Artie had not answered Jose’s question; I wasn’t sure he had even heard it. I nudged him. “I can ride,” I told him softly. “Learned outside. Bikes lay around free-for-nothing; my old man, he fix one up for me.”
Finally Artie’s eyes left the bicycle and fastened on me, still whirling with the enchantment of his racing thoughts. “Your dad can fix bicycles?”
I shrugged. “He know machines ’n’ things. That how we got under shield, finally. Learned him welding.”
At that, Artie scowled and came back to the present. “Don’t talk street, Morgan,” he chided. “You’ve got to practice Book English if you’re going to get into the Academy with me.”
That was his dream for me, that I would pass the entrance exams to go to Spark Academy, too. I worked at it, because he thought I should, but I never had much hope. “Yes, Artie, he knows something about bicycles,” I said with exaggerated articulation. “I’m not sure how much.”
It was enough. When my father got off shift, he had the bike running in less than fifteen minutes; then Artie took it, and me, and found a deserted stretch of tunnel where he could master the two-wheeler without an audience. I was the only one he trusted to witness the ignominy of his early failures. A week later when he returned the bike to Jose, he rode into the street where the others waited, braked to a smooth stop, and dismounted with practiced ease.
“We need more of these,” Artie announced. “We need every one of us to be mounted. We can outrun anyone on these things. We can pick up our families’ rations and not worry about being mugged on the way home, because no one will be able to catch us. We can get to a friend who’s in trouble, and we can get away from trouble when it comes looking for us. Bicycles are the answer.”
And because he was Artie, we all believed him.
Over the next year, bicycles sprouted like primalloy mushrooms in the streets of B9. We lost one kid in the process—Torey got shot by Security making a run out of F5, where he should never have been grazing—but that left seventeen of us on wheels, Knights of the Wheel Round, I laughed.
You might wonder how Artie could develop such a following, win the loyalty of so many people who would— and sometimes did—sacrifice themselves and their own well-being to follow his Code. The answer, I’m convinced, lies in three qualities Artie possessed in greater measure than other human beings: compassion, conviction, and compulsion. When Artie latched onto a notion, he pursued it with a focus ordinary mortals can’t hope to achieve, and the intensity of his devotion sucked other people in like a black hole.
Bicycles became his world. Between my father’s sketchy knowledge and some books we found online, Artie not only learned how to maintain and repair the bikes, he also learned frame geometry and stress factors and performance metrics. I learned some, too, because you couldn’t hang around Artie and not learn, but mostly I stuck with maintenance and repair. It wasn’t enough for him, though, that we should all learn to ride and care for our bikes—we had to train. He had us up before dawn each day, racing along the empty streets of B9 and B7. Our legs grew thick with muscle as we vied with each other for dominance in speed and endurance.
Soon we ventured out of our home sectors, becoming a familiar sight throughout the upground Bs and Gs, and even in parts of the As. Seventeen cyclists whooshing along in a pack at twenty-plus miles an hour is an impressive sight—that was both good and bad. A pack of thugs in A12 called the Big Dogs tried to lay traps for us whenever we crossed their sector, and we crossed it often escorting Artie to and from Spark Academy. But we were always too quick and too smart and too mobile for them.
There were two reasons Artie kept running the gauntlet to get to Spark Academy. Okay, three. The third was that he couldn’t stand for someone to tell him he couldn’t do something. But the first was that he liked learning. It charged his batteries. He was into mechanical engineering, and the teachers at Spark actually encouraged him in that. I guess they thought he could help keep habitat infrastructure from collapsing around us.
But the second reason he kept going to the Academy was Yvonne.
Now, Artie had girlfriends in the neighbourhood, and had since he was old enough to understand why a man would want to insert Tab A into Slot B. He didn’t exactly tell me the first time he got laid—he did have some notion that I was a girl and wouldn’t appreciate hearing about his conquests—but I knew it had happened, because I saw the girl try to take ownership of him. Fat chance she had. Artie always had champagne taste when it came to girls, and you don’t find champagne in B9.
