Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Erno headed up the boulevard. The Mayer lava tube had been sealed with foamed basalt when it was pressurized seventy years earlier, and painted with white titanium dioxide. But where Erno lived the last paint upgrade had to have been thirty years before, and the alleys were draped in shadows. Calle Viernes, along with Calles Sabado and Domingo, was one of these short side streets. Hotel Gijon stood at the street's far end; one wall of the building was constructed of the face of the lava tube. Across Calle Viernes were another flophouse and a RIOP rental shop; next to it a loan shark and a gambling arcade, and on the corner the Café Royale.

  As the boulevard wound its way through the heart of the lava tube, in places it broke into a flight of broad steps or ramps to negotiate rises or falls in the natural floor that the colony designers had deliberately retained. That, and the fact that the older buildings were decorated with red, blue, and yellow ceramic tiles, gave the place its old European look. The vistas were broken by the curve of the gray stucco buildings. Above, from the bright roof with its nest of catwalks, heliotropes fed sunlight down. From the roof of the hotel you could see a considerable way down the tube through hazy, high-CO2 air until it twisted away, a ten-kilometer-long city stretched inside the hollow snakeskin that ancient lunar vulcanism had discarded several billion years ago.

  The first place Erno had gone after he had been exiled from the Society of Cousins had been the scientific station at Tsander, but all they had there was a battery of radio and gamma ray telescopes and a crew of Aspergered scientists. There was no work for an undocumented eighteen-year-old biotech apprentice. But he accessed the Lunar Labor Market and managed to snag a job with Dendronex Ltd. in Mayer, in the Lunar Carpathians.

  Erno had heard little about Mayer among the Cousins. Founded by the EU in 2046, the colony been taken over by free marketers in the Lawyers’ Coup of 2073. Here, Erno's lack of a citizenchip wasn't a problem; when the economy was humming, immigrants like him kept labor costs down. He busied himself as an assistant on a project for adding prion linkages to Human Growth Hormone. It was mindless work, and he wondered why Dendronex was even interested in this, since HGH was a glut on the market and medically questionable anyway. Three months into his job he found out why when it was revealed that Dendronex was a shell corporation for an AI pyramid; in the ensuing market panic, sixteen associated corporations failed, and Erno was on the street.

  With the financial chaos, work became scarce. The rail gun was still in operation sending satellites to low earth orbit; the only other work there was in a factory producing cement building-struts, and in colony services. So every day Erno would go to the labor pool and sit in the ward room with dozens of others hoping to be hired for day work. Since Erno had no membership in the colony corporation, he was paid in e-cash, one ducat a day. The labor pool took 20 percent off the top. He kept the remainder on his bracelet, bought protein bars and, when he could afford it, an apple or two, in the shop at the end of Calle Sabado. Tony, the owner, pestered Erno about sex among the Cousins. Did Erno miss the sex with his sisters?

  “I didn't have sex with my sisters,” Erno told him.

  “Why not? Were they ugly?"

  “Cousins don't have sex with relatives."

  “You can tell me the truth. I'm no bigot, like these others."

  “Trust me, we don't. I mean, there's no actual law against it, but cultural imperatives don't need to be codified in law. The Society of Cousins isn't just about sex, it's a matter of—"

  “Sure, Cuz. Want to buy a lotto ticket?"

  Tony earned more by selling lottery tickets than fruit or anti-senescents. The front of his shop was a big screen monitoring the latest winners. The residents of the Weekend would cycle through the remote celebrity cams: Balls Hakim, Sophonsiba Bridewell, Jun Yamada. Watch him move into his new luxury condo in the park, go shopping with her for clothes, see them have sex with famous people. Everyone talked about the winners with a mixture of envy and pride, as if they were relatives. Felix even claimed to be related to Gudrun Colt, who had won the jackpot three years ago, but if he was, why was he living in the Weekend?

