“No, but damn it, you have no room to—” Heisen leaped up, reaching for Rebel, and she started to her feet. She found her balance and drew back a fist. She’d never been trained in heavy gravity fighting techniques, but the muscles of her new body integrated well with each other, and she didn’t doubt that she could drop Heisen where he stood. Smash his nose first, and then—
“Stop.” Snow’s arm shot out from her cloak (a flash of corpse-white skin stretched taut over bones, small black nipples on fleshless breasts) and formed a barrier between them. The arm was long, anorexic, and covered with silver filigree-exoskeletal muscle multipliers.
Powered on, she’d be able to punch her fist through a slag wall or break bones without thinking. “So far I’ve been speaking hypothetically; no offers have been made.”
Those unblinking eyes fixed on Rebel, as if she were a mystery that they could penetrate by sheer force of will.
Without turning her head, she said, “She could be a trap, Jerzy. Didn’t you think of that?”
Heisen’s face twisted. “No, I—but she could be, couldn’t she?” He darted forward and jabbed a finger at the floating wetware diagram. “Look at that! That split in the r-limb!” Then he calmed slightly. “No, you couldn’t fake something like that. She has to be legit.” But new sweat had appeared on his forehead, and there was a wary look in his eyes.
Snow folded her arm back into her cloak. She dismissed the diagram with a shrug. “More to the point, I find it hard to imagine a persona bum suddenly finding happiness and content in a new personality. It’s a fairy tale.” She glided back to her prayer rug, graceful as a geisha. “I’m afraid, child, that we are not ready to strike a deal at present.
Much as I’d love to find out what’s in that intriguing mind of yours.” At her side, Heisen trembled like a hound on a leash. She shook her head. “We’ve found out as much as we can without getting our fingers burned.”
In the silence that followed, one of Snow’s hidden spikes whispered in Rebel’s ear, in a voice that was both like and unlike Snow’s own: “Deutsche Nakasone’s goons will be here in a minute.” A laser flashed holo images on one of her retinas: a convoluted local street-and-gallery map.
Two blinking lights crept toward Snow’s office.
“Jerzy will have to be sacrificed, but if you turn left when you leave and run like hell, you ought to escape.” The map vanished. “Go wherever you wish. We will know if you escape. And when you’re ready to do business, one of us will contact you.”
Snow herself had not spoken. She stood slim and solitary as a madonna. Aloud, she said, “The door is behind you.”
Rebel turned and fled.
Outside, she ran blindly down the hot and heavy corridors of downtown. She fled randomly, through crowded galleries and empty alleyways, until she was gasping for breath and covered with sweat and her fear rose up and swallowed her.
2
KING JONAMON’S COURT
An indefinite time later, Rebel found a cluster of data ports in the center of a tiled courtyard. She had no idea where she was. Someplace midtown, to judge by the gravity.
Jungle birds flitted between crowded boutiques. A sheet waterfall splashed into a shallow pool. By its edge, a vender sold copper coins to throw into the water.
Without her telling it to, Rebel’s body drifted to a data port. Her head felt buzzy and light, as if it belonged to somebody else. From a vast distance she watched her fingers touch the screen twice, programming it for realtime communication. They tapped in an access code, and she wondered who it was for.
A male face appeared in the port. It floated in blackness, with no visual backdrop. Under a painted constellation of five-pointed gold stars, the eyebrows rose in surprise. “It’s been a long time.”
Rebel listened with detached fascination as a shrill, rapid voice from her own mouth said, “I have to hide. I have to crawl under my face and pull it in after me. I have to get away.” Her face began to cry. “I don’t have any money and I can’t trust anyone and I need your help.”
The stranger’s face shifted, startled and alarmed. “My God, what have you done to yourself, Eucra—?”
“Don’t use my name!”
Blank astonishment. Then, another instant shift of expression and the man grinned. “Gotcha, Sunshine.
Listen, my shift has just started, but maybe you should join me anyway. I’m a vacuum bum these days, scraping flowers, nobody’s going to look for you rockside. You think you can find your way to the Labor Exchange using public transit?”
Rebel wasn’t following the conversation at all. Her head nodded.
“Okay, once you get there, go to the Storage and Maintenance gate. Tell them you want work as ascraper—we’re always short-handed; they’ll give it to you.
Mention my name so they put you on the right crew. It’s all piecework; they don’t care diddly-squat whether you put in a full shift. I’ll have them issue you vacuum gear against my account. That clear? Think you can do that?”
Her body took a deep breath. Her voice said, “Yeah.”
Rebel was scraping vacuum flowers off the surface of Eros when she came up from under.
It was dull, nasty work. The shiny blue blossoms were surprisingly elusive. Her visor polarized out glare, turning the bright flowers into a field of black stars. She had to reach into darkness to find them. Their stems were as thin as wires and tougher. Worst of all, the gravity was so slight that a careless move would send her bounding meters away. She hovered over the rock, keeping afloat with touches of toe and finger as she angled her clippers under each bloom. Her muscles ached with tension and fatigue.
The inside of her vacuum suit stank, and her collecting bag was only half full. It dragged behind her like the abdomen of a queen bee. Her helmet buzzed with voices as the work gang traded chitchat on the intercom channel.
“… and I swear no lie,” a male voice drawled, “I was the suavest thing on two legs. They throw in a hardpacket of etiquette with the persona, you with me? So I know what fork you use to pick your nose with, and all. Not only was I suave out in public, I was even suave sexing it up afterwards.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe I oughta try you out,” said an amused female voice.
“Tamara, honey, the onliest thing less likely than me sexing you up is me admitting to sexing you up.” Hoots of laughter. “You get one of your menfriends to try this program, though. I mean that.”
“Hell,” went a second female voice, “one of Tamara’smenfriends gets suave, and he’ll—”
She snapped off the intercom. Something was shifting within her, and she didn’t know who she was, Eucrasia or Rebel. Rebel or Eucrasia. “Let go,” she whispered savagely, and she was herself again: Rebel. But a sense of her other self lingered, hovering over her. She hunched her shoulders and ignored it as best she could and kept on scraping flowers.
The work was soothing. Her fingers moved with a will of their own, clipping flowers and stuffing them into the mesh bag at a regular, efficient rate. Ahead of her, endless mats of vacuum flowers unfolded to the horizon, each bloom the size of a human head, but so fragile it crumpled to nothing at the touch of a gloved finger.
The sense of Other remained, though, until her entire back itched with the touch of imagined eyes and she glanced back over her shoulder.
There was no one there. Just a stretch of bare rock and harsh shadow and, in the distance, a few low utility buildings and several freight lots. The lots were simply areas where the rock had been ground flat for storage purposes. Some were vacant. On others, orange and green and yellow crates were piled skyscraper-high. Machines as delicately jointed as mosquitos climbed the stacks, adding and removing crates. Below them, vacuum bums wrestled more crates from magnetic cushions or into elevators, standing back as the cargo was flung up and away.