Dean Ing

by Down

  Zen moved to watch over the tall man's bare arms. Two crews could be seen from a utility tug monitor, rushing to repair window leaks where water vapor had crystallized in space as glittering fog. The colony's external heat radiator was in massive fragments, and the mirrors were jammed in place. It was going to get hot in Ellfive Prime. "How soon will we get help from other colonies?’ Almquist hesitated. Then, "We won't, unless we fail to cope. OrbGen is afraid some other corporate pirate will claim salvage rights. And when you’re on my staff, everything I tell you is privileged data.”

  "You think the danger is over?"

  "Over?" Almquist barked a laugh that threatened to climb out of control. He ticked items off on his fingers. "We're losing water vapor: we have to mask mirrors and repair the radiator, or we fry: half our crops are ruined and food stores may not last; and most residents are hopeless clods who have no idea how to fend for themselves.

  Now d'you see why I diverted searches when I could’ve taken you twice before?"

  Zen’s mouth was a cynical curve.

  Almquist: "Once when you dragged a kid from the lake filters I could've had you at the emergency room." Zen's eyebrows lifted in surprised agreement. "And once when a waiter realized you were scamming food from the Hilton service elevator."

  "That was somebody else, you weren’t even close. But okay, you’ve been a real sweetheart. Why?"

  "Because you've learned to live outside the system! Food, shelter, medical help, God knows what else you have another system that hardly affects mine, and now we’re going to teach your tricks to the survivors. This colony is going to make it. You were my experimental group, Zen. You just didn't know it.'’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. "By the way, how many guys are on the scam? Couple of dozen?” An optimist. Torin Almquist picked what he considered a high figure.

  A chuckle. "Couple of hundred, you mean." Zen saw slack-jawed disbelief and went on: "They're not all guys. A few growing families. There’s Wandering Mary, Maria Polyakova: our only registered nurse, but I found her dugout full of mud this morning. I hope she was sleepin’ out.”

  "Can you enlist their help? If they don't help, this colony can still die. The computer says it will, as things stand now. It’ll be close, but we won't make it. How'd you like to take your chances with a salvage crew?"

  "Not a chance. But I can't help just standing here swappin' wind with you.”

  "Right." Eyes bored into Zen’s, assessing him. The thieves' argot, the be-damned-to-you gaze, suggested a man who was more than Hazen had been. "I'll give you a temporary pass. See you here tomorrow morning; for now, look the whole colony over, and bring a list of problems and solutions as you see ’em."

  Zen turned to leave, then looked back. "You're really gonna let me just walk right out." A statement of wonder, and of fact.

  "Not without this," Almquist said, scribbling on a plastic chit. He thrust it toward Zen. "Show it to Frazer.”

  Inspecting the cursive scrawl: "Doesn't look like much."

  "Mas que nada," Almquist smiled, then looked quickly away as his face fell. Better than nothing-, his private joke with Emory Reina. He glanced at the retreating Zen and rubbed his forehead. Grief did funny things to people's heads. To deny a death you won't accept, you invest his character in another man. Not very smart when the other man might betray you for the sheer fun of it. Torin Almquist massaged his temples and called Lee Shumway. They still had casualties to rescue.

  Zen fought a sense of unreality as he moved openly in broad daylight. Everyone was lost in his own concerns, Zen hauled one scam from his plastic bubble under the lake surface, half dead in stagnant air after mud from the creek swamped his air exchanger. An entire family of scams, living as servants in the illegal basement they had excavated for a resident, had been crushed when the foundation collapsed

  But he nearly wept to find Wandering Mary safe in a secret conduit, tending to a dozen wounded scams. He took notes as she told him where her curative herbs were planted and how to use them. The old girl flatly refused to leave her charges, her black eyes flashing through wisps of gray hair, and Zen promised to send food.

  The luck of Sammy the Touch was holding strong. The crop compost heap that covered his half-acre foam shell seemed to insulate it from ground shock as well. Sammy patted his little round tummy, always a cheerful sign, as he ushered Zen into the bar where, on a good night, thirty scams might be gathered. If Zen was the widest-ranging scam on Ellfive Prime, Sammy the Touch was the most secure.

