The image vanished. Maria’s mind danced, flew, fluttered, pirouetted into the future.

  *

  By the time Runaway jumped into the Angelica System, Beautiful Maria had been onstation four weeks, making plans. After a few days in near-zero gee, she’d moved to the outer rim of the wheel, a two-room suite in a Fringe hotel, and spent half of each day under the alpha trades, her mind absorbing the contents of one fastlearn unit after another.

  Economics, law, history. Her skull filled with an ordered schema of disconnected facts. She would have to provide a connecting framework herself. She, Maria thought, and Ubu.

  Within minutes of Runaway’s docking— Ubu had paid extra to put himself at the head of the unloading queue— Beloved’s identical resinous containers began rolling out of the autoloaders. The personnel tube hadn’t even been connected yet, so Maria waited, bouncing lightly on tiptoe as a river of containers came pouring out of Runaway’s cargo bay, Beloved’s product flowing endlessly into humanity.

  After the light above the lock went green, Maria ghosted up the accordion-walled tube toward Runaway, As she cycled through the scarred ship’s lock she felt the ebbing of a tension she hadn’t known she’d possessed. Familiar electron patterns began to sing in her mind. She was home again.

  As the inner hatch began to roll up, Beloved’s scrambled time signatures began to cascade from the other side. Maria stiffened. This was not a part of her comfortable memories.

  Ubu waited on the other side. He hesitated, then came forward and took her in his four strong arms.

  *

  Ubu talked nonstop for hours, first while cooking dinner and then while sitting with Beautiful Maria in the lower lounge. She sat on the old sofa and listened to Ubu run on about his negotiations, his visit to Beloved, his plans for their future. Expanded trade, items tailored for one another’s markets, the slow convergence and mutual absorption of humanity and Belovedkind... Maria listened to it all, sitting with white Maxim purring in her arms, but insisted after a while that Ubu shut off Beloved’s music. Without the drumbeat, his thoughts seemed a little more disconnected. Maria found that disturbing.

  “I’ve been teaching myself to think like Beloved,” he said. “We need that.”

  “Just so you don’t try to become her.”

  He gave her a look. “We need that, too.”

  Maria straightened in alarm. Maxim shifted uncomfortably in her arms. “Not be liking that, shooter man.”

  Ubu shrugged. “I’m halfway there already,” he said. “Her brain is maybe a hundred times larger than mine, but my memory is better.”

  “Your memory is what makes you unique.”

  His face tautened. “Twelve is dead. Beloved had him killed.”

  Chimes of sadness seemed to sound softly in Maria, the vibrations ringing in her nerves. Twelve was another one she’d used, another who had paid for it. “We did it to him,” she said.

  Ubu’s fingers tapped nervous rhythms against his bare chest. “He was contaminated. That’s the point. He had too much human in him, and that frightened Beloved. She killed him, and I think that was her big mistake.” Ubu glanced toward the ceiling. “I’ve got a new volitional this time, Twenty-six. Same model, different number. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t move around. He just sits there in auxcontrol and listens to Beloved’s patterns on the sizer. Beloved doesn’t want him to find out anything about us, not unless he gets lucky and stumbles across something that will give Beloved the advantage.” He grinned. “I’m not making those kinds of mistakes any more. That’s why I’ve beaten her. Because I’ve got Beloved in my head, and she won’t put us in hers.” He gave an ironic smile. “But I’m contaminated now. Beloved’s a part of me, and I can’t get rid of her. Her responses are going to be a part of mine forever.”

  “That doesn’t make you her.” Insistently.

  “It makes me better, I think.” He flexed his heavy shoulders thoughtfully. “I’ll be the one of us to deal with Beloved and her species. I’m good at that, I’ve proved it.” He looked at Maria and gave a rueful grin. “You’re the one who’s going to have to cope with humans and keep our own species off our backs. I think I’ve shown that I’m not good at that kind of thing.”

