by Pat Cadigan
The cyborg who had broken into the clinic had already sold off some of his parts to finance his habit. His left arm was a mess of cheap replacements for the components he’d had the last time Ido had seen him; only half of his right arm remained. He’d run out of things to sell.
Ido had tried to talk him down enough to hit him with a sedative, but the cyborg had already understood he was getting nothing. He threw Ido into some shelves and stormed off to look elsewhere for what he needed. Except Ido’s daughter was between him and the exit.
She hadn’t made much of an obstacle.
* * *
In the days that followed, the world around Ido had seemed thick, blurry and colourless, as if he were mired in underwater mud. Hunter-Warriors he had been treating came to the clinic promising they’d bring the bastard who’d murdered his little girl to justice. Ido could even have the guy’s head on a pike if he wanted. Ido told them quite truthfully: It was tempting. Chiren locked herself in their daughter’s bedroom and refused to see anyone, including—especially—Ido.
The bounty hunters told Ido to give her some time. No parent should ever bury a child, they said, it was always worse for the mothers, always, because the child had come out of her body. Didn’t matter how long ago that had been, the physical connection was always there.
It was the most comfort Ido received, then or ever.
Chiren stayed in their daughter’s bedroom for five days and nights. On the sixth day she was gone. Ido was only surprised that he hadn’t heard her—he’d been sure he hadn’t slept at all the night before, but apparently he had dozed off just long enough to miss her leaving.
Would he have tried to stop her? He didn’t know. He couldn’t even find it in himself to be sorry she was gone. When the numbness wore off he would miss her desperately. But if he had caught Chiren at the door with her suitcase, Ido didn’t know what might have come out of his mouth. The thought of no longer bearing the weight of her unrelenting misery was a profound relief.
Chiren blamed him for their daughter’s death. She never said as much—she didn’t speak to him for a very long time after that night—but he knew she did. Even though they had both worked on the ex-Paladin, she had to blame him. Blaming herself even partially was unthinkable. It had to be his fault that they’d worked at the Motorball track; his fault that they’d set up the clinic together; his fault because he’d been unable to stop Nova from exiling them. If he’d been strong enough, intelligent enough, skilled enough, Zalem would have wanted to keep them, and their daughter would still be alive. And Chiren would not have had to spend the last years of her daughter’s life hating her own existence.
Ido did miss Chiren. Life in this place, where corruption was the order of the day and trustworthy people were few and far between, was harder on those who were alone. Yet, somehow, he persisted. Maybe because Iron City was built on scraps, discards and broken things; he fitted right in.
Missing Chiren didn’t lessen Ido’s relief that she was gone. He blamed himself for his daughter’s death and always would; he didn’t need Chiren’s help to do that.
* * *
Chiren hated her apartment.
She’d hated it on sight, but it was just a couple of blocks away from the Motorball stadium and, now that she had to travel to and from the place alone, that mattered. The only other good thing she could say for it was she didn’t have to live there with Ido. It wasn’t home, but then nothing in Iron City could be. Iron City was an ugly, dirty place with bad-smelling air, bad-tasting water and bad days that only got worse. All bad shit, all the time, as the kids said, and they were bad too. Little delinquents, most of them, who grew up too fast and turned into thieves, con-artists and black-market wheeler-dealers, doing anything to make a little money. Which they spent on God only knew what.
Their dirty faces even turned up at the Motorball track. The first time she’d found herself looking down at a little knave named Hugo, she’d thought he must have sneaked in. Hadn’t even started shaving, but there he was with a box of servos and half a dozen circuit boards. She’d called Vector to ask him if he was running a daycare centre.
Vector had come down from his fancy box to introduce Hugo to her formally, then apologised for not having done it sooner.
I asked Hugo to take the new inventory straight to you, he smarmed. Figured you’d need it. Hugo’s becoming my number one go-to guy for hard-to-find items, or for things we’re always running out of. The one thing I’ve never heard anyone in the pits say is, “We have enough servos.” Am I right?
She’d nodded, feeling both mollified yet chastened.
Hugo wasn’t rude, was he? Vector’s expression went from smarmy to smarmy concern.
He was fine. That wasn’t the problem, Chiren told Vector. I was just surprised. I didn’t think unaccompanied children were allowed in the pits.
Vector had laughed heartily. Oh, my dear Dr Chiren! Hugo’s a kid, not a child.
Then Ido had shown up with Claymore, whose left arm had been hanging by a wire, and Vector had made himself scarce, as he usually did whenever Ido was around, unless he had something to tell both of them. That had been Ido’s fault—she could tell by the way he looked at Vector that Ido was only tolerating him for the sake of the job and, some days, Ido’s tolerance was pretty low.
Chiren had asked Ido how he could feel any hostility towards someone who paid as well as Vector did. So well, in fact, that Vector practically financed the clinic singlehandedly. Without him, they’d have had to close up shop long ago. Ido had said something about getting help for the poor and marginalised from the person who kept them that way. Chiren had told him self-righteousness had always been his least attractive feature.