  Zen accepted a glass of potato vodka—Sammy was seldom that easy a touch - and allowed a parody of the truth to be drawn from him. He'd offered his services to an assistant engineer, he said, in exchange for unspecified future privileges. Sammy either bought the story or took a lease on it. He responded after some haggling with the promise of a hundred kilos of "medicinal" alcohol and half his supply of bottled methane. Both were produced from compost precisely under the noses of the crop crew, and both were supplied on credit. Sammy also agreed to provision the hidden infirmary of Wandering Mary. Zen hugged the embarrassed Sammy and exited through one of the conduits, promising to pick up the supplies later.

  Everywhere he went, Zen realized, the scams were coping better than legal residents. He helped a startlingly handsome middle-aged blonde douse the remains of her smoldering wardrobe. Her apartment complex had knelt into its courtyard and caught fire.

  "I’m going to freeze tonight." Suzy Nagel murmured philosophically.

  He eyed her skimpy costume and doubted it. Besides, the temperature was slowly climbing, and there wouldn’t be any night until the solar mirrors could be pivoted again. There were other ways to move the colony to a less reflective position, but he knew Almquist would try the direct solutions first.

  Farmer Brown—no one knew his original name—wore his usual stolen agronomy-crew coverall as he hawked his pack load of vegetables among residents in the low-rent area. He had not assessed all the damage to his own crops, tucked and espaliered into corners over five square kilometers of the colony. Worried as he was, he had time to hear a convincing story. "Maybe I’m crazy to compete against myself," he told Zen, "but you got a point. If a salvage outfit takes over, it s kaymag.' KMAG; Kiss my ass good-bye. "I'll sell you seeds, even breeding pairs of hamsters, but don't ask me to face the honchos in person. You remember about the vigilantes, ol' scam."

  Zen nodded. He gave no thought to the time until a long shadow striped a third of the colony floor. One of the mirrors had been coaxed into pivoting. Christ, he was tired—but why not? It would have been dark long before, on an ordinary day. He sought his sleeping quarters in Jean Neruda's apartment, hoping Neruda wouldn’t insist on using Zen's eyesight to fill out receipts. Their arrangement was a comfortable quid pro quo, but please, thought Zen, not tonight!

  He found a more immediate problem than receipts. Yves Versky slumped, trembling, in the shambles of Neruda's place, holding a standard emergency oxygen mask over the old man's face. The adjoining office had lost one wall in the spinquake, moments after the recycling crew ran for end-cap domes.

  "I had to hole up here," Versky gasped, exhausted. "Didn't know where else to go. Neruda wouldn't leave either. Then the old fool smelled smoke and dumped his goldfish bowl on a live power line. Must’ve blown half the circuits in his body." Like a spring-wound toy, Versky’s movements and voice diminished. "Took me two hours of mouth-to-mouth before he was breathing steady, Zen. Boy. have I got a headache."

  Versky fell asleep holding the mask in place. Zen could infer the rest. Neruda, unwilling to leave familiar rooms in his advancing blindness. Versky, unwilling to abandon a life, even that of a half-electrocuted, crotchety old man. Yet Neruda was right to stay put: Earthside awaited the OrbGen employee whose eyes failed.

  Zen lowered the inert Versky to the floor, patted the big man’s shoulder. More than unremitting care, he had shown stamina and first-aid expertise. Old Neruda awoke once, half-manic, half-just disoriented. Zen nursed him through it with surfa
ce awareness. On another level he was cataloguing items for Almquist, for survivors, for Ellfive Prime.

  And on the critical level a voice in him jeered, bullshit: For yourself. Not because Almquist or Reina had done him any favors, but because Torin Almquist was right. The colony manager could find him eventually; maybe it was better to rejoin the system now, on good terms. Besides, as the only man who could move between the official system and the scam counterculture, he could really wheel and deal. It might cause some hard feelings in the conduits, but... Zen sighed, and slept. Poorly.

  It was two days before Zen made every contact he needed, two more when Almquist announced that Ellfive Prime would probably make it. The ambient temperature had stabilized. Air and water losses had ceased. They did not have enough stored food to provide three thousand daily calories per person beyond twenty days, but crash courses in multicropping were suddenly popular, and some immature crops could be eaten.

  "It'd help if you could coax a few scams into instructing." Almquist urged as he slowed to match Zen's choppy pace. They turned from the damaged crop terraces toward the Center.

  "Unnn-likely,” Zen intoned. "We still talk about wartime, when vigilantes tried to clean us out. They ushered a couple of nice people out of airlocks, naked, which we think was a little brusque. Leave it alone; it's working.’’

