They had not dared to build a fire all winter long, for fear that an automatic would respond somewhere and bring this road to the attention of the authorities. The purpose of the homemade hut was to conserve body heat. Nicolet, their leader, sat on a box eating from a container of rice and beans one of his followers had brought. Nicolet was in his early thirties, with a brown beard and brown eyes. He dressed in the same shabby stolen clothing the other ghosts did. But he was not as skinny as the others, for his tithe as ghost king was a choice of one-fourth of all food brought in each day. He was “king” only of his group of twenty, a number that changed as his subjects died or were captured or found new recruits.
They treasured him. Nicolet’s number had come up for the recycler long ago, almost in prehistory; not the radiation levels, but a straight black card in the felons’ lottery, a body sent to balance the food production with the population of that year. He was the longest-lived ghost on the Diamond, so far as anyone knew; the most expensive, with the biggest price on his head; and he knew every road and every trick that would get them through another day. Nicolet had been a ghost for eight years.
Tealeaf, a beautiful black-haired, almond-eyed woman of about twenty, sat with her head on his knees. They were not lovers. It was only that the boundaries of physical distance became different for ghosts than it was for the rest of the Diamond. After they had slept against each other and held each other through the heaves from bad food and fought with each other, physically, again and again, the formalities became alien.
The rice and beans belonged to Tealeaf. When he reached the one-quarter mark, he would hand it back to her. Nicolet was scrupulous about that—he never took a free spoonful. A man with the highest price a ghost ever bore could not afford to open himself to criticism.
“Here,” he said now, and shook his knee slightly. She looked up and took the container from him, and also the spoon. There were three spoons among them, and every now and then they actually managed to get them washed. Water was scarce. Nicolet (historian of ghosts) said that for a while two years ago they’d thought they’d found a treasure in the form of a water-tank on J, but they noticed that the ghosts who swam there got sick and often died. More often than usual. It was another place-to-be-avoided.
All eight people in the hut were excommunicated by the Church, and considered themselves damned.
Fox and the Salamander sat nearby, sharing a stew that had been reconstructed from the garbage of The Green Man, that Nicolet had chosen to pass up. They ate with their hands, not willing to wait. The Salamander was in many ways the craziest of the ghosts. He provoked fights with citizens, stole food and clothing with a boldness bordering on insanity, and was in general a sign of the existence of God by his very survival, which was inexplicable any other way. He often told them the legend of the Salamander, that it was a creature so poisonous the very ground it had walked on was lethal. He gloried in that. The Salamander had never pulled a king of spades in the lottery, and never been in line for the radiation levels; he was simply wanted for murder. “Go to hell with the best,” said the Salamander to his fellow damned souls, and by the best he clearly meant himself.
Now he looked up at Nicolet, stew smeared on his swarthy face and hands. “Saw Spider today,” he commented.
Nicolet became very still. Tealeaf moved away from him.
Nicolet said, “I guess you mean you were above G level today, Salamander. Taking risks as usual. Because if you saw that fucking traitor below G, and didn’t kill him or bring him to me, I’m going to bash your fucking head in.”
“Saw him on the train,” said the Salamander. “Don’t know where he was going.”
“He looked well-fed, I’m sure,” said Nicolet.
The Salamander grunted.
“We aren’t trying hard enough to get that son of a bitch,” said Nicolet. “There are twenty of us. He has to come through the underdecks now and then. If I find out you let him escape—”
“It’s the truth,” said Tealeaf. “He was on the train.” She gazed into the distance, her eyes wide and empty. Tealeaf was a rare ghost—she was here to escape charges of witchcraft. But she was no witch, thought Nicolet for the thousandth bitter time. She knew nothing of healing and forbidden medicine. She was a truthsayer, and should have been chosen as an Oracle long ago and taken to Pearl. But the upper deck searchers made no great effort to find Oracles below G. Now it was too late, and if she were captured she’d be executed as a ghost—by witchfire, if some of the priests had their way.
“All right,” he said more gently. “He was on the train. But he won’t always be, and I don’t want anybody to miss him.”
Fox, who should have known better, said, “I don’t get it, Nicolet. How could Spider have betrayed us? He knew lots of the ghost roads—he knew the one we’re in right now, and nobody’s ever come to get us. Why do you always—”
His question was cut off by a blow to the head that sent him sprawling and spilled the last of the stew.
“Nobody gets out of the recycler line except by betrayal,” said Nicolet, breathing hard with anger. “Nobody but a riff gets a cushy job in admin and their name taken off the lottery list.
