Out on Blue Six E-Book

Ian McDonald

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 501

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A thrilling early work from the author of the critically-acclaimed New Moon trilogy "For ten years, I've been singing the praises of OUT ON BLUE SIX, Ian McDonald's 1989 science fiction novel that defies description and beggars the imagination… this book is one of those once-in-a-generation, brain-melting flashes of brilliance that makes you fall in love with a writer's work forever." —Cory Doctorow Hundreds of years from now, the world is perfect. The Compassionate Society guarantees happiness, peace and total personal fulfillment to its citizens, and those less than satisfied are guilty of Paincrime. Among them, count cartoonist Courtney Hall, who runs afoul of the Ministry of Pain when one of her cartoons hits a little too close to home. Pursued by the relentless Love Police, she drops down a rabbit hole into a counter-world of rebels, artists and enhanced raccoons. Out on Blue Six is a fast, funny, bizarre story of an almost-Utopia–and almost-Utopias make the best dystopias.

Leseprobe

OUT ON BLUE SIX

Copyright © 1989 by Ian McDonald

All rights reserved.

Originally published by Spectra.

Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

ISBN 978-1-625674-14-2

Cover design by Dirk Berger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, 12th Floor

New York, NY 10036

http://awfulagent.com

[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Voice On...

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Voices Off...

Thanks

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

Voices On …

“GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING! Good morning! This is Phantomas your famulus waking you to another wonderful morning with a selection of your favorite music, news, gossip, information, and appointments for your day from your personal diary program! And the weather this morning is: much the same as ever, I’m afraid; changeable, maximum temperature a steamy twenty-four, probability of rain before noon ninety-four percent, winds, strong, variable with gusts of up to fifty-five kilometers per hour; yes, just another monsoon day out there in the Big City …”

SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO: CUSTOM LIFESTYLE CONSULTANTS. YOUR DAYS THE WAY YOU WANT THEM. INDIVIDUALLY TAILORED ROMPAKS FOR YOUR FAMULUS/LARES-PENATES SYSTEM. MINIPAIN APPROVED, ABSOLUTE CONFIDENTIALITY ASSURED. CUSTOM-CLIENT PSYCHOFILING ASSURES MINIMUM 90% COMPATIBILITY. ITS YOUR LIFE, YOU LIVE IT, WITH SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO!

Dear sir,

the Bureau of Happiness regrets to inform you that your application for Aptitudinal and Vocational Training as a toymaker Class 16/B has not been successful.

Whilst your Manual Dexterity, Spatial Orientation, and Creative Interpretation factors were all well within the required parameters, Motivational Analysis, Social and Structural Apperception, and Vocational-Altruistic Cross-Correlations indicate that this career would not afford you the maximum of personal happiness and satisfaction which we, as organs of the Compassionate Society, are obliged to provide for you. Therefore, the Bureau has forwarded your application and psychofile results to Career Training and Orientation in Nonfunctional Natural-Wood Furniture Construction. Should you have any queries or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me, Hester Birkenshaw, at the following tellix code …

Hello? Hello? Pantycar Twenty-seven? Report from Data Retrieval: a disturbance in Simbimatu Covered Market: Privacy infringement. PainCrime probability currently sixteen percent—no immediate increase forecast. Suggest you investigate intervention level three. And bring me back a bag of guavas, will you? Damn famulus’s on the fritz again, didn’t get me up in time for breakfast and I’m ravenous.

Mulu the Rainforest:

Pray for us.

Mudmother, Soulsister:

Pray for us.

Green One, Patroness of Planted Things:

Preserve us.

From the sweeping monsoon rains, from the terror of environmental collapse, from radiation, from the stalking horror of mutated disease, from cat, rat, and raccoon:

Preserve us. Hear our prayer.

Hear the prayer of this thy humble servant, laborer in the fields beneath the earth, harvester of the crops of thy bounty:

Hear our prayer.

“So I said, like, whazz new, I mean, like new new, not old new, yuh know, like last-week new, so she said, this yulp in the shop, ‘This is new,’ like, she said, ‘Cheez, like everyone, but everyone’s going to be wearing one this week,’ like, whazz a yulp know ’bout fashion? anyway, I thought, I thought, well, maybeez sheez right, so, I got one, so I did, like, whadjou think? Isn’t it wheeeee! like. Isn’t it the most? Meanasay, you not got fashion, you not got nothing!”

Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid, Captain Elvis in neon skin-hugger and power-wheels, rides the high wires in the wee wee dawn hours when the cablecars sleep in their barns, when four A.M. TAOS gurls call the Scorpios from the high and the low places; silver-maned, forgotten samurai in a world with honor without swords; out on blue six through the vastnesses of Great Yu.

See! Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid run the wires! Power-wheels squeal-shreel on steel ten, twenty, fifty, hundred stories above flat-life ground-zero. See! the speed’o’light flickers of information zigzagging along the circuit webbing of Chiga-Chiga’s chromium ’hugger; pray pray pray to San BuriSan Celestial of silicon and fiberoptics and bioprocessors and young turks up on the wires that the cizzen on the gyro-stabilizer production line wasn’t Monday-or-Fridaying when they built Captain Elvis’s set of power-wheels. Danger on the cables of Yu: if the Love Police ever catch Chiga-Chiga, he will be seeing the remainder of his yearlong walkabout from the inside of a Social Responsibility Counseling Center learning that words like “danger” and “thrill” cannot be allowed to have any meaning in the age of the Compassionate Society. But Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid is too fast, too young, too shiny for that, isn’t he?

Citizen Tambuco? Citizen Tambuco? Selma Whiteside here, Ministry of Pain, Childwatch Department.

Yes, I know you have a constitutional right to children, that is not the issue here. The issue here is April’s constitutional rights. Can you hear me, Citizen? Mizz Tambuco? She has as much right to a happy, fulfilled life as you do, Mizz Tambuco; how would you like it if you were taken out of your caste and forced into one quite wrong for you? Of course you wouldn’t be happy.

Citizen Tambuco, the tests are infallible. Can you not accept that your April is just not suited psychologically, emotionally, physically, to be an athleto?

No, I don’t have to explain the Department’s decisions to you, Mizz Tambuco.

It has to do with sexually dimorphic structures in the brain. In April’s brain. Mizz Tambuco, please stop crying, please try to listen. April will be much happier as a george, the trans-sexing process is safe, painless, and utterly reliable.

