by John Kessel
Most likely the bugs were the remnants of an enterprise that had failed. Some jackleg entrepreneur had seeded self-replicating monitors throughout the colony, hoping to sell the spy service, or the idea of the spy service, or protection from the spy service. The plan had fallen through, and now unless you could afford to have your residence scrubbed, you dealt with the bugs.
He brushed a crawling camera from his thigh, drank the ounce of water left in the bulb by his bed, ate a leftover soycake, and pulled on his stiff work clothes. They were starting to smell. He had hocked his good suit, and his old spex, and even his mother’s turquoise ring. The money they’d brought was gone. Today he had to find work.
Outside his room Erno ran into Alois Reuther, who lived in the suite next door. The hotel’s claim to be more than a flophouse rested on the existence of the one suite on each floor for residents of more substance than guest workers like Erno. Alois carried himself with the casual assurance of one born to wealth. His clothes were expensive and his shoes were genuine leather. Some people said that he had laundered money for the largest crime family in New Guangzhou.
Noticing Erno, Alois raised his left hand slightly in patrician greeting. The last time Erno had seen him, instead of a hand Alois had sported a glittering metal appendage with six digits and a special manipulator.
“New?” Erno asked.
“The newest,” said Alois. He held his hand out.
Beneath the pure white of his shirt cuff, the flesh of Alois’ new hand was olive with fine hairs on its back. Alois turned it over to show the palm.
“Cloned from your other?” Erno asked.
“No—not flesh,” said Alois. “The finest artifice.”
Alois wanted Erno to shake his hand. Although shaking hands was not a custom in the Society of Cousins, he did so. Alois’s grip felt warm and dry. He held Erno for a lingering moment, and a furrow appeared between his eyes. He let go and placed the hand, palm open, on Erno’s chest. Erno flinched.
Alois held his hand there for a moment. “I’m sorry you are troubled,” he said. “Money?”
“No,” Erno said. “I’m fine.” He felt his heart beat against the slight pressure of Alois’s fingertips.
“You are a person of merit.”
What was Erno to say to that? “I’ll take your word for it.”
Alois let his hand fall away. “A man’s word is his bond.” He fixed his eyes on Erno’s for a second, then turned and touched his palm to his door. The latch clicked and Alois disappeared inside.
A person of merit? Uneasy, Erno headed for the stairs.
Alois was only one of the eccentrics who lived in the hotel. On the other side of Erno lived Coventry’s Brian Zeta-Plus Gonzalez, an uplifted dog who worked as a bonded messenger. One floor down the narrow stairs lived Tessa and Therese, a pair of humans only a meter tall—a genetic mod that had been tried at Einstein, engineered at half size to reduce the load on resources. It never caught on, and Tessa and Therese were left to live in a world of giants.
Erno found Anadem Benet at the desk. “Good morning, Mr. Pamson,” she said. “Your rent is due.”
“Tonight, Ana,” Erno said. “I promise.”
“I promise, when your door is locked, I will not open it.”
“I’ll pay,” Erno said.
“Claro. The Deadly Señor P.”
Anadem had let the rent go for two weeks. She had the idea that Erno had been born into a male harem, genetically engineered to give sexual pleasure. “Cousins are a gender-differentiated social democracy,” he insisted, “not a role-reversed sexual tyranny. The founders were women and men; First Chair Nora Sobieski said—”
“So why were you kicked out?”
“I—I made a mistake. Someone died.”
“Ah,” she said, raising an eyebrow. From then on he had become The Deadly Señor P.
Erno headed up Calle Viernes to the boulevard. The Mayer lava tube had been sealed with foamed basalt when pressurized eighty years earlier. 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, constituted the seedy neighborhood called the Weekend, and Hotel Gijon stood at the far end of the street, one wall built into the face of the lava tube. Across Calle Viernes were another residential hotel, a Scientology temple, and a Remote Integrated Object Printer rental; next to it a loan shark and a gambling arcade, and on the corner the Café Seville.