  “You’re...” An ache burned in Maria’s throat. “You’re really all right, you know. You don’t have to become an alien just because—”

  Ubu shook his head. “Become an alien? That’s not the plan.” He gave a brittle laugh. “That’s almost trivial. I’m going to be something better. Something better than a human, too. I’m going to be...” He laughed again. “I’m going to be everything, Maria. Beloved is already a part of my mind, and she’s the most alive thing I’ve ever seen. If I can manage to live long enough, I’ll swallow Beloved, humanity, every perception, every potential. I won’t ever stop being me, Maria. I’ll just be everything else, too.”

  She looked at him, tears stinging her eyes. She bent over Maxim and pressed her cheek to his fur, feeling his warm comfort against her skin. “Stop it,“ she said. “I just want to come home.”

  Ubu was silent for a while. He moved toward her, reached to touch her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize.” He took a breath. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”

  “No.” Maria wanted to scream.

  “I’ve just been out too long. I need to decompress.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Is there anyone we know onstation? Maybe we can meet some friends.”

  It was Ubu I wanted to meet, Maria thought. “I don’t know who’s here,” she said. “I’ve been staying in my hotel and working.”

  “We can find out.”

  She gave a sigh. “Yeah,” she said.

  “We’ve got to change, Maria.” Ubu’s voice was kind. “All Pop ever did was show us how to fail. If we don’t change, we’ll be nothing.”

  Maxim shifted uncomfortably in Maria’s lap. Her tears were making his fur wet. “I don’t want to use people any more,” she said.

  Ubu didn’t offer a reply. His thoughts, she knew, were elsewhere.

  *

  The Fringe was shorter than it had been, losing space as its collective economic power waned. More people seemed packed into a smaller amount of footage. Ubu and Beautiful Maria moved from bar to bar, listened to music, shared drinks with some people they knew. Ubu was reserved, took small bursts of Sharps from his bulb, listened to the clamor of the Sanchez family band. Maria was surprised— Ubu was usually a lot more determined to have a good time after a long series of shoots.

  Clan Sanchez finished their set. It seemed like a good moment to leave. Maria followed Ubu out into a twilight metal street filled with the scents of cooking and humanity. Music roared out of open doorways and stung Maria’s ears. She imagined it all turned eerie, the music lurching to Beloved’s beat, Ubu’s chord structures, the shooters and systers and tourists all members of Beloved’s species, new-model general volitionals marching to alien rhythm...

  Maria shivered.

  Ubu paused, lower hands in pockets. Ahead on the rising slope was brightness, the polished white surface laid down by the encroaching Hiliners. The potbellied Laughing God beckoned outside his casino. Ubu looked at Maria.

  “Shall we invade?” he said.

  “Last time we got the shit beat out of us.”

  He laughed. “Let them be trying it now.”

  They stepped across the invisible line onto the razor-thin insets of white marble. “Gotta live in this world now,” Ubu said. “Gotta learn it. Move in it. Then own it.” He looked at her. “That’s how I see things.”

  “And the Fringe?”

  Ubu looked at his bare feet as they paced along the cool mottled stone. The holographic Laughing God chortled and waved its arms as they passed it to starboard. “We can’t help the Fringe,” he said.

  “No. Wrong. We can.”

  He stopped walking and faced her. His lower hands were still in his pockets. People in grey jackets and striped trousers passed by, gave them suspicious looks. “I don’t want to fight any more battles we’re gonna lose,” he said. “I haven’t got the heart for it any more.”

  “We can’t do everything by ourselves,” Maria said. “We’re building ships and somebody’s got to fly them. Somebody’s got to sell our product. Somebody’s got to do the work of developing these new designs you want to sell everyone.”

  Ubu nodded. “I thought of that. We could put shooters to work, sure. But they’d be our employees. It wouldn’t save their way of life. Be like any other Hiliner outfit hiring them.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. We don’t have to put them on any kind of payroll. We can hire them as crews, as ships. Make them part of an association.”

  Ubu turned and began to move again. The Monte Carlo sprawled for two hundred meters on their left, its façade a shimmering holographic aurora. Autocars moved past on whining electric motors, taking gamblers to and from their hotels.

