SUNLIGHT OR ROCK by John Kessel

       John Kessel is the co-director of the Creative Writing program at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh. He has taught courses in fiction writing,
American literature, and the literature of the fantastic at NCSU since 1982. “Sunlight
or Rock” is a sequel to his novella “Stories for Men” (October/ November 2002),
which won the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. John is co-editor, with
James Patrick Kelly, of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. The book
has just been released by Tachyon Publications.

                                        ****

In Mayer colony, Erno lived in the Hotel Gijon, on Calle Viernes, in a
two-by-three-meter room barely high enough for him to stand up in. The room
contained a gel mattress, a false window, and a thousand bugs. He assumed that
anything he said or did in the hotel was being recorded for later perusal, but in fact
Erno could not imagine why anyone would care what any of the residents of Calle
Viernes did.

       Most likely the bugs were the remnants of some jackleg enterprise that had
failed. Some would-be entrepreneur had seeded self-replicating monitors throughout
the colony, hoping to sell the spy service, or the idea of the spy service, or
protection against the spy service. The thing had fallen through, and now unless you
lived in the park and could afford scrubbers, you dealt with the bugs.

        Erno sat up on the edge of the gel mat, cross-legged, trying to get himself
moving. Too much wine last night. He stared out the window at an earth landscape:
sunrise over forested mountains, pink and blue sky with streaks of white cloud, river
in the valley catching silver fire from the sun. In the distance an eagle circled above
the cliffs. Erno took a deep breath of Mayer’s slightly sour air and relaxed the
muscles in his back and shoulders. The eagle froze dead in mid-glide, the foliage in
the trees stopped moving—then the bird jumped back and repeated its swoop: a
glitch in the ancient image generator.

      Erno had been watching this stuttering eagle for six months now. After ten
minutes he stretched to his feet, shook the bugs from his arms and legs, applied
probiots to his groin and armpits, and drew on his stiff overalls. He drank the ounce
of water left in the bulb by his bed and ate the leftover soycake from last night.

       Outside his room he ran into Alois Reuther, who lived in the next room. Alois,
about to scuttle through his door, raised his left arm in greeting. It looked completely
normal. The last time Erno had seen him, Alois had sported a glittering metal hand
with six digits and a special manipulator.

      “New hand?” Erno asked.
       “The newest,” said Alois. He swiveled the hand 360 degrees and extended his
index finger twenty centimeters. The fact that the hand looked like flesh rather than a
machine was unsettling. “Watch,” he said. Alois touched his finger to the dim light
fixture in the ceiling and the light brightened immediately.

       “Nice,” Erno said, completely repulsed. Alois had replaced much of his body
with obsolete devices. His eyes were multifaceted lenses, his left arm was made of
pink pseudo-flesh over a titanium armature, and servos in his legs clicked as he
walked. The fingers of his flesh hand were stained yellow from the cigarettes that he
smoked, imported from Clavius. His shabby blue suit, worn at the elbows, reeked of
stale smoke, and every night Erno could hear him coughing through the thin wall that
separated their rooms. Some of the other residents claimed that Alois had done hard
time in Shackleton, others that he had a fortune stashed away in some secret
account. Erno doubted it.

       Alois shrank his finger and held his hand out for Erno to shake. Erno
hesitated, then took it. The hand felt like warm flesh. Alois grinned fiercely and
would not let go. “Look,” he said.

       When Erno looked down at their grasped hands, he saw that Alois’s little
finger bore a silver ring—the same ring that Erno wore on his own pinkie. Startled,
he let go of Alois’s hand, and the ring on Alois’s finger gradually subsided into the
flesh. Erno touched the ring on his own finger. It was the only thing he had from his
mother. He always wore it turned around so that the turquoise stone sat toward his
palm, making it look like a plain silver band—less chance for the inhabitants of Calle
Viernes to notice he had anything of value.

      “Perfect mimicry!” Alois said. As abruptly as he had engaged Erno, he turned
and placed the new hand against his doorplate. The door flipped open and Alois
hurried through it into his room.

       Alois was only one of the eccentrics who lived in the hotel. On the other side
of Erno lived Brian, an evolved dog who worked as a bonded messenger. One floor
down the narrow stairs lived a couple of dwarfs who went by the names of Tessa
and Therese, each only a meter tall. At first Erno thought their stature was a freak of
nature, until the concierge told him they were an abandoned genetic mod that had
been tried at Tycho, engineered at half-size to reduce the load on resources. But the
mod never caught on, and Tessa and Therese were left to live in a world of giants.
They earned their living selling pornographic vids that they produced somewhere in
the e-swamp at the north end of the colony. Erno bought one and found it pretty hot.
On disk, they had the ability to convey by expression and pose the desperate need
to have a penis inserted somewhere, anywhere, into their bodies, immediately.
Nothing strange about that: what was strange was to see that ability translated into
money, something that he had heard about back home but never understood. Now,
alone in a place where the sexual rules were all upside down, he understood it better.
He was ashamed to admit how easily he had become a consumer.
      The concierge was already at her desk when he hit the lobby. “Good morning,
Mr. Pamson,” she said. “Your rent is due.”

      “Tonight, Ana,” Erno said. “I promise.”

      “I promise too. I promise, if your door won’t open for you tonight, I will not
open it for you.”

      “I don’t promise unless I mean it,” Erno said.