The boulevard wound its way through the tube between buildings walled with stucco and decorated with red, blue, and yellow tiles, lending the place its Mediterranean look. Far above, heliotropes fed sunlight down to the hexagonal panels of the light canopy. In the evenings, when the residents climbed to the roof of the hotel to drink tea and smoke, you could see down the tube through hazy, high-CO2 air until it twisted away, a ten-kilometer-long city stretched inside a hollow snakeskin that ancient lunar volcanism had discarded several billion years ago.
The first place Erno had gone in his exile from the Society was the scientific station at Tsander, but there was no work there for an eighteen-year-old biotech apprentice without papers. Through the Lunar Labor Market he managed to snag a job with Dendronex Ltd. in Mayer, in the Lunar Carpathians. It was a long and arduous trip to Mayer and the nearside, over three thousand kilometers, but Erno had made it by surface bus and cable train, spending all the money he had to do so.
Little spoken of among the Cousins, Mayer had been founded by Spain in 2058, then taken over by a coalition of free marketers in 2129. Here Erno’s lack of citizenship wasn’t a problem: Immigrants kept labor costs down. He arrived in the middle of the “Mayer Miracle.” People all over the moon were talking about the economic boom fostered by Mayer’s completely unregulated markets and hard currency.
At Dendronex, Erno assisted on a project to develop genome-targeting crRNAs as a bactericidal alternative to antibiotics. It was mindless work, and he wondered how the company turned a profit: Their products were a medically questionable glut on the market. Three months into his job it came out that Dendronex was a speculative front for three AI trading systems that, functioning according to ever-changing algorithms that even their owners could not follow, had inflated the Mayer Stock Exchange into the biggest bubble lunar finance had ever seen. When it burst, the waves inundated a hundred smaller corporations, fortunes evaporated, and Erno was on the street.
In the ensuing depression, Erno no longer had the cash to link his Aide to any employment brokers, so every morning he walked down to the labor pool and sat with dozens of others seeking day work. Those times when he found a posting he earned one ducat a day, which he took in coins, and subsisted on protein chili from the shop at the end of Calle Sabado. In return for ludicrous stories Erno would make up about sex in the Society of Cousins, the owner, Christophe Marble, gave him a discount.
Marble earned more by selling lottery tickets than chili. The front of his shop was a big screen promoting the glamorous lives of recent winners: Balto Santiago, Sophonsiba Bridewell, Jun Yamada. Watch him move into his new luxury condo; go shopping with her and her pop star girlfriend for clothes; see them hiking the Carpathians in gold lamé surface suits. Everyone spoke of the winners with envy. Marble called them “clowns and tramps.”
At least those clowns had money. Money, it seemed, was the basis of all relationships outside of the Society. Erno had a lot of time to think about it. He was what they called “poor.” Mostly, being poor was a matter of earning enough to eat and pay the rent, and then sitting around with nothing to do and not much energy to do it. Erno had spent most of his adolescence feeling ignored, but he had never felt this useless.
In the street outside the labor pool, a woman in shabby clothes peddled hot biscuits from a cart. Another sold jump blood in plastic bags. A man on the Speaker’s Corner ranted about immigrants. Inside, a couple of dozen men and women sat on metal chairs; some ate biscuits they had bought outside, some mumbled to their Aides, o
thers played cards. The muñeco sat in his cube with his feet up on his desk; when people tried to talk with him he would open one eye and crack a bitter joke. His white shirt and detachable collar were pristine, as if he expected to move up soon.
Erno sat with others before the pixwall replaying last night’s hockey game, next to Rudi, an old man who was a regular. “Any work today?”
“Not unless you’re a dog.” Rudi’s cracked voice bore evidence of too many years breathing agglutinate dust. “Who can compete with a dog?”
“Dogs are trustworthy,” Erno said. “But people are smarter.” He glanced up at the screen. “How’d the Gunners do?”