  “We create the association,” Maria urged. “We can each take twenty-six percent of it, so we can retain control. But the rest— the shooters can buy in. Pay for their shares out of profits. We can cut out the Hiliners entirely.”

  “Let me think about it for a minute.”

  “I want it, Ubu.” Desperately. “I want to save our people.”

  Ubu plunged on, head down, then was brought up short by a blaring horn. An electric car whined by, driven by a white-haired male groundling in a long-sleeved blue suit. Sitting next to him, a hand on his thigh, was a tall moned black-skinned woman with diamonds implanted on her shoulder and breasts. Her face was a cool, expressionless mask.

  Maria’s heart lurched into her throat as she recognized Colette. Who had lost everything when Beautiful Maria broke the bank. The first person Maria had used, and it hadn’t even done Maria any good.

  The car moved on, its occupants not bothering to look at the pair of ragged shooters.

  Colette had survived, Maria thought. Survived, she thought with a hysterical laugh, the same way Maria had.

  Ubu marched on, not seeing. Maria ran to catch up. “I want the association,” she said. “I want it in position to help the people we’ve used. Because if we don’t help them, we’ve used those people for nothing. We’re no better than Marco.”

  “Be not sure.”

  “I’ve turned whore. You’ve turned pimp. And it’s just so we can make a big score?”

  Ubu almost stopped, his shoulders hunching as if he was ducking a blow. He hesitated, then started walking again. Maria almost had to run to keep up.

  “I’ve done a lot of checking. A voluntary association is perfectly legal. We can attach practically any conditions we want to membership, short of slavery.” She gave a breathy laugh. “And I think we could probably work that into it, too, somehow.”

  To their left, a cascade of water fell from the wheel’s tented roof, arched in a brilliant spotlit polychrome line across the open space below as the station rotated out from under it, then fell with a continuous rippling splash into a deep lapis-lined fountain set in the street. It hadn’t been here when they were last onstation. Ubu marched past it without seeing.

  “I want some kind of structure in place when the Multi-Pollies finally figure out what we’re doing,” he said. “We want to be emplaced, a part of the power structure. So that they can’t afford to cut us out.”

  “Shooters can distribute our product everywhere,” Maria said. “We can be in place. Most of them can just move stuff. They don’t even have to know where we’re getting it. And we can keep them alive that way.”

  Ubu said nothing. Pastel holographic adverts scanned past, were reflected in white marble. Here, outside the twenty-four-hour traffic of the Fringe and despite the brightness of the lighting, it was early morning. Hotel lights beckoned from above arched doors. Outside the immediate bustle of the Monte Carlo and the other casinos, there were few people on the street. Robots moved about the surface, polishing the laminated marble.

  She thought about Colette’s face, the hardness there that masked her need for the game, for the Monte Carlo and the Laughing God and the other casinos. The same hardness she’d seen growing in Kit, the hardness that came when you knew how people were going to use you, when maybe you didn’t care any more.

  “We’ve got to trust somebody, sooner or later,” Ubu said.

  “We can try to control those in the know. Make sure that, on joining, they’re not allowed contact outside their ships. Major penalties for anyone who blows the secret, like expulsion from the association. And we could also spread false rumors about where we’re getting the stuff.”

  Ubu looked at her with amusement. “Rumors like what?”

  “Kit told me something. He told me what Marco thought we’d found when we were back on Bezel, when he didn’t know about Beloved. He thought we’d found this settlement of shooters who had gone off beyond the Edge when Consolidation came in, that they’d built their own civilization out there. And they’d been manufacturing compounds and maybe a few other things so generic that they couldn’t really be traced, and dealing secretly for the stuff they couldn’t make themselves. Marco thought we’d found them by accident, and they’d bought us off with this big cargo.”

  Ubu laughed. “Guess it fit all the facts he knew.”

  “We can tell a few people, in confidence, that that’s what’s been going on. And we can tell others that we’re working secretly for different Hiline companies. And everyone will settle for the explanation they like best, at least for a while. We can tell our own people that.”

