Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  In a dark corridor between the Sixth Ring bodegas, a skeletal arm reaches out and grabs him. Natch turns and stares at the ghoulish presence slouching against the wall. She's tall as a pillar, her skin black as void, her fingers cold as unforgiven sin. "A fuck for Chill Polly," she mumbles.

  "What did you say?"

  "Fuck. For. Chill. Polly."

  The entrepreneur blanches. It's an unthinkable proposition. Why would anyone pay for pleasures of the flesh when it's cheaper, safer, and easier to find them virtually? If you look on the Sigh, any degradation imaginable, no matter how obscure or grotesque, has already been imagined, organized, advertised, and transformed into an excuse for a semiannual convention. It only costs a handful of credits, and it's indistinguishable from the real thing.

  Natch is about to brush off this deranged skeleton when he catches the look in her eye.

  He knows that stare, because he's given it himself. It's the look of a human soul tangled up in desire so endless that it overshadows the world. The look of someone who has surrendered herself to the endless cycle of need and fulfillment. It's not Natch she desires; it's the black code known as Chill Polly. A miserable set of algorithms designed to utterly obliterate sensation, to truly make you one with the cosmosor perhaps to bring the cosmos down to your level.

  As Natch looks in her eyes, it suddenly occurs to him what this woman is really selling. Sex is only a tangential part of the transaction. She is selling a ringside seat for a life reduced to a spectacle of need, and a drug designed to do nothing but nullify that need.

  A closed system. Wanton need, insufficient fulfillment.

  Natch lets the nameless woman take his arm and escort him down a predictably dark alleyway. "Where we going?" he asks.

  "Grub Town," says the woman.

  She leads him to the colony's main avenue, where security lets them pass through gate after gate without asking for the requisite payment. Soon they have found their way to a maze of repurposed ductwork on the inner rim of Third Ring. It's a tangled skein of permasteel walls three meters high, not so much constructed as haphazardly tacked together metal sheet by metal sheet. Hidden alcoves and makeshift rooms abound. Overlooking the maze on the ceiling is an enormous mural showing endless fields after the rain where the worms come out to frolic. Grub Town. The place serves no purpose that Natch can see other than to keep the uninitiated out and the transactions private.

  The woman leads Natch to an unused corner deep in the labyrinth. He hands over a canister of Chill Polly, watches the application on the woman's wrists. Sees the writhing, insensate dance of desire then fulfillment, desire then fulfillment, over and over until the blackness comes. She does not ask nor appear to notice that Natch has made no move to touch her since their arrival.

  For the next three days, Natch returns to the alleyway between bodegas and repeats the process. It occurs to him that this might be the closest to invisibility one can get in 49th Heaven, where unspoken fiat places the privacy of sexual transactions above all else. While on the arm of a black code junkie headed for Grub Town, the authorities look through him; passersby turn a blind eye to him; other junkies see nothing but the canvas shoulder bag Natch is carrying, location of his black code stockpile.

  Of course they don't see me. I don't exist.

  The boy on the fourth day is much like the others. Shorter, perhaps. A little cannier, a little rougher around the edges. He tries to engage Natch in small talk on the way to Grub Town, which Natch does his best to deflect. The boy's name is Rodrigo, as it turns out. Rodrigo leads him into Grub Town and through a minotaur's labyrinth of makeshift rooms, most empty, a few occupied by the uncaring or the unconscious.

  Finally they arrive at a darkened den populated by nothing but a strangely clean mattress. Natch tries to imagine someone dragging a mattress through all of the seemingly random twists and turns they took to arrive here. Not likely. Perhaps the mattress has been here since the beginning, and this shantytown has expanded over it? No matter. Natch throws his bag on the floor and leans down to join it.

  But before he gets there, he feels a white-hot pain lancing between his shoulder blades. The blade stabs swift and deep and quickly shoves Natch outside the veil of consciousness.

  24

  Natch staggers back into sentience ninety minutes later, cursing his own foolishness at disabling MultiReal-D. Were he still inhabiting virtual time, sixty seconds ahead of the rest of the world, he would not be experiencing this scalding pain between his shoulder blades....

