Dangerous City, Dark Skyway It is a vast thing. Though the physicists will inform you that it is not a thing at all; rather, it is the lack thereof. It is, after all, called space, although this appellation is not entirely accurate either. There's a lot out there, a world of ships, planets, rock, dust, and drifting metal. The appalling hugeness of it, the distance involved, instills a silence, an awe. The concepts alone are enough to twist the brain, never mind the reality of it.
But it is vast. And it is black.
----- Ari Kloss had dreams about space. They were not the naïve fantasies she had imagined as a child growing up in New Lessak City's lower levels, where black exhaust dust from the skyway above filtered down through the muggy air. Nor did they hold the giddy excitement of her teenage years: daydreams of space gangsters hanging around cruddy shuttleports, assassins with flashy good looks, hotshot pilots, fast ships. Space terrified her now. Her dreams were accompanied by heart-racing hot panic flashes, shallow breaths in the dark while her hand fumbled for the light switch, and underneath it all a downward-spiraling sense of flat melancholy. But when the cool blue light, supposedly designed to maximize calm, as if Ari knew anything about calm, flooded the tiny room with its secondhand furniture and tossed-about uniforms, there was no one there. No one there at all, except the faintly taunting stars outside her window, and memories of blackness.
Ari wiped the fine layer of sweat from her hairline and leaned her forehead against the cool window of the railshuttle. Above her and to the right, private vehicles roared past on the city skyway, held on their individual paths by bright tracings of blue lights on the right and yellow on the left. The sky had the dim pinkish glow of very early morning. In the last two years, she had found herself in the uncomfortably lonely position of being neither up nor down. She could never go back to the lower levels, down out of the light, where the grimy silver bases of the city's light towers and shuttle tracks stood fixed to the tiled ground like the roots of great metal trees. But nor would she go… well, up, as she euphemized it to herself. Up there.
The railshuttle shuddered to a stop. Ari lifted her head from the window. The man beside her poked the X in the corner of his pocket reader. He had been perusing a newsclip about Betav, which vanished as the screen went gray and shut down. "Bloody Interrogators again." He lowered his voice to a gruff whisper and inclined his head toward Ari. "Don't they realize people have fucking jobs?"
She did not answer him. Her lips seemed to have frozen, along with her limbs. She could feel the heartbeat in her temple, in her clammy fingertips.
"Them vigilantes," continued the man, barely audibly. "I heard they hit several pods of Aticom's squids yesterday. Detonated them. Debris cluttering up the Belsabb shuttleport, and he's jaggered, he is. Can't get anything into the air." He paused. "Least that's what I heard."
Ari nodded. That was how news came these days, in whispered 'I heard's, because the papers were being paid off. Everyone knew the real news wasn't downloadable anymore. There was no one left in New Lessak City to write it, or who would risk writing it in any case. Since Isos Tri, the Underground and everyone who'd privately had leanings that way was… well, wherever they were, they weren't on New Lessak. Ari's hand shook. She could see it, the long fingers vibrating where they lay on the armrest, and she jumped, shoving her hands into the pocket of her waitgirl's apron. There was a clack of hard-soled boots in the outer tube.
The man swallowed, with a bobbing motion, and smiled at her. "Nothing for a young thing like you to be worried about. Me? Voted for Ando Aticom before he were no good. That's all I'm guilty of. But here, they'll be in with the wires any minute." He licked his lips and fell silent.
The wires were a device the Interrogators attached magnetically to the outside of the railshuttle to listen to passengers' conversations while they searched it for members of the Underground. Any complaints, any bitter grumblings, could be construed as treason. Ari had seen a woman hauled off once for muttering under her breath that she was ten minutes late for work. The wires caught everything. She heard a click and a thunk, as the door slid sideways. The Interrogator was a middle aged man, uniformed in burgundy but hatless, which usually signified that he was high up in the security force. He stomped to the center of the aisle, and raised a printout of three faces to chest level. "We are looking," he announced without preamble, "for these two women and this man. Wanted for grand theft of an upper level apartment and the murder of two small children on the premises." He paused. "These are criminals without mercy." There was a very slight rustle of indrawn breath.
