by Nancy Kress
Borovsky slammed the palms of his hands down hard on the tabletop. Across the table, Andre Wolf Lair set his stein aside and stood. At once, without hurrying, Weinblatt was on his feet, his face hard.
“Coyne, shut your goddamned mouth.”
Coyne bent over as though kicked in the stomach, his stein groping for the nearest table. His face paled. Laura saw that he had realized what he had done: provoked a shift boss to his feet.
Except for the continuous drone of the juke, the Beer Tube was silent. Simon Weinblatt was still standing. “Go home, Johnny,” he said, and took his seat.
Coyne nodded, turned, and began pulling on his rubber suit.
Laura saw little of Coyne next shift. Wherever she and Borovsky happened to be, the yellow ELM happened to be elsewhere. Nor did Coyne appear at the Beer Tube after shift. But Simon Weinblatt was there, and he pointed to the bench opposite his as Borovsky walked in. Laura, left again with the other suits, edged close enough to listen.
“Mik, I’m worried about Coyne,” Weinblatt’s face was smiling, unreadable. “One of these days he’s going to jump you, and you’re going to beat his brains out.”
“Would serve him right,” Borovsky said, eyes on the bench. “The guy is some kind of psycho.”
“Could be; how did this thing between you two start?”
“I didn’t start it.”
“I didn’t say you did,” Weinblatt said pleasantly. “Do you know why he has it in for you?”
“No. One day he just starts in.”
Weinblatt waited; Borovsky, scowling, said nothing more.
Finally Weinblatt said, “Some guys are up only when they’re making noise. They need it, like air. But Coyne is also mighty damned good with an ELM. His replacement index is forty points tougher than yours.” The shift boss sipped from his mug. “If one of you had to go, it wouldn’t be him.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Money isn’t fair. Bear down, make some Q-points, and we’ll see. Right now you have to bend a little. I’ve been doing some watching and asking around. You pretty much stick to yourself, and that’s cool. But up here it never hurts to melt a little. You’ve got no wife to talk about, no kids to brag about. Nobody ever hears of you going off to see a woman somewhere. You make it easy for an asshole like Coyne to single you out. Humans are pack animals. If you don’t show that you’re in, the others will assume that you’re out.” Weinblatt gave Borovsky a level stare for a few moments and then shrugged. “You can tell me that’s not fair either.”
“So what do I do?”
“Starters,” Weinblatt said, and shoved a silver, octagonal token across the scarred plastic tabletop. Laura’s eyes followed the token across the bench. Embossed on the exposed face was a stylized spiral galaxy and the words Berenice’s cluster.
“Silver lay, Mik. Anything you want. This one is on me. It’s my treat.”
After an incredulous moment, Laura snapped her attention from Weinblatt’s token to Borovsky’s face. Her man—her man—looked as impassive as ever. But Laura, who knew the meaning of every twitch in that unlovely face, saw in Borovsky’s eyes a complex reaction: resentment and distaste and—yes—interest. The room lurched slightly, and Laura thought something had gone sour in her F level, but then realized she was discovering something new in the bright, intermost level she knew as her soul. If Borovsky—
“No thanks,” Borovsky was saying. He lowered his eyes to stare at the silver token. “Whorehouses give me the creeps.”
“Be honest, Mik. Are you queer?”
“No!”
Several of the other men nearby looked toward Borovsky; seeing Weinblatt’s warning glare, they quickly looked away. “I can’t afford it,” Borovsky said, and in his voice Laura heard the same thing she had seen in his eyes: He resented being told what to do; he was determined to resist; he felt scorn for the human pressure to fit in, but he was interested.
“Maybe not a silver,” Weinblatt said, “but a purple quickie once a week won’t break you. I know.”
Borovsky nodded. The Combine always knew, to the penny, every employee’s assets, debts, and expenses. Borovsky’s excuse had been a poor one. Was he trying to save face in offering resistance so easily wrestled down? Laura longed to have Borovsky look at her, but his gaze remained on the silver token. It was Weinblatt, in profile to Laura, who seemed for a moment to flick a sidelong glance at the suits against the wall. Desolation swept through her F layer. If Borovsky—Borovsky, her man—
“I’ve never been there before,” Borovsky said.
