Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013

by Spilogale Inc.

  I felt like screaming and kicking the side of the locker. Or throwing up. I knocked on locker six, because I still owed her money. She slid the side up; she'd been watching TV on her own gadget. "I'm not passing you in again."

  "No, I don't need you to. I just want to pay you back for this morning," I said. "I couldn't wait, you see.…" I held out the letter of eviction. My throat was already closing.

  She took it from my hand and looked at it. "Well, isn't that a load of boiled shite," she said. "He took your money, and now he's saying it's not good enough? What, he couldn't tell looking at you that you're a teenager?"

  "I don't know," I said. "The lighting in here's pretty bad. Maybe he couldn't tell."

  She handed me the letter. "Don't worry about paying me back for the water, kid."

  "Can you tell me… do you know if there's anyone who wouldn't care? Who'd let me stay? I'm tired," I said, and my throat started closing again. "I just want somewhere I can sit ."

  The locker door by my ankle slid up and another woman looked up at me. "I'll tell you," she said. "Keep going down."

  The woman in six started to say something but the woman in the lower unit shook her head. "You really think she ought to go home right now? Go down. Dodge the authorities. And don't piss anyone off." She slid her door shut again.

  GO DOWN. Dodge the authorities. Don't piss anyone off.

  A good portion of stead is actually below the waterline. The old cruise ships generally have a draft of about thirty feet, Lib's freighter is closer to forty feet, and to provide stability, there's actually fifty to sixty feet of stead underwater for the main sea platforms that make up Min and Rosa. Some of this is used for habitation—a lot of the locker rooms, for instance, are in the underwater portions of the sea platforms—but the farther down you go, the more it's utility stuff, like generators and desalinators.

  I'd never been below the locker rooms, but I knew the stairs kept going, even if the elevators didn't.

  I shouldered my backpack, glad that I hadn't left any of my possessions behind to be confiscated and given to my father. I had a blanket, a snack, and a flashlight. Everything I really need. I found the stairs and started going down. Below the habitable levels, the doors were supposed to be locked, but when I got to the bottom level, I found that the door's latch had been taped open. Around the edge of the door frame someone had taken permanent marker and scrawled welcome to the free land, the glad land, the fair land, the no-man's-land, the lost land, the you-and-me-and-thee land. It was a song lyric I recognized, from a stateside musician, about a guy being locked up in a hospital after murdering a bunch of people.

  I was under a desalination plant. It was cool down here, and damp. I could hear water dripping and hoped it was condensation rather than a leak. There were supposed to be alarms for things like leaks, but there were also supposed to be locks on doors like the one I'd just come through. Dim lights shone through a tangle of wires and pipes overhead and the ceiling was low. I had to duck a lot to pass under low-hanging pipes and I'm not actually that tall.

  Dodge the authorities. Don't piss people off.

  I had no idea where I was going, but I kept walking for a while. Presumably if you were near the door, you were more likely to be found by the authorities. If they ever actually came down here. I wasn't sure they did. Surely they'd rip the tape off the latch if they came down.

  And then, off to the right, I saw a brighter glow. I followed it, only to be stopped with a blast of brilliant, dazzling light in my face. I flung up one hand and flinched back. "I'm sorry!" I said.

  The light left my face. "Not a cop," someone said.

  I couldn't see anything but spots. "No," I said. "I'm not a cop." Don't piss people off. Too late, I wondered if I should have tried harder to sound friendly.

  Someone grabbed my arm. "Over here," the voice said. "You can sit down. You'll be able to see again in a minute. Next time don't sneak up on us."

  "I wasn't trying to sneak ," I said. "All I knew was, if I went to the bottom level I might find somewhere I could stay. I rented a locker but got evicted, because.…" Should I tell these people I was a dependent? They could probably guess. "Because the guy was an asshole."

  I was sitting on something hard, but it wasn't the floor. I patted it with my hands and concluded it was a concrete block. I could smell food cooking, and as my vision slowly returned I looked around.

