hero of a naive children’s book he’d read a couple of years before the war, when he’d still been a kid, when he’d still had a family and a future, but he’d soon discovered that on the street nothing, not even your name, is your own. The young hoodlum in charge of the gang of streetsellers had started to call him Rocket Boy because of his unnatural fascination with the spaceport, and because that was the name of the brand of cigarettes he sold loose at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Industry Way, and the name had stuck. Rocket Boy worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week, selling cigarettes to the men and women who worked in the fabricants and warehouses. Time moved oddly on the street. Every day seemed interminable, but because each was the same as the one before, weeks and months slipped by like vehicles streaming along the freeway. In winter, dust blew out of the north and shrouded the city in a yellow pall. In summer, flocks of noctids swooped through the dusk air after insects, and the inhabitants of the little shanty town under the intersection knocked them out of the air with sticks or crude bolas made from stones and wire, and made a gummy soup by boiling up their wings.
One summer night, in the middle of a long heat wave, Rocket Boy had given up on sleep and was sitting high on an embankment, watching the lights of the spaceport shimmer across kilometers of blast pits and landing strips and concrete aprons, when a vehicle braked hard somewhere above him, a sliding screech, a blare of horns. As Rocket Boy scrambled to his feet, a man vaulted the safety barrier and slid down the dry bank, asking him if he know a place to hide. He was taller and skinnier than anyone Rocket Boy had ever seen, with dark brown skin, and black hair greased back from a hawkish profile. He wore heavy boots with steel buckles and straps, filthy jeans, and a denim jacket with many zippers and fasteners. A small leather duffel bag was slung over his back. There was a gold socket above one ear, and his eyes were capped with data lenses that blankly reflected the last of the light dying out of the sky as he looked up at the edge of the road above, head cocked. A moment later, Rocket Boy heard the wail of sirens, and whirling blue lights swept past on the beltway.
“Got into a little trouble,” the man said. “My mate will lead ‘em a good old chase, but they’ll catch him soon enough, and he’ll have to tell ‘em where I jumped, so I need a place to lay low. Just for a few hours, until the maintenance workers’ shift changes, and I can sneak into the port. Help me out, and I’ll give you your heart’s desire.”
Rocket Boy knew that the man was trouble, but he also knew that the man was one of the spacers who travelled amongst the worlds beyond, worlds full of wonders beyond measure or understanding, where he so very badly longed to go, and he led the man to the intersection, through the close-set maze of pillars, to his nest. The man declared it an ideal bolt-hole, took a swig of whiskey from a flat bottle, and promptly fell asleep. Rocket Boy, a hundred questions bubbling through his head, sat in the dark, knee to knee with his strange guest, listening for police sirens, and presently fell asleep too.
He woke when the spacer stirred. It was three or four in the morning, and still dark. The traffic on the beltway was as sparse as it ever got. Rocket Boy took the spacer, who told him that his name was Arpad, to the solitary standpipe that supplied water toeveryone who lived under the intersection, and then walked with him along Industry Way toward the bus stop at a crossroads. Arpad told him that he was from Earth, like most of the human race; said that by the universes clock he was seven hundred and fifty years old, give or take a decade, but most of that was down to time compression; said that he’d visited most human worlds, and this one was the most miserable he’d ever seen.
“Of course, you just had yourselves a revolution, but still.”
“It was a war, not a revolution. Our enemy took our country from us.” Rocket Boy hesitated, then said in a rush, “One day I want to go up and out. There is nothing for me here.”
“If you go up and out, you’ll lose everything you ever knew or loved. People, your home, your country… You can’t ever go home again; time compression will see to that.”
“I’ve already lost all that. If I went up and out, I wouldn’t ever want to come back.”
Arpad studied Rocket Boy sidelong. “I guess the war here didn’t do you any favors, huh?”
Rocket Boy shrugged, feeling a twinge of the old bitter hurt he could never bury deeply enough.
He’d never talked about it with anyone; not even the old man.
“What was it about, this war of yours?”
“The enemy wanted our fertile land. There isn’t enough, just strips here and there around the edge of the land. The enemy had a bad drought, and they took our country because they wanted to steal our good river land.”
“What I don’t understand is, when you got a continent here size of Asia and the Americas combined, and everyone lives at the edge of the sea, how come you people don’t try to settle inland?
Man I work for came here to hunt the big critters that live there, but there’s no kind of critter so fierce people can’t deal with them.”
“It isn’t the monsters,” Rocket Boy said. “It’s the wild itself.”
He told the spacer about the deserts beyond the mountains where no rain fell for years on end, about the endless dust storms and tornados and lightning storms. About how, in the center of the wild, it was so hot in the day that water boiled, and so cold at night it froze. He told him the story everyone learned in school, about the man who in the early days of the settling of the world had claimed he was the son of God, and had led a hundred followers across the mountains to a valley where water could be raised from deep aquifers. But insects had eaten most of their crops, dust storms had destroyed the rest, and when survivors had been discovered two years later, they had resorted to cannibalism.
“I guess things always look simpler from orbit,” Arpad said. They had reached the crossroads, and he was looking around at the long, low mounds of rubble that before the war had been warehouses and factories. “I can’t access the city’s infosystem, kid. Are you sure this is where I get a bus into town?”
“The first one comes at five. What about the police?”
“I don’t think they’ll expect me to catch a bus into town. I know a couple of people in town who work in the port. One of them will lend me his ID, and I can use it to get into the port when the shift changes. And once I’m aboard my ship, that’s it, home and free.”
Dawn was unpacking pale bars of light to the east; to the west, both moons were chasing each other below the saw edge of the naked mountains, and a few stars still showed in the deep purple sky.
Rocket Boy wondered if one of them was the star of Earth. Wondered if that was where Arpad was headed, some fifty or sixty years away by universal time, less than a month shipboard. If he went with the spacer and came straight back home, a century would have passed and everything would be changed. Perhaps the enemy would he gone…
Far clown the road, a single point of light slowly resolved into a double star. The bus was coming.
Arpad began to search through his duffel bag. “I promised to give you something, kid. Here. Take it.”
It was a pistol. The poisonous green of potatoes left too long in the sunlight, it wasn’t much bigger than Rocket Boy’s hand. The power LED set at the rear of the reaction chamber sparkled bright red. There were red inserts in a grip still molded to fit precisely the hand of its previous owner.
“Hold it tight,” Arpad said, pushing the weapon into Rocket Boy’s hand, and then poked at a microswitch with the blade of a small penknife.
A hologram bloomed in the air, big as an opened book. The spacer stabbed at its silky light with a dirty forefinger, selecting a submenu from the index, selecting several functions of the submenu.
Rocket Boy almost dropped the pistol when the grip moved under his fingers. Suddenly, it fitted his hand as if it had grown there.
“You need a password,” Arpad said. “Something uncommon. Sing it out nice and clear three times. Ready?”
Rocket Boy nodded.
Arpad touched one of the red buttons on the insubstantial page that hung in the air above the pistol, pointed at Rocket Boy.
“Vigo,” Rocket Boy said. His mouth was dry. His heart was beating in his temples. “Vigo. Vigo.”
“Now it’s yours,” Arpad said, slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder as the bus stopped beside them with a thunderous hiss of air brakes. “Before you decide what you’re going to do with it, you should talk with it, learn what it can do. It’s a clever thing, it’ll give you pretty good advice if you ask it the right questions. I hope you have better luck with it than I did,” he added, and climbed aboard the bus.
Later, Rocket Boy realized that the spacer had left him the pistol because, disguised as a maintenance