  But the boy snuck up on him from behind. If Natch understood Petrucio's explanation of MultiReal-D correctly, the program's predictive algorithms would not have anticipated the attack, and he would still be lying here deep in the bowels of Grub Town struggling to sit up. Even the crowning achievement of the Surinas is ultimately subject to the limitations of a universe built on cause and effect.

  Natch leans against the grimy permasteel and takes inventory of his vital systems. He is, in one sense, incalculably lucky-the knife has not punctured anything vital. In fact, it has missed his lungs by centimeters, he sees in the floating holographic torso that represents his body. OCHREs are thrumming mightily to repair the damage from the shallow knife thrust, but the process will take time. An urgent message from Dr. Plugenpatch warns him to stay prostrate and summon L-PRACG security immediately.

  The entrepreneur ignores the warnings. Stands. Realizes that this boy Rodrigo must have been after his stash of black code cylinders, because Natch's canvas bag is missing.

  Natch is more astounded and curious than angry. After a life in which most of his possessions are virtual and therefore not subject to pickpocketry-a life in which a thief's knife is likely to strike only a neural illusion-the idea of being stabbed and robbed is almost picaresque, like something out of an ancient novel.

  What now?

  He looks down and sees a drop of blood on the floor, and then another, like a vector pointing him in the direction he must go. Natch follows and finds another drop here, another drop there. He pursues it a handful of turns through the maze of permasteel ductwork, wondering just how far this trail of blood is going to take him. Certainly before too long, the knife will have dribbled its last drop, or Rodrigo will have paused to wipe it clean.

  But Natch's serendipity holds. He only has to stumble for a minute, taking a single wrong turn, before he comes across the thief.

  Rodrigo lies in another of these indistinguishable ductwork rooms, on a mattress that seems like it's lain here for decades by the sight of it. The bloodied knife is still sitting on his lap. A handful of empty canisters lie on the floor next to the entrepreneur's discarded canvas bag. Natch wonders briefly if Rodrigo has died in the short interim since the stabbing-but it appears not. He has no medical training beyond the basic grasp of human physiology necessary for bio/logic programming, but he can recognize working lungs and a beating heart.

  The entrepreneur picks up his canvas bag of black code, 49th Heaven currency. (The wound in his back screams in protest. Natch jacks up the analgesic and tries his best to ignore it.) He peeks cautiously around the corner of what functions as a doorway here and prepares himself for a long trek back through the ductwork city. As for Rodrigo-it's not his concern. Someone will find him. Someone will notice the state he's in and bring him to the medical facilities that surely even 49th Heaven possesses.

  Won't they?

  Natch takes another look at the boy. Yes, Rodrigo is alive, but this is clearly not just the ordinary black code stupor. Natch has never seen anyone take so many canisters of Chomp at once. Rodrigo's eyes are open as wide as they go, and yet they see nothing. His entire body is rigid and contorted. It's difficult to even discern that he's alive from more than a few paces. Who would walk into one of these cubicles uninvited when there's a corpse stinking up the place? Who would feel comfortable going to fetch the authorities?

  Surely the boy must have friends. If nothing else, eventually someone else will find a use for this ramshack
le space and decide to investigate. But when will that be, and what shape will the boy be in at that point?

  The little fucker deserves no less, thinks Natch, reaching around to feel the still-splotchy knife wound in his back. He's not my responsibility.

  Natch takes a last look at the scrawny reed of a boy lying on the filthy mattress. Sixteen years old at the outside, sinfully ugly, without prospects, and judging by the results of this ambush, lacking even the intelligence to pull off a successful mugging. A thief who will make no lasting contribution to the human race, who, even should he escape this predicament, will stupidly place himself in another, then another, then another, until he is finally wheeled in to a Preparation compound with an order signed by an official of the local L-PRACG.

  Nobody will come looking for this ephemeral creature. Nobody will miss Rodrigo.

  This is someone who does not exist.

