“For freight transit, there’s the underground route,” said the driver, having guessed the reason for Alex’s surprise. “They run passenger capsules, too. Who the hell likes to be under there, though…”
This was apparently a sore spot—the subway must have been drawing away some of the better-tipping passengers. For a few minutes, the driver told Alex the history of the subway project. To listen to him, the subway was completely worthless to everyone except the corrupt bureaucrats from Town Hall.
Alex closed his eyes. He regretted having kept up the conversation, after all. He should have just paid the fare and taken a nap. Half an hour of sleep—that wouldn’t have been half bad.
“Hey, I like that little tattoo you got,” the driver complimented him. “I mean, it ain’t all that much to look at, just a snot of a thing. But the little devil’s face is well done! You can see how he’s tired, and bored, and… er… maybe stuck-up, even. Like he doesn’t give a damn about anyone.”
“That’s bad,” murmured Alex. “I didn’t order that.”
“Come on, it came out good!” The driver seemed to have grown more comfortable with Alex. “You’re a good guy, for a spesh. No, don’t get me wrong… I personally have no problem with you guys. But the speshes, well… sort of look down on us naturals sometimes. Right?”
“It happens.”
“I even wanted to get a specialty for my little daughter, when I found out my wife was expecting. Not too expensive here, you know. The government helps out, you can pay in installments for ten years. But guess what happened?”
“What?”
“We didn’t agree. Know what I was thinking? It’d be best for the kid to be a good technician. Always in demand, good pay, and, like I said, it ain’t too expensive. Back in the army, we had this independent plumbing contractor, a young lady-spesh. You should’ve seen her get those rusted bolts off barehanded! Caught leaks by ear sixty feet away! And, boy, could she blow out those sewer pipes! And a real looker, besides. Well, I tell my wife… but she’s all in tears—says: ‘I don’t want my daughter to spend her whole life in sewers and basements!’ What the hell? I mean, work is one thing, life is something else. So I ask her, what you want then? She says: ‘Let the girl be a model.’ Now you tell me, ain’t that just loony?”
“Yup.”
“Those specifications ain’t subsidized by the government… they cost something terrible… And what kind of work is that, anyway—shaking your ass on a catwalk?! And you know what? One day they want ’em skinny as a rail—next day they only want the chubby ones. How do you know what they want next?”
Alex was quiet.
“Hey, spesh, you asleep?”
He did not answer, and the driver fell silent. Seemed even a bit offended. He stopped the car at the spaceport a little too abruptly, as though wishing that Alex would smash his face into the windshield.
“Thanks,” said Alex, opening his eyes. He really had dozed off, but his body reacted quickly, readjusted to the inertia, and fixed itself firmly in the car seat, as soon as the car’s brakes engaged. “Good luck to you.”
He did not leave any more tip than had already been included in the fare.
The central civilian spaceport of Quicksilver Pit was not all that its name suggested. Sometime in the past, it had been the main loading dock for ships traveling into orbit. But about twenty years before, another civilian spaceport had been built, farther away from the capital and capable of receiving the larger, modern spaceships. The new spaceport did not receive the title of Central, though in reality that’s what it was.
Alex smoked, standing near the automatic glass doors. There were lots of people around, but this spaceport seemed more crowded because the buildings themselves were small. Periodically, as each shuttle arrived, a crowd would spill out through the doors. The people all looked alike, as if they were clones. Each shift on the orbital factories and shipyards lasted three days and three nights, but there were a lot—a whole lot—of factories orbiting Quicksilver Pit.
Throwing away his cigarette, Alex entered the building. He had suddenly realized that he was simply putting off his last steps toward the ship as long as possible.
Port authority clerks scurried around. Menial workers in uniforms and civilian passengers crowded around registration desks. Security officers strolled back and forth, every one of them a spesh—of deceptively small stature, with narrow shoulders.
Alex walked through the crowd toward one of the entrances leading to the service tiers of the spaceport. He noticed several security officers pause some distance away to keep an eye on him.
He said, looking at the camera panel, “Alexander Romanov, spesh, captain and master-pilot of the spaceship Mirror, the Sky Company, Earth-based.”
His identity chip, implanted under the skin just below his collarbone some twenty years before, pulsed almost imperceptibly. A full-blown identity check, complete with an express genotype analysis, was in progress.
Alex waited patiently while the molecular detectors in his capillary net caught a brand-new lymphocyte, just entering the bloodstream, then split it apart to compare it with the one they had on file. It was impossible to fool the identity chip in maximum vigilance mode. Even if you surgically removed it from the body and placed it in a vial of the owner’s freshly drawn blood, it would not give a false result. The identity check could take a few minutes, but security was more important than convenience.
“Identity established, access permitted,” replied the computer terminal. It was a human voice, so it must have been an actual operator, rather than a machine, which had performed the screening. The force field blocking the entrance changed its polarity, allowing him to pass. “Do you require assistance?”
“Is the floor plan standard here? The spider room in the usual place?”
“The usual place,” replied the operator. “Proceed.” The rank of captain would have allowed Alex to use the transit platforms. But it was not a long walk, so he preferred to go to the spider room on foot. It was a subtle pleasure that was hard to explain—to walk through the wide, half-empty tunnels stretching under the buildings of the port, to nod to the passers-by. There were no passengers here, no tradesmen, no pickpockets, none of the scum that accumulated in any transit artery like cholesterol in human veins. All who remained here were his people. Even if not all were speshes.
The spider room was the spaceport name for the accounting and contract departments. The name reflected both the appearance of such departments and their functionaries, and the eternal antagonism between the technical workers and the paper-pushing bureaucrats. The spiders often retaliated with a vengeance. At times, Alex felt that if it were up to them, no ship would ever leave port.
“Are you here on business?” inquired the guard at the entrance to the bureaucratic realm. The question was almost a ritual one, and Alex had heard it in dozens of spaceports.
“No, I’m just a masochist,” Alex retorted, as usual.
The guard smirked and touched a sensor, unblocking the entrance. He would probably have been happy to let a terrorist into the spider room, but for some reason no terrorist ever turned up to threaten the lives of accountants.
Alex walked in.
The spider room was utterly quiet. Many other departments preferred to have some background music. Not here. Well, maybe they did have music, but for each individual workstation.
Twenty spiders, or to be exact, she-spiders, turned their heads simultaneously and peered at Alex. Almost all of them used the simplest neuro-shunts, and delicate bundles of wires stretched down from their temples to the desktop computers. Only a few accountant-speshes went without these dubious ornaments. Neuro-terminals were built into the headrests of their chairs.