“Bossrider,” he said.

  The old man’s deep eyes turned up to him. Marco raised his bulb, fired espresso past his lips. Making a production of it.

  “Bossrider,” he said finally. “Ubu Roy. Sit.”

  “Maybe we can help each other,” Ubu said.

  “I don’t think that’s very likely.”

  Marco was a tyrant— even his own family admitted that. De Suarez Expressways, his trading company, had been molded in his own peculiar image, much as Runaway’s had in Pasco’s. De Suarez femmes were permitted to have only male children. Marco thought things were easier if each ship had only an all-male cadre, a family united not only by genetics but by sexual attitudes. All women on de Suarez ships came originally from the outside.

  Ubu thought Marco was probably as crazy as Pasco, just not as disorganized.

  Still, there was no one else to turn to. Ubu had been up and down Angel’s rim all day, looking for buyers for Runaway’s hold full of mining equipment. “See Marco” was all he’d been told. “Marco’s the only one who’s got mining contracts since Long Reach folded. Marco’s made a deal with PDK. He’s running Kompanie supplies to Seven Systems Mining on Trincheras. Marco’s in a zero-gee bar in the hub. Called the Bahía. Doing business with a mutanto family.”

  Yeah, okay, Ubu thought. Might as well give in to the inevitable. Long Reach was locked in an extended self-destruction ceremony, tangled up with creditors, revenue agents, confused lines of corporate responsibility, half-completed contracts and takeover attempts. Half the board of directors had scattered for parts unknown, the Navy had to mount a rescue mission to starving citizens in one of Long Reach’s new settlements, and a lot of company records were missing. The only thing that was clear at this point was that no one was getting paid.

  There were no buyers in the Angelica market. Besides the defunct Long Reach operation, only Biagra-Exeter was involved in Angelica System, and Biagra planned years in advance for this sort of thing: they were a self-contained company, keeping major supply purchases entirely in-house, and weren’t interested in picking up independent contracts even at a profit.

  Ubu avoided filing a claim against Dig Angel for the present: that would have made his difficulty part of the public record, let everyone onstation know that Runaway was in trouble and that he was desperate for a sale. So Beautiful Maria was sent off to earn some credit in a Fringe casino, and Ubu took his act up to the hub.

  He didn’t want to deal with Marco. He wanted either a fellow shooter, who could be trusted to sympathize, or maybe a disinterested Hiliner rep who collected a nice salary whether or not he squeezed the competition. He didn’t trust an in-between like Marco, not someone who was shooter enough to understand Ubu’s difficulties and Hiliner enough to take advantage of them.

  But Marco it was. De Suarez Expressways, Ltd., owned five ships and quite possibly had the capital to take on a venture of this sort, and if they didn’t have capital they had access to PDK’s. On his way to the Bahía, Ubu fired up some neurotransmitter multiplier, Red Eight, more for superstitious reasons than for any real belief it would do him any good. If you didn’t have the smarts to be a bossrider in the first place, he’d always figured, messing with your brain chemistry wasn’t going to help.

  “Maybe we can’t help each other that much,” Ubu said, strapping himself to the table opposite the old man. “But let’s talk anyway.”

  Marco inclined his head. Pale rose highlights shone off his white hair. “Be listening, Ubu Roy.”

  Behind him, the mutanto guitarist, playing with his upper arms while hanging by his lower from a castoff bar, was attacking each note as if it was personally responsible for the death of his way of life. Every striff cry was a marching tune; the question was where this particular parade was headed.

  Ubu stared into Marco’s deep yellow eyes. “You have a contract with Seven Systems,” he said. “I’ve got some of Dig Angel’s equipment in my hold. I’d like to lay off some of Dig Angel’s debts. Maybe you’d like to buy it for resale.”

  The old man sniffed. Ubu could see a shine of green mucus smearing Marco’s upper lip: he’d been sitting in his corner of the bar all day, doing his deals, inhaling so much neurobooster the stuff was running out his nostrils.