Weinblatt stood. “I’ll take you. I could use a good time myself about now.”
And Borovsky was standing up. Borovsky was reaching for her. Borovsky, still not meeting her many sets of eyes, was wriggling into her ventral cavity, into her boots. He said nothing. And Laura, sure now that the universe was steady and the lurching continued only in her soul, could say nothing either.
“Let’s go,” Weinblatt said.
Both ports were cast wide at Berenice’s Cluster, up on E Minus Four. Loud, raucous music echoed out through the lock. Borovsky hesitated a moment.
“Come on, Mik. Relax.”
Laura felt Borovsky suck in his breath, and they entered. Inside it was very crowded, a random tessellation of polygonal waterbeds illuminated from beneath by changing, multicolored lights. On each bed lay a woman, some naked, many draped in shimmering cloth. More than a dozen men stood among the beds, reading the fee schedules and counting dollars in their heads and on their fingers. Down among their feet surged a heavy, bluish smoke, stirred into sluggish vortices as the men stepped along the narrow ways between the waterbeds.
Weinblatt doffed his rubber suit quickly, Borovsky much more slowly. A blonde on a nearby bed smiled at him, then drew aside the drapery suspended from cords braided around her neck. She had large breasts to which the heavy swing of E Minus Four had not been kind. Cupping a hand under one breast, she lifted it toward Borovsky and smiled again.
“How long since you’re had a real woman?” Weinblatt asked. Borovsky muttered something that Laura did not think Weinblatt could catch above the jukebox, but she did: four years.
“I’m real,” Laura said, her voice low. “I’m real and I’m—look at them! Like puddles of melting cranberry sauce! Either of us could outlift, outhaul, outproduce them all put together. How can you? Borovsky—”
“It’s not my idea,” Borovsky said sullenly, finally stepping free of her. Laura realized that it would not matter how much she looked at him, what she said, or how she behaved. She could not change Borovsky’s mind.
Confused and hurting, she stepped back against the wall. Borovsky moved quickly away from her, heading toward the far end of the room, ignoring the blonde who followed him with charcoaled eyes. In moments he was lost in the swirling mist. Eagerness to see more melting cranberry women—or to get away from her? Laura was not sure, though she suspected the latter, and took from that some small wrapping of comfort.
“He talking to you?” the blonde demanded. She stared at the emptiness above Laura’s helmet gasket, at the head that Laura had never had nor wanted.
“Yes.”
“Huh!” She sounded neither surprised nor scornful, only annoyed. “He don’t like blondes?”
“I don’t know what he likes.”
The woman looked at Laura shrewdly. “I’ll bet you do so, Honey.” Suddenly she laughed, such an unselfconscious, friendly laugh that Laura found herself drawn away from the wall to stand beside the woman’s pentagonal waterbed. The lights beneath it shifted from green to red, warming the woman’s skin so that to Laura it looked like uncooled metal.
“Why do you do this?” Laura asked softly.
“Do what?”
“Make . . . love to these men. You aren’t their work partners. You have no interest in their lives. They haven’t bought you a soul. You don’t love them.”
The blonde gave her a long, speculative look. Something surfaced in her eyes, somethi
ng Laura had the quickness to see but not the knowledge of humanity to interpret. Then the human woman laughed again. “It’s a living.”
A living. Laura hadn’t seen it that way before. People had to live. Steel walkers needed sex; Laura knew they talked of it enough, and few had fine Rabinowicz suits like Laura. There was a good, respectable economic foundation to Berenice’s Cluster. But Borovsky—Borovsky did have her.
“Jealous, Honey?” the blonde said softly. She did not mock. Her eyes, lids painted blue as far as her brows, seemed sympathetic and a little sad. Staring into those eyes, Laura felt the odd sensation of unrelated data suddenly relating: The woman’s eyes reminded her of Borovsky’s balalaika music.
“Don’t cry about it,” the blonde said. “That’s how a steel walker is. Tin woman, skin woman—he don’t care. We do what we can.”
“No,” Laura said. “No!”
