Lyle reached down, gripped her muscular wrist, and hauled her up into the shop. She wasn't all that good looking, but she was in really good shape -- like a mountain biker or triathlon runner. She looked about thirty-five. It was hard to tell, exactly. Once people got into cosmetic surgery and serious bio-maintenance, it got pretty hard to judge their age. Unless you got a good, close medical exam of their eyelids and cuticles and internal membranes and such.
She looked around the shop with great interest, brown ponytail twitching. "Where you hail from?" Lyle asked her. He had already forgotten her name.
"Well, I'm originally from Juneau, Alaska."
"Canadian, huh? Great. Welcome to Tennessee."
"Actually, Alaska used to be part of the United States."
"You're kidding," Lyle said. "Hey, I'm no historian, but I've seen Alaska on a map before."
"You've got a whole working shop and everything built inside this old place! That's really something, Mr. Schweik. What's behind that curtain?"
"The spare room," Lyle said. "That's where my roommate used to stay."
She glanced up. "Dertouzas?"
"Yeah, him."
"Who's in there now?"
"Nobody," Lyle said sadly. "I got some storage stuff in there."
She nodded slowly, and kept looking around, apparently galvanized with curiosity. "What are you running on that screen?"
"Hard to say, really," Lyle said. He crossed the room, bent down and switched off the settop box. "Some kind of weird political crap."
He began examining her bike. All its serial numbers had been removed. Typical zone bike.
"The first thing we got to do," he said briskly, "is fit it to you properly: set the saddle height, pedal stroke, and handlebars. Then I'll adjust the tension, true the wheels, check the brakepads and suspension valves, tune the shifting, and lubricate the drive-train. The usual. You're gonna need a better saddle than this -- this saddle's for a male pelvis." He looked up. "You got a charge card?"
She nodded, then frowned. "But I don't have much credit left."
"No problem." He flipped open a dog-eared catalog. "This is what you need. Any halfway decent gel-saddle. Pick one you like, and we can have it shipped in by tomorrow morning. And then" -- he flipped pages -- "order me one of these."
She stepped closer and examined the page. "The 'cotterless crank-bolt ceramic wrench set,' is that it?"
"That's right. I fix your bike, you give me those tools, and we're even."
"Okay. Sure. That's cheap!" She smiled at him. "I like the way you do business, Lyle."
"You'll get used to barter, if you stay in the zone long enough."
"I've never lived in a squat before," she said thoughtfully. "I like the attitude here, but people say that squats are pretty dangerous."
"I dunno about the squats in other towns, but Chattanooga squats aren't dangerous, unless you think anarchists are dangerous, and anarchists aren't dangerous unless they're really drunk." Lyle shrugged. "People will steal your stuff all the time, that's about the worst part. There's a couple of tough guys around here who claim they have handguns. I never saw anybody actually use a handgun. Old guns aren't hard to find, but it takes a real chemist to make working ammo nowadays." He smiled back at her. "Anyway, you look to me like you can take care of yourself."
"I take dance classes."
Lyle nodded. He opened a drawer and pulled a tape measure.
"I saw all those cables and pulleys you have on top of this place. You can pull the whole building right up off the ground, huh? Kind of hang it right off the ceiling up there."
"That's right, it saves a lot of trouble with people breaking and entering." Lyle glanced at his shock-baton, in its mounting at the door. She followed his gaze to the weapon and then looked at him, impressed.
Lyle measured her arms, torso length, then knelt and measured her inseam from crotch to floor. He took notes. "Okay," he said. "Come by tomorrow afternoon."
"Lyle?"
"Yeah?" He stood up.
"Do you rent this place out? I really need a safe place to stay in the zone."
"I'm sorry," Lyle said politely, "but I hate landlords and I'd never be one. What I need is a roommate who can really get behind the whole concept of my shop. Someone who's qualified, you know, to develop my infrastructure or do bicycle work. Anyway, if I took your cash or charged you for rent, then the tax people would just have another excuse to harass me."
"Sure, okay, but ... " She paused, then looked at him under lowered eyelids. "I've gotta be a lot better than having this place go empty."
Lyle stared at her, astonished.
"I'm a pretty useful woman to have around, Lyle. Nobody's ever complained before."
"Really?"
"That's right." She stared at him boldly.
"I'll think about your offer," Lyle said. "What did you say your name was?"
"I'm Kitty. Kitty Casaday."
"Kitty, I got a whole lot of work to do today, but I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
"Okay, Lyle." She smiled. "You think about me, all right?"
Lyle helped her down out of the shop. He watched her stride away across the atrium until she vanished through the crowded doorway of the Crowbar, a squat coffeeshop. Then he called his mother.
"Did you forget something?" his mother said, looking up from her workscreen.
"Mom, I know this is really hard to believe, but a strange woman just banged on my door and offered to have sex with me."
"You're kidding, right?"
"In exchange for room and board, I think. Anyway, I said you'd be the first to know if it happened."
"Lyle -- " His mother hesitated. "Lyle, I think you better come right home. Let's make that dinner date for tonight, okay? We'll have a little talk about this situation."
"Yeah, okay. I got an enameling job I gotta deliver to Floor 41, anyway."
"I don't have a positive feeling about this development, Lyle."
"That's okay, Mom. I'll see you tonight."
Lyle reassembled the newly enameled bike. Then he set the flywheel onto remote, and stepped outside the shop. He mounted the bike, and touched a password into the remote control. The shop faithfully reeled itself far out of reach and hung there in space below the fire-blackened ceiling, swaying gently.
Lyle pedaled away, back toward the elevators, back toward the neighborhood where he'd grown up.
He delivered the bike to the delighted young idiot who'd commissioned it, stuffed the cash in his shoes, and then went down to his mother's. He took a shower, shaved, and shampooed thoroughly. They had pork chops and grits and got drunk together. His mother complained about the breakup with her third husband and wept bitterly, but not as much as usual when this topic came up. Lyle got the strong impression she was thoroughly on the mend and would be angling for number four in pretty short order.
Around midnight, Lyle refused his mother's ritual offers of new clothes and fresh leftovers, and headed back down to the zone. He was still a little clubfooted from his mother's sherry, and he stood breathing beside the broken glass of the atrium wall, gazing out at the city-smeared summer stars. The cavernous darkness inside the zone at night was one of his favorite things about the place. The queasy 24-hour security lighting in the rest of the Archiplat had never been rebuilt inside the zone.