  Natch suspects that Rodrigo is the type of boy who draws trouble like a magnet draws metal. But even so, the entrepreneur is surprised at how quickly trouble shows up.

  He manages to half carry, half drag the boy out of the shantytown without too much difficulty. The path is not quite as labyrinthine as Natch remembered, or perhaps he has merely made a series of lucky guesses. Soon he is back on the main avenue of Third Ring. That he can lug an unconscious, bloodied, obviously malnourished boy down a major thoroughfare without attracting any undue attention from the authorities says much about 49th Heaven. Natch knows there are func tioning L-PRACGs with functioning security forces in this place; he remembers selling a batch of code to one of them a few years back. Where are they now?

  Instead there is the occasional jaded look tossed in their direction by the pedestrians, not to mention the odd gruesome chuckle and salacious elbow-nudge from loiterers. "Musta been a great fuckin' blowjob!" quips one anonymous wit loudly enough for Natch to hear. The wit's companion howls gleefully and they walk on.

  A team of medieval jesters capers and caterwauls on the ceiling, as if the very colony of 49th Heaven has decided to join in the mockery.

  The medical facilities reside in a squat trapezoidal structure almost a quarter of the way around the circumference of Third Ring. After a few hundred paces down the main drag, Rodrigo resumes some semblance of consciousness. There is no recognition in his face on seeing Natch. He senses he is being taken somewhere, and somehow he can deduce the presence of altruism at work. With one arm around Natch's neck, Rodrigo begins to assist in the walking in a feeble and not particularly helpful way, collapsing from time to time and occasionally pulling Natch down with him. Each time, the entrepreneur patiently stands him back up on his feet, and they continue the trek.

  Why put up with this? Why help the boy at all?

  Natch doesn't know. He can't articulate it. Rodrigo is a wretched specimen of humanity, an outlier on the scale of misery, possibly even an argument in favor of eugenics. He has done nothing benevolent for Natch; in fact, he is responsible for the puncture wound on his back that continues to throb and itch with pain. Natch should be flagging down one of the few Council officers he sees or summoning L-PRACG security like Dr. Plugenpatch advised.

  Why help Rodrigo? Natch feels no compassion for him. He doesn't particularly care if the boy lives or dies; yet he is interested. Tugging this ruined boy to safety feels like something new. It feels, perversely, like a challenge.

  As they approach the medical facility, a middle-aged woman in a sky blue uniform stands in the doorway and watches their progress with her own version of detached interest. She watches Natch and Rodrigo's whole fumbling trip down the thoroughfare and up the ramp to her door without making a single move to summon assistance. Nor does she offer any help dragging the boy through the door and onto a waiting stretcher, even though he has lapsed back into stiff, wide-eyed unconsciousness. But the moment Rodrigo's ass hits canvas, medical technicians scramble from nowhere to whisk him off. They regard Natch as little more than a faceless obstruction and look past the wound on his back without seeing. The entrepreneur realizes that he has just fallen askance of some draconian liability policy hammered onto the facility by forces unknown.

  Moments later, the corridor is empty. Natch stands on white floors under the harsh glow of hospital lighting, trying to decide what to do next. His own wound seems to be healing nicely-not as quickly as if he were to get professional assistance, but that would entail placing his doctored OCHREs in the hands of a strange bureaucracy. Natch supposes his next step is to make it back to the docks and claim a berth on the OrbiCo freighter Practical for its next journey. In that ship lies safety. Isolation from the world. The dull anonymity of space.

  Keep moving.

  And yet-

  He can't make himself do it. Instead he heads down the corridor where the clinic workers took Rodrigo. Just until I find out what happened to him, Natch tells himself.

  Natch has never seen the inside of an intensive-care facility in his life. He came close after the debacle of the Shortest Initiation, when the minions of the Proud Eagle muscled him out of the hoverbird and stood him in front of an antiseptic white building. He remembers a short, fat pilot pinioning his upper arm in an angry grip. There was a short consultation with a medic, and then they had wheeled Brone by. Unconscious, bloodied, one arm a gnarled stump, face a slashed horror.

