They followed a purple rope into a dark neighborhood with one brightly lit gateway. People hurried in and out of it. Rebel didn’t need to be told that this was their destination.
At the gateway, an angular woman with bony shoulders and small, black nipples blocked their way. “Full up! Full up!” she cried. “No room here, go someplace else.” She didn’t even glance at Jonamon, who was now fully unconscious.
Wordlessly, Wyeth stripped the salaries from one wrist and held them forward. The woman cocked an eye at them, then let her gaze travel to his other wrist. Wyeth frowned. “Don’t get greedy, Roslyn.”
“Well,” Roslyn said. “I guess we could make an exception.” She made the salaries disappear, and led them inside.
It was chaos in the court, with stretcher lines hung up every which way. The lines were crowded with wounded rude boys and rude girls, temporary jackboots, unpainted religious fanatics, and even one tightly bound raver. A
miasma of blood droplets, trash, and bits of bandages hung in the air. But people with medical paint moved among the wounded, and their programming seemed efficient enough. Roslyn stopped one and said, “Give this guy top priority, okay? His friends are paying for it.” The tech gave a tight little nod and eased Jonamon away.
Roslyn smiled. “You see? Ask anyone, Roslyn gives good value. But you got to go now. I got no room for bystanders.” She shooed them back.
On the way out, Rebel suddenly spotted a familiar face.
She seized Wyeth’s arm and pointed. “Look! Isn’t that…?”
Maxwell was stretched out on a line, unconscious. The red police strip was smudged on his finely chiseled face.
Roslyn saw the gesture and laughed. “Another friend of yours? You oughta maybe get some new ones who can stayout of trouble. But he’s okay. Might lose a tooth. But mostly he’s just got a histamine reaction from being bee-stung too often.” They were at the gateway now. “Young woman brought him in. Pretty little thing.” She cackled. “I think she’s sweet on him.”
“Oh?” Rebel said coolly. “Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”
They moved through near-empty corridors, away from the center of the tank, and away from the receding storm front. “Wyeth,” Rebel said after a long silence,
“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his calcium depletion, aren’t they?”
“Jonamon’s problems are all the result of his being a stubborn old man. He’ll survive this time, but it’s going to kill him sooner or later.”
“No, really,” Rebel insisted. “I mean, like the kidney troubles, he gets them from the calcium depletion, right?
You watch him for any length of time, and you see that he gets muscle cramps, his breathing gets irregular… So why hasn’t he had that corrected?”
They were nearing the shell. The temperature was cooler here, up against the outside of the tank. Wyeth paused, took a narrow side-way, and Rebel followed. “It’s not correctable. You live a year or so in weightlessness, and you reach the point of no return. It can’t be reversed.
Slow down, we make a turn soon.”
“But it would be so simple. You could tailor a strain of coraliferous algae to live in the bloodstream. In the first phase they’re free-swimming, and in the second they colonize the bone tissue. When they die, they leave behind a tiny bit of calcium.”
“Coral reefs in the bones?” Wyeth sounded bemused.
“That’s how we do it back home.”
“You come from an interesting culture, Sunshine,”
Wyeth said. “You’ll have to tell me all about it someday.
But right now… here we are.” The corridor they had entered was completely shuttered and lit only by nightblooms. Scattered trash gathered in long drifts unbroken by the passage of traffic. They were the only people in sight. Silently, Wyeth moved down the corridor, looking for a particular door. When he found it, he stopped and rattled a wall. “This is King Wismon’s court.
He’s got something we need.”
“What’s that?”
“A bootleg airlock.”
4
Londongrad You’re too late, I’m afraid. You’ll simply have to go away.”
Eyes closed, King Wismon floated in the center of his court. In stark contrast to the skinny young rude boys who had ushered Rebel and Wyeth through twisty passages to the court and who now stood guard over them, Wismon was enormously fat. His was the kind of fat that is only possible in a zero-gee environment. Even in half gravity the weight of his bloated flesh would have strained his heart, pulled his internal organs out of place, stressed muscle and bone, and threatened to collapse his lungs. His arms were unable to touch around the vast curve of his stomach, and his skin was mottled with patches of blotchy red. His crotch was buried under doughlike billows of leg and belly, rendering him an enormous, sexless sphere of flesh.
“We have to be gone before the police front comes by again!” Rebel held forward her wrists. “We can pay!”
Without opening his eyes, Wismon said, “I have been paid for use of my airlock five times today. That is enough.
The lock is the basis of whatever small affluence I have—I don’t want to draw attention to it. The secret of a good scam is not to get greedy.”
“Hallo, Wismon,” Wyeth said. “No time for an old friend?” The fat man’s eyes popped open. They were bright and glittery and dark. “Ah! Mentor! Forgive me for not recognizing you—I was asleep.” He waved an ineffectual little arm at the rude boys. “Leave. This man is a brother under the skull. He won’t harm me.”
The rude boys backed away, suspicious but obedient.
They disappeared.
For an instant Eucrasia’s technical skills came back to Rebel, and in a flash of insight she read the eyes, the facial muscles, that weird, smirking grin… This was not a human being. This was a mind that had been reshaped and restructured. The play of intelligence behind those dark eyes was too fast, too intuitive, too perceptive to be human.
Its mental life would be a perpetual avalanche of perception and deduction that would crush a normal human persona.
Rebel realized all this in an instant, and in that same instant saw that Wismon had been studying her. Slowly, solemnly, he winked one eye. To Wyeth, he said, “For you, mentor, I’ll gladly violate my own protocol. Go ahead, use the lock, I won’t even charge you for it. Just leave me the woman.”
Rebel stiffened.
“I doubt she’d be of any use to you,” Wyeth said. His eyes were flat and intent, a killer’s eyes—there was no impatience in them at all. “But even it she were, Deutsche Nakasone is after her. Do you really feel like going up against them? Eh?”
There was a dark explosion of hatred in those little eyes.
“Perhaps I do.” Wismon smiled gently.
“Now wait a minute, don’t I have any say—” Rebel and Wismon said in unison. Rebel stopped. She stared at Wismon in mingled outrage and amazement.
“Don’t interrupt, little sweets,” Wismon said in a kindly voice. “I can read you like a book.” He peered owlishly at Wyeth.
With a slight edge in his voice, Wyeth said, “Let’s put it this way. Do you feel like going up against me?”
A long silence. Then, “No, damn it.” One of Wismon’s little hands reached up to scratch convulsively at the side of his neck. It left red nail tracks. Then Wismon grinned companionably and said, “You’re bluffing, mentor, but I don’t know about what. I never was able to read you. Go through the hutch to your left—the one with a green rag for a door. You’d oblige me by both leaving at the same time. It’s a tight squeeze, but I’m sure you’ll manage.”
They kicked out of the airlock arm in arm. Rebel touched helmets with Wyeth. “What was that all about?”
“An old friend.”
They drifted slowly toward the butt end of the Londongrad cannister. It was a great dark circle that did not seem to grow any closer. A tangle of bright machines flashed by. Behind them, the tank towns slowly shrank.
“He was afraid of you.”
“Well… I did most of his reprogramming. When you put together a new mind, it’s kind of traditional for the programmer to put a Frankenstein kink in the program, just in case. Sort of a dead man’s switch. So that with a prearranged signal—a word, a gesture, almost anything—the programmer can destroy the personality.”