Her private self might not exactly shock them—surely as mortal children they had raised their own share of hell. But they’d worry about her, and gently offer their advice, which was always right and always dull, and she just didn’t need that in her life right now. At nineteen, the age-of-consent laws were complex, but if she didn’t go looking for brutes or father figures she was basically free—finally!—to sample those worldly delights that interested her. And what the hell else was there?
So she went to the swimming pool to look at the boys, and to let the boys look at her in a Polynesian-styled two-piece that did, yes, show off her assets rather nicely. In the changing room fax, she even gave herself a set of good, old-fashioned tan lines underneath, just in case. And just so her intentions were not in doubt, she applied a bit of that illuminated red sparkle to her lips and toes and fingernails. Boy bait.
The pool itself was housed in a structure that could open and close and swivel and opaque in response to the sun and wind and the changing moods of its patrons. Right now, with clouds rolling in off the mountains and a hot, dusty breeze blowing up from the south, the walls were clear and closed, looking out on a dry summer meadow, with cottonwood trees and apartment buildings in the distance.
Treading barefoot across the wet, sticky tiles of the floor, Xmary staked out a lounge chair next to the windows but facing away from them, looking out over the kiddie pools and hot tubs where everyone she knew actually swam and played. Through an archway she could see the edge of the “adult swim” area, where people went for hard exercise and competition—two activities that struck her as ridiculous in a world where your physical fitness was determined by the fax. She’d played water polo and bottom-hockey a few times there, just for fun, but otherwise had never been in it.
The kiddie area was something else again: a play-ground of rivers and tunnels, wave machines and water-falls, slippery slides and rickety pontoon bridges. There was so much screechy laughter in the air that you could barely hear anything else. She’d learned a few years back that natural humans, unmodified by the fax, could hold their breaths for only a minute or so, if that. A place like this would probably kill them, which was a sad thought considering how short and miserable their lives were to begin with! But Xmary, with no training and only infrequent practice, could stay underwater for three minutes with heavy exertion, and almost six without. It made life bearable, playing porpoise in the kiddie pool, groping through whirlpools in a darkened cavern.... In the unlikely event she ever managed to grow up, this would be one of the things she’d truly miss.
But even more important than the swimming itself was the survey of the crowd. There were maybe a hundred people here—not bad for a Friday afternoon on the hot side of the summer solstice—and the majority were under thirty. Since there were only a few thousand children in the whole of Denver, this meant—as always—that there was a pretty good chance of running into someone she knew. And yes, sure enough, she spotted a few almost immediately. None of her inner circle, or even her outer one, but there was Hacienda deFlores over there by the fountains, and Chad Breck a few meters farther on, looking Hacienda over from a covert angle.
Chad was actually a walking advertisement for the sexual politics of the age: he was cute enough—who wasn’t?—and he had that winning smile. But he didn’t know a damn thing about anything, and he liked it that way, and if you got buzzed enough to fall into bed with him then you had some hard decisions to make.
If you took him home, your house would log the fact and your parents would know everything. If you went to his place then at least his parents wouldn’t care—score one more for their precious sonny boy—but you had to know there were a hundred and fifty sensors recording you in every imaginable detail, and likely as not he’d be sharing these with his friends the next day. Illegally, yes, but if they were even a little bit careful about it there was no good way to catch them. Of course, those same images could be faked by any decent hypercomputer, but in an age of nearly perfect lie detection they’d be hard to fool your friends with. Which of course made even better trophies of the real thing.
And hotel rooms were expensive and left a money trail, and rented cars and aircraft were too damned cramped. So inevitably you ended up in a park or basement somewhere—with a blanket if you were lucky—and the magic of it all wore off pretty quickly. The holy grail was for one of your friends to get an apartment of their own that you could use, but of course the moment they did, that care-free spirit would begin to wither under the pressures of worldly responsibility. Theirs was a different Denver altogether: coldly competitive, and filled to bursting with bitches and bastards too selfish and fearful to die or retire or move somewhere else, or even step out to enjoy a day in the sun.
“Meritocracy can be cruel,” her Da was fond of saying. “It takes a hundred years to build a life, and six months to ruin it if you play your hand badly.”
You had forever to recover from your mistakes, true enough, but who wanted to risk another hundred years of numbing labor? For that matter, who wanted to start the process in the first place? Moving out to the planets wouldn’t help. Frontier, schmontier—if you didn’t have money it was just like everywhere else. Worse, really, because even the “outside” was artificial and owned. There was no place to escape to.
She spotted another familiar face, attached to a boy standing knee-deep in the Figure Eights and looking right at her. She couldn’t put a name to him—she wasn’t sure they’d ever spoken—but she had seen him around the campus this month, and in a few other places where people their age were found. Actually, he looked a few years younger than she was—sixteen or maybe seventeen—but to the extent that she cared at all, that was potentially a plus. What she really needed was a project.
She favored him with a smile and a wave, and he looked nervous for a moment before steeling himself and wading over in her direction.
“So you survived, eh?” he said to her as he stepped, dripping, out of the water.
“Survived what?” she asked.
“The café: 1551. Can I borrow your towel?”
And this was a pleasantly intimate request, because her towel was dry and he was only really wet from the waist down. He was cute enough—again, who wasn’t?— but he spoke with an accent she couldn’t place, and wore a mustache that wouldn’t really grow in for another few years, and there was something innocently delicate and artistic about him, something that tugged gently at her strings.
She tossed him the towel. “I’m at a loss, here. Were you there when the 1551 collapsed?”
“Most definitely,” he said, wiping the beads of moisture off his legs. “And I left the scene in a hurry, so I’m glad to see you’re none the worse.”
She blinked. “You saw me there? You talked to me?”
It was his turn to look puzzled, though he nodded. “Yep, I surely did. You had that same hairstyle. That same stuff on your lips. And a black dress. You don’t remember?”
His manner was increasingly nervous. He handed the towel back and did not quite meet her eye.
“I disappeared that night,” she said quietly, pinning him with her gaze. There was no reason to be afraid, not with all these people around. But she had probably thought the same thing on that fateful night, and where—where?—had it gotten her? “If you know anything about that, I advise you to spill it before I scream for the cops.”
“No, no,” he said nervously. “Don’t scream. I’m an agent for the Prince of Sol, and my cover is thin. May I sit down? May I share this chair with you so we can keep our voices low? I remember your name, it’s Xiomara something.”