“Going to Shanghai, child?” a woman’s voice said in Anglaic.
Alonza looked up. A woman with short dark hair and a kindly smile was gazing down at her.
“No,” she replied hastily.
“But this is the waiting area for that suborb flight.”
“I’m waiting for my mother,” Alonza said. “She told me to wait here.” She glanced down at her hands and saw, too late, that she had forgotten to pull the long sleeves of her tunic over her wrists. The woman would notice that she was not wearing an identity bracelet.
But the stranger did not look down at her hands, but instead continued to stare at Alonza’s face.
“I see,” the woman said.
“She didn’t want me to get lost,” Alonza added.
“Of course. Well…” The woman turned away and sat down on a cushion near the wall.
Alonza waited as more people entered the lounge and settled themselves on the cushions around her. Among them were two Linkers, dressed in long white formal robes and kaffiyehs, each with the diamondlike gem on his forehead that marked him as one of the few who had a direct Link to Earth’s cyberminds; the two men sat together, and those making their way past them nodded respectfully in their direction. A few of the people were eating small rolls and pieces of fruit, and drinking from small bottles; Alonza, feeling very hungry, wondered if she could risk begging or stealing some food. Nearly every seat was taken by the time she started worrying about Amparo.
Her mother should have been here by now, Alonza thought. Soon all these people would begin to board the suborb, and somebody else would wonder what she was doing here.
Already a gray-haired man was watching her with a puzzled look on his face, while a guide wearing dark blue overalls and a badge hanging over his chest had come by a couple of times already, slowing down to glance at her both times.
A space in the back wall opened. A man came through the opening and stepped to a counter as the doorway behind him closed. He wore a dark blue shirt; like the guide, he had a badge that said “Port of San Antonio” on the top and “Nueva Republica de Texas” on the bottom. Alonza knew how to read a little, and she had seen those words often enough to recognize them immediately.
The man peered at the screen of his console, apparently checking the passenger list. That meant that everyone here would be lining up in a few minutes, having their bracelets scanned and their identities and credit confirmed, and then heading for the doorway that led to the field outside.
She was suddenly frightened, afraid to move from her cushion. Then she saw the guide walking toward her with another man at his side, a tall thin pale-haired man in the black uniform of a Guardian, with a stun wand hanging from his belt.
“Is your name Alonza Lemaris?” the man in the Guardian uniform asked.
She nodded. If he knew her name, it meant that her mother had been caught.
“Come with me,” the man said.
They took her to a small room. The guide left them there alone, and the Guardian asked her a lot of questions, keeping his hand around his wand the whole time, but terrified as she was, she knew that Amparo would want her to say as little as possible. “I’m waiting for my mother. She told me to wait there for her. She told me not to get lost.” She kept saying the same thing over and over and at last the Guardian stopped pacing and sat down in front of her.
“Listen to me, you little bitch,” he said angrily. “We’ve already got your mother on assault, credit theft, and ident theft. If we put her to the question, we can probably get a lot more out of her, but she wouldn’t be the same afterward, and you’re the only one who can stop us from doing that kind of damage to her. So you can begin telling me about what kinds of things she’s been up to, and we’ll find some work for her to do while she’s serving her sentence that won’t be too hard on her, or else we can start interrogating her until she breaks down and confesses. She won’t be of much use to anybody after that.
Some people get so messed up in their minds afterward that they end up killing themselves.”
“I want to see her,” Alonza said softly.
“You won’t see her until after she’s finished her time, and that’s going to be long from now. Get this through your head—you’ll probably never see her again. The only favor you can do for her now is to tell me exactly what she’s done, what you’ve seen her do, what you’ve done together.”
Amparo had always been terrified of getting caught, of being interrogated by Guardians.
They would put a band on your head, her mother had told her, one of the slender silver ones like the ones people used to access a mind-tour, and then they would dig into your mind, force you to confess, find all kinds of ways to hurt you and make you scream in pain until you told them the truth. That was why it was so important never to get caught; better to be dead than in the custody of Guardians preparing to question you.
“She didn’t do anything,” Alonza insisted, staring at the gold lieutenant’s bars on the man’s shoulders. “She told me to wait for her, that’s all.”
The Guardian stood up and slapped her in the face. The blow shocked her more than it hurt her. “You’re a stubborn one,” he muttered, sounding almost pleased. “I guess we’ll let you visit with your mother after all.”
He led her out of the room, gripping her arm tightly. A hovercar with another Guardian was waiting for them. They rode through the hallways of the port to another room, where two more Guardians were waiting with Amparo.
Her mother was bound to a chair. A console with a screen sat in front of her. “I didn’t say anything,” Alonza cried out, trying to free herself from the man holding her arm, but Amparo did not seem to hear her. Then one of the men in the room stepped toward Amparo and held out a circular silver headband.
Amparo screamed. Her scream was so sharp and piercing that Alonza froze.
“Tell them!” her mother shrieked. “Tell them anything they want to know!”
Alonza told the Guardians about the woman and how Amparo had struck her and where she had ditched the bracelet they had stolen from her. The men asked her more questions about other marks they had taken things from, and Amparo, who was sobbing by then, told Alonza to answer those questions, too. When Alonza had finished telling the Guardians about what they had stolen over the past months and how they had obtained the goods, the pale-haired Guardian told her that her mother would be doing useful labor for the Nomarchies of Earth while serving out her sentence. They did not say anything about a hearing, how long a sentence Amparo would get, or how unpleasant the useful labor would be.
“What about my daughter?” Amparo asked hoarsely.
“That’s none of your business, woman. We’ll take care of her. She’ll be a lot better off than she was with you. She’ll be a better citizen of her Nomarchy when she grows up, and by then she’ll forget about you.”
The Guardian had been right. Alonza had been cared for afterward, and supposed that she had grown up to be a better citizen than she would have been otherwise.
Her memory of her mother grew fainter over time. In the first years after her mother’s arrest, while she was still living in the children’s dormitory, Alonza had occasionally tried to find out where Amparo was being held, but the cyberminds always blocked those channels so that she could not get an answer, and then the teaching image on her screen would order her to get back to her lessons. After a while, she stopped asking about Amparo. When she was older, after the officers in charge of the dormitory had decided that she and a few of her friends showed enough promise to be sent to a school for more lessons in academic subjects instead of being trained for satellite repair, she rarely thought of her mother.
The pale-haired Guardian had been right when he told her that she would be better off in the dormitory than with Amparo. There had been the opportunity for schooling, and since the Guardians often recruited from the children housed in the dorms while their parents served time, she had eventually been trained at an officers’ academy for the important work of being one of the protectors of Earth’s biosphere and its peace. Had she remained with her mother, she would have grown up to be another one like her, a mosquito as they were called in their crowded neighborhood near the port, one of those who lived by stinging any unwary travelers passing through San Antonio. Had she stayed with Amparo, she would never have made it to the Wheel, certainly not as an officer and as an aide to Colonel Jonas Sansom, the commander of the Guardian detachment at the Wheel, and also the pale-haired Guardian officer who had detained her at the San Antonio port so many years ago.
Alonza Lemaris stood in the small waiting area just beyond the shuttle dock’s bay.
Another group had just arrived, passengers from Earth bound for Venus. Most of the people coming to the Wheel could be left to find their own way to the lounges and bays in the hub where they would wait to board their