Privately she’d thought he was jealous. Ido had never been the jealous type, nor had he ever envied anyone for their belongings or talents. But that had been in Zalem. In Iron City even a saint would have felt at least a little threatened by an attractive and obviously affluent man in handmade suits and supple leather shoes, who was chauffeured around in an armoured limo. Vector was always so impeccable, just the way she and Ido had been once.
Vector was also well-spoken—for Iron City, that was. After more than a few words, it had been obvious to Chiren that he was doing his best with comparatively little formal education and above average street smarts. But that was only because she had a basis for comparison. To anyone born in the dirt, Vector probably seemed like a higher form of life. Most of Iron City seemed to look at him that way. She was impressed with what he’d managed to do for himself with the resources available.
If they’d been in Zalem, the Dyson Ido she had known and loved would have outshone him in every way. Down here, however, Vector showed her how much Ido had deteriorated. Long before that night, Ido had been shrinking and fading in her eyes. Maybe Ido had thought she’d been withdrawing from him. But, really, it had been the other way around.
Day after day they’d worked in the clinic but she hadn’t been with him, she’d only been in the same location. In accepting exile, Ido had given up. He lost all his power, his magnetism, and there had been nothing to keep the two of them from drifting away from each other, not even their daughter. Ido had been completely unaware; he’d never seen what was happening.
Chiren got up from the scratched, uneven kitchen table—one of her apartment’s ineffably sad, shabby furnishings—and made herself another cup of tea, using the teabags and bottled water Vector had given his pit crew as gifts after the last game. Supposedly the tea was the same stuff they sent up to Zalem and the bottled water was from Vector’s personal distillery, but it tasted a little off to her. Maybe it was the crappy air.
She opened the window by the table a little more and put on the floor fan. It helped a little; the humidity was awful tonight, even for Iron City. Poking her head out of the window, she looked up at the overcast sky, not at the clouds but at the darker shadow that was the disk of the floating city. The weather down here had three main settings—rain, pre-downpour
and post-downpour. With occasional brief periods of blue sky. God, she missed Zalem.
She could not forgive Dyson for this, and she never would. He had been the one who bowed his head and accepted Nova’s judgment—delivered by bureaucrats!—without a fight. He had built the stupid pod so they could land in the trash heap—as if they belonged there! He had insisted they open the clinic and help those who were even worse off than themselves. As if there really was anyone worse off! No one else in this godforsaken town had lost as much as they had.
But did Dyson even try to get any of it back? Of course not. He was too busy being St Dyson, ministering to the so-called less fortunate. Looking back on it now, she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d have been able to stand being under the same roof with him anyway. He’d seemed content to go on living in a wasteland, having nothing, being nothing, doing nothing—well, nothing that really mattered—even though he knew she was unhappy. He’d probably thought he was being patient; in truth, he didn’t know the difference between patience and apathy.
At least his famous insomnia had allowed her to rest undisturbed. They worked so hard all the time, she was too tired, either to be intimate or to explain why she didn’t want to be. For the first time in her life, she’d been glad of his sleeplessness.
And then their daughter—
Chiren had taken to blanking the whole thing out. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to a parent, and she avoided reliving it. When her daughter’s life had ended, her life as a mother and wife had ended too. Yet she had gone on living.
But not with Ido, not in the home they’d shared with their daughter, not in the clinic where the girl had scooted around helping them, laying out clean instruments and sterilising used ones and chattering to the patients in the waiting room. Not in the place where Dyson had put all those holos with them looking like they really were a happy family.
They were so absurd and unacceptable, those holos, with their daughter smiling because she didn’t know any better and Ido grinning like the fool he was. Ido had even made her look happy in some of them—as if she weren’t revolted by the very air she was forced to breathe, as if she hadn’t hated the dirt that soiled her shoes, her clothes, her life. Looking at those holos, anyone would have thought they were a happy little ground-level family.
Not hardly. Not even close.
The one holo that irked her most of all was the one Ido had smuggled out of Zalem. It was a close-up of the three of them, showing nothing that would reveal anything about the floating city. Well, unless you counted the fact that all three of them were clean, well-dressed and obviously better off than they could ever be on the ground.
She hated that one most of all because she didn’t look happy enough for it to have been taken in Zalem. That woman in the holo with her daughter on her lap and her husband’s arm around her, that woman was stupid and clueless and vacant. She didn’t know anything bad could ever happen to her, even though the toddler on her lap was obviously too thin and pale to be normal. That woman had been too obtuse to know misfortune when she was actually holding it in her arms.
And Ido—the son of a bitch wasn’t smiling as broadly as in a lot of the holos taken in Iron City. He didn’t look sad, just a bit thoughtful. Like he didn’t have brains enough to know that he was in the best possible place and he should appreciate it.
Ido probably hadn’t learned his lesson either. For all she knew, he was grinning like a damned fool right now, as if there really were something in this ugly, dirty world to be happy about.
CHAPTER 5
The bruises on Hugo’s face had faded enough to be practically unnoticeable. People no longer winced when they looked at him or asked him if he’d taken the license number of the ass-kicking machine that hit him.
