by Pat Cadigan
“Hugo, do you ever stop talking?” the man said and was instantly sorry when he saw the stricken expression on the kid’s face. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” He hesitated. “I just keep losing my train of thought and this is really important. It could make a big difference to how well cyborgs function, especially TRs.”
“Oh, yeah? Too bad you didn’t get here before my old man dropped dead. He mighta had another twenty years to perform better in the Factory.” He rolled himself across the floor to the workbench. “What’s so great about this chip?”
“It’ll improve integration between newer parts and older ones. This will reduce rejection and speed up the healing process. That means less medication. It has other potential—no more drop-out, hesitation or scrambled signals to nerves.”
The man felt himself warming to his subject. He was really just thinking out loud. But thinking out loud felt so much better with another person in the room, even if the other person was a street kid who didn’t understand more than two words in every five. “See, what happens sometimes is, in high- or extended-performance situations a cyborg will intend some movement—maybe something small with the fingers, or something large, like walking up steps—and suddenly nothing happens. It only lasts a second or half a second, but it’s startling, disturbing, especially when you’re in the middle of some complex task.
“And if you’re lucky enough to have achieved a state of flow, it’s like having the floor pulled out from under you. If I can do something to preserve flow for cyborgs, I’ll die happy.” The man frowned. “No, actually, I’ll die happy if I can also eliminate hesitation and stutter. That’s really just drop-out on a much tinier scale—you make a movement, nothing happens, and you make the movement again. Which is different from echo, where the same intentional movement repeats two or more times.
“The problem—I mean, the overall problem—is the speed of brain impulses. Even the most advanced cyborg body isn’t quite as fast as organic nerves. Almost, but not quite. I’ve been trying to speed up cyborg bodies, and I don’t just mean accelerated movement. However, accelerated movement is mostly what I get.” He was about to go on but decided to have mercy on the kid just for staying awake.
Hugo was silent for a long moment. Then: “See, that’s what I’m talking about—there’s no place to go in Iron City if you want to learn stuff like that.”
“I could teach you if you wanted to learn,” the man said.
“Oh, yeah, right—can you see me as Doc Hugo? Is that why you came here, to teach kids like me how to be doctors? I wouldn’t buy that for a second. I can hardly believe you’re here fixing up cyborgs. Why didn’t you stay in Zalem, where you could have everything you need? Why would you come to a place like this?”
The pale man was saved from having to think of a way to dodge the question by the sound of the clinic door opening and closing. “My next patient is here,” he said. “Do me a favour and bring them through, will you?”
“Sure thing, Doc,” Hugo said. “But just as a favour. I don’t want a job as your receptionist.”
“You could do worse,” the man said.
Hugo laughed. “I already do a lot better.”
* * *
Business picked up later in the day, as it always did. By the time the last patient left, the pale man was too tired to see him out. He collapsed in the refurbished dentist’s chair Hugo had been playing around with earlier and put his feet up. When Hugo asked him if there was anything else he wanted him to do before he left, the man waved him off.
“Okay, Doc,” Hugo said. “See you tomorrow!”
Not if I see you first, the pale man replied silently.
* * *
Dr Dyson Ido, educated cyber-surgeon to Iron City’s cyborgs, Good Samaritan and befriender of street kids too smart for their own good, told himself he had to get serious about hiring some staff. A nurse at the very least; the income from his other job was enough that he could afford someone good, even if it wasn’t enough to send Hugo to med school. No amount of money would be enough for that; the Factory chose very few people for further education. The rest, like Hugo, were left to the social Darwinist crucible that was Iron City.
Yet Ido still kept hoping that he could awaken something like intellectual curiosity in a street kid who mainly saw him as a customer for various bits of tech… when he wasn’t pumping him for information about Zalem.
