“Used to be. Been watching the newsfax coming out of Angel. He killed his family, then himself.”

  Maria looked at him in shock. Her left hand hung on one chord, shooting a bright yellow flare into Ubu’s mind. “When?” she said.

  “Fifteen standard ago. Infix Station. The bank had just confiscated his drive.”

  Maria looked down at her hand. The chord burned on.

  Though Ubu and Redwing had only met once or twice, Ubu’s mind could sketch him perfectly. Black hair, pebble eyes, soft voice, large hands. He’d used a hammer, the newsfax said. Ubu thought about a hammer in those big hands.

  “It used to be years before you’d ever hear of a murder on a shooter ship,” Ubu said. “Remember? And now there’s two or three a year.”

  “Killed his family.”

  And for a moment they looked away from one another while the sizer chord shimmered on, each thinking about Pasco, about how maybe they were lucky he’d chosen his particular form of self-destructive despair when his time ran out.

  Maria lifted her hand from the keyboard and looked at it as if she’d never seen it before. “Get your guitar,” she said, “and play with me.”

  “Yeah.” He opened the instrument locker and took out his old black Alfredo with the plastic triangular body and the genuine hardwood neck.

  His mind was already buzzing, hard angry chords to call up Redwing and lay him to rest.

  *

  Wherever there were shooters and systers, wherever people lived in the Now, there lived also the zone with which they lived in symbiosis, where they were both fed and eaten. The neighborhood had many names: on Masquerade it was called the Road; on Bezel it was Port Town; here on Angelica Station, it was called the Fringe.

  The Fringe lived in perpetual twilight. It curved gently upward from where Maria and Ubu stood, dark storefronts full of bustle, holograms moving in explosive colors, a population in perpetual transit.

  The main street had no name, being the only one, the long metal road that circled the rim of wheel-shaped Angelica Station. Crowded against it were the small operators that made their living from the commerce of shooters and systers: margin banks, trading companies, gene banks, small casinos, hotels, bars, hookshops, missions for Jesus Rice or the Mahayana Buddha, eateries, cosmetic surgeries, pawnshops... the usual bright, noisy gamut of shops, most facing the street, some turned into little dark side-alleys that curled off the main road, like appendices off some primitive intestine.

  Ubu and Beautiful Maria walked the length of the Fringe, savoring the bright colors, the smells, the exotic flavor of the traffic. Maria bought some chips and fried chicken from a vendor. Ubu bought a recyclable plastic bulb of Kolodny beer.

  Maria had two arms and two legs, not entirely the norm for full-time tide riders. Ubu had an extra pair of arms. Their father had bred them for adaptability, not specialization. Ubu was thirteen years old and six feet four inches tall. The prevailing fashion was for androgyny and he dressed against it, wearing cutoff jeans, sandals, a silver vest hacked out of an old piece of reflec and held together with orange tape. His fair hair was shaggy over his ears. His upper body, massive with overlapping arm muscle, was powerful, a shooter typicality. He moved fast when he wanted to.

  Beautiful Maria was eleven years old and an inch shorter than her brother. She wore a long robe of the same smoky color as her eyes. Her pale face glowed, like cream poured in sable glass, from its soft aureole of blue-black hair. Her voice was soft, her hands moved white in the air like doves. The long hair was unusual in a shooter, but appropriate on Maria. Her name was not inappropriate, either.

  A four-armed shooter, a mutanto, slid by on his easicart, waved an arm that rotated on a hip socket. There was pain in his eyes, distorting a seamless face unworn by gravity. A desperate man, Maria knew, to come all the way to the rim to do business, when he could stay at the hub where his weight wouldn’t crush him and do his business through the phone.

  Desperate. Like the crew of the Runaway.

  At least, she thought, she and Ubu had more choices. If the mutanto lost his livelihood, he’d have little choice but a long-term indentureship to some company like Biagra-Exeter. A contract on their terms, the mutanto being a beggar.

  Maria swallowed a piece of chicken, cayenne pepper burning her palate, then took a shot of Ubu’s beer. Saw the edge of the Fringe ahead, where the twilight turned into the bright white corridors of the Outside Life. A coldness touched her. “Uniquip,” she said. “It’s gone. Look. The Fringe’s got smaller.”