Mizz Tambuco, the Compassionate Society does not use words like “perversion” anymore. It is as normal for her to be a george as it is for you to be an athleto. The Ministry of Pain does not judge, who are you to say what is normal and what is not? To some other castes, you might not appear to be normal, Mizz Tambuco. Mizz Tambuco, the Ministry of Pain has the constitutionally enshrined duty to provide each citizen with the greatest possible personal happiness. Can you deny your daughter the only happiness she may ever know?

Her fosterers are good and loving people. Yes, of course they will look after April. Yes, they will love her. I’m sorry, but no, you will not be allowed to visit. Or even call on the public dataweb. I know it sounds hard, Mizz Tambuco, but it is in April’s best interests. At this early and vital developmental stage we cannot allow April to be in any way confused as to her social identity. Now, are you going to send April out to me? Please …

Mizz Tambuco, I’m waiting. Mizz Tambuco, please open the door. Citizen Tambuco, think. Not only are you obstructing a representative of the Ministry of Pain in their appointed duty, but by denying April her right to personal happiness, you are committing a PainCrime. …

Chapter 1

THE FIRST LIGHTNING OF the southwest monsoon flared over the dark canyonscapes of Yu. Their flanks streaked with rain and glittering with lights, the arcologies and co-habs and manufactories shouldered close to each other like nervous thugs; the perpetual clouds drew together, glowering darkly about their shoulders. From the fifty-third-level editorial penthouse on the upper slopes of the Armitage-Weir publishing mastaba, Courtney Hall (profession: cartoonist; caste: yulp; sex: female; age: approximately; height: approximately; weight: approximately) watched the lightning flicker down to earth somewhere out among the black steel chimneys of Charlemont, counting one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, all the way up to twelve hippopotamus before the windowpanes of Marcus Forde’s glass conservatory-office rattled to distant thunder. Fifteen kilometers, give or take; come, great monsoon, and at least put an end to this head-pounding mugginess. Outside the darkness deepened further, as if in some grand wicked conspiracy with itself; the summits of all the towers along Heavenly Harmony Boulevard were suffocated in cloud. Lights came on automatically in the arbor, window louvers closed in anticipation of cold wind. Courtney Hall’s editor maintained his jungle of an office with almost religious zeal.

“He’s in conference.” Tixxi Teshvalenku, his personal assistant, had informed her in between painting golden stripes down the center of each five-centimeter-long nail. “Say, Courtney, what do you think of my noo dress, neat, neh?” A black silk frill, all lace and roses, that went right up at the sides and over each shoulder … “Isn’t it just wheeeee, neh? Like I only got it this lunchtime from my designer, she says it’s the latest fashion, so I had to wear it before everyone else gets one.”

“I’ll show myself in if you don’t mind, Tixxi,” Courtney Hall had said. She knew better than to be drawn into talking fashion with a zillie.

That had been twenty minutes ago. In the intervening time, Courtney Hall had, despite a long-term allergy, made the acquaintance of each of the four and twenty cushioncats with which Marcus Forde adorned his private jungle. From seal-point Siamese to collapsar black, he had built them all from kits, as he had indeed built his entire office, from the panelwoods and flowering vines that formed the walls through the livewood floform desk unit to the carpetgrass—his personal tour de force, it being green, soft as moss, and four centimeters deep. Marcus Forde’s sexual partners (of which he had many, being a member of a caste given over almost entirely to the exploration of sexual pleasure) were regularly invited up to his penthouse rather than his apt in an all-winger co-hab over in Ranves. Given his twin proclivities, Courtney Hall did not doubt that biotoys of a more sinister and intimate nature lurked pulsing and tumescent among the blossoms. She wiped sour sweat from her brow onto the sleeve of her best business three-piece. Her designer had assured her she looked every millimeter the professional yulp (but to be a yulp was to be a professional, a caste of professionals), but she was not convinced.

“You know, Benji, I am definitely experiencing severe distress.”

“If you want, I can have a mild tranquilizer dispensed from the office Lares and Penates system,” replied the rather stifled voice of her famulus. She considered the offer.

“No. Thanks, Benji.” But she did take the cuddly toy-dog puppet out of her workbag and slipped it onto her drawing hand. She flexed her fingers and the famulus came to life: Benji Dog, her famulus, her watch, her ward, her jiminy-cricket conscience since she had joined Armitage-Weir five years ago to produce Wee Wendy Waif, Nobody’s Child, the vicariously adoptive daughter of the almost third of a billion readers of Armitage-Weir’s daily newssheet.

“Oh, what is keeping him.”

“You are keeping him, CeeHaitch.” Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been given a famulus with a voice like an idiot on a children’s cartoon show. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been given a famulus that looked like a flock glove puppet. But the Ministry of Pain, in its omniscience …

“And I also have to inform you, CeeHaitch, that I am still not happy about your decision to press ahead independently with these ideas for revamping Wee Wendy Waif, Nobody’s Child; you should have gone through the proper channels, the Department of Arts and Crafts, the Bureau of Media Affairs, the Office of Socially Responsible Literature … they are there to help you, you know.”

“One more Socially Responsible cheep out of you, doggy, and it’s back in the workbag for the rest of the afternoon.”

“And I feel I have to remind you,” the famulus continued in its high-pitched squeaking, “that it is technically a Category Two SoulCrime to remove or conceal a Ministry of Pain–assigned famulus from your immediate person.”

Lightning flared again as, muttering and mouthing, Benji Dog was stuffed back into Courtney Hall’s bag. For an instant the stupendous hulks of the arcologies were backlit brilliant, stark white. The horizon crawled with fire. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopotamus … thunder bawled. Four and twenty cushioncats howled.

The door opened. In rushed Marcus Forde, Courtney Hall’s editor, slipping out of the paper modesty robe he wore for conferences into the casual nudity he maintained for the office.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Did you tell them about me? Did you put my plans on the table, did you show the board my sketches, the new plotlines and characters, did you show them my storyboards, what did they think of my new idea?”

“I showed them.”

Her editor sat down behind his desk; the floform seat molded wood to flesh.

“And?”

“Ah.”

She was not certain whether it was the room’s heartbeat she was hearing, or her own.

“Would you like to sit down?”

Her voice sounded as if coming from kilometers away as she said, “No. Thank you.”

Marcus Forde was absentmindedly stroking his famulus, a soft fabric pouch on a string around his neck containing herbs, dried semen, pubic hair, bioprocessors, and speech synthesizers, in that way he tended to when he was once again ever so nicely asking Courtney Hall just when she thought she was going to have the next week’s storyboards ready.

