Seria Mau put the clone out of a cargo port.
'Goodbye,' she said.
The clone ignored her. 'I loved them,' she said to herself. 'And I know they loved me.'
She had been saying that to herself for five hours. She looked round at the municipal buildings, the tractor park and the schoolyard, where waste paper blew about in the dust.
What a dump, she thought. Perkins' Rent! She laughed. She walked a little way away from the K-ship, lit a cigarette, and stood in the street waiting for someone to give her a ride. 'It looks like that,' she told herself. 'It looks like somewhere that would be called Perkins' Rent.'
She started crying again, but you couldn't see that from across the schoolyard, where the children were still glued to the windows, the girls eyeing enviously her pink satin tube skirt, patent leather high heels and crimson nail polish, while the boys regarded her shyly from the corners of their eyes. When they grew up, the boys thought, they would rescue her from some bad situation she found herself in, down in the Core among the gene doctors and rogue cultivars. She would be grateful and reward them by showing them her tits. Let them touch, even. How good and warm those tits would feel, resting in your hands.
Perhaps sensing some of this, the clone turned round and banged on the hull of the White Cat.
'Let me back in,' she called.
The cargo port opened.
'You should make up your mind,' said Seria Mau.
Local interceptor squadrons, scrambled as the K-ship hit the outer atmosphere, showed up a minute or two later. They got good locks and began to make an attack run. 'Look at these idiots,' said Seria Mau. Then, on an open channeclass="underline" 'I told you I wasn't staying.' She torched up and quit the gravity well vertically at a little under Mach 40, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas. The kids cheered again. Thunder rolled round Perkins IV and met itself coming the other way.
From out beyond the atmosphere, Perkins' Rent looked like a cataracted eye. The clone sat in her cabin staring listlessly down at it, while the shadow operators clustered around her, reaching out as if to touch her, whispering regretfully in their languages of guilt. 'You can stop that,' Seria Mau Genlicher warned them, 'before you start.' She saw off a couple of orbital interceptors with one of her low-end assets; then consulted the mathematics, fired up the dynaflow drivers and committed her ship to the endless dark.
A few tens of nanoseconds later, a familiar object detached itself stealthily from the ghost train and slipped after her. Its hull showed some pitting from a recent high-temperature event.
FIFTEEN
'Kill Him, Bella.'
Ed always made sure he talked to Tig as well as Neena.
It was hard on the street. The police were everywhere. The Cray sisters were everywhere. (Ed sensed them out there, nursing their grievance in the New Venusport night, cruel as fish. He knew he shouldn't feel safe in the warren, where only plankton like himself collected, just beneath the surface in the dim blue light.) Tig came in later and later at night. He was always hungry but he had no time to eat. His gait was more disconnected when he was tired.
'It's me. It's Tig,' he would say from the doorway, is if he was reluctant to enter the cubicle without Ed's permission.
Some nights, Ed went back out on the street with him. They stayed uptown, and played for small points. It was corner trade, a little here, a little there. If Tig suspected Ed was fucking his wife, he never let it show. By an unspoken agreement, they didn't mention the Cray sisters either. They didn't have much else in common, so most of the time they talked about Ed. That suited Ed. Talking helped. By his third week, thanks to Neena's generosity, he had begun to reclaim large tracts of the past. The problem was, none of them joined up. It was sudden analepsis-images, people, places, events, caught by an unsteady camera, lit with bad light. Connective tissue was missing. There was no real narrative of Ed.
'I knew some amazing guys,' he began suddenly one night, in the hope that talking about it would make it clearer. 'You know, really mad guys. Guys with charmed lives.'
'What sort of guys?'
'You know, all over the galaxy there are these guys who just do it,' Ed tried to explain. 'They're widely distributed. They're having fun.'
'Do what?' Tig asked him.
Ed was puzzled that Tig didn't already know. 'Well, everything,' he said. They were standing at the corner of Dioxin and Photino at the time. It was maybe half two, half three in the morning. The street was slow. In fact, it was empty. The night sky was over it all with a field of stars. Off in one corner the Kefahuchi Tract glared down on them like a bad eye. Not really meaning to, Ed made a gesture which took it all in. 'Just everything,' he said.
What it turned out was this:
From an early age, Ed Chianese had been some kind of drifter and sensationist. He couldn't remember what planet he came from. 'Maybe it was even this one!' He laughed. He left home as soon as he could. There was nothing for him there. He was a big raw black-haired kid who loved cats, excited all the time for no reason, and he felt less trapped than too well looked after. He rode the dynaflow ships. He hopped from planet to planet for three years until he fell off the edge of things onto the Beach. There, he got in with people to whom life was nothing unless it looked as if you were about to lose it. This meant doing the Kefahuchi Boogie. It meant prospecting, and the entrada. It meant surfing stellar envelopes in the one-man rockets they called dipships, which were made of nothing much more than mathematics, magnetic fields and some kind of smart carbon. Not many people did that any more.
It meant running the old alien mazes scattered across the artificial systems of the halo. Ed was good at that. He did Cassiotone 9 in the best time since Al Hartmeyer off of the old Heavyside Layer, who was, as everyone agreed, a fucking madman in his own day. No one ever matched Ed's distance into the maze on Askesis, because no one else ever made it out. Maybe you did these things for money, on contract to some shit EMC subsidiary. Maybe you did them because they were a sport. One way or the other, Ed hung out with extreme people for some years: entradistas, sky pilots, particle jockeys, full-tilt people looking to score amid big, difficult alien machinery. Some of these guys were women. Ed was at the Venice Hotel on France Chance IV the day Liv Hula brought her hyperdip Saucy Sal out of the photosphere of the local sun. No one ever went that deep before. The instant she was safe you could hear the cheers a light year off. She was the first to go that deep: she was the fucking first one. He lived four weeks in a freighter in the Tumblehome parking orbit while Dany LeFebre was waiting for the unknown disease she caught on-planet to run its course. He pulled her out of there in the end. Half mad. Half dead. He didn't even know her that well.
Everywhere there was excitement to be had and determined people gathered to have it, Ed was there. Go deep was what they said to one another: Hey, go deep. Then something happened he didn't remember, and he drifted away from all that. Maybe it was someone he knew, maybe it was something he did; maybe it was Dany after all, looking up at him, unable to speak ever again. One tear ran down her face. Afterwards, Ed's life seemed to go downhill a little, but it was still full of stuff. He dropped proasavin-D-2 on Badmarsh, and in the orbital cities of the Kauffman Cluster shot up Earth-heroin cut with the ribosomes of a tailored marmoset. When he ran short of money he was, in a minor way, thief, dealer, pimp. Well, maybe more than minor. But if his hands weren't clean, his heart was crazy for life, and where you got most life was on the edge of death. This is what he believed since his sister left, when he was just a kid. He wound up on the Beach at Sigma End, where he hung out with guys like the legendary Billy Anker, at that time obsessed with Radio RX1.