"Ten-forty," said the console clock politely. He used the ladder instead of the small one-person lift to get up to the catwalk, hoping the exertion would keep his muscles from knotting. Just as he reached the top, something in his pocket dug into his thigh. The key to the freight elevator; he'd forgotten to return it to Security. The hell with it. If they wanted it, let them come and get it.
There was a short delay after he pressed his fingers to the printlock; keeping the program active stole a little from the other pit functions.
"Love my work," he muttered.
Likewise, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind.
The lock released, and he went down the hall to the elevators.
5
"You should have come to me first, Sam-I-Am," Fez said congenially.
Sam shrugged. "I guess I took a stupid pill this morning."
In the chair across from Sam, Rosa took a second doughnut from the box on the table between them and then offered the box to the young blond kid sitting on the couch. Fez's grand-nephew Adrian, just in that morning from San Diego, a real bolt from the ether. Fez had never mentioned having any family. The kid was fourteen and looked twelve, and there was something funny about his almond-shaped eyes. They seemed slightly out of focus, as if he'd taken a hard knock on the head moments before. A stunned fourteen-year-old. Sam imagined she must have looked the same way when she'd first been emancipated. The freedom was all you thought about, and when you finally got it, you were scared shitless. Welcome to the world, kid.
"Don't suppose you ate much else," Fez said with some amusement.
"Oh, I managed a little something," Sam told him, finding a stray rice grain on her pants. She rolled it between two fingers and then, for lack of anything else to do, put it in her pocket.
"The usual seaweed and grass clippings?" asked Fez.
"Seaweed and sushi rice."
Fez glanced upward. "Let me have a look in the larder. Maybe I can serve you something real. Besides doughnuts." He went to the kitchenette, a little alcove with a cooktop, zap-box, and midget-fridge built into the cabinets. Sam knew it well. She'd learned to cook there.
"You know how he gets about seaweed," Rosa said, wiping powdered sugar from the corners of her mouth.
"Yah. Fez's four food groups-meat, dairy, vegetables, and doughnuts." Sam sighed and let herself slump farther into the easy chair. "God, I'm tired. Those stupid pills really take it out of you."
"I wouldn't know," Rosa said loftily, and then winked. Sam laughed a little. Rosa probably didn't know. She was a canny little woman who had already achieved elder-statesperson status in the electronic underground by the time Sam had bumped into her on the nets three years before.
She'd met Fez right around the same time, along with the rest of them-Keely, Gator, poor lost Beauregard, Kazin, many others, some of them long since vanished, canned or on the move to keep from getting canned. Like Keely, perhaps.
"You know, I thought you'd come for your laptop first thing," Rosa said. "I couldn't believe you'd gone off without it to begin with. Like someone taking a trip around the world stark naked with no luggage."
Adrian giggled and then covered his mouth, embarrassed. Rosa turned her wry, lopsided smile on him. "It's okay, kid. Underneath their clothes everybody's going around naked." The boy giggled again and looked away from her.
"Don't torment Adrian," Fez called from the kitchen. The zap-box hummed and clicked off. "Try to remember that you two were once nervous junior citizens without a shred of savvy."
"If you can prove I was ever that young, I'll pay you a hundred thousand dollars," Rosa said.
"Listen to the old lady of twenty-four," Fez said, coming out of the kitchen with a large mug and a spoon. "Once you'd have paid me a hundred thousand dollars to prove you were ever going to get this old." He presented the mug and spoon to Sam with a slight bow. "Navy-bean soup, in lieu of green eggs and ham."
"Yuck to both. "Sam frowned at the lumpy tan mess in the mug. "I told you, I ate."
Fez stabbed the spoon into the soup and curled her hand around the mug. "I find it hard to, um, swallow seaweed and rice as a meal. Iodine's fine in its place, but you need something sticking to your ribs, which are still easily countable."
"You peeked," she said, which brought a small flush to his cheeks and sent him bustling over to the couch to sit next to his grandnephew.
Fez was about sixty, as near as she could tell, with a cloud of white hair that reminded her of cotton candy, and bright black eyes, a nose that had been broken once or twice, and a mouth that never quite stopped smiling. The particulars might have suggested Santa Claus, but Fez was neither fat nor bearded. Even if he had been (Sam couldn't imagine it), the angles of his face had a little too much sharpness to them, and in spite of the smile, his face had the wariness of a man perpetually on guard.
She remembered how hard it had been to reconcile this semigrandfatherly presence with the mental image she'd formed from on-line contact, picturing him as a grand old man of perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, with all the looks, charm, and sex appeal that had always been attributed to renegades.
In retrospect she knew she should have figured it out. Fez's knowledge of the past forty years, casually displayed in the course of their many odd-hours on-line conversations, had been too idiosyncratic in detail to be the product of anything but firsthand experience.
Sitting in the old easy chair, trying to choke down enough of the bland/salty soup to appease him, reminded her of the first time she'd come to this one-roomer in East Hollywood. Rosa had brought her, and he'd tried to feed her that day, too, but she'd been too boggled. Rosa herself had been a revelation, Cherokee Rosa as she was known on-line; she really was a Cherokee, and her name really was Rosa, and she had a mass of curly black hair, a knowing look, and a bone-crusher handshake. And, apparently, a mandate to bring her out of the tiny Santa Monica closet she'd been holed up in, making subsistence with gypsy scut work on her homegrown laptop.
We've been watching you, doll. You hack good.
Sam had had mixed feelings about that. Big Brother, is that it?
Not Big Brother. More like the relative nobody wants to talk about.
That's me, Sam had said.
Doll, that's all of us.
Sure was. And so Rosa had brought her to be surprised by Fez, and after that she'd kept coming back on her own as often as possible. She found out later that she was one of a very few Fez allowed to visit so frequently or, for that matter, ever (Rosa was another). She might have ended up all but moving in with him if he hadn't always thrown her out eventually. He wasn't looking to host the eastern branch of the Mimosa, he told her firmly, and he was nobody's father figure, he told her even more firmly, both of them well aware that father figure was not how she felt about him.
She settled for the benefit of his extensive knowledge of computer communications, and the privilege of being allowed to use the elaborate computer system sitting on the desk against the far wall. It looked deceptively jerry-rigged with all the mismatched upgrades and add-ons. The configuration had changed again since she'd last visited; there was a second flat easel-type screen now, and a couple of very large housings that had to have quadrupled available memory. She also noticed that the head-mounted monitor sitting off to one side was hooked up to the system, as if it had seen some use recently, which surprised her. Fez had never been especially enamored of Artificial Reality, at least as a place to visit.
The system was on, she realized, even though neither screen was lit. That was unlike Fez, as well, to run anything without screening its progress.