  From inside the shop Tony could watch the passersby stop and stare at the screen, and he would make vicious fun of them. Their bovine faces. Their fantasies. “Two kinds of tramps,” he'd say, holding up one finger. “The unfettered, free spirit. Ultimate individual, self-reliant, not owned by anyone.” He held up a second finger. “Then you've got the broken parasite feeding on the labors of good citizens, a beggar and prostitute, thief, and hustler. Social deviant who must be controlled, limited, quarantined. They ought to freeze them all and forget the defrost."

  Erno wondered what kind of tramp Tony considered Erno to be. He had a lot of time to think about it, because mostly he had no work. He was what they called “poor.” All the people living in the Weekend were poor, even the shop owners that the other hotel residents spoke of with envy. Tony had stacks of cash, they told him, hidden away. Erno did not know what to believe.

  Mostly, being poor was a matter of finding enough to eat and to pay the rent, and then sitting around with nothing to do and not much energy to do it. Poverty was boring. Even though Erno had spent most of his adolescence feeling ignored and underutilized, he had never felt this useless. He sat in the labor pool all morning and the Café Royale all afternoon.

  This morning in the street outside the labor pool, a woman in shabby clothes peddled hot biscuits from a cart, and another, no older than Erno's little sister Celeste, sold jump blood in plastic bags. Inside, forty men and women sat on plastic chairs; some were eating biscuits they had bought outside, others played cards. The muñeco slouched in his cube off to the side with his feet up on his desk; if people tried to talk with him he just opened one lazy eye and cracked a bitter joke. His white shirt and detachable collar were pristine, as if he expected to move up soon, but his demeanor belied that expectation. Down on the Miracle Kilometer, beyond the last pressure wall, the wealthy had their homes in the park. Erno had walked down there one time, ogling the large, clean banks of buildings, the conspicuous waste of water in the fountains, the lush hanging gardens. The muñeco would never live there. None of them would.

  It reminded him a little of the apartments on the ring wall back at Fowler, but at home living in such a nice place was not a matter of having money. And here, even the rich had to breathe the same bad air, and they made people sit in a room waiting for work when they could just as easily register workers online and call them by remote.

  Erno joined the crowd before the video wall watching the replay of last night's hockey game against Aristarchus. He sat next to Rudi, an old man he had worked with several times. “Any work today?"

  “Not unless you're a dog.” Rudi's cracked voice bore witness to too many years breathing agglutinate dust. “Fucking dogs. Who can compete with a dog?"

  “Dogs are trustworthy, all right,” Erno said. “But people are smarter.” He glanced up at the screen. “How'd the Gunners do last night?

  Rudi snorted, which turned into a racking cough. He leaned forward and his face turned red. Erno slapped his back. When the cough at last petered out, Rudi drew a shuddering breath and continued as if nothing had happened, “They're getting paid to play that game? Professionals."

  The video, subjective from the POV of Gunners’ defenseman Hennessey Mbara, showed him cross-checking an Aristarchus forward into a high parabola out of the rink. The forward bounced off the restraining netting, landed on his feet, and deflected a chest high pass from the center past the Gunners’ goalie. The siren wailed. People in the labor pool shook their heads, smiled grim smiles. They stuffed another stick of mood gum and complained about the coach, the strategy, the star forward who was in a scoring slump. The goalie, according to the regulars, had lost all hand-eye coordination.

  Erno was still musing over Rudi's comment. “Where does that word come from—'professional'? That makes it sound like, if you claim to be something, that makes you more than someone who just does th
at thing."

  Rudi looked at him sideways. “They're freaks, they get paid big money, and they've got no balls anymore, and they're going to be dead before they're fifty."

  “Yes, but what about the word? What does a professional profess?"

  “Erno, please shut up."

  Erno shut up. He had never gotten used to the way men here considered every conversation to be a competition.

  The voice of the muñeco broke in. “I need six certified remote Integrated Object Printer handlers for D'Agro Industries.” The men and women in the room sat straighter in their chairs, the card games stopped. “Frazielo, Minh, Renker, Wolfe, Marovic, Tajik. Have your prods ready."