  Yes, there were people living here. I could see blankets spread on the floor, marking out beds. Someone had a little stove going: they'd cut into one of the wires running past our heads and added a spliced-in makeshift outlet. It looked like a fire hazard. I could see the dripping water now: it was dripping from one of the pipes, and being caught in a bucket. One of the men got up to swap in a fresh bucket, and carried the full bucket over to the circle. He ladled water into cups. "Do you have a cup, kid?" he asked.

  I had a water bottle in my backpack. "It's fresh?" I asked.

  "Straight from the desalinator."

  "Do I need to pay you?" I asked a little nervously.

  "Yeah," he said and held out his hand. "In advance. In gold ."

  "Shut up, Leo," the woman next to me said, laughing. "I think she believes you." She turned to me. "It's free as long as you're down with receipt of stolen property. You could get a pretty hefty fine for taking that water, you know."

  "But they'd fine you just as much for being down here at all," someone else added.

  I held out my water bottle and Leo filled it.

  "My name's Kat," the woman said. "The water boy is Leo."

  "Shut up," he said.

  "Water boy of the day ."

  "I'm Rebecca," I said, wondering if people would recognize me. If they'd throw me back out. Or over the side. That last would be tricky, though, since we were several stories below the waterline.

  No one reacted to my name. I was just a grubby nobody, apparently, and grubby nobodies were okay.

  "Soup's up," someone said, and they gave me some of the soup, too. I offered my trail mix to the meal, and that got a round of approving nods; I appeared to be following the rules.

  Kat showed me around the encampment. They drew water (a trickle at a time) out of the fresh pipes; they drew electricity from the wires and yes, they were willing to let me charge up my gadget. The thing I thought was most impressive was the latrine; they'd hung a shower curtain to provide privacy, and the latrine went straight to a waste pipe. Kat showed me how it worked: you unlatched the top part to use it, then relatched the top part and pulled on something near the bottom to flush. "Be absolutely sure the lid is latched when you flush," she warned me, "or we will be swimming in shit."

  When the meal was over, everyone settled in for the night, leaving one person awake to empty buckets and watch for cops. "If anyone comes," Kat said, "you'll need to grab your bag and get out as fast as you can. Keep your flashlight off if you possibly can—light will lead them to you."

  Dodge the authorities .

  "What happens if you're caught?"

  "They fine you for trespass and theft."

  That didn't sound too bad, but Kat raised an eyebrow and added, "Could you pay a fine? Because if not, they bond you for it till you pay off the debt."

  "You'll still come out ahead, if you're not caught too often," Leo said from his sleeping spot a few meters away.

  "What if you're a dependent?" I asked. "Theoretically, I mean." It's illegal to sell someone under eighteen into bond—everywhere that has laws, at least.

  "Then your parents get the bill. And the bond, if they can't pay. You're their responsibility. Theoretically ."

  "Okay," I said.

  "Sleep tight," she said.

  My gadget was charged, and as I started to stash it, I wondered if I'd be able to get a signal down here. I could, it turned out. I wrapped up in my blanket and tried to check my mail. I couldn't get into any of my accounts—not even the one I thought my father hadn't known about. It was a good thing I hadn't used that account to
contact my mom.

  On the stead's "trending" page, where you could see all the "hot right now!" links, I saw that the first episode of High Stakes had been released. I pulled it up to watch.

  It was weird to see which scenes they put back-to-back, telling the story. They'd focused a lot on Debbie, and there was a long clip of her telling the story about getting arrested with her sister when they were caught with the T-13.

  From that, they segued into a scene of one of the people from the network staff at a shop—it was on Amsterdarn, I was pretty sure, because it was well lit and I didn't recognize the owner. They bought a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, and ten tablets of T-13. There was a brief interview with the shopkeeper, who looked utterly baffled when they asked him about the legality of T-13.