The Interrogators would take notice if you didn't look at the pictures. Ari crossed her eyes to blur her vision. It was what she always did when the Interrogators came. No one could accuse her of recognizing them if she hadn’t seen their faces. Two blobs of burgundy floated before her strained eyes. The stillness in the railshuttle pressed in on her.
The Interrogator snapped the printout down. He made a hand signal to someone outside the shuttle door, and strode out. No one said anything. After a minute or two the railshuttle squealed to life and inched grittily along the tracks.
Ari exhaled.
NLC was a city in the grip of something. People scurried to their jobs with their heads down, and the very air itself seemed to have edginess mixed in with its ordinary smells of metal and exhaust. It wasn't that people were outwardly nervous. Rather, it was a tension that roiled and oozed and grated, behind the glass facades, until it grew on you like a fungus. She felt it as she exited the railshuttle on Level 50 and began to weave through the station. It was a trepidation that brooded. Between that feeling and the lurid space dreams, Ari had a permanent dull pain between her eyes.
Even here, in the upscale San Aliyah District, city security was in evidence. She flashed her ID at the guard who leaned in the doorway of the 50th level and said, "Shufar's Coin." He barely glanced at her. Once upon a time the name on the ID, printed in official block lettering under the image of a girl with straight red hair, had been her own. This one said "Xhena Mekkai." Xhena had been born in Calced Falls, far from NLC, nearly on the opposite side of New Lessak. Xhena was a small town girl who'd moved to the greatest city in the Federated Planets with aspirations of being a star. Or, Xhena was working the tables to put herself through uni. Or a young mother of three struggling to make ends meet after being ditched by her wiry tattooed gambler of a lover. Xhena could be anybody. It usually depended on how bad a day Ari had had.
They called her Red at the restaurant. She didn't know whether to find it endearing that she had a nickname or insulting that no one seemed to remember that her name was Xhena. If it had been her real name, perhaps "insulting" would have won out. As it was, she found it difficult to summon up the will to care. She was the middle waitgirl on one of the more successful teams at Shufar's Coin. It was a pricey eatery located around the corner from one of the major government buildings, and famed for its wall-to-wall windows and décor of shiny blue-white sculptures. Customers said it was like eating in the clouds, and indeed the 50th level was almost that high up. This close to the weather shield you could sometimes even see if a storm was going on above, from the faint lashings of light that skipped across the shield membrane and may or may not have been real lightning somewhere above. The view didn't impress Ari anymore. She hurried through the service door with her head down and shoulders hunched. Maybe if no one looked at her, no one would notice she was late.
"Hey Red!" Her front waitman leaned his bulk against the kitchen wall as he scrolled through the orders on his touchpad. "We've got a single at Table 19. Get on the drinks." She whipped her long hair back, securing it with a metal clip, and pushed through the swinging doors into the restaurant. Table 19 was a window table in their section. Usually the host wouldn't put a single on a window table, but it was still early, and there were only five or six guests, few enough that the restaurant still appeared tranquil, almost dormant. She halted.
Ari felt the blood drain from her ears. Her face and head were light, as if they hovered above her neck, detached from the rest of her body. The woman seated at Table 19 with her back to Ari was diminutive, and wore a green scarf on her head. But it was what she saw streaming neatly down the woman's back from under the scarf that caused Ari's breath to disappear: black braids, like a nest of tiny snakes. She saw a flash of white stars on a black backdrop, and was hit with a wave of nausea. She knew, with the dead certainty of encroaching fate, that it was over. The game was up, the dance had ended. Ari had known this day was coming; it was the source of the hanging dread that wrapped about her as she slept. Sooner or later, your chips come due.
This was her gallows, and she walked to it. With a false waitgirl's smile stretching her lips, she pulled her touchpad out of her apron and said robotically, "Good morning, my name is Xhena and I'll be your server."
The woman who stared up at Ari had mocking eyes with alien white irises. The grin on her face revealed a row of gleaming teeth. "Xhena, is it?" she said, the faint twang of an accent just audible. She settled back in her seat and propped a knee up on the table edge. Her white eyes shone eerily in the dim morning light. "Fix me a cup of Carulta juice, Xhena. I believe this day is turning out better than I thought."
Copyright 2005 Sarah L. Tolcser