Geosynchron (35 page)

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 ramshackle 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."