Rudi snorted, which turned into a racking cough. He leaned forward and Erno slapped his back. When the cough at last petered out, Rudi drew a shuddering breath and continued, “I can’t believe they’re getting paid to play that bad.”
They chatted about lunar hockey for a while. Erno was trying to work up the nerve to ask Rudi if he’d lend him some cash when the voice of the muñeco broke in. “I need six certified RIOP handlers for Agro Construction.”
Erno had spent thirty ducats getting certified on remote devices in the first month after the Dendronex collapse. The people in the waiting room sat up straight; the card games stopped. Erno closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing.
“Sharistanian, Minh, Renker, Fernandez, Altamirano, Tajik,” the muñeco said. “Have your prods ready.”
The workers he’d named bounced out of their chairs, 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 the grumbling unemployed in their wake. One of the card players threw in her hand, the cards sliding across the table and tumbling slowly to the floor. “Enough,” she said.
This late in the day there was little chance of any more work coming in.
“He hasn’t called my name in a month,” Erno grumbled.
“You need to grease him more,” Rudi said.
“Grease him?”
A look of astonished amusement creased Rudi’s face. “You haven’t slipped him anything? Seriously?”
Erno stared at the floor tiles. Rudi’s dry chuckle rasped.
“Look,” Erno said, “can you lend me some cash? I wouldn’t ask but I’m in a bind right now.”
Rudi shook his head slowly. “Ah, boy, boy . . .” Some sympathy showed in his rheumy eyes. “It’s a hard world for fools and old men.”
Erno left Rudi sitting there. He 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 freezers.
He wandered through the commercial district for a while, looking through the windows of the glistening shops and restaurants. He considered taking the risk of asking some passerby for a handout, but he could not work up the nerve. Plus, if he got arrested for begging he’d go straight to the freezers.
Instead he surveyed the quotations inlaid into the pavement. He stood for a while on “In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.” He contemplated, “Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.” He was loitering outside a casino on “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves,” when he drew the attention of one of the uplifted chimeras acting as a security guard. The chimera’s ears were pointed and his pale face smooth as a baby’s, ancient brown eyes impassive as polished stones. His uniform sported lighted green epaulets and a matching fluorescent belt. Attached to the belt was a stun baton. Chimeras were notorious for the dispassionate way they had with a stun baton. Erno left.
Back at the Weekend he slid into a seat on the patio of the Café Seville. The smell of empanadas made his stomach growl.
He counted his change. He had exactly seventy-two centimes. He poked the coins around the palm of his hand. His finger glided over the raised profiles of Smith on the two quarters, Hayek on the two dimes, Rand on the two pennies. What point in saving money now? He ordered a wine and watched the traffic on the boulevard: pedestrians, carts, messenger dogs. He tried to think of someone he could borrow enough from to get to the end of the week.
Three people at the next table were arguing. “On Earth they know how to run a society,” said the man with orange hair.
“We’re going to Earth, now?” the bigger man said.
“Why not, Luis?” said the orange-haired one. “They make big money on Earth.”
“You couldn’t take ten minutes on Earth,” said the woman.
“Genmod,” orange hair said. “Denser bones, better oxygenation.”
“I would not mind visiting Earth someday,” Luis said.
Erno doubted the three had the money to buy new slippers, let alone gene therapy. As he listened to their aimless blather, Alois Reuther strolled by the café. He wore his camel jacket, purple ascot, and a panama hat. A cigarette dangled languorously from his new left hand.
Erno’s heart leapt at the sight of him. He should have admitted to Alois that morning that he was broke. Well, pride was foolish and it wasn’t too late.
He was about to call out to him when the three who had been talking stood up and stepped into the street. “Alois, old friend,” said the big one, Luis. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“You need to come with us,” said the woman
Alois attempted to slip past them. “No, I don’t.”
“Au contraire,” said the orange-haired man, putting his arm around Alois’s shoulders and guiding him toward the alley beside the restaurant. “Mr. Blanc worries about you.”