“Sorry.” Again the blonde gave Laura that knowing, sad, blue-lidded look. From the airlock a man walked into the room and stripped off his rubber suit. After glancing around the misty room, he smiled at the blonde. She raised her huge breast to him and looked up through her lashes. The man sauntered over to the bed.
“Silver lay, stud?”
“Purple quickie. You available?” The man grinned mischievously at her.
“Why not?”
Laura stepped back against the wall. Around the blonde’s bed the blue mist grew thicker, rising in hazy walls shot through with multicolored lights from the bed. The man in his eagerness had left his rubber suit at Laura’s feet. She kicked at it, then abruptly picked it up and hung it on a nearby peg. Its empty arms dangled helplessly. Without a man inside it, it was useless. Rubber suits. Balalaika music. Blue-lidded eyes. Borovsky. Simon Weinblatt. Coyne. Silver lays. Souls—souls.
That was what she had seen in the blonde’s sympathetic look.
Startled, Laura stared at the bed. The mist around the bed grew thicker and darker blue. The bed began to move away from Laura on its cushion of air. Another bed, this one with two women and one man just leaving it, slid toward Laura. One of the women put one foot on the floor and squealed. The man laughed and slapped her bare ass. Music blared and mist swirled. Nothing in the scene looked to Laura anything like Wolf Lair’s outstretched arms on the steel beam, but Laura knew she was not mistaken. In the blonde’s balalaika eyes Laura had seen another soul. And she had recognized it only because she had her own.
Laura settled back against the wall in resignation and waited for the sliding beds to bring Borovsky back to her.
The spare yoyo was dead.
Borovsky snapped the battery cover free and peered into the space crowded with wires and age-crusted components. Nothing looked amiss.
“Take a look,” he told Laura, and poked their right hand into the cavity.
Laura’s fingers nudged the wires aside as the eyes that rode over each finger examined the mechanism.
Her fingers saw it and teased it out into view from where it had been tucked behind a voltage regulator: a carefully snipped wire.
Hesitantly she described the wire. Borovsky stopped for many long seconds, one hand on the battery pack and one hand holding a screwdriver.
“He came in here. I noticed him before we got tied up with the trouble setting up the last beam. He didn’t come out.”
Borovsky and Laura checked between the piles of steel for a place where a man might hide.
“We could have missed him coming out,” Laura suggested.
“I don’t miss nothing from him no more,” Borovsky replied coldly. “He’s in here.”
Laura said nothing. Borovsky’s bionics alarmed her. Pulse, blood pressure, muscle tension, skin resistance—this was not normal anger. He was in a cold rage.
In one corner of the dump was a circular column three meters wide, rising up from the floor and vanishing into the ceiling. It was the conduit core that carried power down from the center of the titan cylinder to the construction on the Low Steel. At knee level was the inspection hatch.
“Get that hatch on your infrared,” Bovorsky ordered.
The wide oval eye on Laura’s brow saw the vague smudge on the hatch’s handle. The vacuum of E Minus Seven preserved heat traces as well.
“There were hands on that handle recently,” she said, wishing it were not so.
Borovsky grunted and grasped the handle. It would not turn.
“Locked,” Laura said.
“For me, maybe. Not for you. Turn.”
Laura’s fingers tightened on the handle and twisted hard. She felt the metal of the latch resist and moan, then break free. The hatch swing inward.
Wriggling through the hatch took some minutes. It had not been designed for passing a man in an amplified Rabinowicz space suit. Laura supposed that had been Coyne’s hope . . . and ached that it could have been true.
Inside the column were pipes and bus channels vanishing upward in the darkness. Running among the pipes was an aluminum ladder. Laura turned off her suit lights and saw the warm spots where sweating, rubber-suited hands had gripped the rungs.
The olfionics within her helmet smelled Borovsky’s rage. “Up.”
They climbed in darkness quickly, twice as fast as a nonamplified man could climb. Borovsky said nothing, and Laura dared not plead for him to give up the chase. It would do no good and would only feed the rage she so feared.
“It’s a mess in here,” she said truthfully, trying to read the swirl of multicolored images her infrared eye gave her.
