On the other hand, there was nothing here to attract the attention of my neighbors. Most of the other residents were laborers or fractional-reserve servants of one variety or another: poor but sufficiently respectable not to attract the attention of the secret police. (Not that the SPs cared about anything except direct threats of sedition or subversion that might impair their patrons’ ability to keep their salaries flowing. Accept capitalism into your heart, and you were almost certainly safe, except for the occasional unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Yet another reason not to dwell here too long . . .)
I flopped back onto my bed and waved at the retina. “Any mail?” I asked halfheartedly.
“Good evenshift, Krina! I’m sorry, there’s nothing new for you today.” I’d given it an avatar, the facial map and mannerisms of my sib Briony—but left the eyes empty, to remind me there was no person behind them. “A communiqué from your cousin Andrea”—a sib of another generation from mine—“is buffering now and will be complete within two thousand seconds. Price of release is thirty-two fast. Do you wish to accept?”
I swore under my breath—not at the retina, lest it misinterpret. But rent-seeking intermediaries with a monopoly on interstellar commerce would have been a good candidate for the bane of my life had they not also become the source of my income (by a cosmic irony that I no longer found even remotely humorous). In this case, the station’s official receiver had decided that Andrea’s incoming message was inconveniently large, or that the exchange rate since its transmission began (at least twelve years ago, assuming she was still back home) had fluctuated sufficiently to justify levying a supplementary fee. In any event, what was I going to do? I could pay the additional service fee or miss the message. Which might be something as banal as a we’re all missing you, come home safe and soon or as vitally important as word that my entire multiyear mission was pointless, that the long-lost property had been picked up by a rival syndicate.
“Accept and debit my account,” I said aloud. I paused to update my expenses sheet and stared gloomily at the dwindling cash float: Today was turning out to be very costly indeed. “Have there been any more responses to my primary search?” I asked the retina.
“No new responses!” I winced. I’d spent another chunk of fast money a week ago, buying a broadcast search—not merely of Taj Beacon’s public-information systems, but propagated systemwide—for news of Ana. Who had now been missing for over a hundred days, since shortly after I began to download into the arrival hall’s buffers—a suspicious coincidence, in my view, given that she had lived in the same floating city on Shin-Tethys for over twenty years. “Three archived responses. Do you wish to review them?”
“No.” I had them off by rote memory: One anxious inquiry from an out-of-touch friend of Ana’s (I think an ex-lover); a request for an interview from the local police (doubtless wondering why an out-system visitor was interested in a missing person); and a debt-collection agency wondering who was going to pay the rent on her pod. It was depressing to think how faint the mark she’d left behind must be, that so few people were interested in her disappearance. (Much like me, in fact. Loneliness is our only reliable companion when we fish the well of time for magic coins.) “Download and archive Andrea’s packet in my second slot as soon as it’s available.” A thought struck me. “Transaction with M. Hebert, travel agent: labor-exchange placement. When does it time out?”
“Your offer closes in four thousand four hundred seconds! Placement vessel preparing for departure!” My retina chirped.
What? The agent didn’t tell me it was leaving so soon! I looked around my cube in a momentary panic, then realized there was virtually nothing here that I couldn’t replace easily enough. I grabbed my go bag, already stuffed with a spare change of clothes and a palm-sized retina: “Dump Andrea’s packet into my number two soul chip as soon as you’ve got it, then erase yourself,” I told my sister’s hollow-eyed face on the walclass="underline" “I’m out of here for good.”
An hour later, I arrived at a docking node in an old part of the station. It was all grubby metal and delaminating anticorrosion treatments, the lights flickering, ventilation ducts howling mournfully behind rattling panels. Fat umbilical trunks snaked between nodes and across exposed walls, floors, and ceilings, their papery shrouds rippling in the breeze: Odd gelatinous globules hang quivering from leaky pipes, their surfaces fogged and filthy with trapped dust and fluff. There was a marked lack of life in this place, a sense that here the bones of the world were showing through the skin.
I found myself afloat in the middle of a desolate six-way crossroads. It took a few seconds for me to compose myself before the next step. At times like this, I have always been susceptible to a weary, familiar dread. I was on my own here; if Ana was dead (as seemed likely), I was the only one of my kind in this entire star system, and my generation in my lineage is not one that is comfortable with solitary working. I’m a creature of habit and a team player—by design. I’d been up and alive on Taj Beacon for around a million seconds: time enough to develop a routine, even as a near down-and-out in an unfriendly and highly competitive realm. And routines are comforting. It would be easy to stop moving and stay here. I was achingly, numbingly tired of constant motion. Sometimes it felt as if I’d been traveling and studying and covertly searching forever, as if I’d been built to run down darkening corridors in beacon stations across the whole of inhabited space, driven by hallucinations and night terrors from the wrong side of the balance sheet. The darkness behind me was gaining, filled with the terrible fear that I and my closest sibs had been set up to be the targets of a killing joke of monstrous dimensions. Or perhaps just a killing. There was, quite clearly, no turning back—but I was deathly tired of going forward.
I made a conscious effort of will to get moving again, drawing deep on the reserves of determination held by the bank of Krina. I had long since anthropomorphized my regular doubts into familiars (for the only friends I had to talk things over with were imaginary). No Payoff At The End Of The Tunnel shuffled behind me and stared at my back with starvation-dulled eyes. In Too Deep rode on my shoulder, hunched and squinting suspiciously at every anomaly. Moral Hazard flew ahead of me on wings the color of bonemetal, occasionally turning its head to mock me over its shoulder. I did my best to ignore them: They were along for the voyage, but I was determined to chart our course without reference to insecurities. So I forced myself to kick off, diving headfirst into the shadowy recess of the air lock connected to the docking node above me, imagining them trailing behind.
The air lock was a dingy cylinder with no obvious exit: just a hand wheel protruding from one wall, some grab rails, and a sign on the dead end opposite the entrance that said YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE PRESSURIZED ZONE. I braced myself and turned the wheel. The entrance to the air lock narrowed as the cylinder rotated around me. As the solid, curved wall drifted across the entrance to the air lock, a mournful whistling began: A mesh of holes slid into view, venting into a cold trap to reclaim the valuable gases. When I felt the pressure drop in my vestibular machinery I stopped cranking and waited for silence. Then I turned the wheel again and kept turning until the air lock finally rotated far enough to show me the other doorway—the one that opened onto the unwinking starry darkness of deep space.
Space walking is dangerous, but the mooring crew had made adequate provisions: They’d fused no less than three brightly colored ribbons to the outer grab rail beyond the air lock, glowing merrily in the floodlit glare of a portal embedded in the chapel’s belowground service structures, some twenty meters away. There was a harness and pulley attached to the nearest tape. I blinked to shatter the film of ice that had crusted over my eyeballs, then grabbed the harness and fastened it around my body, looping it through the strap of my bag. A minute later I fell headfirst through the violet-glaring hoop of the chapel’s air lock. The light was cast by ultraviolet sterilizers. I knew what that meant: On the other side of this air lock, there was meat. Living meat.