Timmy grunted and pointed up. Erich followed the gesture. Far above, a star burned in the vast oceanic blue, a plume of fire pushing a ship out of the atmosphere. Near the horizon, the half moon glowed pale, a network of city lights crossing the shadowy meridian.
Transport, Erich said. They use mass drivers for the stuff that can take the gees.
I know, Timmy said.
Ever want to go up there?
What for?
I dont know, Erich said, staring down the street for the client. Hed seen her picture: a tall Korean woman with blue hair. He didnt know who shed been before, and he didnt much care. Burton wanted her made into someone new. Piss out the window and make everyone down here think it was raining, maybe.
Timmys chuckle sounded polite.
Its what Id do, if I could, Erich said, making a swooping gesture with his good hand. Zoom. Get up the well and out of here. Go where no one cares about who you are so long as youre good at what you do. Seriously, its the wild fucking west up there. You want nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona, its alive and well on Ceres Station. From what I heard, anyway.
Why dont you go, then? Timmy said. With a different intonation, it could have been dismissive. Instead it was only a mild kind of curiosity. It was part of what Erich liked about Timmy. There was almost nothing he seemed to feel deeply.
Starting from here? Id never make it. Im not even a registered birth.
You could tell them, Timmy said. People get registered all the time.
And then they get tracked and monitored and wind up dying on basic, Erich said. Anyway, no ones taking me for a vocational. Waiting lists for that are eight, ten years long. By the time I came up, Id have aged out.
Could build one, couldnt you? Timmy asked. Make a new identity and put it at the front of the list?
Maybe, Erich said. If you gave me a couple years to layer it all in like I did for Burton. He can go anywhere with docs I built for him.
So why dont you go, then? Timmy asked again, his inflection as much an echo as his words.
Guess I dont want it bad enough. Anyway, Ive got real stuff to do, dont I? I wish shed fucking get here, right? Erich said, unaware that he made everything a question when he wanted to change the subject. Unconsciously, he made a fist with the hand of his bad arm. Timmy nodded, squinting down the street for the client that wasnt coming.
Most of their lives had been spent on streets like this. The trade that exploited prostitutes and their illegal children was the second largest source of unregistered births in the city. Only religious radicals accounted for more. It was impossible to know how many unregistered men and women were eking out lives on the margin of society in Baltimore or how many had lived and died unknown to the vast UN databases. Erich knew of perhaps a hundred scattered among the legitimate citizens like members of a secret society. They congregated in condemned buildings and squats, traded in the gray-market economy of unlicensed services, and used their peculiar anonymity where it was most helpful. Looking down the pocked asphalt street, Erich could count three or four people that he personally knew were ghosts in the great world machine. Counting him and Timmy, that was half a dozen all breathing the same air while the plume of the orbital transport marked the sky gold and black above them. There was old water in the gutters, black circles of gum and tar on the sidewalk, the combined smell of urine and decay, and ocean all around them. Erich looked up at the sky with a longing he resented.
He knew himself well enough to recognize that he was a man of desires and grudges, so well in fact that hed come to peace with it. The blackness of space where merit counted more than the placement on a bureaucrats list, where the brothels were licensed and the prostitutes had a union, where freedom was a ship and a crew and enough work to pay for food and air. It called to him with a romance that made his heart ache. On Ceres or Tycho or Mars, the medical technology was available to regrow his crippled arm, to remake his shortened leg. The same technology could be found fewer than eight miles from the filthy curb where he sat, but with the triple barriers of being unregistered, basic medical care waiting lists, and his own ability to function despite his disabilities, space was closer. Out there, he could be the man he should have been. The thought was like the promise of sex to a teenager, rich and powerful and frightening. Erich had resolved a thousand times to make the effort, to build himself an escape identity and shrug off the chains of Earth, of Baltimore, of the life hed lived. And a thousand and one times, he had postponed it.
Get up, Timmy said.
You see her? Erich said.
Nope. Get up.
Erich shifted, frowning. Timmy was looking east with an expression of mild curiosity, a casual witness at someone elses wreck. Erich stood. At the intersection a block down, two armored vans had pulled to a stop. The logo on their sides was a four-pointed star. Erich couldnt tell if the people getting out were men or women, only that they were wearing riot gear. Metallic fear flooded his mouth. Timmy put a strong hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently but implacably across the street. Two more vans came to a halt at the intersection to the north.
What the fuck? Erich said, his voice distant and shrill in his own ears.
Timmy got him across the street and almost up to the doors of a five-story squat before Erich pulled back. My deck. My setup. Weve got to go back for it.
A deep, inhuman voice broke the air, the syllables designed in a sound lab to be sharp, clear, and intimidating. This is a security alert. Remain where you are with your hands visible until security personnel clear you to leave. This is a security alert. At the intersection, teams of armored figures were already questioning three men. One of the civiliansa thin, angry man with close-cropped black hair and dark olive skinshouted something, and the security team pushed him to his knees. The biometric scanfingerprints, retina scan, fast-match DNAtook seconds while the mans arms were held out at his sides, his elbows bent back in restraint holds.
I think maybe you used to have a deck, Timmy said. I dont think you got one right now.
Erich stood unmoving, caught between the animal urge to flee and to protect himself by hiding the evidence. Timmys thick fingers closed around his good shoulder. The big kids expression was mildly concerned. We dont go right now, theyre gonna have you and it both. I sorta screwed up the last thing Burton told me to do. Lets not burn my second chance getting you caught.
This is a security alert. Remain where you are with your hands visible until security personnel clear you to leave.
Erich swallowed and nodded. It was the nearest he could come to speech. Timmy turned him toward the squat and pushed him forward.
In the streets, the security teams converged slowly, moving from person to person, door to door, floor to floor. Before the operation was through, they would identify three hundred forty-three people and detain four who appeared in the operational database as persons of interest. Three unregistered individuals would be identified, entered into the system, and held pending investigation. The two of the unregistered who refused to provide a name would have names assigned to them. The operation, covering three city blocks, would locate an unlicensed medical clinic, three children in distressed circumstances, seven pounds of S-class psychoactives, eighty-two instances of illegal occupation, and the network interface deck and data collection setup offered up by a blue-haired detainee in exchange for a reduced penalty. The process would take ten hours, and so it was still hardly under way when Timmy and Erich emerged from the undocumented access tunnel that connected the squat with an abandoned seawater pumping station. They walked together, Erich with his good hand stuffed deep in his pocket, Timmy with the same amiable air that was his default. Erich was weeping silently. Above them, the transport ship was gone, the golden exhaust plume now only a streak of smoke against the sky.