  “Jesus Rice. It’s only been a few months.” He licked his lips. “Where we gonna sell our cargo? Hiliners won’t want it.”

  There wasn’t a line drawn at the edge of the Fringe, or a sheet of transparent glass set up where the Fringe turned away from the Now, toward the Outside, but there might as well have been. The Fringe was dark, crowded, alive with the pulse of people cutting deals, the whisper of small commerce, the sharp smell of sweat and adrenaline from those who were operating on the margin. Beyond the twilight the metal street had been paved with razor-thin slices of the marble encased in plastic and laid down in big rolls, like toilet tissue. Along the bright street were the big companies, the concerns that stretched all the way across human space, operating their fleets of haulers, stations, liners, their centers of finance and investment... the Outsiders who had the ear of the Multi-Pollies in the center of human space, who wanted the entire universe to be nothing but a succession of white humming corridors, filled with orderly humanity busy accumulating capital, making investments in the safest places, giving it to the Outsiders to finance the Multi-Pollies’ policy of Consolidation, denying the Edge, the margin, expansion.

  Ubu hawked and spat, his saliva arcing out of the twilight, toward the cold fluorescent life of Outside humanity. “Fuck that,” he said.

  “It’s smaller,” Maria said again. Sadly.

  “Maybe they’ll keep part of the Fringe open,” Ubu said. “Clean it up a little, then keep it as a place for Mudville tourists. So they can get drunk and gamble away their souls to the Hiline companies.”

  “Consolidation,” said Beautiful Maria. It was the foulest word she could think of.

  Ubu turned away from the Mainstream. A whore’s metallic laughter floated toward him from the Fringe.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve gotta do some business.”

  *

  Ubu heard the locker close behind him. His right hands held a charged silver glitch rod, two feet in length. There were faded red warning labels pasted on it. A red LED blinked urgently by his hand, telling him it was armed. His finger was near its trigger.

  He felt his arms tremble. His tool chest banged against his left knee. His breath was quick. He paused outside Pasco’s door and wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.

  He stepped in. The front half of the compartment was empty. Full of disordered junk, fastlearn cartridges tossed on furniture, pictures of the family Pasco had lost in the airlock explosion, printouts lying under a light tracing of dust, unlooked at for years, computer consoles pulled apart and never put back together ... all levels of Pasco’s madness, receding into the years, awaiting excavation like some old desert mound on Earth. Ubu put down the tool chest. His heart pounded. He wiped his face again, stretched out his left lower arm, opened the door into the bedroom.

  It isn’t murder, he told himself.

  The android sex toy was sitting on Pasco’s rack. She looked up at Ubu as he came in. Ubu knew he would remember that forever, the toss of the short blond curls, the flash of the silver-and-lapis stud in her left nostril, the look in the wide green eyes. Seeing the glitch rod, and knowing. Kitten was naked, as Ubu had more or less expected, wearing only the jewelry that Pasco, in his senile passion, had given her. Rings flickered on her fingers, bangles danced from her wrists. A sapphire hung between her breasts.

  Ubu stopped in the doorway. Just go in and do it, he told himself.

  “Pop’s dead,” he said.

  “I know,” said Kitten. Her eyes glittered with artificial tears. “He left me a message. He said he loved me.”

  “He would.” The glitch rod at the end of his upper right arm seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He shifted it to the other right hand.

  Kitten had been three years on the ship. Pasco had kept her in his cabin for a week before Ubu found out about her. He’d heard her tinkling, idiot laugh from his father’s double cabin as he passed by, then heard his father’s answering laughter. Somehow he’d known it wasn’t a hype.

  He had just got his growth then, shooting up a foot in the space of a year, and the spurt had left him clumsy. His muscles ached from the onset of mones that stressed him like stellar tides. Passions swept through him like fever: hatred, resentment, lust, fury ... He worked like a demon to exorcize them and did his best to avoid Pasco and Maria, spending his onstation time alone, a solo shooter.

  At the sound of the laughter Ubu stopped in the corridor, turned... and somehow his feet got tangled and he had to throw out his four arms for balance. Unknowing laughter mocked him, leaving a scattering burnt-orange color in his mind, a sour taste on his tongue. Anger rose unbidden. He opened Pasco’s door.

