Balot opened the window and sniffed the air, which carried a hint of brine.
Eventually the car came to a stop in a designated car park for rental cars.
As she got out of the car and started walking, she came across a gathering of obviously able-bodied teenagers who had parked their gas-powered cars in the free spaces designated for vehicles with placards for the handicapped.
As she walked past Balot snarced the gate of the parking lot. The teenagers looked on in horror as the gate slammed shut. As one, their faces turned to the emergency aid button. Faces that were silently calculating the fines they would have to pay for being caught using the handicapped spaces without a permit.
–Well, you’ve got to obey the rules, right? Balot asked through the crystal, using a silent, electronic signal.
“Uh, yeah.”
Oeufcoque seemed about to say something else, but in the end that was all he said.
The mall was bustling, and a fresh breeze blew through the arcade.
The people were coming and going purposefully, and the occasional pair of Hunters—the city police—walked past on patrol, but they showed no sign of looking for an easy target to beat up. Rather, they too walked with a sense of purpose, and there was no particular scent of anyone on this street looking to find any sort of warped pleasure.
Responding to her surroundings, Balot put on a purposeful expression and started walking. Her heels clicked along as if she were testing them out, feeling their sensation, and Oeufcoque called out to her, “Let’s get some papers. It’s hard to keep track of what you’ve spent when you’re using a card.”
Like a dad. He wasn’t going to buy anything. Just cast a watchful eye over her purchases.
They found a nearby ATM and used the card to draw out a wad of notes.
Twenty twenty-dollar bills. The amount Oeufcoque specified. She was worried that this might be too much and wanted to take fewer than ten, but Oeufcoque said that she would be better off having a few nerves to keep her on her toes, so she did as he said.
She folded the crisp new bills in half and crammed them into her card holder. She put one bill in her jacket pocket and deliberately scrunched it up. As if to say This is all I have.
She bought a bag from a stall inside the mall using this bill. Seeing the crumpled note the shopkeeper threw in a cheap leather wallet, giving it to her along with her change at no charge.
Balot meekly obeyed the rules of the street.
She transferred the bills from her card holder to the wallet in the shadow of a building and put them away in her bag, and now, instead of scrunching up another bill, she captured the movements of all people within a fifteen-meter radius.
She wore her bag diagonally over her shoulder and then put her jacket on over it in order to protect it from purse snatchers.
Now all she had to do was think about what she wanted to put in the bag.
She bought some toiletries and sanitary napkins at the drugstore. She bought some handkerchiefs and hairpins, then wandered aimlessly through the mall. Clothes and shoes, jewelry, electronics, ethnic goods. She examined the handicrafts and souvenirs as she chatted with Oeufcoque about nothing in particular. That frame doesn’t suit the picture, or you could make one of those using my body as a mold, that sort of thing.
“Aren’t you starting to get hungry?” Oeufcoque asked. He’d been keeping track of Balot’s biorhythm. He had constant tabs on her pulse, and at the same time was checking the surroundings to make sure there was no danger.
–Can I eat whatever I want?
“Of course. I was asking for you. I don’t really need much, after all.”
They had a quick look at a plan of the mall attached to a public telephone, looking for the entries for food and drink stalls, and found a block of open-air food carts. Balot headed in that direction.
Without having to walk for too long she saw a row of carts linked together all serving colonial food.
There were white plastic tables and chairs in a courtyard, and Balot went up to the tableware section and took a disposable tray before heading over to some of the stalls. The place was a real salad bowl of races, and anyone working at the stalls could handle a number of different languages. They picked them up naturally in the course of business with various different customers, and were also used to communicating even when they couldn’t understand a word of what the other person was saying.
Balot took her tray, laden with paper plates full of food, and found a seat.
Her main dish was a plate of Tick Noodles smothered in red Charlie Sauce. It contained boiled squid and chunky slices of vegetables. She’d also bought a dish of deep-fried fish slices and chilled whole fish on the bone.
“You’re pretty good at that, aren’t you?”
Oeufcoque watched with admiration as Balot skillfully used her chopsticks.
“Chopsticks have always been a mystery to me—I’ve never understood why people go out of their way to turn one piece of cutlery into two smaller pieces.”
Balot sifted through the fish with her chopsticks. She elegantly separated the bones from the flesh, forming two piles.
–I was always the best at this. The other girls used to say I was handy.
She transmitted the words to Oeufcoque electronically as she ate. Well, wasn’t this convenient? She could eat and talk at the same time.
–I think I’d probably be good at excavating fossils, that sort of thing.
“Is that something you’re interested in going into in the future?”
–I’d like to, but maybe I’m saying that because it’s the only thing I can think of that’s at all related to my skills.
Balot started thinking about the things that had died such a long time ago. Things that had been buried underground for many years, slowly turning to stone. Things long since forgotten. Why did they then have to be dug up again?
–I don’t really know.
Oeufcoque changed the subject. “Isn’t it about time for your medication?”
Balot tidied her tray away and went to the self-service water cooler to take the medicine the Doctor had given her. Skin stabilizers, hair growth agents, medicine to fix her eyelashes, vitamins, calcium tablets. Lots of things she had to take—and she took them all.
As she swallowed her medicine she thought about the fossils. One fossil in particular. A swirling shell. What were those things called that stayed hidden in their shells except for their moplike hands and feet that they used to crawl along the seabed?
“Ammonite or something, that sort of thing, wasn’t it?” Oeufcoque answered conscientiously when asked.
After she’d walked through the mall for a while, she did indeed come across a collection of spirals.
They were in the form of some computer graphics projected onto the wall of a building. Balot stopped in front of the stall that sold them.
The shop sold Eject Posters. Small square boxes that, when fitted to a wall, would project images onto the space just below. There were a number of patterns lined up in a row, and there was a memory card that contained over a hundred different pictures of fossils.
“Why not buy something that takes your fancy? It’d be a pleasant diversion, and the decor in your room is pretty dull,” said Oeufcoque.
Balot took advantage of his offer. She bought an Eject Poster and a card with the fossils on it, then walked on, eyes on the instruction manual. Computer simulations of live ammonites, nautiluses, trilobites, along with photographs of the fossilized creatures, mixed with other minerals and fossilized into spirals of silver and gold and crystal.