“We looked at your proposals. The entire editorial and directorial board studied them all carefully; and yes, we all agree, the plotlines are excellent, the new characters are wonderful, and the standard of the artwork is the finest we’ve ever seen from you since you joined us. However … satire is not a thing the Compassionate Society has a need for anymore. It’s good, it’s clever, damn it, it’s funny, but it’s not Socially Responsible.” She could hear the capitals slamming into place like steel teeth. There was a tight singing in her ears she had not heard since her childhood days in the community crèche: the tight singing noise you hear when you are trying not to cry. “It’s all very clever, all very droll, it may even be true, it may even be deserved, but it’s still criticism. Do you think those folk down there really want to know that the Seven Servants are nothing but a pack of computer-run, money-grabbing, capitalist leftovers from an unhappier age; that the Polytheon is nothing but a jumble of corporate-personality simulation programs that got out of hand; that their beloved Elector is just a crazy athleto who got pulled out of a gym one night and stuck on the Salamander Throne; that the Ministry of Pain is run by professional incompetents who got promoted beyond their natural ability because the Compassionate Society wants everyone to do the job which makes them happiest, irrespective of whether they are any good at it? You think that would make them any happier, no matter how funny you make the faces or the walks or the words?” Courtney Hall began to feel curiously threatened by this sweaty, naked man, though she topped him by at least twenty centimeters and outweighed him by a similar number of kilograms. “To take away those people’s faith in their Compassionate Society; the faith that the Ministry of Pain, the Seven Servants, the Polytheon, care for them as individuals and want nothing more than their individual happinesses; you think this will make them happy? Tell me this, then, what are you giving them that the Compassionate Society cannot? Questions? Doubt? Uncertainty? Criticism, cynicism, sneering cheap laughs? Hurt? Pain? You must be some kind of arrogant creature if you think that just because something is true for you it must be true for everyone. What right have you to tell them, ‘Sorry, it’s all false, all an illusion’?”

Courtney Hall rallied under the stunning attack.

“Even if it is?”

“Even if it is. The Compassionate Society isn’t perfect, I’m not naive enough to believe that it is, but it’s the most perfect we’ve got. What right have you to try and take away happiness, false or not, illusory or not?”

“Because I believe there must be something more important than happiness. Accountability. Quality. Satire.”

“Not in the Compassionate Society.”

“And it would seem, not at Armitage-Weir.”

Lightning flickered nearer, white-hot bolts frozen in the dark spaces of her pupils. Courtney Hall looked out through the looming clouds and the warm, driving monsoon rain sweeping through the corporate canyonlands, across Heavenly Harmony Boulevard, to the face of the girl in the forty-story videowall advertisement for the TAOS Consortium. Turn, smile, dissolve, disintegrate into a forty-story rendition of the TAOS lozenge-with-T logo, freeze again, hold final dissolve, and then hello hello hello, look who’s back again; forty stories of the Seven Servants’ epitome of citizenship.

“Marcus, tell me, don’t you ever feel oppressed by her? Doesn’t it ever bother her how perfect she is; perfect hands, perfect nails, perfect face, perfect skin, never too tall, never overweight, just lovely in every detail; does that not make you feel kind of inadequate, having to work across the street from someone as perfect as that? It would me.”

Marcus Forde waited. The TAOS girl performed her rigidly choreographed moves, over and over and over. When he spoke, he chose his words with the deliberation of a master mason from some long-defunct caste of manual laborers.

“No, not at Armitage-Weir. Courtney, leave the art to the tlakhs and the witnesses; you’re a yulp, a professional, remember that.”

“A professional who can draw, who can think up funny cartoons that make a third of a billion people laugh. You know something about yulps? We were originally a caste of lawyers. That’s right. All my friends are lawyers. I go to dinner with them and they sit about and talk about their jobs and their careers and their positions in the company or the department or the Ministry, and I think, what the fug am I doing here? Just what Yu needs, another caste with a membership of one: the Hallites, the yulps who think they’re tlakhs.”

“Courtney, please, I know you’ll take this in the right way when I say that your job here is secure until you make it insecure.”

“I understand you completely, Marcus. Absolutely.”

She was halfway to Tixxi Teshvalenku’s desk when the voice came chasing her from the office-jungle: “We can’t have blatant PainCrime on the front page of the city’s most important newssheet!”

“Newssheet shug!” Courtney Hall shouted. “There hasn’t been any news in this city for years. For centuries!”

Tixxi Teshvalenku opened her carmine lips, ready to spew something inane.

“And shug you, too, Tixxi!” said Courtney Hall. She took a malevolent delight in the way Tixxi’s chromed fingers formed an immediate nona dolorosa, the hurt-me-not, the sign of personal aggravation. “Good-bye, Tixxi,” she added in parting. “I am going home. Good-bye.”

All the way down in the elevator to the level-forty cablecar junction, her famulus lectured her from her bag. “That really wasn’t very Socially Harmonious of you, Courtney, that was a Category Three PainCrime and I feel I must also remind you that you are leaving your work two full hours ahead of your optimum psychofiled quitting time as prepared for you by the Department of Personpower Services … in fact, coupled with your performance in the office, which I monitored through the Lares and Penates system, I really think you should consider meeting with a Social Harmony counselor for a course of therapy—”

“And you shut the fug up, too,” said Courtney Hall as the high-line cablecar came clanging and swinging in billows of wind and warm rain into the stop.

Hands automatically reached for steadying straps as the cablecar lurched out into the monsoon. Lightning turned the sky white; only two hippopotamuses, the storm was almost on top of them. Ten times a week for the past five years Courtney Hall had made the long swing from the level-one-hundred high-line junction at Kilimanjaro West arcology where Courtney Hall had been assigned an apt by SHELTER via Lam Tandy South interchange to the Armitage-Weir spur on Heavenly Harmony Boulevard. And back. Faces, places … such and such a face appeared at such and such a place, such and such a face disappeared at such and such a place, such and such a face was always in the third seat from the left when she got on, such and such a face was always hanging from the strap by the door when she got off … same faces, same places. But not today! Today those faces are two hours behind Courtney Hall, it’s different faces today, let’s have a look at them, what do we see?

An athleto in a smelly green weight-suit immersed in Volleyball Today. A neo–Iron Age anachronist with a web of blue lines radiating out from her hypothetical spirit-eye in the center of her forehead—the Iron Age was never like this. … Three identical, plastic-dull prollet workers in blue coveralls with the yellow sunburst of Universal Power and Light on their breasts, all poring over personal dataunits. A radiantly beautiful george in a lace one-piece whispering to his/her famulus. A little starry-eyed yulp girl by the door studiously studying her Observer’s Guide to Castes and Subcastes (“trogs: bestial appearance, prominent canine teeth, pointed ears; customarily un- or partially clad, extremely hirsute, with prehensile, hairless tail …”). All separate, independent nation states bristling behind borders one centimeter greater than the surface area of their skins. Never talking. Never ever talking: privacy infringement, caste-breaking, SoulCrime, PainCrime, help! call the Love Police!