  Kitten stood on a small table, her arms raised, her legs apart for balance. Little-girl laughter tinkled from her throat. Her green eyes looked into his. The laughter continued.

  Pasco was crouched in front of her among a scatter of pills, black and red. His slack furry body was marked with blue and ochre. He was painting her, the spray gun in his hand. Violent colors gleamed wetly across her body. The room smelled of sex. There was something in Pasco’s laughter Ubu had never heard, something that made sharp metallic colors dance in his skull.

  Pasco made a sound in his throat and rose from his crouch. He put his arms around her, pressing himself to her color, smearing himself against her. He reached a hand up behind her back to grasp her hair, pulling her head back as he pressed his head between her breasts. Her laughter never stopped, never changed its tone. Ubu could see the programmed puppet-sounds vibrating in her taut throat.

  Her eyes never left him. Even as he closed the door he could see her watching him through slitted lids. He stared at the face of the closed door, wishing it were possible to forget.

  Kitten’s eyes were open now, watching Ubu standing in the door with the glitch rod in his hands. Tears ran down her face.

  “I loved him, Ubu,” she said. “I’m programmed that way. Programmed to love what my partner loves, a kind of feedback.”

  Did he teach you to cry? Ubu wondered. Or did that come in standard programming? “I know,” he said.

  He knew she was an idiot by most standards, a puppet. Good enough for sex, if your taste went that way, useless for anything else. Even conversation was highly limited, mostly parroting what she’d been told, that and the laughter that sprayed from her whenever her small mind told her the time might be appropriate. A parasite on the ship, unable to contribute even to her small upkeep. Pasco had bought a rich man’s toy and put Runaway in hock to do it.

  She was smart enough, though, to want to survive. Kitten gazed up at him. Licked her lips.

  Do it, Ubu thought. It’s not killing.

  “I could learn to love someone else,” she said. “It’s an easy operation. You don’t have to... use that for it. Just a little adjustment. I could be whatever you want.”

  And have me senile by the time I’m fifteen, Ubu thought. Dancing on the end of her robot’s strings while she laughs her idiot laugh. He stepped forward, shifted the rod to his upper set of hands. Kitten flinched back against the wall.

  He pushed the rod out. Remembered paint gleaming on her synthetic flesh, the smell of sex, the sound of Pasco’s laughter.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said quickly. “I’ll stay out of your way.” Her voice rose to a wail. “Why don’t you like me?”

  Ubu closed his eyes, not wanting to see. A fist seemed to tighten in his throat. He pushed the glitch rod forward blindly, swept it left and right with his finger on the trigger.

  A crack of electricity. The fall of something heavy onto pillows. The smell of burning.

  Ubu opened his eyes. Kitten lay crumpled on the rack, a scorch mark on her flank where the glitch rod had touched. She was wiped, her programming erased. Her eyes were open. There was a tremor in her thigh. Her fingers twitched randomly. Already the scorch mark on the synthetic skin was beginning to heal.

  If he’d had the oral codes that controlled her, he wouldn’t have had to do it this way. But only Pasco had the codes. He hadn’t trusted anyone else around his blonde obsession.

  Ubu dropped the rod to the padded floor. He turned and went back to the front compartment for his toolbox. Brought it in, put it on the rack, opened it.

  The smell of burning was still in his throat, unforgettable. He reached out to Kitten’s shoulder, feeling the warm touch of perfect skin. He turned her over. Her limbs splayed over the rack. Ubu took out a knife, cut the skin between the shoulder blades, parted it before it healed. Revealed the control switch. He inserted a screwdriver and shut off the android’s automatic systems.

  “Ubu.” Maria’s voice, grating in the ship intercom. “Fifteen minutes to shoot.”

  Ubu took the jewelry from the cooling body. Turned the head, pulled the silver stud from the nose, felt the flesh resist and then tear, knew the small brutal act would be in his mind forever—far longer than the wound he’d just made, which would heal when Kitten was reconnected.

  He put the jewelry in a pillowcase. Sell this stuff, he thought. It would look nice on Maria, but he didn’t want to see it again.

  The sheet under Kitten’s head was turning wet. Her tear reservoir, draining.