By that level the column was pressurized, and warm air confused the heat traces Coyne had left behind. She saw that the dust on the hatch handle had not been disturbed for some time. She did not volunteer the information.
Borovsky steered Laura’s helmet crest beam along the ladder above. “Still too heavy. This is E Minus Four. He lives on E Minus Two. He’s still climbing.”
Without responding, Laura grasped the rungs and climbed.
Two airlocks higher E Minus Three began. Above them locks had been removed to make the column an air-return manifold. The black mouths of air tunnels yawned on four sides, and a constant draft through the tunnels had erased any possible heat traces the man might have left behind. Borovsky scanned the four tunnels.
“He can’t be far. Damn, I’ve got him. I know I do. Damn.”
They stood in silence for tens of seconds. Laura gradually learned to separate the gentle white noise of the air tunnels from the general subsonic rumble created everywhere by life in a steel habitat. With panic and despair, she realized she could hear high above them the sound of a man’s labored breathing.
A man Borovsky wanted to kill.
She could tell him where Coyne was, or not tell him—a sickening choice. She had never failed to tell Borovsky, her man, her life, anything she knew he wanted to hear. If he commanded her, she would tell him—to refuse was to face consequences too final to consider. But if he found Coyne—if he killed Coyne—what would the Combine do to Borovsky then?
The words formed a hundred times, and each time she wiped them away before sending them to her helmet speakers. She strained to believe that hiding the truth was not a lie and knew that to believe so would be lying to herself.
“He lives east of here,” Borovsky said. “He’ll follow the tube. Let’s go.”
“No,” Laura said, forcing the words to form. “I hear him. He’s up on the ladder somewhere.”
Borovsky spat something foul in his native language. He gripped the ladder with both hands and sent Laura’s crest beam stabbing upward. Coyne was there, wrapped around the rungs, panting. Laura could smell his sour sweat drifting down on the stale air.
Coyne stiffened, made motions to start climbing again.
“Stop!” Borovsky screamed. Laura’s arms pulled with his arms, and the aluminum of the ladder tore raggedly away from its lower wall brackets.
“Eat shit!” Coyne cried and dropped free of the ladder.
His boots struck the top of Laura’s helmet
, crushing many of her most delicate instruments, including the pale-blue glass oval that imaged in the infrared. His knees flexed, and he leaped to one side.
The still vicious swing of E Minus Three drew him down, but he had time to plan his movements. He drew up in a ball and rolled, screaming in pain as one shoulder slammed into the steel. But then he was up, stumbling, then running crookedly down one of the air tunnels, favoring his left leg and sobbing in pain.
Borovsky swore to himself in Russian. Laura longed not to run, but Borovsky’s legs were running; so her legs ran. His arms swung in a deadly determined rhythm; so hers swung, too.
Coyne was a pathetic scarecrow, highlighted in every detail by the cold lights of Laura’s helmet beam. His rubber suit was smudged and tom, helmet long abandoned to lighten himself. He had only a few seconds’ head start and appeared close to exhaustion. As much as Laura hated Coyne, she felt a moment of pity for him.
Coyne chose that moment to look over his shoulder, side-stumbling for two steps. He moaned and turned away but it had been enough. Laura had seen his face, smeared with the grime of the tunnels mixed with tears of exertion, and abruptly saw herself through his eyes.
Shaped like a man cut out of steel and crushed in a magnetic press; torso nearly as wide as it was tall; arms and legs clusters of hydraulic cylinders contracting and extending in smooth, polished motions. Faceless, silvered helmet without any neck, ruined instruments atop it dangling by tiny wires and striking the helmet’s sides with little sounds. Hands twice human size, guided by flesh but powered by a hydraulic exoskeleton strong enough to crush rocks. Hands reaching forward, fingers splayed and grasping, grasping. A machine bent on death.
But she was not! She was life, productivity, strength, steel! She was, in her soul—
No time. Coyne screamed again, stumbled, fell to his knees, rolled over, and stared in wide-eyed horror as Laura bore down on him.
Her right hand caught him by the neck and lifted him like a rag doll. He gurgled, eyes bulging, as Borovsky slammed him against the steel wall.