do bicycle work. Anyway, if I took your cash or charged you for rent, then the tax people would just have another excuse to harass me.”
“Sure, okay, but…” She paused, then looked at him under lowered eyelids. “I’ve gotta be a lot better than having this place go empty.”
Lyle stated at her, astonished.
“I’m a pretty useful woman to have around, Lyle. Nobody’s ever complained before.”
“Really?”
“That’s right.” She stared at him boldly.
“I’ll think about your offer,” Lyle said. “What did you say your name was?”
“I’m Kitty. Kitty Casaday.”
“Kitty, I got a whole lot of work to do today, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay, Lyle.” She smiled. “You think about me, all right?”
Lyle helped her down out of the shop. He watched her stride away across the atrium until she vanished through the crowded doorway of the Crowbar, a squat coffeeshop. Then he called his mother.
“Did you forget something?” his mother said, looking up from her workscreen.
“Mom, I know this is really hard to believe, but a strange woman just banged on my door and offered to have sex with me.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“In exchange for room and board, I think. Anyway, I said you’d be the first to know if it happened.”
“Lyle — ” His mother hesitated. “Lyle, I think you better come right home. Let’s make that dinner date for tonight, okay? We’ll have a little talk about this situation.”
“Yeah, okay. I got an enameling job I gotta deliver to Floor 41, anyway.”
“I don’t have a positive feeling about this development, Lyle.”
“That’s okay, Mom. I’ll see you tonight.”
Lyle reassembled the newly enameled bike. Then he set the flywheel onto remote, and stepped outside the shop. He mounted the bike, and touched a password into the remote control. The shop faithfully reeled itself far out of reach and hung there in space below the fire-blackened ceiling, swaying gently.
Lyle pedaled away, back toward the elevators, back toward the neighborhood where he’d grown up.
He delivered the bike to the delighted young idiot who’d commissioned it, stuffed the cash in his shoes, and then went down to his mother’s. He took a shower, shaved, and shampooed thoroughly. They had pork chops and grits and got drunk together. His mother complained about the breakup with her third husband and wept bitterly, but not as much as usual when this topic came up. Lyle got the strong impression she was thoroughly on the mend and would be angling for number four in pretty short order.
Around midnight, Lyle refused his mother’s ritual offers of new clothes and fresh leftovers, and headed back down to the zone. He was still a little club-footed from his mother’s sherry, and he stood breathing beside the broken glass of the atrium wall, gazing out at the city-smeared summer stars. The cavernous darkness inside the zone at night was one of his favorite things about the place. The queasy 24-hour security lighting in the rest of the Archiplat had never been rebuilt inside the zone.
The zone always got livelier at night when all the normal people started sneaking in to cruise the zone’s unlicensed dives and nightspots, but all that activity took place behind discreetly closed doors. Enticing squiggles of red and blue chemglow here and there only enhanced the blessed unnatural gloom.
Lyle pulled his remote control and ordered the shop back down.
The door of the shop had been broken open.
Lyle’s latest bike-repair client lay sprawled on the floor of the shop, unconscious. She was wearing black military fatigues, a knit cap, and rappelling gear.
She had begun her breakin at Lyle’s establishment by pulling his shock-baton out of its glowing security socket beside the doorframe. The booby-trapped baton had immediately put fifteen thousand volts through her, and sprayed her face with a potent mix of dye and street-legal incapacitants.
Lyle turned the baton off with the remote control, and then placed it carefully back in its socket. His surprise guest was still breathing, but was clearly in real metabolic distress. He tried clearing her nose and mouth with a tissue. The guys who’d sold him the baton hadn’t been kidding about the “indelible” part. Her face and throat were drenched with green and her chest looked like a spin-painting.
Her elaborate combat spex had partially shielded her eyes. With the spex off she looked like a viridian-green raccoon.
Lyle tried stripping her gear off in conventional fashion, realized this wasn’t going to work, and got a pair of metal-shears from the shop. He snipped his way through the eerily writhing power-gloves and the kevlar laces of the pneumo-reactive combat boots. Her black turtleneck had an abrasive surface and a cuirass over chest and back that looked like it could stop small-arms fire.
The trousers had nineteen separate pockets and they were loaded with all kinds of eerie little items: a matte-black electrode stun-weapon, flash capsules, fingerprint dust, a utility pocketknife, drug adhesives, plastic handcuffs, some pocket change, worry beads, a comb, and a makeup case.
Close inspection revealed a pair of tiny microphone amplifiers inserted in her ear canals. Lyle fetched the tiny devices out with needlenose pliers. Lyle was getting pretty seriously concerned by this point. He shackled her arms and legs with bike security cable, in case she regained consciousness and attempted something superhuman.
Around four in the morning she had a coughing fit and began shivering violently. Summer nights could get pretty cold in the shop. Lyle thought over the design problem for some time, and then fetched a big heat-reflective blanket out of the empty room. He cut a neat poncho-hole in the center of it, and slipped her head through it. He got the bike cables off her — she could probably slip the cables anyway — and sewed all four edges of the blanket shut from the outside, with sturdy monofilament thread from his saddle-stitcher. He sewed the poncho edges to a tough fabric belt, cinched the belt snugly around her neck, and padlocked it. When he was done, he’d made a snug bag that contained her entire body, except for her head, which had begun to drool and snore.
A fat blob of superglue on the bottom of the bag kept her anchored to the shop’s floor. The blanket was cheap but tough upholstery fabric. If she could rip her way through blanket fabric with her fingernails alone, then he was probably a goner anyway. By now, Lyle was tired and stone sober. He had a squeezebottle of glucose rehydrator, three aspirins, and a canned chocolate pudding. Then he climbed in his hammock and went to sleep.
Lyle woke up around ten. His captive was sitting up inside the bag, her green face stony, eyes red-rimmed and brown hair caked with dye. Lyle got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and fixed the broken door-lock. He said nothing, partly because he thought that silence would shake her up, but mostly because he couldn’t remember her name. He was almost sure it wasn’t her real name anyway.
When he’d finished fixing the door, he reeled up the string of the doorknocker so that it was far out of reach. He figured the two of them needed the privacy.
Then Lyle deliberately fired up the wallscreen and turned on the settop box. As soon as the peculiar subtitles started showing up again, she grew agitated.
“Who are you really?” she demanded at last.
“Ma’am, I’m a bicycle repairman.”
She snorted.
“I guess I don’t need to know your name,” he said, “but I need to know who your people are, and why they sent you here, and what I’ve got to do to get out of this situation.”
“You’re not off to a good start, mister.”
“No,” he said, “maybe not, but you’re the one who’s blown it. I’m just a twenty-four-year-old bicycle repairman from Tennessee. But you, you’ve got enough specialized gear on you to buy my whole place five times over.”
He flipped open the little mirror in her makeup case and showed her her own face. Her scowl grew a little suffer below the spattering of green.
“I want you to tell me what’s going on here,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“If you’re waiting for your backup to come rescue you, I don’t think they’re coming,” Lyle said. “I searched you very thoroughly and I’ve opened up every single little gadget you had, and I took all the batteries out. I’m not
