worker, he wouldn’t have been able to smuggle it through the security checks at the port. He also realized that the pistol was probably the reason why the spacer had been running from the police. He’d brought it here to sell, and something had gone wrong, someone had betrayed him or had themselves been betrayed, and he’d had to dump it.
The spacer could have simply thrown it away, Rocket Boy thought. Instead, chance or fate had caused it to fall into his hands, and because it was unlikely he’d ever be so lucky again, he must make the most of the opportunity.
He didn’t go to work that day. Instead, he spent all that morning and most of the afternoon in his nest, talking with the pistol. It taught him its functions and, once it was certain that he had grasped the basic principles of its operation, asked him what he wanted to do.
“I don’t know.”
“Perhaps I have asked the wrong question,” the pistol said. “Tell me instead what you most need.”
Rocket Boy wanted his family back, he wanted everything to be the way it had been before the war, but he knew that nothing, not even this magic little weapon could give him that. He said, “I want to be safe.”
“Who is threatening you?”
“No one. Everyone. Living on the street, you feel that every moment could be your last…”
“Perhaps you should tell me how you came to be here,” the pistol said.
It teased the story out of him piece by piece. Rocket Boy found himself telling it things he had never told anyone else. He told it about the war that had started after the enemy had tried to block the flow of a major river. He told it about the so-called popular revolution, supported by the enemy, and the Night of the Long Knives when most of the government and dozens of senior officials, including his mother and father, had been assassinated. He told it that he and his younger brother and three sisters had been attempting to escape the city and reach the house of their aunt when their vehicle had been caught in a fire fight between loyalists and a brigade of enemy soldiers. There had been an explosion which had knocked the car on its side, and he’d woken to find himself in the chaos of a hospital that was attempting to deal with hundreds of civilian casualties. Suffering from concussion and a broken wrist, he had gone to look for his family, walking all night and most of the next day, only to discover that his aunt’s house had been burned to the ground. After failing to find any of his family or friends, he had fled the city, and for a year worked on the huge collective farms in the wide, fertile river valley, but when a new law forced casual workers to register with a union, he’d been scared that the cheap hack that had altered his ID chip would be discovered, and he’d returned to the city, and had been living under the intersection ever since.
After a short silence, the pistol said, “Do you require advancement, or revenge?”
“I used to think that I could hunt down the man who had my parents killed,” Rocket Boy said.
“Do you know the name of that man? Do you know where he lives? Do you know how he is protected?”
Someone else said, “If you want true revenge, you’ll have to destroy the occupying force and the puppet government.”
It was the old man. He raised his hands in a warding gesture when Rocket Boy, angry and afraid, asked him how much he’d heard, and said, “I suppose just about everything. What is your real name, Rocket Boy? Who were your mother and father? It is possible that I worked for them, in happier times.”
“It doesn’t matter who they were now.”
“Yet you want to avenge their deaths. If you let me, I can help you. I assume that spacer you sheltered last night gave you the pistol.”
“What if he did?”
“It’s like no other weapon on this world, an all-purpose hand weapon with a nanotech forge and a near-AI kernel. Very powerful, and very smart.”
The pistol said, “I also possess a database that includes several million tactical scenarios—”
“Be quiet,” the old man said sharply, and the pistol shut up at once. The old man smiled at Rocket Boy. “You have to let it know that you are its master, and make sure that it does not attempt to find a way of manipulating you. We don’t have AIs on our world—they are far beyond the capability of our world’s technological base—but I am familiar with them because I worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before the war. I’ve negotiated with many trade delegations in my time, and I once traveled to another star system—you wouldn’t think it to look at me, but it’s true.”
Rocket Boy believed him. The old man, squatting in his tattered rags, hair hanging around his leathery face in filthy dreadlocks, possessed a dignity he hadn’t noticed before.
“Tell it what you want,” the old man said. “Give it an order. Make a wish. Start with something simple.”
Rocket Boy thought long and hard, then said, “I wish I wasn’t living on the street.”
The pistol said, “My analysis of your story suggests that this is a Class E or F capitalist society.
Am I correct?”
The old man’s smile showed the blackened tombstones of his teeth. He said, “Much has changed since the war, but I believe that we still have money.”
The pistol said, “Tell me, who supplies the cigarettes that you sell?”
Kalim was tall and quick-tempered, and ruled his little gang by fear. He beat anyone who showed any sign of hesitation or answered back when he gave an order, and sometimes he would pick on someone and beat them just to keep the others in line, remind them who was in charge. He’d beaten all the boys who worked for him more than once, and let it be known that he had killed people who’d let him down.
“With this very knife,” he liked to say, holding up the six-inch ceramic blade, “Afterward, I lick off their blood. Nothing tastes sweeter than the blood of your dead enemies.”
Every morning, Kalim and his two sidekicks drove up in a battered car and handed out cigarettes; every evening they returned to inspect the takings of each boy. Sometimes Kalim took only half; sometimes he took everything. The day after the spacer gave the pistol to Rocket Boy, Kalim climbed out of the car and went straight for him. Getting right in his face, asking him where he’d been yesterday, asking him if he’d enjoyed his holiday, pushing him with angry little shoves until he was backed against a support pillar. The two sidekicks leaned against the car, enjoying the show. The other cigarette boys stood in a loose knot, watching it too, and shopping carts and mechs had crept up on either side, attracted by the disturbance. High on a concrete slope, a madwoman barked like a dog.
Kalim grasped Rocket Boy’s throat in one hand and turned to his audience, producing his knife with a theatrical flourish, saying loudly, “None of you little jerks take time off unless I allow it. Time is money, and all the money around here is mine. When you take time off, you steal from me, and then I got to teach you a lesson, like I’m going to teach this little worm.”
That was when Rocket Boy shot him. He was holding the pistol in the pocket of his tattered jerkin, and thrust its muzzle against Kalim’s leg and pulled the trigger with a convulsive effort. The pistol made a tremendous noise, a thunderclap that echoed and reechoed under the crossing ribbons of on-ramps and beltway, shocking hundreds of roosting noctids into the air. Kalim staggered backwards, clutching his bloodied thigh, clutching at his belly and then his chest as the smart little bullet burrowed upward. It detonated when it reached his heart, and he spewed a pint of blood and fell down and didn’t move again. The bigger of the two sidekicks drew a pistol, an ordinary automatic, and Rocket Boy shot him too, the self-guiding bullet drilling a hole in his forehead and blowing his skull apart. The other sidekick froze, drenched in his companion’s blood and brains, his hands half raised in surrender.
The other kids watched silently as Rocket Boy climbed onto the car and told them that he was taking charge of the business. “I promise that I will take only half of what you earn, no more, no less,” he said. “And there will be no more beatings.”
That evening, the sidekick, a boy by the name of Vance, drove him to the cafe where the cigarettes were distributed. The pistol had shot Vance with a smart bullet, and Rocket Boy told him that he would live as long as he was loyal, but if he even thought of betrayal or revenge, the bullet would kill him at once. At the cafe, following the advice of the pistol, Rocket Boy turned over the money he’d taken from the cigarette sellers to the fat man Vance pointed out, and explained that from now on he was running Kalim’s pitch.
The fat man barely looked up from the food he was spooning into his mouth, saying, “I don’t care what you punks do, long as you bring in the gelt,” and that was that.
Later that evening, in Kalim’s coldwater apartment at the edge of the industrial district, the pistol told Rocket Boy that there was a high probability that one of the gangsters who ran the neighboring pitches would try to lake