He still hadn’t told his crew what had happened, not even Tanji and Koyomi. Tanji would have been all for getting everyone together for some payback, not caring how much bigger those guys were. That was Tanji all over. Tanji had been on the street longer than Hugo or anyone else in the crew, and he didn’t back down from anything or anyone. He didn’t go around looking for fights but he wasn’t afraid to square off against someone if he had to. Most of the time he came out on top, but even when he didn’t, his opponents always knew they’d been in a fight.
Tanji had taught him a few moves, good for both Motorball scrimmages and self-defence. Hugo’s preferred strategy for either was simply to be faster than everyone else, but that only worked if you remembered to stay alert, especially on someone else’s turf.
So now here he was: back in south-town a week and a half later, staying very, very alert as he stalked the guys who had handed his ass to him and walked off with his mother’s bracelet. At the moment he was parked at the mouth of an alley, watching the crew hang out in the southie version of a market. It made him glad he lived in midtown.
The market wasn’t really small, but everyone was squashed together with the vendors practically on top of each other, like south-town wouldn’t give them any more space than was absolutely necessary and they were lucky to get that much. The forced togetherness didn’t bring out the best in anyone’s disposition.
The food area didn’t have as many different kinds of foods. The falafel looked good, but the woman behind the counter never stopped yelling at the kid working prep for her. Worst of all, in Hugo’s opinion, there weren’t any buskers, which might have made the general atmosphere a bit less grim and prickly and generally unpleasant.
Or not, Hugo thought, watching one of his attackers harass a woman who’d had the poor judgment to get within arm’s reach of him while searching for a place to sit down and eat the sandwich she’d just bought. The other guys jeered and hooted as she slapped his hands away. She left the market altogether, ignoring the calls and kissing noises. As she passed Hugo, she gave him a dirty look. He didn’t blame her. She was around thirty, a bit plump, dressed in a Factory jumpsuit. Just coming off the early-bird shift at the nearby distribution centre, packing shipments for Zalem, and she couldn’t even eat a sandwich in peace.
She had cyborg legs—Hugo recognised the gait. Everyone with cyborg legs attached to their torso walked the same way. Like his father, but only until he’d replaced more of his body. Then he’d walked like all the other machines.
The woman could have kicked her harasser into a pulp with her cyborg legs. She could have stomped the whole crew, and everyone in the market would have cheered her on like a Motorball hero. Didn’t she know what she could do? Or was she too afraid of payback?
The strong didn’t just prey on the weak, Hugo thought, they made sure no one knew their own strength too.
Not me, you assholes, he told them silently. You might get a piece of everyone else but you won’t get me. Not again.
Two guys Hugo didn’t recognise joined them. They were just as big, possibly a little older than their fearless leader. Or maybe they just had more mileage. They had more scars and one of them had a mouthful of crooked broken teeth. Hugo was surprised to find he actually felt a little sorry for them. Sad bastards—they had nothing going for them but following a bully. Tanji would have told him he was stupid to feel sorry for a couple of meat-bags who would have joined in stomping him if they’d been there.
The crew ambled out of the market, heading farther south; Hugo paced them on a parallel street a block away. Even at that distance, he was taking a chance. He knew what Tanji would have said: Are you crazy or do you just have a death wish? What do I tell Vector if they beat you again—you can’t help it, you’re addicted to tough love?
The Tanji in his head was as big a pain in the ass as the real one, Hugo thought ruefully. He was also right. If Vector knew he was doing exactly what he’d been told not to, he’d kick the whole crew to the curb, even though they’d delivered two orders on time since the late one.
Tanji might even go looking for another crew and take the others with him, leaving Hugo with no one to watch his back. People who tried to make it alone, without a
crew or family or anybody to care what happened to them, didn’t last long.
The thing was, Tanji and Koyomi and the others, they all still had family. Even if they didn’t live with them, they had blood relatives— parents or aunts and uncles, cousins. Koyomi had so many cousins it seemed like half of Iron City was related to her. People with family didn’t know what it was like to be related to no one, and they didn’t know what it was like to have the only thing you could remember your mother by taken from you like it was nothing. Like you were nothing.
Hell, Hugo didn’t even know where his parents were really from. They’d never talked about their families except to say they were all dead. Now that they were gone too, Hugo might have just sprung up out of the ground or dropped out of the sky from nowhere.
Or from Zalem? Hugo looked up longingly at the city floating overhead.
If only.
* * *
The south-town crew wandered through the neighbourhoods in no particular hurry, taking a route that arced west as well as south, and all they did was hassle and harass everyone they met, shaking them down for money and anything else that caught their eye. It was a protection racket, Hugo realised—pay up and we won’t kick your ass. Some people gave them credits without being asked. Sometimes the crew would leave them alone; more often they’d hassle them for more money.
They collected from a few businesses too, mostly small grocers or cafés or sad little hardware stores or junk shops. Why did those people go along with it, Hugo wondered; why didn’t anyone do something, or ask someone for help?
Like who? A Hunter-Warrior? Hunter-Warriors only went after someone if there was a price on their head. The Factory wouldn’t bother putting a marker on these guys; they were too penny-ante. No marker, no bounty; no bounty, not a bounty-hunter’s problem.