The fragile glass bauble of lives dipped down toward the streets, spinning its way down from Angleby Heights into the luminous canyons. Faces, different; places? The same. The lights. Everywhere, light. The cablecar descended between the window-studded walls of arcologies and co-habs, between blinking aerial navigation lights, between clashing, rampaging videowalls, between cascades of neons and fluorescents, between darting lasers painting the Ninefold Virtues of Social Compassion across the faces of the arcologies, across the clouds, across municipal dirigibles, across the descending cablecar, every soul aboard transfixed with ruby beams like medieval saints, across a Courtney Hall immersed in lines and grids and squares and pyramids and cubes and double helices and every possible Euclidean and non-Euclidean permutation of lights; ten thousand lights, ten million lights, the ten billion lights of Great Yu, each one a voice calling, “I is what I am! Notice me! Notice me!”

Beneath her feet now, through the glass floor, the manswarm, the never-resting polymorphic organism whose domain was the streets of Yu and whose constituent cells were the trams and pedicabs and yellow Ministry of Pain jitneys, and the chocolate vendors and the public shrines and the confessoriums and the fortune-tellers and the hot-noodle stalls and the scribes booths and the shoe-shines and the barbers and the waxmen and the umbrella salespersons and the Food Corps concessionaires and the lotto sellers and the street balladeers, and the trogs and the wingers and the yulps and the Scorpios and the bowlerboys and the georges and the migros and the didakoi and the soulbrothers and the prollets and the tlakhs and the anachronists and the witnesses and the white brothers and the skorskis and every single one of the castes and subcastes of Great Yu, all jammed, slammed, crammed together together into the great mass beast that is the manswarm of Yu, the only truly immortal creature, for cells may join and cells may leave and cells may be born and cells may die, but the general dance goes on forever. …

She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream. She called it the sixteen-o’clock dream because on any other day, she would just be nodding off as the cablecar pulled away from Lam Tandy South. She loved her dream, because in the midst of the lifeswarm, it was one thing that was hers and hers alone, her dream of flying. Just … flying. Never to, or from, anywhere, for every time she was about to see how, why, where she was flying, Benji Dog woke her with a beep to tell her it was coming up on Kilimanjaro West, time to get off, CeeHaitch. She hoped the time difference would not dissuade the dream. …

Something black and silver and roaring tore across her dream. Courtney Hall woke up in time to see the blue taillights and jet-glow of a pantycar scoring across the jade-pearl features of the Venus de Milo (Venus de Beauty) Cosmetika girl in video on twenty stories of the local SHELTER headquarters. The black and silver thing gave an arrogant flip of its taillights and vanished into the clouds. The Love Police, vigilant and valiant defenders of …

Of what?

Mediocrity? Benign Incompetence? One and a half billion people for whom nothing was more important than their own happiness?

It wasn’t enough. Not anymore. There had to be more to life than being put in the job that was most satisfying for you, living in the home that made you most comfortable, visiting the friends with whom you never fell out because it was impossible to disagree with them, marrying the partner who was totally compatible with you in every way, being happy in everything because happiness was compulsory. …

She had never really known why the Ministry of Pain called its aerial slouch-craft “pantycars.” Maybe in certain lights, from certain angles, they did look like jet-propelled underwear. She suspected the truth was that no one really knew.

“Kilimanjaro West arcology!” announced Benji Dog from her workbag. “Home again, home again, jiggity jig!”

She had always been wary of organized religion: the greater the degree of disorganization, the greater the true essence of the divine, she maintained on those rare occasions when her friends pressed her on such matters. That the computers watched over her, guided her, kept her safe and warm and healthy, from the household Lares and Penates units to the massive systems that governed the Seven Servants, the self-proclaimed Celestials; of course she believed in them; what she did not believe was that they were, in every possible way, gods. Yet today she waited for the crowds pressing off the cablecar into the level-one-hundred station to clear before she went up to the shrine to Phaniel, Miriel, and Phesque, the Triune Patronesses of Cablecar, Tram, and Pneumatique Municipal. She clapped her hands to draw the attention of the goddesses, three-in-one poised in an unlikely one-footed pirouette amidst the plastic squabble of minor saints and santrels.

“Answer me, Enlightened One, Empowered One, Mother of Velocity.” She had learned the formula from other, more superstitious, travelers. “Tell me, how is it that Courtney Hall can have all her life mapped out for her from beginning to end for the maximum personal happiness and satisfaction and still be neither happy nor satisfied? Tell me, Mother of Velocity, Transport of Delight.”

The nine hands raised in perpetual benison were still, the lotus masks just that, masks, concealing nothing. Courtney Hall said, “I thought so,” and walked away down the corridor. Behind her, lightning struck down at the city of the Compassionate Society and the thunder bawled.

She was still playing the game with all the faces from Corridor 33/Red—the pallid yulp couple who were too shy to speak to her; Mindy the zillie who was always, always, always calling at exactly the wrong time because her psychofile said she loved to visit people, and so she did; the pair of furtive wingers she occasionally saw flitting down to the elevator in modesty bodices and street cloaks—are they, will they be, have they ever been truly happy?

Good question.

She opened the apt door with her word. Home at last. Scenting her mood the moment she entered the vestibule, the Lares and Penates had turned the walls a soothing cissed green and a slightly spicy, slightly sexy sandalwood scent was wafting from the butsudan.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” she shouted. The furniture stared at her. Her own sour little joke ever since the Ministry of Pain Department of Interpersonal Relationships had decided it was best for her to annul her five-year relationship with Dario Sanducci, a yulp counselor in the Department of Housing and Welfare.

Benji Dog always complained about her sour little jokes. She flung him bag and complaining and all into the corner by the window wall. As the famulus grumbled and tried to pry open the fastening with soft paddy-paws, she draped herself over a floform and watched the window lights of Kilimanjaro East, three vertical kilometers of windows and lights and terraces and platforms, with the gray, dirty rain pounding down upon it all. She wondered if someone was sitting in the opposite apt, looking out at her, wondering if someone was in the opposite apt, looking out … Speculation was pointless; she tried instead to summon up the sixteen-o’clock dream.

