At last she came to a stretch of gates and waiting areas that were nearly empty of people.
She hurried to the nearest bin and dropped the stolen bracelet into a slot, then continued down the long lighted passageway. Her feet were beginning to hurt. Amparo had traded a stolen belt for the shoes, which were made of synthaleather, but the leather had molded itself to its former owner’s feet and had never fit Alonza’s very well.
She was far enough away from the bin now. Alonza moved toward one of the empty waiting areas and sat down on one of the smaller cushions, wondering how long it would take Amparo to find her.
“Stay in one place,” Amparo had always told her, “and sooner or later I’ll find you.”
Alonza sat there, listening to the announcements in Anglaic, Arabic, Espaqol, and other languages. “Twelve-twenty suborb to Toronto, gate fifty-two, now boarding.” “Two zero five, suborb to Damascus, gate forty-seven, now boarding.” “Sixteen thirty-one, shuttle flight to the Wheel, leaving at thirteen-oh-two from gate ninety-five.”
The Wheel! Alonza thought of the space station high above the Earth and was soon lost in a familiar daydream. Someday, when she was older, she would board one of the shuttles and travel to the Wheel herself, to wander its curved corridors and loiter in its lounges before boarding a torchship to another place, maybe Luna or the Islands of Venus. Her daydream was formed mostly of images and experiences drawn from a mind-tour called “Journey to the Wheel,” one of the mind-tours anyone was free to call up without having to spend credit, even people like her and her mother who had to live on Basic and steal anything else they needed. Most of the free mind-tours she had seen bored her; either they were designed to teach some sort of skill like homeostat repair or else they were filled with action scenes that tired her out and were often hard to remember later.
But “Journey to the Wheel” was different. It kept her interested even when there wasn’t really that much going on, when she was feeling and seeing what it was like to travel in a shuttle, floating weightlessly up against the harness that held her to her seat while viewing the distant pale circular tube with spokes that was the Wheel. The end of the mind-tour always left her with a tired but happy feeling of expectation, of feeling that something wonderful was about to happen to her.
Maybe people who went to other places, who didn’t just do their traveling with bands around their heads so that the cybers could feed them a mind-tour’s images and sensations, had that kind of happy feeling all the time. She imagined leaving the room she shared with Amparo and never having to return to the maze of apartment buildings, cubicles, and shacks where the homeostats rarely worked and the air was always too hot and smelled of sand and dust. Maybe—
“Going to Shanghai, child?” a woman’s voice said in Anglaic.
Alonza looked up. A woman with short dark hair and a kindly smile was gazing down at her.
“No,” she replied hastily.
“But this is the waiting area for that suborb flight.”
“I’m waiting for my mother,” Alonza said. “She told me to wait here.” She glanced down at her hands and saw, too late, that she had forgotten to pull the long sleeves of her tunic over her wrists. The woman would notice that she was not wearing an identity bracelet.
But the stranger did not look down at her hands, but instead continued to stare at Alonza’s face.
“I see,” the woman said.
“She didn’t want me to get lost,” Alonza added.
“Of course. Well…” The woman turned away and sat down on a cushion near the wall.
Alonza waited as more people entered the lounge and settled themselves on the cushions around her. Among them were two Linkers, dressed in long white formal robes and kaffiyehs, each with the diamondlike gem on his forehead that marked him as one of the few who had a direct Link to Earth’s cyberminds; the two men sat together, and those making their way past them nodded respectfully in their direction. A few of the people were eating small rolls and pieces of fruit, and drinking from small bottles; Alonza, feeling very hungry, wondered if she could risk begging or stealing some food. Nearly every seat was taken by the time she started worrying about Amparo.
Her mother should have been here by now, Alonza thought. Soon all these people would begin to board the suborb, and somebody else would wonder what she was doing here.
Already a gray-haired man was watching her with a puzzled look on his face, while a guide wearing dark blue overalls and a badge hanging over his chest had come by a couple of times already, slowing down to glance at her both times.
A space in the back wall opened. A man came through the opening and stepped to a counter as the doorway behind him closed. He wore a dark blue shirt; like the guide, he had a badge that said “Port of San Antonio” on the top and “Nueva Republica de Texas” on the bottom. Alonza knew how to read a little, and she had seen those words often enough to recognize them immediately.
The man peered at the screen of his console, apparently checking the passenger list. That meant that everyone here would be lining up in a few minutes, having their bracelets scanned and their identities and credit confirmed, and then heading for the doorway that led to the field outside.
She was suddenly frightened, afraid to move from her cushion. Then she saw the guide walking toward her with another man at his side, a tall thin pale-haired man in the black uniform of a Guardian, with a stun wand hanging from his belt.
“Is your name Alonza Lemaris?” the man in the Guardian uniform asked.
She nodded. If he knew her name, it meant that her mother had been caught.
“Come with me,” the man said.
They took her to a small room. The guide left them there alone, and the Guardian asked her a lot of questions, keeping his hand around his wand the whole time, but terrified as she was, she knew that Amparo would want her to say as little as possible. “I’m waiting for my mother. She told me to wait there for her. She told me not to get lost.” She kept saying the same thing over and over and at last the Guardian stopped pacing and sat down in front of her.
“Listen to me, you little bitch,” he said angrily. “We’ve already got your mother on assault, credit theft, and ident theft. If we put her to the question, we can probably get a lot more out of her, but she wouldn’t be the same afterward, and you’re the only one who can stop us from doing that kind of damage to her. So you can begin telling me about what kinds of things she’s been up to, and we’ll find some work for her to do while she’s serving her sentence that won’t be too hard on her, or else we can start interrogating her until she breaks down and confesses. She won’t be of much use to anybody after that.
Some people get so messed up in their minds afterward that they end up killing themselves.”
“I want to see her,” Alonza said softly.
“You won’t see her until after she’s finished her time, and that’s going to be long from now. Get this through your head—you’ll probably never see her again. The only favor you can do for her now is to tell me exactly what she’s done, what you’ve seen her do, what you’ve done together.”
Amparo had always been terrified of getting caught, of being interrogated by Guardians.
They would put a band on your head, her mother had told her, one of the slender silver ones like the ones people used to access a mind-tour, and then they would dig into your mind, force you to confess, find all kinds of ways to hurt you and make you scream in pain until you told them the truth. That was why it was so important never to get caught; better to be dead than in the custody of Guardians preparing to question you.
“She didn’t do anything,” Alonza insisted, staring at the gold lieutenant’s bars on the man’s shoulders. “She told me to wait for her, that’s all.”