“So they tell me. You’ll have to pardon my ignorance, mynor.”
Eshlava smiled benignly, apparently pleased at the proximity of the ship that would return him to Baret Station and the five thousand units that would soon be in his possession. He patted the arm of the odd gray-eyed youngster beside him. “It’s no dishonor, cyr. You people in the Three Cities are just not technically inclined.”
Tal’s lips quirked. “Yes. I suppose we simply must face the facts.” And he entered the ship behind the mynor, to take up the hunt once again.
Chapter 9
“You, whosoever or wheresoever you be, that live by spoiling and overreaching young gentlemen, and make but a sport to deride their simplicities to their undoing, to you the night at one time or other will prove terrible, except you forthwith think on restitution; or if you have not your night in this world, you will have it in hell. ”
THOMAS NASHE
Spider’s bed was wet with night-sweat. In Spider’s dreams, he pounded through the streets and back alleys of the underdecks. He climbed the walkways, shinnied up pipes, and dived behind garbage cans—in his dreams he was skinnier. He wasn’t always sure who was after him; sometimes it was the citycops, as real as they’d been twenty or thirty years ago when they’d terrorized the kids from Spider’s neighborhood. More often it was the ghosts, the spikes beneath the carpet of his present comfortable existence.
Tonight, in his dream, he’d entered a ghost road, one of the old secret ways through the ship that only deckrats and other lost souls knew, and found the gang waiting for him. Why he’d entered the road was incomprehensible, for in waking life the thought of being trapped in one of those places terrified him. And now here was his worst paranoid fantasy standing at the twist in the blue metal corridor, Fox and Breaker and Snake and the Salamander, all the ragged bunch of them, with only Nicolet missing. If Nicolet had been there, Spider’s heart would have crashed to a standstill on the spot. Nicolet hated him.
Spider recalled once seeing what was left of a ghost Nicolet had taken a dislike to. He’d had no idea skin looked like that when it was stripped off, like some kind of bloody pile of old trouser hems. Ghosts couldn’t tolerate the appearance of disloyalty, they couldn’t afford it; they feared it in themselves and were vicious when it appeared in others.
But I didn’t do anything! he thought helplessly, and jumped as the Salamander lunged at him. The Salamander tipped his fingernails with nerve poison from the barracks warehouse on P level. He didn’t seem to care if it meant crossing the radiation barriers. He was nearly as crazy as Nicolet.
Spider dived past Fox and Breaker and ran blindly around a comer of the ghost road. He recognized where he was now; there was an exit here, somewhere, that came out behind a Vance Alley restaurant on G deck. If he could make it out in time … his heart was pounding dangerously. His side hurt. Oh, God, he was going to die before he got there—
He burst out of the alley. His blind run took him straight into the arms of two citycops who were standing by the back entrance to the restaurant, eating rolls. If they hadn’t been armed, or if he’d had as much as a shred of strength left, he might have been able to do something about it…. Wait a minute, he thought, as they took him away. This had happened before, hadn’t it?
The scene shifted, tearing that thought away. Now he was standing in the goat line at the recycler, next to two lottery losers. The man behind him wore a red cheek brand, marking him as a three-time convicted thief, born cycle fodder. Not like Spider, dammit, who’d only been caught once in his life, whose number only came up through a fluke of perversity on the part of the universe. … They took the man ahead of him, escorting him gently to the civilized room on the other side of the door, where two priests waited to give him final rites before he was reduced, alive and aware, to his respective components.
Which was, at that moment, fine with Spider; it gave him five more minutes. He glanced over to the glass-enclosed walkway where a group of citycops were standing. There was an officer-rank there, a young one— couldn’t be more than seventeen, had to be somebody’s kid with a bought commission.
The tumblers in his head clicked, and Spider smiled. Tal. He remembered, he knew what happened now. Tal would point him out to the supervisor, show his pass from Adrian, and Spider would be summarily plucked from the line. Then Tal would introduce himself, and Spider would accept a cup of coffee that his hands would be shaking too much to drink. He knew this story. The relief from his previous terror was like waking up from a fever, whole and remade.
Tal was pointing toward the execution line. The citycop descended the steps from the walkway, strolled past Spider, and began untying the hands of the man with the cheek brand who stood behind him. Spider stared in disbelief. His heart started hammering again. He threw a look of pleading up toward the walkway, as though by sheer force of will he could penetrate the glass and make Tal see.
Tal was turning now. He was examining the entrance to the recycling room with interest. Me, look at me, Spider thought! The escorts approached him, clubs discreetly at the ready. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, this wasn’t the way— He looked up at the door to the room. He turned, planted his feet on either side of the doorway, and twisted wildly, trying to dislodge the hands that reached now for his arms and shoulders, pushing him along. “It’s not fair!” he yelled. “This isn’t what