Something flying. Dashing, darting, weaving between the concrete behemoths of the arcologies and co-habs … she closed her eyes, tried to persuade her imagination into creating a flying something that might complete her fragment of a dream.

And the window wall of her thirty-third-level apartment exploded. Through the shatter of splintered glass and tortured aluminum and spinning shards of concrete came something huge, something black and silver and inexorable as death, wedging itself into the hole it had smashed for itself, grinding, heaving across the floor until two thirds of its black and silver bulk had jammed itself into Courtney Hall’s apt. The remaining one third of the thing thrust into a solid kilometer of air and rain. Dust snowed down as the alien bulk settled on the “greengene” carpetgrass. The walls rioted color and finally lapsed into anonymous buff, the controlling spirits overwhelmed. Benji Dog, trapped in her stuffbag, was a pathetic smear of green organic circuitry and matted synthetic fur. The black and silver thing steamed and hissed.

Courtney Hall, cartoonist by disappointment, sat phantom-white where reflex and shock had thrown her against the far wall.

Doors gull-winged open with a blast of compressed air. Courtney Hall gave a little scream. Alien insect-figures in leather uniforms boiled into the apt and formed a semicircle of bulbous goggle-eyes and black, pointing, menacing things.

“Citizen Grissom Bunt of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society you are under arrest for a Category Twelve PainCrime and LifeRight Violation; namely that you did, on or about sixteen-thirty this day, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, violate the LifeRight of your partner Evangeline Bunt by driving a twenty-centimeter nail, improperly purchased from de La Farge’s Hobby Hardware Shop, through her forehead; said nail penetrating skull, frontal cerebral lobe, corpus callosum, and upper cerebellum, resulting in the immediate termination of said partner’s life functions, in your apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro East Arcology. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

“Sergeant.”

“Have you anything to say for yourself?”

“Sergeant …”

“In a moment, Constable, after the formalities have been completed. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

“East, Sergeant. Kilimanjaro East.”

“In one moment, Constable.”

“This is West, Sergeant.”

“Come again?”

“Kilimanjaro West, Sergeant.”

“Well, snug …”

And the room was suddenly, stunningly empty as the black and silver leather men boiled back through their gull-wing doors, which blasted shut as the black and silver thing on the floor shook itself free from Courtney Hall’s apartment (bringing more concrete and steel clunking down), turned in the kilometer-deep, rain-filled canyon between Kilimanjaro West and Kilimanjaro East (main drive jets sending a maelstrom of sketches, drawings, and tear-off paper prayers from a pad halfheartedly dedicated to Galimantang, Siddhi of Graphic Inspiration, cawing and flapping about the wreck of the apartment), and in the twinkling of an eye was no more than a score and slash of main drive glow across the face of Kilimanjaro East arcology.

The door whispered a visitor, opened a crack, and died.

“Whee! I think I’m going to wet myself!” screamed Mindy Mikaelovich, paying one of her unwelcome and unnecessary visits. “Just what happened here, neh?” she bellowed in Courtney Hall’s ear. A zillie, Mindy never employed a whisper where a shout would suffice. A little aerodynamic anomaly was sucking seven years of Wee Wendy Waif sketches out into the monsoon. Exposed to warm acid rain, the manicured “greengene” carpetgrass was withering and dying of overexposure to reality, blade by blade until Courtney Hall was marooned on a small island of living green against the wall.

“Mindy, would you go away please?”

“Like, whee! CeeHaitch, can I like, ask a little favor, could I like, bring my friends to look? Like they’ve never seen anyone’s apt get cosmicked by the Love Police before …” Courtney Hall’s hand, her left hand, her drawing hand, darted. There was an outraged wail and the door slammed. A clod of half-dead “greengene” carpetgrass had caught Mindy Mikaelovich right in the ever open mouth.

Nameless

… COLD.

“Cold,” he said, and understood. Cold was the meaning for his shivering body, the steaming billows of his breath, the trickleways of water down the windows, the pinching, unfamiliar assault upon his skin.

“I am cold,” he said. The three words shattered. Before them he had not known that he could speak, that there even existed a thing called speech. “I am cold, and I can speak,” he said. The words sounded good to him. Wrapping his long arms about him for … “warmth!” he went in search of other words he might speak.

So many names in this … “place.”

“Window,” he said. Tracing the condensation drops with his forefinger, he marveled at that word that had come to his lips out of nothing. “Water, forefinger.” The words were coming fast now, tumbling, streaming out of that noplace where the names of all things waited to be used. “I am cold, I can speak, and I am tracing this water down this window with my forefinger.” More than names, abstract relations also waited in the dark, the thing that made the window “this,” the forefinger “my.” He shivered and it was a good shiver. Like birds came the names: “Walls, floor, ceiling: room.” His naming released a wave of crystallization across the small and tightly bounded universe. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations, the whole profusion of anarchic impressions fell into ordered patterns around the geometrical entities of their names. And the names drew about themselves a nimbus of quality, of good and bad and color and weight and hardness, a state of existence to come, a state of existence that was and a state of existence that had been. Time entered the small and tightly bounded universe and gave all things a past out of which they had come, a present through which they were passing, and a future toward which they were progressing. All things. Except himself. He had only present. There was no past to direct him toward a future. There was no remembering of a time before. Before? Before the streaming walls, the damp, sprung boards, the splintered ceiling, its lathes bared like broken bones through the rotted plaster. That they possessed a past was evident. Why then had he no past before he found the word cold in his mouth? He squatted down on the poor warped floorboards, shivering, rubbing himself for warmth, trying to remember. For a long time he squatted like a bird, for birds have no past or future but only an eternal present.

Voices.

—You will lose everything. Everything. Everything.

—Is this what you really wish? To lose everything you have ever been?

—The choice is yours.

“And I took it!” he cried to the streaming walls. “I took it!” But he could not remember what it was he had chosen.

—He has chosen.

He remembered questions swarming like flocks of birds, voices filled with consternation, some soft, some sibilant, some somber, some shrill. He remembered that all the questions had been directed at him and that he had answered each and every questioning voice. But he did not know what he had answered.

—You will forget, was his final memory. There his history ended, without a future, without a name.

Perhaps not without a future. His future would be a future of questions, of remembering all that he had forgotten. And perhaps that was all the future he needed, the act of asking was an end in itself.

He crossed to the window. He drew slow, wide fingertracks in the beads of condensation. He pressed his face to the glass. His breath fogged the glass almost immediately, but through the rents his fingertips had torn in the edge of the world, he saw what he had suspected, what he had hoped, that his search for a past and a future was not confined to the small and tightly bounded universe into which he had been born; that there was a new universe of huge, possibly infinite, extent beyond, in which an infinity of questions might be asked.