  Marco looked at Ubu from out of his death’s head. “Why not take it outsystem and sell it to Seven Systems yourself?”

  “I’ve got a contract to pick up a hold full of pharmaceuticals at China Light for delivery to Salvador and Ascención. China Light doesn’t need mining equipment. I’d hate to pay storage or let the contract go just to make a run to Seven Systems, not when I could sell to Seven Systems by selling to you.”

  All of which was a lie, though Ubu figured Marco would have no way to know for sure. The truth was he’d only got the OttoBanque loan in the first place because he’d talked Maria into glitching their system. The loan was coming due in less than a week and the only way to extend it was to glitch the OttoBanque here, doubling the chance the bank’s comps would notice the fact they’d been fiddled with.

  Unless he could sell his cargo, Ubu wouldn’t be able to pay the new taxes and docking charges here at Angel Station, charges raised by the Multi-Pollies as part of their Consolidation policy.

  Ubu looked coolly into Marco’s whiskered face and gave him his best shot. “Besides,” he said, “I hear you’ve got an exclusive contract with PDK and Seven Systems. I don’t know what kind of terms you have with them, but PDK might reconsider the deal if I sold to them direct and they realized they could get another supplier out here.”

  The striff cry came to an end in a rolling barrage of percussion and broken guitar arpeggios. Mutantos banged four hands, cheered.

  Marco’s expression didn’t change, but he reached down to his lap, came up with a chak of neurotransmitter juice, and fired one round up each nostril. Which meant he was thinking real hard.

  Behind his expressionless face, Ubu smiled.

  *

  The hype was called Renewal. It was made on a planet where people spoke mostly Mandarin, but there were subtitles in Melange as well as the new-style ideograms for those who spoke other Asian dialects. Before the story was very old, Ubu was thankful he couldn’t hear what the people were saying.

  The hype had been widely praised, and the story was supposedly true. It was about dispossessed shooters, people who through their irresponsibility and fecklessness had lost everything, and how a brave few were rehabilitated and turned to useful work by the caring people of a groundling community.

  The story didn’t mention how the shooters had lost their livelihood. It said nothing about how the groundlings had voted for a government who had sent Multi-Pollies to the human core who then in turn decided to implement Consolidation and destroy a way of life.

  Whoever made it had probably never met any shooters, never been out of a planetary well in their life. The hype’s shooter life was wildly exaggerated, all madness and drug-induced brutality, though among all the decadence were a few pure-hearted young people longing for a better way of life.

  There was so much missing, Ubu thought. The sense of community, the ways families actually work out here. The music: not a musical instrument to be seen.

  “Fuck them,” Ubu said, and reached for the holo controls. He knew already how it was going to end. The hero was going to rehabilitate himself and end up with the farm girl; the hero’s best friend would die tragically as a result of his chronic drug use; the six-year-old blond orphan girl would be rescued from her brute of a father; and every remaining shooter over the age of sixteen would go to hell by the shortest possible route.

  As far as Ubu could see, hell seemed the way to go.

  He hammered at the controls. The hype’s sudden disappearance from the lounge’s threedee screen seemed to leave a yawning gap in Ubu’s heart. Is that how they really see us? he wondered.

  Anger rattled through him aimlessly, like stones thrown in a bucket. Billions had seen the hype. Billions now knew that the shooter families were dying because of their own inherent character flaws, and were confident that civilization could no longer afford such barbarians on its fringes. What the hell could Ubu possibly do to change their minds?

  He pulled the lounge control board in front of him, called up the hype directory, scanned the list of available recordings. Nothing he came up with seemed to fit his particular mood of aggressive longing.

  A title scrolled past. He stopped the scrolling, reversed, gave a grin.

  His theme hype. He hadn’t seen it in years.