  The laborers named all checked in at the window, ran their forearms through the scanner, and were let through the bubble where they would be hustled by cart out to their posting. They left a score of grumbling unemployed in their wake. Behind Erno, one of the card players threw in her hand, the cards sliding across the table and floating slowly to the floor. “I've had enough for today,” the woman said.

  The room began to clear out—this late in the day there was little chance of any other work coming in. Erno stood, stretched his legs, touched Rudi on the shoulder and left. The old man just sat there. Erno couldn't imagine a worse place to be at Rudi's age than the waiting room of the Mayer labor pool. Unless it was the debtor's freezer.

  He wandered back toward the Weekend. When he got there, rather than continue on to the hotel, he slid into a seat on the patio of the Café Royale, a small patch of level concrete a couple of meters square, with yellowed fiberglass tables and tube chairs. The other buildings of Calle Viernes had grown up around it, leaving the café a little pit in the shadows. For ten centimes you could buy a tumbler of wine and sit and talk with the other unemployed. From the back came the smells of yeastcake and fried onions that made Erno's stomach growl. An onion sandwich cost a quarter.

  Erno counted his change. He had exactly seventy-two centimes. He poked the coins around the palm of his hand, his finger gliding over the raised profile of Friedman on the two quarters, Smith on the two dimes, Jesus on the two pennies. He ordered a wine and watched the sparse traffic on the boulevard: pedestrians, electric carts, messenger dogs.

  A trio of loiterers at the next table were arguing. “They make big money on earth,” insisted one of them, slender and with orange hair.

  “Earth! You couldn't stand up for ten minutes on earth,” said the burly one with the shaved head.

  “GenMod takes care of that,” the third said. “Denser bones, better oxygenation."

  These guys didn't have the money to buy new slippers, let alone therapy. As Erno listened to their aimless blather, Luis Ajodhia came by and sat at his table. Luis was tall, slender, and wore tight silver pants and a loose black shirt. When he smiled, his wide mouth quirked higher at one corner than the other, and his eyes closed to a squint. When Luis asked him for money after the first time they slept together, Erno didn't understand what he was talking about.

  Today Luis leaned in toward him and whispered in Erno's ear. “I've got a business proposition."

  “I'm not a bank, Luis."

  “You only need forty ducats to get in on this."

  Erno laughed. “I don't have forty ducats."

  “Don't kid me. You came here with money, Cousins money."

  “In that you are mistaken."

  “You don't have forty? So how much do you have, sweet boy?” Luis tapped his long fingers on the scarred surface of the table.

  The men in the emigration conversation were still going. “The Polity on earth knows how to run a society."

  “Yes, they run things. That's the problem. Laissez faire for me."

  “You go one step outside the standard here and the corporation will let you faire in the freezer."

  “I'm not afraid of the freezer."

  Besides his now sixty-two centimes, Erno had only the one ducat thirty on his bracelet, which he owed Anadem. “What's the proposition?"

  Luis looked at him through those squinted eyes, as if assessing whether Erno was worth his confidence. “I know who's going to win tonight's hockey game."

  “And how do you know this?"

  “I spent last night at the Hotel Serentatis with the forward for the Aristocrats. He told me that the Aristocrats were going to throw the game."

  “Why would he tell you that?"

  “I have means of persuasion, dear boy. The odds are running 6-1 against the Gunners."

  “And if the Gunners lose?"

  “They won't lose. I know this, Erno."

  “And now that you've told me, I know too. What do I need you for?"

  “You need me because I know the bookies, and can get the best odds."

  As Erno and Luis haggled, Alois Reuther twitched by the café. He wore his blue suit and puffed nervously on a cigarette in his new left hand. The three men who had been arguing immediately got up. “Alois, old friend,” said the shaven-headed man. “We've been waiting for you. You need to come with us."

  Alois's lenses rotated as they focused in on the men. He attempted to push past them. “No, I don't."

  “Au contraire,” said the orange-haired man, putting his arm around Alois's shoulder and guiding him toward the alley behind the café. “Mr. Blanc worries about you."