Communing With the Rain

MINIPAIN EDUSERVE CLIMATOS: ANinteractive variable response environmental/meteorological educational program for age groups 10–16, conceptual levels 4 through 6 Breeden Compensated Scale, Literacy Ratings 1a to 7b illiterate.

LOAD

RUN

CLIMATOS: Hello, I’m CLIMATOS; your domestic education program has accessed me because you have some queries about the environment. Please key in, or recite, your psychofile code number, name, and caste, so I can help you.

STUDENT: 103@5/B*4X7/26A26D£19: Lux Jonathon Eternuum, Soulchild of the Chone Michiganseng Chapter of the Sygmati.

CLIMATOS: Thank you … Lux Jonathon. If you’ll just wait a second while I adjust my program parameters for your caste, illiteracy level, and religious affiliation … there.

STUDENT: Hold on, I won’t have to read anything, will I? I’m not allowed to look at words, reading’s sinful.

CLIMATOS: No worries, Lux Jonathon. I’ve taken care of everything. You can trust the MiniPain Eduserve to respect your religious doctrines. So, what is it you want to know?

STUDENT: Well, what I really want to know is why it rains so much.

CLIMATOS: That’s a good question, Lux Jonathon. A lot of people ask me that one. Well, as with most things environmental and climatological, the answer’s kind of complicated and has its roots way deep in the past. So, I’d like you to settle back into the Logrus position and open your Third Eye to the Panversal Radiance and we’ll go back together. Back to the world at the time of the Break. Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you, and I’ll be with you all the time. What I want you to do is imagine the way the world was back then, with big companies and corporations and state monopolies, all fighting each other, tearing the mother earth open to loot her precious treasures so they could make more, sell more, make more, sell more, and so destroy their enemies. Imagine their factories, imagine kilometer after kilometer of great dark machines working away in the darkness, imagine the roaring furnaces, the burning tail-gases flaring into the night, imagine the chimneys billowing smoke. Concentrate on those chimneys, can you see them?

STUDENT: I can see them.

CLIMATOS: Now, multiply them a thousand times, a million times, ten million times. Imagine the smoke, pluming up into the sky, a great pall of smoke, so thick it hides the sun.

STUDENT: Smoke, choking smoke, smothering smoke, smoke, smoke …

CLIMATOS: And why is there so much smoke? Because in those days people had to burn things to make energy. They burned nonrenewable fuels, like coal, and oil, burned them as if they were going to last forever, which of course they couldn’t, and didn’t. So today we don’t have any coal or oil, Lux Jonathon, and a good thing, too. But we’re getting a little off the subject. As well as smoke, the combustion of these fossil fuels gave off immense amounts of a gas called carbon dioxide. Imagine that, if you can, a dense, invisible blanket spreading over the earth, year by year growing bigger and bigger, and thicker and thicker. Got it in your head?

STUDENT: Sort of like fog?

CLIMATOS: That will do, even though, strictly speaking, carbon dioxide gas is invisible. Invisible to your eyes, invisible to the light spectrum that enables you to see. But not so invisible to infrared light, or, to put it another, more familiar way, heat waves, all of which are …

STUDENT: I know, I know, all facets of the Panversal Radiance Herself.

CLIMATOS: Precisely, Lux Jonathon. Imagine the beams of the Panversal Radiance striking the earth as you’ve been taught in Contemplation and Presence Class. Imagine these infrared waves striking the clouds. Some of their heat is absorbed, some bounced back into space again. Some penetrates all the way to the surface of the earth before it is reflected back again. But this heat that is reflected back is trapped by the carbon dioxide, and it can’t escape, it can never return to the Plasmic Void of Lightlessness from which it came. It stays trapped.

STUDENT: And what does that do to the earth?

CLIMATOS: Well, if you think about it, the heat will eventually build up and up and up, won’t it? And the earth will get warmer and warmer and warmer, won’t it? Now, I want you to imagine something else, and you may find this very hard to picture, but at one time the earth had snow and ice at its poles!

STUDENT: You mean, like ice in the icebox?

CLIMATOS: Exactly, Lux Jonathon, only you must imagine it much much thicker, kilometers thick, in some places.

STUDENT: Wow! How could that be?

CLIMATOS: It had built up over thousands and thousands of years. You must understand that at the time of the Break, the earth was a very much cooler and drier place than it is now. This part of Yu where your Chapter lives used to have ice and snow every winter, before the Break.

STUDENT: Snow?

CLIMATOS: Frozen water vapor. Soft and cold. A little like ice cream.

STUDENT: Wow!

CLIMATOS: And some parts, up at the poles, were so cold it used to stay beneath the freezing point of water all year round. So the ice never melted and it just built up year after year after year. Now, you have to imagine what happens when the earth gets warmer. Imagine all that snow and ice melting, all the millions of millions of tons of ice turning back into water, running into the sea. There was so much water locked up in the polar ice caps, Lux Jonathon, that when it melted, the oceans rose by almost a hundred meters all over the world. Can you imagine the water reaching a third the way up the side of this People House? That is how much the sea rose. Cities were drowned, whole tracts of land submerged, coastlines radically altered. The people who escaped the flood could hardly believe how much the world had changed.

STUDENT: Was this the Great Flood from which we were all saved by the light beams of Sygma?

CLIMATOS: It is, Lux Jonathon.

STUDENT: Shee. I always thought it was all made up by grown-ups. So it really happened.

CLIMATOS: It really did. And there were other effects of the global heating. As the world changed from cool and moist to warm and wet, all the established weather patterns changed, too. You may find this a bit hard to understand, but they had all been based on the polar ice caps and their pressure barriers, and when the poles vanished, the high pressure zones vanished, too. There were terrible storms, hurricanes and lightnings and droughts and downpours as the weather was all chopped and changed about. Deserts became jungles, farmlands became swamps, winds reversed direction, ocean currents switched about, rains failed, there were crop failures, people starved.

STUDENT: What’s that?

CLIMATOS: It means that people died because they had no food.

STUDENT: What?

CLIMATOS: Yes, incredible as it may seem, they had nothing to eat, and there was no one who could give them any because in the end the big international food producers and sellers that had once been so rich and evil found themselves with nothing to give.

STUDENT: So, what happened?

CLIMATOS: We happened. The Compassionate Society happened. It took all the big, selfish corporations and monopolies and transformed them into the Seven Servants so that instead of serving themselves, from then on they served everyone by making sure that everyone had what they needed to make them completely happy.