  Ubu knew that he was not going to be able to forget this, that he would relive it, the smell, the anger, that final electric snap and the draining of ionized tears ... it would come back to him. He stood up and walked blindly out of the compartment to find another plastic bag. Stuff ’er in, he thought, sell her once we reach Caliban Station.

  He was trying hard not to feel like a murderer.

  *

  “Your play?” The bouncer leered at Beautiful Maria from behind his window of glass. Teeth gleamed below a mustache sharp as an icepick. Black eyes stared stonily from behind the perfect round metal frames of a black-ribboned pince-nez.

  Beautiful Maria gazed at the double reflections of herself. “Blackhole,” she said. Red Nine was moving through her veins. Her nerves jittered, flared.

  “Stakes? You got, or just looking?” The steel smile came again. “Mudviller inside, looking for a shooter femme, maybe. Has that yearning gaze anyway. You could be his good luck.”

  “Ten-twenty,” Maria said. She held up a black credit counter. The smile broadened.

  “Be my guest, shooter femme. Take my word. Tide riders be lucky at blackhole.”

  Especially me, Maria thought. There was an electric buzz as the bolt locked back. She pressed the doorplate and it swung in. The door sighed shut behind her, the lock snapping closed.

  The place was called Stellar City, a deliberately old-fashioned name, a self-mockery. It was on the third level of a ramshackle collection of eateries, a cheap hotel, a used-clothing boutique. Maria had to climb a narrow foam ramp to get here. The walls were made of tempafoam: the place had recently moved from somewhere else on the Fringe, would probably move again before long. The casino was dark, spotlights picking out the active tables. Fringe people, systers, shooters. The room was silent with concentration, sweat, and thought.

  The Mudviller was obvious, overdressed like he was expecting weather here, a middle-aged man staring hopelessly at the naked brown breasts of the woman who was dealing vingt-et-un. Beautiful Maria grinned. Nobody was going to be his luck tonight, not as long as he kept gazing at the distractions the house was throwing in his face.

  Red Nine pulsed in her nerves. The people in the room seemed to move through the smoky room in slow motion. Maria moved to the back, to the blackhole booth. She stepped inside, closed the transparent door. When she sat on the padded chair, the long metal projectors, each topped by a delicate web of stimulus antennae, eased out of the walls with a slow hiss, each pointed at her head. She put the credit counter in the slot. Pressed the button. Black diamond space exploded in her head, filled with burning singularities, the radio cry of dying matter.

  Maria was in a silver metal sphere called a pinball. She floated in the dark vacuum. Distantly, unspeakable gravities tugged at her. The object of the game was to navigate from place to place by dipping into the singularities’ gravity wells, flinging the pinball in and out of the black holes’ embrace. There was a time limit to provide a sense of urgency, and the computer would try to glitch up the ride, introducing random variations: making singularities appear in the path of the pinball after it had accelerated too fast to avoid them, running variations on the stars’ densities, causing fuel shortages, announcing shutdowns of various parts of her navigation aids and simulation screens. She could opt for an easy ride or a hard one, the payoff rising with the difficulty. It was enough like a regular singularity shoot to produce a sense of familiarity, but enough unlike one so that she couldn’t trust her shooter’s reflexes.

  Red Nine burned at her, urging her to choose the maximum. She overrode the impulse and chose a medium level, deciding to stretch her nerves a little first. She placed her bet.

  Numbers spun in the lower right corner of her field of vision, the seconds ticking away. There were cash bonuses if she made her ride in less than seventy-five percent of her allotted time. A destination star glowed briefly, along with the number of black holes she would have to play tag with along the way.

  “Okay,” she murmured, and began her acceleration. Red Nine fired her neurotransmitters and sparked in her brain as she chose a path, as she felt a gravity well reaching out to touch her. She looked into the black negation before her. Smiled. And felt the pinball moan, torn by the tides of gravity.

  Reflex handled the pinball, its burns and course corrections, its dives into the pulsing wells of gravity. Another part of her mind plotted strategy. And, as she played, as the time counters ran in the lower corner of her vision and the pinball spun along its track, she felt another level of awareness arise, slow and sure, a sense of the electronic world that was the complex computer simulation ... an intuition of the bits of energy that flew at the speed of light and formed the illusion of space, interacted with the decisions that flickered from her mind. The electron world hovered at the back of her awareness, a constant presence.