Yvonne was champagne. I never met her, but I knew because Artie told me all about her. He’d lost his heart, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell other guys, so he told me. Most of what he was learning in Spark Academy, he confided, he could pick up out of books and vids that were available remotely, even on the archaic B9 equipment. And besides, he could earn a ration just running the courier service he’d started, so he didn’t really need to get into a university program. But a girl like Yvonne wouldn’t marry a courier and live in B9. So he had to get a degree, and a better housing assignment, so he could make a life with Yvonne.
For the record, I think he would have gone to the Academy anyway. Not that he didn’t like running courier— he liked using his cycling skills, evading obstacles, flirting with danger only to escape. He liked organizing the rest of us as couriers, and he liked being able to deliver packages quickly and safely for people who were afraid to walk the streets. As with protecting smaller children, and helping outsiders adjust to the habitat, it was a way for him to touch people’s lives and make them better. The need to do that was deep in him, and it was the foundation of the Code he established.
For Yvonne, though, he needed to be more than a courier. The others in our pack knew Artie had an Academy girlfriend, but they assumed she was no different than the girls he fooled around with in B9—except it was somehow more exciting to get your rocks off with some C5 princess, so the rest of the guys looked at Artie in awe. That was why, when Yvonne dumped him, he climbed the drainpipe to my room and cried in my arms.
We were never lovers, Artie and I. He never wanted me that way, and I knew better than to try enticing him. It would have been laughable: I am a homely woman, and I was an ugly child. My mother said it was the radiation I endured outside—she blamed everything on radiation—but I didn’t have to look far to find the long jaw and the close-set eyes I inherited, or the limp, colorless hair and crooked teeth. My shape, too, eschews beauty: I have a bony frame and tiny breasts. There are boys who don’t care what Slot B looks like, as long as it will accommodate Tab A, but Artie was never one of them.
So I held him the night Yvonne rejected his love, knowing this was as close to him as I would ever get. The next day he went out and built his first bicycle.
Before he graduated from Spark Academy, the counsellors there tried to push him into vocational training because he was so gifted in working with his hands: carving, moulding, welding. “Wouldn’t you be happier,” they asked, “crafting components? Building machines? Turning out a product?” If Yvonne had dumped him earlier, he might have yielded to their pressure; but he had told them he could do both: design and build. With his heart torn to shreds, he needed to prove that.
It was no work of art, that first bicycle: primalloy tubes patch-welded together. But it was serviceable, and it was a start. DeRon and I took over running the courier business—we already handled the routine maintenance and repair of our pack bicycles—so Artie would have time to build. His instructors in the university engineering program derided him, he told me, for wasting his time building “toys.” New robots to evacuate clogged water and sewer lines, or innovative geometries to prop up the sagging tunnels of KanHab—those were projects worthy of a mechanical engineer, they said. Not swift transportation through the unsavoury streets of lawless sectors.
But he did all they asked of him by day, and when darkness blanketed KanHab, he locked the front door of the abandoned storefront that served as our headquarters, called up his drawings, and began to build.
Artie made it his business to see that every child in B9 who kept the Code had a sleek, efficient machine that could carry him or her away from danger. The Code was fairly simple at that point: Take care of your bike and your friends; never fight when you can run; study and learn; make things better for everyone, not just yourself. Those same tenets were required of everyone in his pack.
By this time we had left thievery behind and were a legitimate business, recognized by Admin, delivering parcels and providing reconnaissance for electric cart convoys and groups of pedestrians throughout KanHab. We wore patches that showed we were part of Artie’s pack—Artie’s Angels, we called ourselves—with authorization to cross sectors and ride through public tunnels and buildings. Admin gave us helmets, gloves, and light body armour as part of our ration, and they stamped out cleats for Artie to fasten on flexible, steel-shanked shoes so we could lock into our pedals. When we rode as a pack, armoured and shod identically, people stood aside, gaping.
As our customer base expanded to other sectors, our fees originally accepted as comestibles, tools, and clothing—were paid more and more in ExCees, or Exchange Credits, flushed through habitat accounting and redeemable in rations, entertainment, or just about anything else we could want. I drew a single ration for myself
