Five minutes after leaving him, Fixx knew he would find it impossible to remember the face, another five minutes and he’d probably have forgotten the clothes. And somehow Fixx got the feeling the man wanted it that way.
“Your luggage?” Mr Aziz looked round vaguely.
“I travel light,” said Fixx, nodding towards Ghost who was rubbing his neck against Fixx’s ankle.
“Twenty-four hours,” the man said firmly.
Fixx looked blank.
“It is twenty-four hours, isn’t it? Before you blast off for your new ring colony...”
So that was how LISA had swung it. Obscenely rich and just passing through. “Yeah,” said Fixx, “if you say so.” Hefting Ghost under one arm, Fixx turned for the door marked Exit. It opened before he was ten paces away, offering him a cheerful welcome in a language he didn’t understand. Japanese from the sound of it, which said something about who usually used the VIP lounge.
“They didn’t have time to change the program,” Rez Aziz said after him. He didn’t sound apologetic, just matter-of-fact, as if reclusive, arrogant, by-law breaking CySat stars came through all the time, expecting to be humoured. But then, hell, maybe they did.
Outside the door was a walkway, perched high above the floor of Arrivals. And looking down, Fixx could see a swirling blue mosaic and below that wall-to-wall tourists, refugees and journalists. People were beginning to look up — first one or two, then dozens — attracted by the glint of light on his arm and the cloak that billowed behind him when it remembered.
Some of them, the older ones, recognized him and Fixx bowed, unable to resist the urge; but even as he did, part of him wondered where to buy clothes that were more anonymous, for when he needed to blend in, become invisible.
It was one thing to be famous, even once-famous. Quite another to find a kidnapped girl when every step you took advertised who you were. All Fixx had in his favour was that no one yet knew he was here to find LizAlec.
“Can I get a look down there?” Fixx asked a passing cleaner. The cleaner whirred, glass eyes swivelling towards Fixx, and it nodded reluctantly. Fixx took the slight bob of its head to mean he should use the lift.
A drop lift stood waiting to take passengers down to the marble floor below and Fixx carried Ghost into the Orvis. A button released the holding magnet and his own weight-plus-gravity took them slowly down. Another button blasted the lift back to its original position. The whole contraption was based on an ancient Victorian idea of using pneumatic power to send messages down tubes from one office to another.
The American woman who’d taken out the patent on the pneumatic lift was now Croesus-rich and holed up in Baja California, her blood, kidneys and lungs wired into a Mitsubishi Extopian Special.
“Need any help?” the lift asked as its doors opened.
Fixx shook his head.
“Then enjoy your stay,” said the lift and was gone back to the VIP floor, leaving Fixx standing in the swirl of people crowding Arrivals Hall. The vast atrium stank of people, McDonald’s soyburgers and recycled air. It was a smell Fixx had forgotten and one he was going to have to get used to — fast.
Every breath, every gulp of water taken on the Moon was endlessly recycled. Tears, sweat, piss, everything was collected or leached from the air and swallowed back into the system. Breathing someone else’s stink was afact of life. As locals never stopped telling the tourists, if they didn’t like the air they could always try outside.
Plenty of people looked at Fixx. Men glancing away or defiantly meeting his silver eyes, the women smiling at Ghost and Fixx’s ludicrous cloak, or frowning at his hair. Only kids watched the weird man with undisguised interest, stopping to nudge each other at the metal arm, leather trousers and kitten clutched like a baby in his arm.
Floor level at Planetside was logo hell and fly-post heaven. HoloAds for Coke jostled flashing neon bottles of Bud. Someone had staple-gunned a flickering faux-telex It’s cheaper with Mercury over the top of Cablebox’s flashing Now phone home. There were signs pointing you to God, LunaWorld and the nearest legalized brothel. What there wasn’t was any sign of a Japanese ballerina.
LunaWorld’s Man on the Moon Spacetel was themed to mid-twentieth-century America. At least, Fixx figured it was mid-twentieth from the bright clothes in the photographs and the big pink Cadillac with fins that stood in the foyer. He knew it was a Cadillac from the reverential little notice alongside. Booking him into the MMS had to be LISA’s idea of a joke, but it wasn’t one that amused the desk staff. Oh, they had his reservation, right enough. Made months back. They just didn’t have a room to spare. Fixx shrugged and took a swig from his complimentary beer. After Paris anything was bliss.
Out of the bar window was a view of a huge white Saturn rocket taking off in a billowing cloud of smoke. It was convincing enough to fool a child, but Fixx noticed the slight jump where the tape was looped, to let the same rocket endlessly fire up its engines and vanish into an impossibly blue Cape Canaveral sky.
Ignoring the window was the sign of an old hand. Fixx realized that when he noticed that only he and a family of newly arrived South Africans were watching: everyone else was pointedly ignoring the thing. All the same, Fixx kept looking until the sequence had started over again.
Speaking personally, if he’d been fixxing the sequence he’d have done a 2001 with the colours, put an orange Saturn blasting into a purple shy, black flames belching from the afterburners. And he’d have put in some proper contemporaneous music. Maybe a little mid-period Jimi Hendrix, but hey... Fixx finished his beer and shrugged.
He didn’t see what was so wrong with watching a fake window. It couldn’t have been a real one anyway. Like all of LunaWorld except the actual dome, the MMS was dug into bedrock, sealed safely away from the sucking vacuum of the surface. It was easier, cheaper and faster to dig out the space you needed and let the overhead rock take the strain. You did away with the problems of radiation, too.
“Mr Valmont?” The thirty-something woman standing in front of him was Luna-born. Wasp-waisted from where low gravity kept her guts from pressing down into her abdomen and with pert breasts that would never know the need for a bra, but her arms were muscle-withered and her face puffy with water retention.
No amount of working out could help, unless you were rich enough to afford weekly membership of an artificial-gravity gym, and that meant going orbital. Fixx knew, he’d seen the holoAds in the Arrivals Hall.
“Yeah, that’s me.” Like it was going to be anyone else. She was desperate to tell him how difficult it had been to find him a room, Fixx could see that from her harassed face, but he didn’t need telling. Half of Europe had fled into exile and credit alone wasn’t enough to find you living space on Planetside, not these days. Whatever electronic strings LISA had tugged, it had impressed and irritated the hotel in equal amounts.
“I want to thank you,” said Fixx, looking into her grey eyes, and smiled. “I know how impossible it must have been.” The woman waved away his thanks hurriedly, butttushed all the same. She was old enough to remember him when had been famous.
Leaving the South African family still trying to check in, Fixx followed the woman into a lift, dropping five floors to level minus five. His suite was vast but filthy. Grey dust frosted like chalk across a glass table in the centre of the main room and in the bedroom it covered the grey enamel bedside locker. The bed was themed, like the rest of the furniture in the suite. And while the puffed satin headboard was undeniably hideous it wasn’t anything like as bad as the bedside lamp that had gold tassels that swung when brushed.