  “Your finances,” said the first. “And your health."

  “For instance, this hand,” said the third, taking Alois's hand in his. “Has it been properly attached?"

  With that they disappeared around the side of the building. In a minute came sounds of a beating. Erno got out of his seat. Luis did not move.

  Nor did anyone else in the café. Erno circled around to the alley and saw the three men crouched over Alois's body in the shadows. “Hey!” Erno shouted. “Stop!"

  The men looked up indifferently. “Where is it?” one of them asked the other, who was kicking around the trash in the alley.

  “I don't know. It bounced over here, I thought. Why did you have to take it off ?"

  “Just find it."

  A cloud of security midges was accumulating over their heads. Their tiny loudspeakers all spoke in unison, making an odd AI chorus: “In all disputes, entrepreneurs must relate to one another with complete transparency. Wait here until the settlement agent arrives."

  The bald man reached into his blouse pocket and tugged out a card. He held it up to the monitors. “I have accumulated a Social Deviance Credit,” he announced.

  “And your colleagues?"

  The small man flashed his own card. But the orange-haired man did nothing. The bald man confronted him. “What? Don't tell me you're out of SDC."

  “Okay, I won't tell you."

  “Fuck!” said the small man.

  “Fuck,” said the big man. “I don't know why I married you. Let's go.” They straightened and pushed past Erno into the street.

  “Why are you—” Erno started.

  “Mind your own business,” the tall man said as he shouldered past.

  Erno knelt over Alois. His shirt was torn, his leg was bent funny, and his hand had been torn off. A trickle of blood ran from his scalp, but he was breathing. Erno ran back to the café. Luis was talking to the manager. Erno returned with a wet towel and held it to the unconscious Alois's head. In fifteen minutes a bored settlement agent came by and loaded Alois onto an electric cart.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Erno asked.

  “Was he all right before this?” the agent said.

  “Where will you take him?"

  The agent ran his reader over Alois's good arm. “He's insured. I'll take him to Holy Dividends HMO."

  “What about the men who beat him?"

  The agent calmly surveyed Alois's semi-conscious body. “On the violence scale, this probably isn't outside of one standard deviation. You want to make a statement?"

  “Uh—no."

  “Good day, then.” The agent climbed onto the cart and drove away, Alois's handless arm danglin
g off the side.

  Luis emerged from the bystanders and pulled Erno back to the table. “So, are you done wasting time? This information is only valuable until game time."

  “They just beat him up."

  “You don't have anyone who'd like to beat you up?"

  Not yet, Erno thought. But next week he could be Alois: if he paid all he had against his rent, he wouldn't have enough left to feed himself. He couldn't even sit in the café unless he bought something. Maybe he could put Ana off with one ducat on account, but any way he looked at it, in another week he would be destitute.

  He could sell his possessions. He had the spex he had brought with him from home. He had his good suit, some other clothes. A few tabs of IQ boosters. “I can maybe raise some money."

  “Go do it. I'll meet you back here at 1600. I'll have to lay off the bets at a couple of different bookies or somebody will figure out something's up. We need to get the money down by 1800. By midnight we'll be counting our winnings."

  Erno left the café and went back to his room. He got the boosters from his drawer and stuffed them into an inner pocket. He put on his worn slippers, then folded his good ones up inside his suit, and tucked the suit under his jacket with the spex, hoping he could get them past Anadem. He left the hotel for the pawnshop.

  The front of the shop was filled with racks of plasma shirts, boots, spex, jewelry, sex implants, toys; in the back were older and odder items: paper books, mutable sculptures, ugly lamps, antique drugs. A little boy sat on the floor playing with a wheel on a wire armature. Several other people were ahead of Erno, waiting for their moment with the woman behind the counter. Erno sat on a bench until his turn came. He went up to her and laid the suit and slippers down. Beside them he put the spex and the boosters.

  With her index finger she pushed the spex back toward him across the counter. “Worthless."