  The medical facilities here in Third Ring are nothing like Natch expects. There is no array of flexible glass equipment throbbing with pastel colors, like in the dramas. Instead he sees a cavernous warehouse with dozens of stretchers laid across the floor in a tight grid. Perhaps two-thirds of the stretchers are occupied by a cross section of the 49th Heaven hoi polloi. Sickened tourists, junkies, victims of muggings. A squadron of technicians walks up and down the aisles asking questions. A team of nurses takes up the rear, applying bandages and injecting specially prepared OCHREs with long syringes. The whole is a model of robotic regularity and faceless efficiency.

  Natch walks up and down the aisles, looking for Rodrigo. Nobody stops him or even gives him a second glance. Faces from the stretchers watch him pass in dull-eyed confusion and misery. A representative from the Prepared gives Natch a friendly nod, then turns back to the catatonic patient lying before her.

  By the time Natch locates Rodrigo in this vast sea of human despair, the boy has already attracted a visitor.

  "Name's Molloy," says the visitor, unfolding himself out of the plastic chair alongside Rodrigo and offering a bow. He's a robust fellow in his late thirties with arms like industrial piping and abs that look solid enough to turn back steel. His eyes glint with hard-edged humor underneath the enormous black eyebrows that stick out from his forehead like bristles. Other than the eyebrows, Molloy's head is completely devoid of hair.

  Natch nods and bows in return, but says nothing.

  "Thanks for finding this one," says Molloy, extending his open palm in Rodrigo's direction. "Saved me a lot of trouble, you did." The palm is nearly the size of Natch's entire head.

  Both of them look down at the boy, who is lying stock-still in the stretcher, his synapses still misfiring wildly from the Chomp. But he's awake. His eyes still show no recognition of Natch, but there is a clear sign that he knows who Molloy is. Despite the Chomp haze, there's both an overpowering fear and an underlying fatality in that gaze, as if Molloy is the authorized representative of death itself.

  "What do you want with him?" asks Natch.

  "We're in business together," replies Molloy smoothly.

  "What kind of business?"

  "Business," says Molloy without elaborating.

  Natch regards the thug's biceps, the wrinkles of ruinous experience around his eyes, the sheer murderous confidence in the firm set of his jaw. This is the type of man who does not threaten, because he has spent many years ensuring that he doesn't need to.

  "Listen, friend," continues Molloy, still smiling. "If you don't mind, Rodrigo and I have some things to discuss."

  The entrepreneur looks down at Rodrigo. There'
s a fearful stare on his face, the pleading stare of a boy who already feels the undertow of the Null Current pulling him in.

  "I think I do mind." The words escape from Natch's lips before he realizes he's spoken them.

  "Nah," says Molloy, shaking his head with a convincing facsimile of good-naturedness. "I know this kid. You really don't want to get involved."

  "Maybe I do."

  Far from turning angry at the entrepreneur's gumption, Molloy's smile turns into a toothsome grin. He pauses and wets his lips with a single swipe of his tongue as he sizes Natch up. "C'mon," he says, heading down the aisle with an inviting wave of one hand. "Let's talk."

  Natch joins him and lets the brute put one arm around his shoulder as they walk up and down the grid of patients, threading their way between doctors and med techs. He glances around the enormous room, looking for an authority figure who might notice any sudden display of violence. But everyone from the medical techs to the nurses to the patients seems to be following the 49th Heaven ethos of studiously staying out of other people's business. Even the friendly woman from the order of the Prepared has decided that Natch's welfare is not her concern.

  "This kid, Rodrigo," says Molloy, muscles still slack and face still unruffled. "I don't know what he did for you in Grub Town last night-"

  "He stabbed me in the back with a knife."

  Molloy throws his head back and laughs with gusto. It's such a strange noise in this place that two of the med techs snap their necks around, but on spotting Molloy they quickly turn away. "He did, did he? Spirited little fucker. Believe me, you're not the first. The Chomp must really be messing with him-his aim's usually better'n that, and he stabs 'em in the heart. What, you looking to take some revenge? Get him before someone else does?"