  A nod. "Seems to be. But I have doubts about the maturing rates of your seeds. Why didn't my people know about those hybrid daikon radishes and tomatoes?"

  "You were after long-term yield," Zen shrugged. "This hot weather will ripen the stuff faster, too. We've been hiding a dozen short-term crops under your nose, including dandelions better than spinach. Like hamster haunch is better'n rabbit, and a lot quicker to grow.”

  Almquist could believe the eighteen-day gestation period, but was astonished at the size of the breeding stock. "You realize your one-kilo hamsters could be more pet than protein?"

  "Not in our economy," Zen snorted. "It's hard to be sentimental when you're down and out. Or stylish either." He indicated his frayed coverall. "By the time the rag man gets this, it won’t yield three meters of dental floss."

  Almquist grinned for the first time in many days. What his new assistant had forgotten in polite speech, he made up in the optimism of a young punk. He corrected himself: an old punk. "You know what hurts? You’re nearly my age and look ten years younger. How?"

  It wasn't a specific exercise, Zen explained. It was attitude. "You're careworn,” he sniffed. "Beat your brains out for idling plutocrats fifty weeks a year and then wonder why you age faster than I do." Wondering headshake.

  They turned toward the Center courtyard. Amused, Almquist said. "You’re a plutocrat?"

  ’Ain’t racin’ my motors. Look at all the Indians who used to live past a hundred. A Blackfoot busted his ass like I do, maybe ten or twenty weeks a year. They weren't dumb; just scruffy."

  Almquist forgot his retort; his desk console was flashing for attention. Zen wandered out of the office, returning with two cups of scam "coffee." Almquist sipped it between calls, wondering if it was really brewed from ground dandelion root, considering how this impudent troll was changing his life, could change it further.

  Finally he sat back. "You heard OrbGen's assessment," he sighed. "I’m a Goddamned hero, for now. Don't ask me about next year. If they insist on making poor Emory a sacrificial goat to feed ravening stockholders, I can't help it.”

  Impassive: "Sure you could. You just let ’em co-opt you." Zen sighed, then released a sad troglodyte's smile. "Like you coopted me."

  "I can unco-opt. Nothing's permanent."

  "You said it, bubba."

  Almquist took a long breath, then cantilevered a forefinger in warning. Watch your tongue, Hazen. When I pay your salary, you pay some respect. He saw the sullen look in Zen's eyes and bored in. Or would you rather go on the scam again and get Earthsided the first chance I get? I haven't begun to co-opt you yet, he glowered. "I have to meet with the Colony Council in five minutes—to explain a lot of things, including you. When I get back. I want a map of those conduits the scams built, to the best of your knowledge '

  A flood of ice washed through Zens veins. Staring over the cup of coffee that shook in his hands: "You know I can': do that."

  Almquist paused in the doorway, his expression smug. "You know the alternative Think about it,” he said, and turned and walked out.

  When Torin Almquist returned, his wastebasket was overturned on his desk. A ripe odor wrinkled his nose for him even before he saw what lay atop the wastebasket like an offering on a pedestal: a lavish gift of human excrement. His letter opener, an antique, protruded from the turd. It skewered a plastic chit, Zen's pass. On the chit, in draftsman's neat printing, full caps: I THOUGHT ABOUT IT.

  Well, you sure couldn't mistake his answer. Almquist reflected as he dumped the offal into his toilet. Trust Zen to make the right decision.

  Which way had he gone? Almquist could only guess at the underground warrens built during the past fifty years, but chose not to guess. He also knew better than to mention Zen to the Colony Council. The manager felt a twinge of guilt at the choice, truly no choice at all. that he had forced on Zen—but there was no other way.

  If Zen knew the whole truth, he might get careless, and a low profile was vial for the scams. The setup benefited all of Ellfive Prime. Who could say when the colony might once more need the counterculture and its primitive ways?

  And that meant Zen had to disappear again, genuinely down and out of reach. If Almquist himself didn't know exactly where the scams hid. he couldn't tell OrbGen even under drugs. And he didn't intend to tell. Sooner or later OrbGen would schedule Torin Almquist for permanent Earthside rotation, and when that day came he might need help in his own disappearance. That would be the time to ferret out a secret conduit, to contact Zen. The scams could use an engineering manager who knew the official system inside out.

  Almquist grinned to himself and brewed a cup of dandelion coffee. Best to get used to the stuff now, he reasoned: it would be a staple after he retired, down and out on Ellfive Prime.