STUDENT: So, that’s why it rains so much.

CLIMATOS: Yes. Because of the greed and wickedness of selfish and hurtful people.

STUDENT: I never knew that. Thank you, computer.

CLIMATOS: Thank you for accessing me. My pleasure. Always at your service, Lux Jonathon.

Chapter 2

THE SLEEP-POD WAS NOTHING more than a pay-by-the-day biotech coffin so small she had to crawl out through the entrance iris to turn around. It was wedged up on the twelfth level of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel, which was nothing more than a two-hundred-meter cube of girders, sleep-pods, and corrugated tubeways that offered temporary shelter to some six and a half thousand migros. And one yulp, Courtney Hall, thanks to the Ministry of Pain’s Emergency Shelter Section. The migros were not a caste that Courtney Hall had ever encountered even in the mixed-caste environment of Kilimanjaro Complex, though she recalled dimly from her social anthropology lessons that they were a caste of migratory laborers who drifted across the city in and out of casual employment. The harassed-looking yulp who had handled her case at the Department of Housing had assured her that her personal compatibility ratings, though not ecstatic, were higher with migros than with any of the other castes offering available accommodation in that locality at the time. Woken once again from fitful sleep by the voices from the adjacent pod where an entire family of mother, temporary father, grandmother, and two children and one fosterling lived in conditions of near-to-collapsar density, she wondered just how low those personal compatibility ratings had been.

She hated migros.

She hated their clattering, angular music that blasted from their angular radios. She hated the loud angular voices outside in the warren of tubeways as workers came off-shift from their water-processing plants and underground agrariums. Even more, she hated their conspicuous silences because when she could not hear them, she knew they were talking about her, muttering words like “transcaster” and “castebreaker” even though the harassed woman from the Department had made it quite clear that Cizzen Courtney Hall was resident with the full cognizance and approval of the Ministry of Pain until such time as the Environmental Maintenance Unit restored her home to habitability. She hated the way the tiny, wire-thin children stared at her every time she heaved herself like some fat mollusk out of the sleep-pod so she could lie with her feet where her head had been. She hated the continuous urinous smell from the sleep-pod waste-digester, and the thought of having to excrete where she lay outraged her yulp sensitivities almost as much as did the soft, muscular vibration of the quasi-living sleep-pod against her skin. She loathed remaining cocooned but loathed to go out more. So she remained a hermit in her pod, waiting for tomorrow when, for the first time, she could look forward to going to work, wondering when the Environmental Maintenance Unit would get round to patching up the hole the Love Police had blasted in her apartment wall. She thumbed in vain across the video spectrum in search of some channel that was not limited to wholly migro entertainment (almost exclusively long and exceedingly complex dramas drawn around the migro’s transitory plug-in, plug-out social order)—flick flick flick: same faces, places, races—until she came to the conclusion that migro entertainment was the only entertainment that the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel Lares and Penates system was sanctioned to narrowcast.

She wished she had Benji Dog back. At least he would have been something to talk to. No famulus. She felt very naked, as if she had slipped through the sustaining fingers of the Compassionate Society and had not been missed.

She tried once again to sleep, only to be woken by the vaguely obscene sensation of the sleep-pod’s synthetic flesh molding itself to her body contours. Her screaming fit woke the migro family next-pod and brought them peering in through the iris muttering in their all-but-incomprehensible dialect of City-ese and making all-too-comprehensible nona dolorosas with their fingers.

Sleep denied, wakefulness impossible, Courtney Hall found her mind escaping into a third state, a hallucinatory half-awareness where she remained conscious that her body was cocooned in the sleep-pod, while at the same time she hovered over the rooftops and streets like the omnipresent spirit of some Celestial. And from this altered state she passed onward into a kind of dreaming unlike any she had ever before known, in which she was utterly certain of her own self-awareness, so that everything that happened in this was, in a real and personal sense, actual, true.

In this dream she dreamed the sixteen-o’clock dream once more, but in this heightened state of awareness all those images and symbols that had so far evaded her now came flocking to her fingers like singing birds, and they lifted her, by her fingertips, and she flew with them.

In the sixteen-o’clock dream it was an impossible mongrel of bicycle and ornithopter, but it flew, oh, yes, it flew, banking and swooping between the thunderous gray monoliths of the arcologies and co-habs; oh, it flew. Huge, slow-beating wings feathered the air as she looked down into the rain-washed streets aswarm with faces. And in the sixteen-o’clock dream the faces looked up as she bicycled overhead, looked up from their rained-on lives to say, look, oh look, look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous, and as she flashed blue-silver over the sea of upturned faces she would wave a leather-gauntleted hand to all the rained-on lives, and then, flash! she would be gone, a streak of blue-silver splashing across the forty-story face of the TAOS girl, pedaling hard up the big, big gravity hill, steel wings laboring, silver pinions clawing handfuls of air, gray tears of warm monsoon rain streaming down her leather flying-helmet, down her goggles, but the white silk scarf streamed and snapped out behind her like purity. Striving, straining for the clouds, she could hear the voices in the manswarm below shouting, “Never do it, never make it, too far, too high, too much,” and she shouted down to them, “Of course I can, of course I will, watch me, watch me!” and up she went, up she went, straining, striving, yearning, up we go, up we go, into the clouds, the soft, wet, gray clouds, silver wings shredding the soft, wet grayness, swallowed, swaddled, smothered in softness, grayness, wetness, but still straining, striving, yearning, leaning on those pedals, up we go, up we go, up we go, until she burst from the stifling, swallowing clouds in a shout, an ecstasy, of wings, beating blue-silver in the sun as she skimmed the white cloud-tops, banking slowly, lazily, between the cloud-piercing summits of the arcologies, her wings angel-bright in the light of the naked sun. She flew up and up and up and up until even the clouds were reduced to a vague silver carpet some unfathomable distance beneath her, up and up and up and up into a realm of ion-blue where planes of light and shafts of luminescence shifted in and out of being and the tintinnabula of the angels chimed.

(Deep down under the rain and the clouds, down in the sleep-pod in the heart of the great city of Yu, Courtney Hall felt two large salt tears trace down her face.)