  He’d come across it by accident six or seven years ago, just scrolling through the list looking for something to do. The hype had been in computer memory since its installation a century before, one of a whole series of lectures and classic hype given away free with the old Torvald. Most weren’t interesting to Ubu, though Pasco had watched a lot of them, but for some reason—maybe the weird title— Ubu had found one of them interesting enough to sample it.

  The hype was animated, but the animation looked as if it had been done by a brain-damaged six-year-old armed with crayons: crude figures with big heads that never seemed to stay the same shape, backgrounds sketched in lightly if at all, objects appearing and disappearing without rhyme or reason. Even day and night seemed to change from moment to moment, without any break in the scene— though Ubu, whose concept of day and night was entirely the result of seeing hypes set in Mudville, didn’t even consider this odd until he stopped to think about it. The main character was a potbellied little king who wore a crown shaped like a jagged mountain range and clutched in his hand what looked like a toilet brush. He careened about the story at breakneck velocity, stealing money, gobbling food, chopping off heads, and running away from battles.

  Ubu loved it. It was as if the little king were some mainline to the primal Id, a creature of pure undirected impulse. The madcap, bloody anarchy of it rang in his mind for days.

  Ubu, whom Pasco had originally named Xavier, decided to change his name to that of the crazed king. The mutable terrain depicted, with all its crudity and weird variability, seemed somehow navigable to him, seemed to make more sense than the human interface with which he was normally expected to interact. Certainly, even with all the violence, it seemed more safe.

  He tapped the computer deck and called the hype from the files. The king roared in and began barking out his plots. Heads started falling left and right with sounds like bladders breaking wind.

  He thought of the people who made Renewal, and wished he could unleash King Ubu on them all.

  *

  Enclosed in the silken curtains of Blue Heaven, Beautiful Maria felt she wanted to be in motion. She took Kit’s hand and glided down the rim, her feet almost weightless. A thorny plant with pink blossoms, planted in the street’s centerline, gave off a sweet pheromone smell. She laughed.

  “You want to go dancing?” Kit asked.

  “Maybe later. Right now I’d like to walk.” She skimmed over the surface, walked through a hologram advertising custom genetics, saw green laser burn holo helixes on her skin. Electronic awareness hummed in the back of her head.

  She looked at Kit. “Your family won’t let you shoot, right?” she asked.

  He looked at the floor with a stubborn frown. “Yeah. I said.”

  “You want some experience? We can apprentice you to Runaway.”

  Kit stopped moving in surprise, hung on to her fingertips. The green hologram turned orange as it crossed his features. “I— yeah, I’d like that.”

  “For a consideration,” Maria said. “Your family would have to pay for your training.”

  He swallowed. “I don’t know if they’d go along with that.”

  “It’s something to think about. You’d be more valuable to them. On Runaway you’d get experience handling cargo, station approach, everything.”

  The hologram moved down the street. “I’d like that,” Kit said again.

  Maria tugged him down the rim. She felt as if she was floating, with only Kit holding her to the alloy floor. She passed a male-model android toy dancing under blue lights in a window, a Fringe barker with a synthetic smile running a game on a pair of Mudville tourists. “Sure it’s real,” he said. Maria felt a wave of uneasiness. The android had a male body, but Kitten’s face. She tried to shrug the feeling away.

  “How’d you like to pimp for androids?” Maria asked Kit. “Jesus Rice.”

  “Mudvillers don’t know the difference.”

  “I guess you’d get to keep a hundred percent of the take,” Maria said, still dubious about the idea.

  “I like your hair. Can I touch it?”

  She tossed her head, smiled. “If you like.”

  Kit moved his grip on her fingers from his left hand to his right, began to stroke her hair with his left hand. She could feel his gentle touch on her spine, her neck. As caressing as Blue Heaven. The flurried electronic traffic of the rim flickered on the edge of her perceptions. Maria steered down an alley. Twilight bordered onto night. She turned and kissed him. A touch, chemical or possibly Kit, trickled down her ribs. A sad dolores ballad moaned distantly from a bar. He raised a hand to lift a long silk riverlet of her hair, and his head dipped to burrow between it and her neck. His lips brushed her throat.

