” he said to her as he stepped, dripping, out of the water.
“Survived what?” she asked.
“The café: 1551. Can I borrow your towel?”
And this was a pleasantly intimate request, because her towel was dry and he was only really wet from the waist down. He was cute enough—again, who wasn’t?— but he spoke with an accent she couldn’t place, and wore a mustache that wouldn’t really grow in for another few years, and there was something innocently delicate and artistic about him, something that tugged gently at her strings.
She tossed him the towel. “I’m at a loss, here. Were you there when the 1551 collapsed?”
“Most definitely,” he said, wiping the beads of moisture off his legs. “And I left the scene in a hurry, so I’m glad to see you’re none the worse.”
She blinked. “You saw me there? You talked to me?”
It was his turn to look puzzled, though he nodded. “Yep, I surely did. You had that same hairstyle. That same stuff on your lips. And a black dress. You don’t remember?”
His manner was increasingly nervous. He handed the towel back and did not quite meet her eye.
“I disappeared that night,” she said quietly, pinning him with her gaze. There was no reason to be afraid, not with all these people around. But she had probably thought the same thing on that fateful night, and where—where?—had it gotten her? “If you know anything about that, I advise you to spill it before I scream for the cops.”
“No, no,” he said nervously. “Don’t scream. I’m an agent for the Prince of Sol, and my cover is thin. May I sit down? May I share this chair with you so we can keep our voices low? I remember your name, it’s Xiomara something.”
“Xmary,” she corrected. “And stay where you are. So you’re the prince’s agent, are you?”
“One of them,” he said, making another shushing motion with his hands. “And if you’ll please keep your voice down I’ll tell you everything I know. I didn’t see your name on the injured list. On
any
list.”
“Neither did I. I couldn’t have been there when it fell, with cops everywhere. They’d’ve found me.”
“Oh, but you were. I was this close to you. You were sitting at the prince’s elbow, talking about a signet ring or something.”
“Again with the prince!” she said, throwing her hands up. “His name wasn’t on the lists either. I think I would have noticed that.”
“It’s been hushed up. A royal embarrassment. But I
saw
the cops arresting him. I think you must have gotten out the same way I did: by running your pretty ass off.”
“Yeah? Then where am I now?”
He tried a nervous grin. “Right here?”
She slugged him for that, not gently. But there was something in the way he said it that eased her fears.