It was just that Hugo seemed more thoughtful than most of the kids running around Iron City. He had a gang of friends, a crew that he hung out with, played Motorball with, raced gyro-bikes with. Occasionally there was a girlfriend but none of them held Hugo’s interest for long. Hugo had something different on his mind. He talked about Zalem so much that sometimes Ido thought he had a fixation. That was never good.
Zalem fever was a phase most young people went through. Young people loved the idea of beating the system to make their way to the last and greatest flying city of them all, the one the Enemy could not crash. Youth was all about believing that if you wanted something badly enough, if you were willing to do whatever it took, all that effort, all that motivation would become a magic beanstalk you could climb all the way to Zalem. And, once there, all that determination and resolve would earn you a hero’s welcome.
Most people grew out of Zalem fever sooner or later; later was more difficult. But Ido could understand the reluctance to let go of the Zalem dream. It must have felt like giving up on the whole idea that there could be something better than plain old everyday life; like turning your back on Heaven.
Ido couldn’t help thinking that Iron City’s existence was proof that there was a very big difference between giving up your dreams and waking up to a reality where a force beyond your control had given your dreams up for you.
And that wasn’t true only in Iron City. It was true in Zalem too. Most people in Zalem had no idea. They had everything they could possibly want, so there was no need to dream.
Unless you weren’t perfect.
* * *
His daughter had been destined to be perfect. Her lineage, like that of everyone else in Zalem, was impeccable. He and Chiren had lived properly, without giving in to weakness or decadence.
And as far as he was concerned, his daughter had been perfect, the most beautiful creature in their beautiful floating world. Her illness had not been a flaw. Zalem’s geneticists had missed something, failed to correct it; Ido didn’t care. Nothing could spoil her perfection for him.
The flaw was in Zalem’s notion of perfection.
Or more precisely, the flaw was in the vision of Nova, the man in charge. The chrome optics he had over his eyes supposedly gave him enhanced perception, beyond the spectrum normally visible to humans. But Ido didn’t think it was enhanced at all if Nova couldn’t see his daughter was perfect.
It was Nova who evicted them from Zalem. He sent glorified errand boys to their home to tell him and Chiren they had to leave. A very hard decision, the errand boys said, neat and apologetic in their immaculate errand-boy suits, but there was no other way, nothing to be done. Ido and Chiren had produced something so flawed, normal life would be impossible for her. The girl had to be enhanced simply to do what normal people did unassisted. This was not how things were meant to be in Zalem. A flying city had to be inhabited by people better than those at ground level. Otherwise there was no difference between the two places, and they might as well let the grimy unwashed come up and track dirt all over the place. No one wanted that. Surely Ido and Chiren could see how important it was to preserve Zalem as it was supposed to be—especially since it was the only flying city left.
In his mortification and anger, Ido had finally understood why there were no physical defects, no disabilities or atypical mentalities—in fact, no marked differences in perspective among the privileged population of Zalem—and then he was only too glad to leave. But first he demanded that Nova come to their home in person to say all those things to his face, to Chiren’s face, to his daughter’s face. T
o see they were not merely names crossed off a list but living people condemned to exile.
Chiren had been utterly devastated, but her heart had not yet frozen over; there had still been enough humanity in her to persuade Ido that having an autocrat tell their daughter she wasn’t good enough for Zalem would be even more destructive. In the end, Nova’s refusal to see them was his one and only small mercy.
The manner of their leaving was one more humiliation. Heavier-than-air flight was forbidden, punishable by death, a sentence carried out by ground-level robot enforcers called Centurians. Mostly Centurians existed to make sure people born on the ground didn’t try to get above their station—literally. But neither would it do to have the residents of Zalem lowering themselves—also literally. If they did, the people on the ground would demand to visit Zalem, resulting in a complete breakdown of the social order. For the last three hundred years the world had been stable and at peace—no wars, no internal unrest, no problems. It would be insane to risk doing anything to spoil it.
The supply tubes that ran from dispatch centres on the ground up to Zalem receiving stations were only for cargo—food, manufactured goods—and they were set for one direction. Nothing ever came down through a supply tube. Zalem didn’t exist to supply anything to the world below.