“Your finances,” said Luis. “And your health.”
“For instance, this hand,” said the woman, seizing Alois’s wrist. She plucked the cigarette from between Alois’s fingers, flipped it away. It bounced and rolled under the table where Erno sat. “Has it been properly attached?”
They disappeared around the side of the building. In a minute came sounds of a beating. Nobody in the café even flinched. Erno got up and peered into the alley. They crouched over Alois in the shadows.
“Hey!” Erno shouted. “Stop!”
They ignored him. “Where is it?” one of them asked another, who was kicking around the trash.
“It flew over here. Why did you have to rip it off?”
“Just find it.”
A cloud of security midges accumulated over their heads. Their tiny loudspeakers spoke in unison, making an odd chorus: “In all disputes, entrepreneurs must relate to one another with complete transparency. Remain here until a settlement agent arrives.”
Luis reached into his blouse pocket and tugged out a card. He held it up to the midges’ cameras. “I have accumulated a Social Deviance Credit,” he announced.
“And your colleagues?”
The woman flashed her own card. But the orange-haired man did nothing. Luis confronted him. “What? Don’t tell me you’re out of SDC.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
“Fuck!” said the woman.
“Fuck,” said Luis. “I don’t know why I married you. Let’s go.” They hurried past Erno into the street.
“Why are you—” Erno started.
“Shut up,” the woman said as she jogged past.
A contingent of the midges flew after them, while the main body hovered over the alley chanting, “A clash of rights has taken place! A clash of rights has taken place!”
Erno knelt over Alois. His shirt was ripped open, his leg was bent funny, and his hand had been torn off. His wrist was not bleeding, but a trickle of blood ran from his scalp. Erno ran back to the café and asked the counter man for a wet towel. He returned and held it to Alois’s head. In a few minutes a bored settlement agent drove up and loaded the unconscious Alois onto his cart.
“Is he going to be all right?” Erno asked.
The agent tapped a stylus against his wristpad. “Was he all right before this?”
“Where will you take him?”
The agent ran
his reader over Alois’s good arm. “He’s insured. I’ll take him to Beneficent Dividends HMO.”
“What about the men who beat him?”
The agent calmly surveyed Alois’s semiconscious body. “On the violence scale, this probably isn’t outside of one standard deviation. You want to make a statement?”
He didn’t need to appear in the colony’s legal system right now. “Uh—no.”
“Good day, then.” The agent climbed onto the cart and drove away, Alois’s handless arm dangling off the side.
Erno took the bloody towel back to the counter man.
“They beat him up,” Erno said.
The man looked harried, but took the time to say, “You don’t have anyone who’d like to beat you up?”
Not yet, Erno thought. But soon.
Erno went back to his table. His glass of wine was undisturbed. He sat there and nursed it for a long time, until the waiter came by and told him he needed to order something else or leave. He stepped into the street. He walked a few paces away from the café, then stopped. Back at the hotel Anadem waited for her rent. He had nowhere to go.
The weight of the day, and of the past year, came down on Erno so heavily that he simply sat down on the curb.
Twilight came; the colony’s sunlight panels were fading. Music blared from the back of the restaurant—staccato drums and pipes, a song he remembered from home, Klarasdaughter’s “Sunlight or Rock.” The café was crowded, talk was loud. Above the buzz of conversations came Klarasdaughter’s sweet, mocking voice:
But it seems you were mistaken
And the truth came as a shock
To learn which one was stronger
Sunlight or rock.
Erno studied the pavement between his feet. Mixed from lunar regolith, the concrete was so old that it had been poured by people instead of machines. Those swirls, laden with dirt, had been brushed into its surface by some long dead hand. How many people as broke as Erno had sat here and stared at it? How many had fought with each other here, talked idiot love, concocted and abandoned plans? He needed a plan. Anadem would not have him beaten, he reckoned. He’d just be arrested and shoved into the freezers until some company thawed him out as an indentured worker.