On she flew, through the place of the spirit powers, which, in their wisdom or their folly, had stooped low to touch the earth and bring the Compassionate Society out of the chaos of the Break. And then she saw it, glimpsed through the flickerings and phasings of the Celestials, something so remote that she knew it must be of stupendous size to be visible from the edge of heaven. A line of black that reached out seemingly to infinity, yet which closed behind her, a border of black circling the world. The edge. On she flew, and drawing closer, she saw that the line of black reached both outward and upward; high, she reasoned, but not so high that it had no upper boundary. Closer yet, and she saw that it was a wall of black bricks clean and smooth as obsidian, perfectly adamantine, perfectly untouchable. “Up we go, up we go,” she whistled to herself, and as she did, she noticed how the light caught the obsidian bricks at just such an angle that each brick seemed to have a face carved upon it. A wall of souls. “Up we go, up we go, up we go!” she shouted, and up she went, up beyond even the place of the gods, up and up and up until the breath was exploding in her lungs and the muscles in her legs blazed with cramps. With her last breath and final erg of energy she topped the wall (sharp-edged as the razor of wisdom) and saw what lay beyond.

Then a wind came tearing out of that place beyond and sent her spinning, plummeting toward the clouds. Blackness—she had lost consciousness of both her hallucinatory and earth-bound self. Out of the panic she somehow found the key to sanity and opened the door into the light. She found herself once more pedaling the silver flapping machine through the chasms and abysses of Yu. Over her shoulder was a sack, as if she were Siddhi Befana, Patroness of the Winter Solstice and bestower of gifts upon the worthy, and as she swooped above the upturned faces of the manswarm (look, oh look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous?) she seized great handfuls of paper and Stardust from her sack and sent them showering down upon the rain-weary heads of the citizens. And people of every caste and subcaste and sept and clan scrambled to grab some Stardust and paper, and what they found in their clutching hands sent them to their knees in joy and sadness. On each twinkling scrap of paper Courtney Hall had drawn what she had glimpsed in that instant of the things that lay beyond the wall, the things the Compassionate Society had pushed away and abandoned and forgotten, the old things, the things of wonder and terror and joy and pain.

And she was back.

Early-morning rain dripped from the corroded girders of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel. She heard it tip-tap-tip on the skin of her sleep-pod. And she heard another thing, the engine-thunder of a Love Police pantycar dopplering in low over the pantiles of Old Toltethren, chasing something bright and blue-silver and elusive as the reflection of a song through the edge of morning.

Doubting ended. Faith restored. What to do, how it must be done, and why; clear and unambiguous as the whisper of an archangel. Rebirth from the womb of a synthetic sleep-pod. Courtney Hall grinned.

The Enchanted Unicorn chocolate shop was perched on a stone ledge halfway up the artificial ravine that was Chrysanthemum of Heavenly Rest Mall. Courtney Hall sat at a table for one and watched gossamer-frail myke-lytes turning lazily in the gulf between the bustling, shop-lined walls. Her fingers, she discovered, were moving of their own accord, a sinister alliance of subconscious with motor reflexes, drawing with fiberpen on a paper napkin. Her fingers had felt naked without a fiberpen between them ever since she had left Armitage-Weir, and the first shop she had visited in Heavenly Rest Mall had been an artists’ supplier. And what was it pen and fingers had drawn? What else.

Wee Wendy Waif. As she could be. As she should be. As she would be. Now. Courtney Hall’s smile was as bitter as her chocolate. She paid the little anachronist girl (Marie Antoinette) on the till and went in search of Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard.

Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, Scorpio, had been early into his year out on blue six (the compulsory yearlong wanderjahr all young Scorpios undertook before returning to their keeps and employment for life with the TAOS Consortium) when Courtney Hall first came searching for his spun-glass cocoon that hung—surprising fruit—from one of the tendrils of the giant geneform clematis covering the east end of the Mall. Once you knew where to look, Yu was full of little nests and hideaways where the Scorpio young spent their time out in the city. She’d been in need of background material for a time-travel fantasy sequence that wafted Wee Wendy Waif to the mid-twenty-first century Gregorian when society finally, and relievedly, fell apart in the upheavals of the Break. Such information could only be accessed through application to the Ministry of Pain Prehistoric Records Division, but as usual, her deadline had come and gone for the third, fourth, fifth time, so she was forced to employ less orthodox tactics. It had taken twelve seconds for the Scorpio’s brain lynked into the city-wide datanet to pull her fish out of the ocean of tellix codes, accesses, files, Lares and Penates nets, and the lofty, luminous ziggurats of the Polytheon. Now, almost three seasons later, the Cap’n’s preparations to return to Chapter and Keep were complete. Still he seemed glad to be performing one final service for Courtney Hall before turning the cocoon’s units over to his successor.

“So, whazzit dis time, cizzen? More old movies?” As a caste, Scorpios possessed remarkable memories, even without the assistance of the memory chips they wore braided into their dreadlocks.

“Something different this time. Something a little more … challenging.”

“Say what?” A true craftsman, Cap’n Black Lightnin’ performed his services for love of his skill, a sentiment with which Courtney Hall could sympathize.

“I’d like you to locate the access codes to the Armitage-Weir compositing system”—he was grinning already—“and slip this in, in place of the regular Wee Wendy Waif cartoon.”

“Cizzen, you make my twilight days bright.” Lean bone fingers flexed and cracked to address themselves to the quest. Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, summoned his holographic familiars and was taken up in the cybertrance that wheeled his consciousness out along each of the million billion axons of Yu’s nervous system.

They say the whole city is alive, aware, at a level of consciousness totally alien to any we can know, Courtney Hall mused. Spooky.

Cap’n Black Lightnin’ gave a shuddering sigh, dismissed his communicants with a wave of his ectomorphic arms. “Got it.” The cybertrance had lasted forty-four seconds. He ran the cartoon through the scanner. “Neh, what is it about this cartoon’s special, neh? Art?” Courtney Hall felt deeply disappointed. Most Scorpios were functional illiterates but that was no excuse. Some of her biggest fans had been Scorpios. He returned the scanned cartoon, already worming its way through the Armitage-Weir computer system toward the laser printers of tomorrow’s newsstands. “There you go, cizzen. Many thankings.”

Back into the manswarm again.

The door startled her. It startled her because it was her door, 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West arcology. Damned absentmindedness and old engrained habit. Wonder what it’s like, have they started work yet, go on, one teeny tiny peek.

Rain and rust and ruin. Carpetgrass dead slime. That made her very sad. Maybe it hadn’t matched Marcus Forde’s, but she had loved her carpetgrass. So had Dario; then; once. Walls still frozen in dull, dumb buff. Dripping concrete, corroded tear-tracks where acid rain had cried down exposed metal. The stench from Benji Dog’s decomposing biocircuitry was really rather sad.