Soon we ventured out of our home sectors, becoming a familiar sight throughout the upground Bs and Gs, and even in parts of the As. Seventeen cyclists whooshing along in a pack at twenty-plus miles an hour is an impressive sight—that was both good and bad. A pack of thugs in A12 called the Big Dogs tried to lay traps for us whenever we crossed their sector, and we crossed it often escorting Artie to and from Spark Academy. But we were always too quick and too smart and too mobile for them.
There were two reasons Artie kept running the gauntlet to get to Spark Academy. Okay, three. The third was that he couldn’t stand for someone to tell him he couldn’t do something. But the first was that he liked learning. It charged his batteries. He was into mechanical engineering, and the teachers at Spark actually encouraged him in that. I guess they thought he could help keep habitat infrastructure from collapsing around us.
But the second reason he kept going to the Academy was Yvonne.
Now, Artie had girlfriends in the neighbourhood, and had since he was old enough to understand why a man would want to insert Tab A into Slot B. He didn’t exactly tell me the first time he got laid—he did have some notion that I was a girl and wouldn’t appreciate hearing about his conquests—but I knew it had happened, because I saw the girl try to take ownership of him. Fat chance she had. Artie always had champagne taste when it came to girls, and you don’t find champagne in B9.
Yvonne was champagne. I never met her, but I knew because Artie told me all about her. He’d lost his heart, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell other guys, so he told me. Most of what he was learning in Spark Academy, he confided, he could pick up out of books and vids that were available remotely, even on the archaic B9 equipment. And besides, he could earn a ration just running the courier service he’d started, so he didn’t really need to get into a university program. But a girl like Yvonne wouldn’t marry a courier and live in B9. So he had to get a degree, and a better housing assignment, so he could make a life with Yvonne.
For the record, I think he would have gone to the Academy anyway. Not that he didn’t like running courier—he liked using his cycling skills, evading obstacles, flirting with danger only to escape. He liked organizing the rest of us as couriers, and he liked being able to deliver packages quickly and safely for people who were afraid to walk the streets. As with protecting smaller children, and helping outsiders adjust to the habitat, it was a way for him to touch people’s lives and make them better. The need to do that was deep in him, and it was the foundation of the Code he established.
For Yvonne, though, he needed to be more than a courier. The others in our pack knew Artie had an Academy girlfriend, but they assumed she was no different than the girls he fooled around with in B9—except it was somehow more exciting to get your rocks off with some C5 princess, so the rest of the guys looked at Artie in awe. That was why, when Yvonne dumped him, he climbed the drainpipe to my room and cried in my arms.
We were never lovers, Artie and I. He never wanted me that way, and I knew better than to try enticing him. It would have been laughable: I am a homely woman, and I was an ugly child. My mother said it was the radiation I endured outside—she blamed everything on radiation—but I didn’t have to look far to find the long jaw and the close-set eyes I inherited, or the limp, colorless hair and crooked teeth. My shape, too, eschews beauty: I have a bony frame and tiny breasts. There are boys who don’t care what Slot B looks like, as long as it will accommodate Tab A, but Artie was never one of them.
So I held him the night Yvonne rejected his love, knowing this was as close to him as I would ever get. The next day he went out and built his first bicycle.
Before he graduated from Spark Academy, the counsellors there tried to push him into vocational training because he was so gifted in working with his hands: carving, moulding, welding. “Wouldn’t you be happier,” they asked, “crafting components? Building machines? Turning out a product?” If Yvonne had dumped him earlier, he might have yielded to their pressure; but he had told them he could do both: design and build. With his heart torn to shreds, he needed to prove that.
It was no work of art, that first bicycle: primalloy tubes patch-welded together. But it was serviceable, and it was a start. DeRon and I took over running the courier business—we already handled the routine maintenance and repair of our pack bicycles—so Artie would have time to build. His instructors in the university engineering program derided him, he told me, for wasting his time building “toys.” New robots to evacuate clogged water and sewer lines, or innovative geometries to prop up the sagging tunnels of KanHab—those were projects worthy of a mechanical engineer, they said. Not swift transportation through the unsavoury streets of lawless sectors.
But he did all they asked of him by day, and when darkness blanketed KanHab, he locked the front door of the abandoned storefront that served as our headquarters, called up his drawings, and began to build.
Artie made it his business to see that every child in B9 who kept the Code had a sleek, efficient machine that could carry him or her away from danger. The Code was fairly simple at that point: Take care of your bike and your friends; never fight when you can run; study and learn; make things better for everyone, not just yourself. Those same tenets were required of everyone in his pack.
By this time we had left thievery behind and were a legitimate business, recognized by Admin, delivering parcels and providing reconnaissance for electric cart convoys and groups of pedestrians throughout KanHab. We wore patches that showed we were part of Artie’s pack—Artie’s Angels, we called ourselves—with authorization to cross sectors and ride through public tunnels and buildings. Admin gave us helmets, gloves, and light body armour as part of our ration, and they stamped out cleats for Artie to fasten on flexible, steel-shanked shoes so we could lock into our pedals. When we rode as a pack, armoured and shod identically, people stood aside, gaping.
As our customer base expanded to other sectors, our fees originally accepted as comestibles, tools, and clothing—were paid more and more in ExCees, or Exchange Credits, flushed through habitat accounting and redeemable in rations, entertainment, or just about anything else we could want. I drew a single ration for myself and gave everything else I earned to Artie, to buy materials for the bicycles that gave the kids of B9 a chance: a chance to learn, a chance to grow, a chance to believe in the goodness and worth of other people.
But it’s hard to give hope to a dying planet.
All the time Artie was trying to make things better in B9, outside KanHab, life became more and more futile. Plants and animals died in the unfiltered sunlight, people starved to death, babies were born with mutations so horrible their own parents killed them. Brutality reigned, for life was short and ugly, and people snatched what pleasure they could; too often that meant the adrenalin rush gained by inflicting one’s will on someone or something else. How long the Reapers were a problem outside, I don’t know; but the day they broke through Security into KanHab is a day we will never forget.
They rode old combustion-engine motorcycles, powered by whatever alcohol they could manufacture to fuel them. Their philosophy was nihilistic: Earth and its inhabitants were doomed, so why not help them along the path to destruction? Whether or not they died in the process seemed of no consequence to the Reapers. Of the twenty or so who crashed the gate that day, only two made any effort to escape the certain death they found at the hands of KanHab’s defenders. But before they died, eighteen Security officers and over a hundred civilians fell to the Reapers’ projectile weapons—not to mention the people they simply rode down. Hundreds more burned to death in the fires they started.