The only way anything went down was via the ragged disposal chute on the underside of Zalem’s disk. At one time the chute had been longer, but it had been too much of a temptation for daredevil ground-dwellers and had to be shortened. That was what most people had been told; any other story had passed from living memory. Only people with the extensive education available on Zalem knew more.
Not that it mattered. The long and the short of it was, the chute had always been used for waste disposal, and it was the only way Ido, Chiren and their daughter could travel to the ground.
Nova allowed them to have a pod constructed so they could survive the landing without serious injury. The pod would be good only for that one landing and would accommodate only themselves and very little else. They were forbidden to take with them anything that could reveal detailed information about Zalem—what the city looked like, how many people lived there, what they had. People on the ground were better off just imagining how much better Zalem was; if they actually knew, they might get so dissatisfied, they’d do something foolish.
Yes, it was too bad they had to leave the girl’s wheelchair behind, but Ido and Chiren could make another for her out of the materials available to them. The place wasn’t called Iron City for nothing—there was plenty of salvage to be repurposed. The people there had become very good at finding new uses for Zalem’s discards.
The landing hadn’t been the mild bump the bureaucrats had claimed it would be, but Ido had added a lot of extra padding, especially for their daughter. She came through the landing without physical injury or trauma.
The final humiliation was where they had landed. Ido and Chiren had known in advance, but that did nothing to lessen the effect of what they saw when they opened the pod’s escape hatch. Zalem had thrown them out with the trash—had thrown them out as trash.
And then, as if to drive the point home in the most obvious way possible, more refuse poured down on top of them, some of it bouncing into the pod through the open hatch. Chiren stared in horror at the fragments of plastic, dented pieces of metal, shredded bits of cloth, wires and machine parts. A moment later she tore herself and their daughter out of the safety cushions and rushed out with the girl in her arms, her face wild with panic.
Ido followed, intending to tell her she should have waited; if something had fallen on them, they might have been killed. But as he made his way over the absurd and treacherous landscape formed from generations of junk and discards, he spotted a small bowl, scratched but intact. Some impulse made him pick it up—first thing for their new home, he thought. Then suddenly he understood why Chiren had bolted. She had been terrified of seeing something she recognised. He tossed the bowl away.
* * *
Their daughter had been young enough that Ido had hoped adjusting to their new life wouldn’t be too hard. Obviously, they were living in reduced circumstances, but children were always just children, even when they were disabled—they didn’t know if they were rich or poor. Occasionally the girl asked why they were doing without something they’d had in Zalem. She accepted Ido’s explanation that there were some things Iron City just didn’t have cheerfully, without complaint. Which was a relief—Chiren complained enough for all of them.
Ido did his best to keep his own spirits up for her sake, trying to make himself believe his daughter’s condition wasn’t getting worse before his eyes. It had taken Chiren throwing a soft, near-rotting tomato at him for him to realise how far they had really fallen; all the best food went up to Zalem. Iron City ate only what the flying city rejected.
The patients at the clinic introduced them to the black market. Ido was shocked at how quickly it became as normal to him as the open-air food market. Even so, they might have ended up having to close the clinic and find squat space under the causeway if they hadn’t discovered Motorball. Or maybe Motorball had discovered them. Word had got around from their patients that there were a couple of cyber-surgeons in town that could work miracles with a little masking tape, copper wire and spit.
The work paid well—not enough to restore them to anything near their previous standard of living, but they wanted for nothing. Ido began working on a project that might change their daughter’s life for the better.
Their daughter, A—
Ido was about to speak her name when he opened his eyes. The clinic was dark and silent; he’d fallen asleep in the chair. He should get up, eat something, and then go out. He needed the income that only his nighttime business could provide.
