By the tenth hand I had their system figured out, and I took them for several hundred dollars. By the fifteenth hand they knew I was onto them, so I cashed in my chips and winked at the guy as I left. I went up a level and ordered a drink and took it to a window seat. The Coriolanus Force was coming from a steep angle now, "down" was somewhere between a perpendicular to the spoke and another to the rim. The elevator accommodated this by turning the cable-side FLOOR into a series of three-foot-wide steps. It made everything look a little cockeyed. The row of windows I was looking through, for instance, had been horizontal when I first saw this deck. Now they were at a thirty-degree angle to my internal "level." Don't worry about it if you can't visualize it. I had to see a computer model of it before I got it straight in my head.
"How long did it take you to catch on to us?" Poly said, placing her drink on the table beside mine, sitting beside me. (The glasses? Magnetic bases with clear glass hemispheres mounted on little gimbals. Turn them upside down and nothing would spill. In zero gee a top snapped over the liquid automatically and you sipped through a straw.)
"You guys weren't bad at all," I told her, fudging a little. She wasn't bad. He was playing with fire. "Don't ever get in a rough game, for high stakes. Your boyfriend might not make it out alive."
"His name is Brian, and he's not my boyfriend."
"No?"
"A classmate and violin rehearsal partner. We're really terrible, aren't we?"
"Don't play with the big boys," I reemphasized.
She shrugged. "It was just for fun. Kind of exciting, but we never took very much money. We didn't want to make anybody suspicious."
"You win enough, somebody at the table's gonna be suspicious. Make sure he doesn't catch you in anything. Make him have to prove it. The other players'll back you, usually."
"What if they don't?"
"Make sure you're sitting close to the door. Not in front of it, not with your back to it. Then hope, if you're cornered, that the weapon you brought to the table is better than the ones they brought."
"You carry a weapon to a poker game?" She looked excited at the idea.
"Always."
"What's the best one?"
"The sense not to sit down with killers."
"That's not a weapon."
"Depends on how you employ it. It's the best one I know." And the one I've used the least, I added, dolefully, to myself.
She cocked her head the way self-confident, lovely young girls do, girls who haven't suffered much yet. A girl who is trying to decide if you are a pearl in her oyster or just sand in her clam.
"You've been around a bit, haven't you?" she asked.
"Here and there."
"I've never been off Oberon. It sounds like an exciting way to live."
"You mean professional gambling?"
"You said you never gamble."
"Poker's not gambling. And I'm not a professional. It's too exciting a way to make a living." This was true, though over the years I've played here and there, depending on my circumstances and the qualifications of the other players. (Who do you want to play with? Rich people, people who won't miss it, and who fancy themselves card sharks.)
"May I ask how old you are?" she said.
I put my hand behind her neck and drew her to my lips. She didn't seem to object. When I broke away a little, she was smiling.
"Old enough to know a gentlewoman never asks that question."
"Who said I was gentle?"
She was, though. Quite gentle when she wanted to be. Something else entirely when sterner measures took her fancy.
"Hello. Uh... is this..."
"Oberon Mutual?" the voice said, helpfully.
"Uh... yes." Had I called them already? It seemed I'd been living a tape loop, the same conversation over and over.
"Do you have an account for... T. Frothingwell Bellows?"
"I'm sorry, we do not."
They'd never heard of Woolchester Cowperthwaite Fields or Elwood Dunk, either. I looked at the little handset phone, and rubbed my ear, which felt hot and sweaty. Maybe I ought to get one of those implanted phones, like the huge majority of my fellow citizens. I'd had to ask for this handset at the front desk; they no longer put phones in rooms.
Ah, but the key word was "citizen." I was not a citizen, except in the narrow, textbook meaning of one who resides, or someone born in a certain administrative district. Citizens didn't break the law. It seemed, these days, that I couldn't help breaking three or four laws before breakfast.
If I ever started thinking of myself as a citizen, I was sure arrest would follow within days.
I put the phone down, along with any thought of having Big Brother's favorite listening device implanted in my head. I picked up the pack of reefer I'd bought at the drugstore downstairs, withdrew a yellow paper cylinder, and struck it. As I drew in the smoke I moseyed over to the big window and stood looking out over the city of Noon.
I guess you had to call it a city. It was a big clump of tall buildings, like you'd see on Old Earth or Mars. Everywhere else cities are underground, defined by internal space, "cubic," not by external walls. Surface cities are defined by buildings, crisscrossed by open-topped streets, speckled with parks and fountains and many other things, all open to the sky. It can produce agoraphobia in people raised underground.
But after you'd called it a city, you had to add that it was like no city ever seen on Earth or Mars. These buildings were not anchored on bedrock; everything below them was man-made for about two or three hundred feet, then there was nothing but vacuum in the basements. You'll have to put the rec room somewhere else, Dad.
The realization that the buildings did not have to be tied to something as stable as a planetary crust had quickly sunk in among the Oberoni architectural community, and it had liberated them. Or driven them crazy, depending on who you talked to. Liberated architects, men and women with a newfound freedom to explore, a new Zeitgeist, if you will, can create a Parthenon on the one hand, and a Bauhaus on the other.
The revolution that had produced Noon City and the several other clumps of madness on the rim of Oberon was the realization that they need not be tied down. In fact, it was better if they weren't. The construction of the wheel in the early stages had often required the shifting of large masses up to several miles to maintain balance with the opposite arc. Instead of wasting their time building big blocks of nothing, the engineers had made buildings on rails. If the wheel started to wobble a little, by golly, why they'd just get a few skyscrapers in gear and motor on down the road.
I told you the Oberoni were different.
And then, since you were literally building everything, first building the ground, then building from the ground up, and since the rails were already in place, why not utilize the long-established efficiencies of the production line? Why not build all the structures in one spot and roll them to where you wanted them? Build your city like Henry Ford built Model Ts.
Now, old Henry was famous for saying you could have a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Applying that rule here, the Oberoni might have come up with a monumentally drab and depressing place ("Hey, Charley, got an order here for half a dozen thirty-five-story Neo-Leninist apartment monads by next Thursday. Do they get a discount for a six-pack?").
It never happened, mostly because construction on the wheel began at the height of a trend we're all familiar with: Custom Construction. Remember when no two washing machines looked alike? When it was a mark of your rejection of "herd values," and "urban sameness," and "standardized thought" to own only items that reflected your unique persona? How it became necessary to own a washing machine that was at least as unique as the Joneses' washing machine? The guts of the machines were identical, of course, since the job of mixing water and soap and clothes and then drying them could only be done in a certain small number of ways. But the surface, that was the point! Computers could design you a machine that looked like no other machine on the block. And ditto for bicycles, and hockey sticks, and living-room carpet, and popcorn poppers. I don't need to look at the serial number, Jack. That goddamn ice bucket is mine!