  Then a scene stateside: this time Janet was interviewing a lawyer who said that for a first offense, if he was representing someone, he thought he could have drug possession charges reduced to the point where the person would be sentenced to five years of probation. "If someone can't afford a good lawyer, though," he added, "if they're working with an overwhelmed public defender's office, they might get three years, or five, or even ten. And I mean prison time, not probation."

  I wondered what a public defender was and moved over to the sidebar to see if they had notes. They did: it was a lawyer who worked for people who couldn't afford lawyers. Weird. I switched back over to the show.

  Now they were showing video of people getting off a plane on Amsterdarn while a voiceover talked about laws on the stead, and how the differences between stead and shore had led to all sorts of fugitives taking up residence on the stead. I thought maybe they'd segue to Thor's father, but no. They switched to a picture of a little girl with pigtails, hanging from a bar, a big grin on her face.

  "My name is Lenore Garrison," a new voice said. "This is my daughter, Becky. I haven't seen her since she was four years old, when her father violated the custody order and took her to New Minerva."

  It was my mother. That's my mother . I looked around wildly, wanting to show someone—wanting to show Thor , actually, but of course he wasn't there. She looked older than my father, because her hair was mostly gray. She was tense. I could see it from the way she held her hands.

  My mother pretended, in the interview, that she hadn't heard from me; she was protecting my secret. She spoke in a composed, calm way, although the camera angle changed a few times and I could tell they'd edited out bits. I wondered if she'd told Janet that she could only interview her if she didn't show her crying.

  "I kept my married name," she said near the end, her lips twisting into a faint smile. "I'm hoping that she'll have an easier time finding me, if she ever comes looking. I'm not sure whether she even knows I'm alive."

  After the interview with my mother, Janet's voice talked about how they ran a database check on all the heavy-hitters of the seastead and found that it wasn't just the bond-workers who were often on the lam. I thought they'd mention Thor's father for sure now, but in fact there were fifteen people on the station who'd committed embezzling and tax evasion, plus another twenty-two who'd done one but not the other, and a bunch more who'd been either convicted or charged with fraud. There were eleven sex offenders, four men who'd been involved in human trafficking (I had to look that one up: apparently they'd been selling people somewhere that bond-workers were illegal), and two who'd jumped bail after being charged with felony assault. One man had been charged with murder. Probably the creepiest people on the list: nine of the doctors practicing medicine on the seastead had lost their stateside medical license due to ethical violations, including someone who'd been experimenting medically on his patients . That got them curious about seastead medicine and they'd done some checking; four more doctors on the seastead might never have actually gone to medical school at all.

  Cut to the lawyer. "The fact is, here in the U.S. we pay a lot in taxes, but part of what we get from that is oversight. We have people who check to see whether the food we eat is safe, whether our water is safe to drink, whether our doctors are licensed to practice medicine. On the seastead, it's caveat emptor for everything. Let the buyer beware. But the fact is, most of us are not in a position, on a day-to-day basis, to check every bite of food and make sure it's not contaminated with pesticide or E. coli ."

  Back to the stead, and Deb was talking again.

  "My sister was poisoned," she said. "I don't know if it was on purpose or by accident, but it destroyed her kidneys. The cost of treatment was so high, the only way to get a loan to cover it was to allow her bond to be sold to a skin farm on Lib. She said no, but there's a loophole. If you're dying, your bond can be sold without your permission to anyone willing to pay for the treatment. And that's how she wound up chained to a bench in a skin farm."

  I knew what was coming next: the recording I'd gotten and passed to Janet, of the skin farm. I didn't need to see that again. I shut my gadget off before I killed the battery, and lay down to try to sleep. The floor was hard, and even wrapped in both my coat and the blanket I was chilly. I rested my head on my backpack. I want my Mom , I thought, and drifted—finally—to sleep.

  WHEN I WOKE UP, the camp was quiet around me, and when I sat up, I realized that everyone was gone.

