Poor little breast fed babies.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I tell him. I stow my guitar into its carrybag and lean it against a wall.
“You got a return chit. Sooner or later they gotta send you back.”
“No, I want to go home now. I can’t take it here anymore,” he stammers and twitches like a jumping bean. “Tattooed Lydia said you could help me out.”
Lydia, oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia? Lydia the tattooed lady? Nice girl—looks like a living picture book. Real friendly too, if you get my drift. And she sends a lot of business my way.
The orb of Earth had long since ceased to be a gollygee sight, but the observation deck was still milling with eager-eyed touries. I look around for goons—both kinds—the loonie goons with the uniform stripes on their arms, and cheesehead goons, the muscle for Concourse queens like Amazing Gracie. The loonie goon from before is gone, and no other two legged security in sight. Plenty of cameras in a public place like this, but cameras don’t bother me. Brahe City Security isn’t who I’m concerned about.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I tell him. “How good is your chit?”
He reaches under his shirt and pulls out a gray plastic tag on a thin chain. Along the underside is a magnetic strip. “It’s got two and a half months left. I need to go home tomorrow.”
Survived two whole weeks Up Here, eh?
“Cool your jets, buddy guy,” I say. “You think you’re booking a jump to Las Vegas? Best I can do is a berth to Mexico City in a week.” That much is almost true. Let’s see what else he’s got. With only so many spots available on transports going Up and Down, even charity has its bounds. And it’s not like he can just walk up to Lunar Authority and say “take me home.” They got iron sphincter schedules with every seat going up or down booked well in advance of some poor moonunit with the fidgets. You can buy whatever kind of visa chits you want Down There but to book an early passage downside, you need an expiring chit saying you’ve used up your prepaid welcome. No Travelers Aid around here. Not yet anyway.
The best Kimochi Stan can do if he wants to bug out is either fake an illness—which will land him in the Quarrines for a spell—or do something to get tossed into Facilities for an undetermined amount of time until Lunar Authority decides they might have some cargo space available. Doing crimes got you put in jail Up Here, but once you got sent Down There you spent even more time in jail. The only smart way to get back to Earth before your time is to get hold of an expiring chit and grab the seat assignment before the shuttle takes off. Most touries know this. It’s the moonunits who think they can just wing it without a plan.
“I can’t make it another week,” says Stan, all distressed and the like—more warui by the second. Total spaznik. He pulls a handful of meal tickets from his pocket. “I have three week’s of meals. Genuine!’’
They better be. Getting caught with phony meal tickets gets you nothing but bread and water with the loonie goons until they kick you home for more of the same. I sling my guitar bag over my shoulder.
“Follow.”
I set a loping pace, wide leaping, low gravity strides, but—you know—controlled and graceful, and take a public tunnel leading away from the Concourse and crowds. I don’t think anyone is following us, but there’s no sense letting Amazing Gracie or her crew spot me taking a spaznik to a hideyhole. At the end of the tunnel I jump up a level and pull an unscrewed access panel from the wall. I motion Kimochi inside and pull the panel closed behind us.
Boxes of control switches, circuits, and pressure gauges line the walls and insulated pipes crisscross the ceiling. Things get more cramped in these rabbit holes, so instead of the arcing strides that pass for walking up here, you have to sort of pull yourself along, single file, bracing your hands against the walls while keeping your head low.
Even in enclosed quarters, there’s no sense in giving Kimochi Stan enough time to gig on the path to my hideyhole. In the techtunnels, there are no conveniently placed glowstrips to show touries the way to the food court or gift shops. The walls and circuit boxes aren’t numbered and coded in any sequential order, but if you know how to look at them—and I do—they make spiffy-skiffy landmarks. Two years ago I did some sly work for this one claustrophobic techie and got the lay of the land. Learned a lot about the ins and outs of just about every rabbit hole in Brahe City.
We take so many twists and turns, paths that double back, and others that look like dead-enders unless you squeeze past another loose panel, I figure I’ve got Stan lost enough where if he tries to branch out on his own, he’d be dead lost. Not that I want him to, mind you, but I didn’t get by for four years Up Here by being the fool. If any of Gracie’s crew grabs him and beats my hideyhole loc out of him, I’ll be all done. Busted flat. Game over and sent downside.
I weave through the maze for another fifteen minutes, until I’m abso-smoothly sure I have Kimochi thoroughly scroggled. Judging from the bitty whimpers, he’s just about there. I quit the runaround and cut across a little courtyard where eight tunnels all join together. I pick the leftmost one on the far wall and head toward my hideyhole. Well, one of the several I got scattered hither and yon.
We reach the end of the last tunnel where I switch on a battery lamp taped to the wall. I can’t really call it home; but it’s a place to sleep and sometimes just hole up. A sleeping bag sits on the floor and some boxes for clothes and incidentals lean against a wall. It’s as cozy as it’s going to get, a lost little place that only me and probably Security knows about. But like I said, this is just one of several, and Security can’t be sure which one I’d be using and when.
Not that they care much.
I swivel toward Stan and point, “About face,” I tell him. He’s looking worse and worser. Real fidgety. The Concourse is a nice big open space, like a mall, but even then it can feel real small to a lot of earthworms. The rabbit holes, by comparison, are as tiny as wombs—or coffins—depending on how you look at things. My pal Stan is not in a good state of being, but he doesn’t question me. He just nods and turns away until I say otherwise.
I put my guitar down and pull a box away from the wall. A single strand of hair sticks out from between two panels right where I left it. I push on a corner of a panel then pry it off. Inside, sitting on a plasteen pump control housing, is a chip scanner I once fished out of recycling and fixed. I grab it, replace the panel, and push the box back.
“Give me your chit,” I say, standing up.
Stan turns back around, pulls the chain over his head and hands me the chit. He looks around at my little refuge—pure envy on his face. Brother, this didn’t come easy. It took a long time before I had enough tricks to stake out a safe hideyhole in the belly of the base. Learned from those who came before me, but none of whom lasted so long. As for Stan, he probably curls himself up in some communal corner each night, hoping not to be robbed by another spaz. He doesn’t look the sort to have the dollies for a comfort room. I run his tag through a slot in the scanner and check the length of time remaining in his pre-paid stay. Not exactly eight weeks, but close enough not to make a big stink about it,
I hold up his chit. “With this and your meal slips, I’ll trade you a berth to O’Hare in three days.”
What happens next is totally my fault.
Stan launches himself at me and shoves me up against the wall. If he had taken more time to brace himself before his lunge, he might have had more luck. As it was, I’ve lived on the moon for nearly five