Except there was someone banging on the clinic door and ringing the bell, over and over and over. That was what had awakened him, Ido realised. Somebody had an emergency and they weren’t going to go away. He struggled out of the chair, stretched and half-stumbled to the door.
It was an emergency, all right, but not the kind he usually took care of.
“What the hell happened to you, Hugo?” he asked, easing the kid into the wheelchair he kept near the entrance.
Hugo made a noise that might have been, Don’t ask. Or possibly, Kicked my ass. Ido didn’t pursue it.
CHAPTER 2
Some hours earlier, about the time Dyson Ido was dozing off in his dental chair, Hugo was thinking about breaking a rule that, in his personal code, was supposed to be unbreakable.
Prior to that, he’d been thinking about Ido. Nobody worked as hard as the Doc, and cyborgs all over Iron City sang his praises. There was no one else with his cyber-medical knowhow in Iron City who was willing to treat cyborgs even if they couldn’t pay right away. Or at all.
Well, there was his wife—his ex-wife, rather. When the clinic had first opened, they’d split their time between it and taking care of Paladins at the stadium. The Motorball income must have let them keep the clinic open. Hugo had no idea how Ido kept the clinic going since he’d quit Motorball. His wife was still working at the track but no longer at the clinic, having left Ido. Hugo doubted she was donating anything. There weren’t a whole lot of ways to make good money that didn’t involve something dangerous and/or illegal, and the doc didn’t seem like the type for either. Oh, he’d done a little trading on the black market, but everybody did. Obeying the law all the time in Iron City was a good way to starve. The Factory made the rules and the game was rigged.
If you wanted to do better than just survive you had to make your own rules. Sooner or later this would put you on the wrong side of the law. It was more important to stick to your personal code. Your word had to be your bond. Anyone you dealt with had to know without a doubt there were lines you wouldn’t cross, no matter what.
Hugo had been scrupulous about not violating his own code. But then he wasn’t much like other guys his age and he knew it, albeit in an obliq
ue, mostly unconscious way. Early in his life circumstance had caused his focus to shift from material things to intangibles like trust and honesty, will and intention, even inspiration and love. Not that he understood himself in those terms. Hugo didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating abstractions.
For most of the day he’d been at Ido’s clinic, partly to find out what Ido was in the market for—besides servos, that is; Ido always needed more servos—but also to pump him for information about Zalem. Ido seemed to think he was curious about scientific and medical stuff, like he wanted to be a doctor or something. He didn’t, and he’d have been shit out of luck if he did; people like that came from the Factory. Nobody knew where the Factory got them, but Hugo knew it wasn’t Zalem. They didn’t have the mark.
Which raised all those questions about how Ido had ended up on the ground, why he wasn’t trying to go back, why Zalem had let him and his wife go in the first place, and so on and so forth, around and around and around. The doc was trying to play it close to the vest but Hugo felt like he was wearing him down. Ido had started to let things slip now and then. Hugo hoped if he let the doc keep talking about things like his famous chip that would integrate new this with old that, Ido would get talkative enough to confide in him. The doc wanted someone to confide in—he was obviously lonely as hell. He probably would have preferred another doctor like his ex-wife, but he’d settle for someone who’d listen to his scientific blah-blah-blah.
Right now, however, Hugo was wishing he hadn’t given in to his hunger pangs, or that he’d gone instead for a pineapple-coconut shake he could have tied onto his gyro-bike handlebars and sipped as he rode home. But no, he’d felt like falafel, and he’d parked near the coffee shop while he ate it, in a spot that had given him an unobstructed view of the woman sitting alone at one of the sidewalk tables.
It was just chance that she was there having an extra-large cappuccino at the same time. It was also just chance she’d decided to wear a bracelet today. And it was just chance that he saw her wearing it. She was a slightly plump woman with dark-brown skin, short corkscrew curls and large dark eyes, dressed in a t-shirt with a bunch of black cats on it and jeans faded almost to white. She was anybody; Hugo couldn’t have said whether he’d seen her before or not.