  Ahead, just beyond the Lucky Counter casino, the white reflective marble came to an end. The twilight Fringe yawned ahead, heralded by the thudding of distant music. Ubu slowed.

  “Funny,” said Beautiful Maria. “We can make Marco’s fantasy come true.”

  “We’ve still got to buy him off somehow.”

  “Offer him membership in the association.”

  Ubu gave her a warning look. “If you say so.”

  “I think we should.”

  “Because if you don’t want to, fuck him. If he mistreated you in any way, we don’t have to deal with him at all. We’ll deny anything he claims and we’ll buy off everyone around him and if he makes trouble we can buy out his contract with PDK and put his whole licehead family out of work.”

  Maria looked at him, at the taut anger in his face, the anger burning in his eyes. “We need him,” she said. “He’s smart. He’s discreet.”

  “Shit.” The muscles worked in Ubu’s heavy shoulders, over his cheekbones. Finally he sighed. “I pimped you to him. I don’t wanna be reminded of that.”

  She stepped up close and put her arms around him. “It was my shoot,” she said. “My plan.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you.”

  “Funny thing about Marco,” Maria said. Ubu’s four hands stroked her hair. “He invented this fantasy about shooters who went off on their own, who helped each other and formed their own settlement and got around Consolidation. He could think of it, but he wouldn’t do it himself. He didn’t believe in it. We’re gonna have to believe in it for him.”

  “It’s up to you. You’re the one who can deal with people.”

  She looked into his pale eyes, saw Beloved there, Twelve, the inhuman pattern that had become a part of him as the electron world had become a part of her, the pattern in Ubu that, somehow, she would have to find some way to cherish.

  “We’ll be okay,” she said. Hoping she believed it.

  CHAPTER 25

  There was Familia’s beacon, and there Abrazo’s, about twenty degrees apart with the colossal burning radio cloud of Montoya 81 between them. They were moving toward a rendezvous with one another and still hanging on, still waiting for Beloved.

  Ubu could taste Blue Ten on the back of his throat. In his mind he could detect a residual mental coolness, aftereffect of the drug.

  He tracked his couch from the shooters’ station to the comm unit. It would take his message about half an hour to reach Abrazo, then half an hour for a signal to return. By that time he figured the Blue Ten would have worn off.

  The other ships would have detected his incoming burst of radiation. Marco and the others would be sitting over the comm boards, waiting for a message from Beloved.

  He put on a headset, tested the mic, then sent out his beacon and ID. He followed this radio punch to Familia’s solar plexus with a personal message, delivered with his face creased by the sunniest of smiles.

  “Bossrider de Suarez,” he said, “I wonder if you can guess how I got here?”

  *

  Ubu’s music was bouncing from the laminate walls of the fuge as Ubu sat under the alpha trades. He saw the comm board lights go on, waited for the full message to read itself into memory, then turned off the music and triggered the message.

  Marco was sitting in a darkened room, with one yellow overhead light that made him look like death. The taut muscles of his neck stood out like ramparts on his thin shoulders. Jesus Rice was a bloody mess on the wall behind, a posture echoed by the crucifix around Marco’s neck. The two of them together looked like some kind of depressing religious allegory.

  “Doesn’t matter how you found out,” Marco said. “You and me got a contract, bossrider. You get a sixth. Nothing more.”

  Gotta admire that Marco, Ubu thought. The man goes down fighting.

  Marco’s voice grated on. “I could tie you up in court for years, Pasco’s Ubu. I could get the Multi-Pollies to embargo you. Remember all that.”

  Ubu took off the trodes and put on the headset. His mind felt clear and perfect as a pool of distilled water. He pressed Transmit.

  “One sixth of zip is zip,” he said. “Your contract with Clan Lustre was broken when you didn’t show up on time— there’s a clause about timely deliveries, remember? That makes our own contract a big zero.” Ubu gave his sunny smile again. “Don’t make me laugh about tying me up in court, either. What you gonna pay the lawyers with when I buy out your contract with PDK?” One of Beloved’s primary patterns, 5-5-5-3-3, rolled through his mind.