  “Let’s go someplace,” Maria said.

  “Too many people on Abrazo.” Warm breath fluttered against her skin. “How about Runaway?”

  She thought about Pasco, his holographic ghost frozen somehow in the macroatomic heart of Runaway’s main computer. She shook her head. “Same problem.” She felt a hand touching her moned breast. Warmth filled her heart. She kissed his ear. “How about a hotel? I’ve earned some credit today.”

  He stepped back for a moment, looked at her with solemn eyes. “I’d like it to be in a nice place. You know. Not just a shacktube.”

  Beautiful Maria smiled at him. His dark skin seemed to reflect her glow. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Don’t worry. I’ve got enough.”

  *

  Ubu swam out of the Bahía on a growing wave of adrenaline and fear. He’d cut as close a deal with Marco as he dared, and he was still far from out of debt. If he couldn’t find some outbound cargo in a few days OttoBanque was going to foreclose on him and Beautiful Maria, sell Runaway’s singularity drive to clear the debt, and leave them high and dry on Angel Station. Without its drive Runaway was only useful as scrap— hundred-year-old spare parts weren’t worth much on today’s market. If they were lucky they’d find work as riggers on a syster ship, confined forever to the reaches of this one system. If not— Mudville.

  The computers were what had soiled the deal. Dig Angel had been starting operations in this system and had wanted everything, mining robots, tools, parts, and the custom-tooled Kanto computers to control them. Any established mining op, like Seven Systems, would already have enough comp capacity to run their operations. Marco had only bought the robots and parts.

  His mind numb, Ubu dropped to the rim, where there was gravity. The bright lights of the Outside Life gleamed around him. The holographic deity in front of the Laughing God Casino boomed out his hearty amusement. People dressed in grey and brown glanced at him as he strode up the pale marble deck, their eyes lingering a shade too long, just long enough to let him know he was out of place. People in Hiliner uniforms refused even to look at him.

  He went to station central and filed his claim against Dig Angel and Long Reach. Maybe OttoBanque would extend the loan, with the Dig Angel claim as collateral.

  Maybe Mudvillers would learn how to fly. Ubu figured the odds were about the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kit and Beautiful Maria sat cross-legged on their hotel bed. On the bed between them was curried something-or-other, robot room-service food, eaten off recycled white metal trays with disposable alloy forks lighter than plastic. The Hotel Susperides was on the edge of the Fringe, where it could attract minor bureaucrats from the Outside Life and tourists eager to have the Fringe element take their money.

  “Not in years,” Kit said. He was talking about his mother. “She and my father were always fighting. Finally she left the ship at Masquerade Station. That was six years ago.”

  “Sorry,” said Maria.

  “She got a job in a casino, but the place went under. I think she went to Mudville. I haven’t heard from her in three years.”

  Beautiful Maria sighed. “Must be hard.”

  A stray memory bobbed disconnectedly to the surface of Kit’s mind. “She kept cockatoos,” he said. He hadn’t thought about the big white birds in years.

  Maria took a shot of her lemonade. “I’d like to show you Runaway. But before you go there, you should know—sometimes my pop is there.”

  Kit looked at her with surprise. “I—I thought...”

  “He’s dead. Yes. But before he died he made hundreds of recordings of himself giving lectures on all sorts of topics. He buried them in our old Torvald and programmed them to appear at random. He’s a random glitch—hard to find. We were afraid to wipe him because something important might go with him.”

  Kit frowned and took a hit from his bulb of Lark. “How does he... make himself known?”

  Maria grinned. “A holographic projection. Sometimes it’s an old one, sometimes more recent. Sometimes he babbles, sometimes he just stands there. Sometimes he almost seems able to have a conversation.” She reached out to take his hand. “I didn’t want to take you to Runaway. Figured you’d freak if you saw him.”