She had considered getting back into the trade, but it was too early. The scansheets and broadcasts were still full of stories about aliens, alien ways, alien imports. About “restructuring” going on in the policorps who dealt with the Powers. It was strange seeing the news on the vid, with people ducking for cover, refusing statements, the news item followed by a slick ad for alien pharmaceuticals. People were going to trial—at least those who survived were. A lot were cooperating. Things were still too hot.
Fortunately money wasn’t a problem. She had enough to last a long time, possibly even forever.
Gunfire sounded from the vid. The young man was in a shootout with aliens, splattering Powers with his shotgun. Reese felt her nerves turn to ice.
The young man, she realized, was supposed to be Steward. She jumped forward and snapped off the vid. She felt sickened.
Steward had never shot an alien in his life. Reese ought to know.
Fucking assholes. Fucking media vermin.
She reached for her quilted Chinese jacket and headed for the door. The room was too damn small.
She swung the door open with a bang, and a dark-complected man jumped a foot at the sound. He turned and gave a nervous grin.
“You startled me.”
He had an anonymous accent that conveyed no particular origin, just the abstract idea of foreignness. He looked about thirty. He was wearing suede pumps that had tabs of Velcro on the bottoms and sides for holding onto surfaces in zero gee. His hands were jammed into a grey, unlined plastic jacket with a half-dozen pockets all sealed by Velcro tabs. Reese suspected one of his hands of having a weapon in it. He was shivering from cold or nervousness. Reese figured he had just come down the gravity well—he was wearing too much Velcro to have bought his clothes on Earth.
Some descendants of the Golden Horde, dressed in Flieger styles imported from Berlin, roared by on skateboards, the earpieces of their leather flying helmets flapping in the wind.
“Been in town long?” Reese asked.
HE TOLD HER his name was Sardar Chandrasekhar Vivekenanda and that he was a revolutionary from Prince Station. His friends called him Ken. Two nights after their first meeting, she met him in the Natural Life bar, a place on the top story of a large bank. It catered to exiles and featured a lot of mahogany imported at great cost from Central America.
Reese had checked on Ken—no sense in being foolish—and discovered he was who he claimed to be. The scansheets from Prince mentioned him frequently. Even his political allies were denouncing his actions.
“Ram was trying to blame the February Riots on us,” Ken told her. “Cheney decided I should disappear—the riots would be blamed on me, and Cheney could go on working.”
Reese sipped her mataglap star, feeling it burn its way down her throat as she glanced down through the glass wall, seeing the wind scour dust over the Uzbeks’ metal roofs and receiver dishes. She grinned. “So Cheney arranged for you to take the fall instead of him,” she said. “Sounds like a friend of humanity to me, all right.”
Ken’s voice was annoyed. “Cheney knows what he’s doing.”
“Sure he does. He’s setting up his friends. The question is, do you know what you’re doing?”
Ken’s fine-boned hands made a dismissive gesture. “From here I can make propaganda. Cheney sends me an allowance. I’ve bought a very good communications system.”
She turned to him. “You going to need any soldiers in this revolution of yours?”
He shook his head. His lashes were full and black. “I think not. Prince Station is a hundred years old—it’s in orbit around Luna, with ready access to minerals, but it cannot compete effectively with the new equipment on other stations. Ram wants to hang on as long as possible—his policy is to loot the economy rather than rebuild. He’s guaranteed the loyalty of the stockholders by paying large dividends, but the economy can’t support the dividends anymore, and the riots showed he has lost control over the situation. It is a matter of time only. We do not expect the change will be violent—not a military sort of violence, anyway.”
“Too bad. I could use a job in someone’s foreign legion about now.” She glanced up as a group of people entered the bar—she recognized a famous swindler from Ceres named da Vega, his hands and face covered with expensive, glowing implant jewelry that reminded her of fluorescent slime mold. He was with an all-female group of bodyguards who were supposed to stand between him and any Cerean snatch teams sent to bring him to justice. They were all tall and round-eyed—da Vega liked women that way. He’d tried to recruit Reese when they first met. The pay was generous, round-eyed women being rare here, but the sexual favors were supposed to be included.
One of those jobs, Reese thought. She was tempted to feed him his socks, bodyguards or not, but in the end told him she was used to a better class of employer.
Da Vega turned to her and smiled. Uzbekistan was suddenly far too small a place.
Reese finished her mataglap star and stood. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“AN ARCHITECTURE OF liberation,” Ken said. “That’s what we’re after. You should read Cheney’s thoughts on the subject.”
The night street filled with a welling tide of wind. Its alloy surface reflected bright holograms that marched up and down dark storefronts, advertising wares invisible behind dead glass. The wind howled in the latticework of radio receivers pointed at the sky, through a spiky forest of antennae. A minaret outlined by flashing red strobes speared a sky that glowed with yellow sodium light.
“Liberation,” Reese said. “Right.”
“Too many closed systems,” Ken said. He shrugged into the collar of his new down jacket. “That’s the problem with space habitats in general—they strive for closed ecological systems, and then try to close as much of their economy as possible. There’s not enough access. I’m a macroeconomist—I work with a lot of models, try to figure out how things are put together—and the most basic obstacle always seems to be the lack of access to data. We’ve got a solar system filled with corporate plutocracies, all competing with each other, none giving free access to anything they’re trying to do. And they’ve got colonies in other solar systems, and nothing about those gets out that the policorps don’t want us to know. The whole situation is far too unstable—it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen because the data simply isn’t available. Everything’s constructed along the lines of the old Orbital Soviet—not even the people who need the information get the access they require.
“Prince Station’s main business is processing minerals—that’s okay and it’s steady, but the prices fluctuate a lot as new mineral sources are exploited in the Belt and elsewhere, and it requires heavy capital investment to keep the equipment up to date. So for the sake of a stable station economy, it would be nice for Prince to develop another, steadier source of export. Biologicals, say, or custom-configured databases. Optics. Wetware. Export genetics. Anything. But it takes time and resources—five years’ worth, say—to set something like that up, and there are other policorps who specialize in those areas. We could be duplicating another group’s work, and never know it until suddenly a new product comes onto the market and wipes out our five years’ investment. All this secrecy is making for unstable economies. Unstable economies make for unstable political situations—that’s why whole policorps suddenly go belly-up.”
“So you want the policorps to give away their trade secrets.”
“I want to do away with the whole concept of trade secrets. Ideally, what I’d like to do is create a whole new architecture of data storage and retrieval. Something that’s so good that everyone will have to use it to stay competitive, but something that by its very nature prohibits restriction of access.”