"Oh, you are, huh?" Satin said. But Mira reached up and put a hand on one of the flippers that would have been a leg, to reassure him. Still, Satin asked, "And why him?"
Javier shrugged. "Because he's got a backpack. And because he does what he's told."
"What about water?" Nhu asked.
"There's running water," Mira said. "And this place is self-sufficient for power. It must have its own generator system in the basement."
Nhu headed into the little kitchen unit of 1-B. "A nice place like this, there has to be a food fabricator."
Mira followed after her, waddling quickly. "I wouldn't do that if I was you."
Nhu flicked on a light, glanced around her, moved to a control strip set into a faux black marble counter top. "Is there anything still in the fabricator stores? Did you try?"
"Of course we tried, but."
Nhu started tapping the keys without waiting for the tiny woman to finish. A screen lit up, showed a menu of meals the fabricator could create from the generic soup in its banks (a raw material that consisted largely of fermented bacteria). She punched up something simple: imitation chili con carne. After a hesitation, then the sound of rushing air, there was a gurgling and a tray was pushed out of the processing unit onto the counter. In a ceramic bowl fizzed a foamy black sludge that smelled like pond algae.
"Oh, wow," Nhu said, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth.
"It's gone bad," Mira said.
"How long has this place been abandoned, then?"
"Well, I think the soup sat in the banks but never got used," Mira replied. "Because I don't think this building was abandoned. It seems to me like it never even opened in the first place."
CHAPTER FIVE
wrapped in skin
On the way from his flat to the Arbury School, Stake became mired in traffic. His battered hover-car was wedged in a stream of vehicles of every sort, some even riding on wheels. He glanced up in envy at the helicars that swarmed more freely above him, though their flight paths were still limited to invisible channels beamed in layers between the ranks of towering buildings. These too were of every stripe. Skyscrapers with sides so smooth and featureless (with vidscreens on the interior, instead of windows) that one might think they were solid granite monuments in a graveyard for dead gods. Other buildings that looked like they'd been pieced together from thousands of odd-matched parts salvaged from stripped factory machines, steam curling out of grids and grates in their complex flanks. Buildings with snake skins of multicolored mosaics. Buildings wearing an armor of riveted metal plates, like retired warships looming vertically with their sterns jammed into the street. Flat roofs upon which perched smaller buildings, symbiotically. Other structures tapering to needle points that seemed to etch the clouds upon the blue glass of the sky. Stacked apartments. Stacked businesses. On street leveclass="underline" shop fronts, and gang kids squatting on tenement steps, glaring insolently at the slow sludge of traffic. In many an earlier traffic jam, he had seen such kids walk across the roofs of vehicles to attack someone in a car who they felt had gestured or looked at them in a challenging way, or simply in order to rob a certain individual too boxed in to escape. He now saw a group of small but hard-faced teenage boys loitering outside a Vietnamese pho restaurant, who wore as their identifying garb clear plastic jackets that brazenly showed off the guns they wore in holsters beneath them. Ah, Punktown.
A movement caught his eye, distracting him from the banner advertisements he had begun watching numbly as they scrolled across the top of his dashboard monitor. A hoverbike, weaving slowly but deftly through the deadlocked larger vehicles. The person astride it was slight in frame. A woman, most likely. And though a helmet enclosed her head, he saw the blue of her bared arms.
Stake's heart was jolted. A Ha Jiin, he thought. Thi, he thought.
But it could not be Thi. What were the odds of her being in this city? No, Thi was not on this world of Oasis. Not even in this dimension.
Thi was not the only Ha Jiin woman in existence, was she? Though for him, she might as well have been.
He continued watching the woman on the bike as she worked her way between the idling cars with a stubbornness, a tough determination, that he felt was characteristic of her race. And watching her, Stake felt transported back to the teeming city of Di Noon. The buildings were not nearly as tall as these giants which cast an icy sea of shadow over the street. And it was primarily motorbikes, in staggering numbers, that flooded the streets in place of all these bulkier crafts. Smoothly humming hoverbikes, noisily buzzing older bikes with wheels, and even bicycles-all of them miraculously seeming never to collide with each other, though he had seen, and himself barely evaded, countless near collisions. It was in Di Noon that he had developed his preference for riding outside on a bike rather than packaged up inside a car. Cutting through Di Noon's hot, tropical muggi-ness and smog of exhaust. Out in the blaze of twin blue-white suns that wrung the sweat from his skin and steamed the blood in his heart. The throng of life, so intense and immediate, and him immersed in its very substance, corpuscle in a vein.
The Blue War had been the only war that Earth had participated in-thus far, anyway-in which the soil of battle was not only that of an alien world, but an alien plane of existence. The blue-skinned people themselves might very well be a parallel incarnation of his own kind, for all the Theta researchers knew. The Colonial Forces had gone there to support the new Jin Haa nation as it fought to maintain its sovereignty from that of the Ha Jiin, and Di Noon where Stake was initially stationed was the capital city of the Jin Haa. This support from the Earth Colonies of course had nothing to do with the rich clouds of gas that seethed and fermented in pockets beneath the surface of the blue-leaved jungles, waiting to be bottled up for transportation back to their own dimension.
Watching the elusive figure of the woman on the hoverbike recede, Stake vividly recalled in every cell of his being the first time that he and a large group of fellow soldiers had seated themselves inside one of the big metal pods, in two long rows facing each other. Also aboard the transdimen-sional pod was a small team of Theta agents, the research branch that explored and mapped whatever alternate material planes they could pry their way into. This car which now confined him felt like a smaller, more personal version of that pod. And he shivered, as he had then. He shivered, as if again he experienced his body being sifted through the veil, filtered through the very weave of the universe, squeezed out like strings of hamburger to be reconstituted in another realm as far away as infinity and as close as the opposite side of a thin sheet of paper.
Something in the logjam seemed to break, and the river of steel and plastic began to flow forward again. And a moment later, he lost sight of the woman on the hoverbike altogether.
Sitting on a bench outside the Arbury School, under the watchful eye of the guard in the visitors' entrance scanning vestibule, Stake tried not to be obvious about eyeing a girl in blazer and plaid skirt and navy socks that clung to round hard calves as she knelt down to gather the books she'd spilled. Her silky, blue-black hair made him think she might be adorable little Yuki, but when she straightened and turned he saw the swimming clear tendrils that sprouted out of her eye sockets, and realized she was of the humanoid Tikkihotto race. Most of the girls at the school were Earth colonists, though he had spotted the occasional Choom, and a minute ago he had seen a female alien more akin to a giant dust mite walking upright on her four hindmost legs. However exclusive this private school was, it couldn't get away with racial exclusivity, though money was often the best way to filter undesirables. Because of her anatomy, the mite being wore only a diagonal band of the same black material as the blazers across her body, the school insignia displayed on this. The alien girl who had been walking beside her, though, with her gaping face like that of a deep sea hatchetfish, had been wearing the typical uniform, her tartan skirt giving Stake a look at knobby legs shimmering with silvery-gray scales.