  The whole camp was gone, in fact. Bedrolls had been packed up and carried away. The curtain around the latrine had been taken down and the waste pipe closed back up. Even the water leak was patched (with what looked like a wad of gum). Next to me, someone had written in chalk, TONIGHT: L-38.

  I wondered how to find L-38. Probably Kat could have explained it to me.

  Someone had filled my water bottle for me before closing up the water pipe. I wondered what time it was and reached for my gadget.

  It was gone.

  I went through my bag, double-checked the spot where it had been plugged in to charge the night before…nothing. My money, which was deep in the bag I'd had under my head all night, was still there, but the gadget had been in my hand when I fell asleep and someone had taken it. Stolen it.

  It probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. These people routinely stole water and trespassed rather than pay rent. Stealing from a person is different, but I doubted swiping my gadget had been some sort of collective decision. Although leaving me sleeping surely had been.

  If I could find my way to L-38 tonight, I could ask for it back. That might work. I sighed heavily and headed for the stairs.

  Upstairs, I went to the sandwich shop, hoping to find Thor. He jumped up when he saw me and pulled me into a hug.

  "That was your mom, wasn't it?" he said.

  "Yeah," I said into his shoulder. "It was."

  "She pretended—"

  "She knew I was keeping it a secret," I said. We sat down. "They sort of mentioned your dad, too."

  "Yeah, guess he's not the only lowlife on board, huh?" Thor had already bought two sandwiches, and passed one over to me, along with a pop. I would have liked to refuse on principle but I was too hungry.

  "Yeah, it gets worse, too. Who do you think the sex offenders are?"

  "Uncle Paul," Thor said. "I don't trust any man who wants me to call him 'uncle' when he's not actually my relative."

  "Huh." I couldn't talk; too busy eating.

  "And I totally bet that jerk doctor who didn't want to treat Tom's ankle properly was one of the ones who had his license yanked."

  I swallowed. "I don't know where Janet looked this stuff up. Can we check?"

  "I bet we could from your dad's computer. But database access like that costs money, and some of these people are probably using false names here—someone would have noticed the license thing, otherwise. Also, digging for this information takes time. Janet has assistants." He looked a little wistful. "Someone else will do it, though. It'll get around."

  "Ha. We could start rumors about people we don't like. My dad, for instance."

  "True. I mean, he's already a kidnapper. Maybe he's also defraude
d people, molested children, and eaten kittens."

  "He'd never eat a kitten. Too much work for too little meat."

  "Wait, are you quoting something he's said ?"

  "He was kidding around at the time." I looked at Thor. "He's not always awful, you know? Back when I was little we got along better."

  "Well, I'm glad he's not always horrible to you."

  "He's not."

  "Good."

  I finished my sandwich and was thinking about buying another one when the shop owner brought over two banana splits.

  "Dammit," I said, between bites. "I have money, you know. I could be buying my own breakfast. Lunch. Whatever this is."

  "I was kind of thinking of this as a date," Thor said, looking at his own banana split and turning bright red. "So I'm paying, okay?"

  A date.

  "Well, okay," I said, taking another bite of banana split.

  When we'd finished eating, Thor said, "Hey, I had a message for you. Not from your mom."

  "Oh?"

  "Or your dad, either. Someone from Stead Life wants to talk to you. They tried reaching you by phone and mail and couldn't get you, so they came to me. They said you could go straight to their office, if that would be easier than calling. They're on the Cruise Ship part of Rosa, level thirty-two, west edge."

  " Stead Life wants to talk to me?" This made me unaccountably nervous. "Do you think it's about my mom?"

  "No, actually, they called yesterday before High Stakes went live."

  "Weird. Well, I'll go see them, I guess. What time is it? Are you late for anything?"

  "I don't care," he said.

  "Don't get yourself in trouble," I said, and squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back.

  "Are you sure you don't want me to walk you to the Stead Life office?" he said.

  "Do you think I actually need protection?"

  "I mostly just think it would be fun to walk with you."

  "How about halfway, then you go to class?"