      “Claro. The deadly Mr. P.”

       He could not pay the rent. Anadem Benet had loaned him cash for two weeks
now. Perhaps it was that he was an immigrant from the Society of Cousins, and she
liked quizzing him about life in what she persisted in thinking was a dictatorship of
women. The first time she had seen his penis, she’d asked him why it wasn’t bigger.
She had the idea that Erno had been born in a male harem, genetically engineered to
give sexual pleasure. Erno’s descriptions of everyday life among the Cousins only
disappointed her. “Cousins are a gender-differentiated anarcho-social democracy,”
he insisted, “not a role-reversed sexual tyranny. The founders were women and
men; first chair Nora Sobieski said—”

      “So why were you exiled?”

      “I—I made a mistake. Because of it, someone died.”

       “Ah.” It was the only time he had ever impressed her. The deadly Mr. P.
Maybe that was why she had let him ride so long. Anadem claimed she came from
one of the wealthiest families on the moon, graced with pre-natal mods that gave her
lightning intellect and catlike balance. It was only through an unlikely series of
investment reverses, and the malice of her great aunt Amelia, Anadem allowed, that
she had come to manage the Hotel Gijon. Erno found the story hard to reconcile
with her lank hair and spotty skin, and as for preternatural balance, the only evidence
Erno had seen of that was when she dodged out the back of the lobby whenever
Felix Menas came down Calle Viernes looking for her.

       Erno headed up the boulevard. The Mayer lava tube had been sealed with
foamed basalt when it was pressurized seventy years earlier, and painted with white
titanium dioxide. But where Erno lived the last paint upgrade had to have been thirty
years before, and the alleys were draped in shadows. Calle Viernes, along with
Calles Sabado and Domingo, was one of these short side streets. Hotel Gijon stood
at the street’s far end; one wall of the building was constructed of the face of the
lava tube. Across Calle Viernes were another flophouse and a RIOP rental shop;
next to it a loan shark and a gambling arcade, and on the corner the Café Royale.
       As the boulevard wound its way through the heart of the lava tube, in places it
broke into a flight of broad steps or ramps to negotiate rises or falls in the natural
floor that the colony designers had deliberately retained. That, and the fact that the
older buildings were decorated with red, blue, and yellow ceramic tiles, gave the
place its old European look. The vistas were broken by the curve of the gray stucco
buildings. Above, from the bright roof with its nest of catwalks, heliotropes fed
sunlight down. From the roof of the hotel you could see a considerable way down
the tube through hazy, high-CO2 air until it twisted away, a ten-kilometer-long city
stretched inside the hollow snakeskin that ancient lunar vulcanism had discarded
several billion years ago.

       The first place Erno had gone after he had been exiled from the Society of
Cousins had been the scientific station at Tsander, but all they had there was a
battery of radio and gamma ray telescopes and a crew of Aspergered scientists.
There was no work for an undocumented eighteen-year-old biotech apprentice. But
he accessed the Lunar Labor Market and managed to snag a job with Dendronex
Ltd. in Mayer, in the Lunar Carpathians.

       Erno had heard little about Mayer among the Cousins. Founded by the EU in
2046, the colony been taken over by free marketers in the Lawyers’ Coup of 2073.
Here, Erno’s lack of a citizenchip wasn’t a problem; when the economy was
humming, immigrants like him kept labor costs down. He busied himself as an
assistant on a project for adding prion linkages to Human Growth Hormone. It was
mindless work, and he wondered why Dendronex was even interested in this, since
HGH was a glut on the market and medically questionable anyway. Three months
into his job he found out why when it was revealed that Dendronex was a shell
corporation for an AI pyramid; in the ensuing market panic, sixteen associated
corporations failed, and Erno was on the street.

       With the financial chaos, work became scarce. The rail gun was still in
operation sending satellites to low earth orbit; the only other work there was in a
factory producing cement building-struts, and in colony services. So every day Erno
would go to the labor pool and sit in the ward room with dozens of others hoping to
be hired for day work. Since Erno had no membership in the colony corporation, he
was paid in e-cash, one ducat a day. The labor pool took 20 percent off the top. He
kept the remainder on his bracelet, bought protein bars and, when he could afford it,
an apple or two, in the shop at the end of Calle Sabado. Tony, the owner, pestered
Erno about sex among the Cousins. Did Erno miss the sex with his sisters?

      “I didn’t have sex with my sisters,” Erno told him.

      “Why not? Were they ugly?”

      “Cousins don’t have sex with relatives.”

      “You can tell me the truth. I’m no bigot, like these others.”
        “Trust me, we don’t. I mean, there’s no actual law against it, but cultural
imperatives don’t need to be codified in law. The Society of Cousins isn’t just about
sex, it’s a matter of—”

      “Sure, Cuz. Want to buy a lotto ticket?”

       Tony earned more by selling lottery tickets than fruit or anti-senescents. The
front of his shop was a big screen monitoring the latest winners. The residents of the
Weekend would cycle through the remote celebrity cams: Balls Hakim, Sophonsiba
Bridewell, Jun Yamada. Watch him move into his new luxury condo in the park, go
shopping with her for clothes, see them have sex with famous people. Everyone
talked about the winners with a mixture of envy and pride, as if they were relatives.
Felix even claimed to be related to Gudrun Colt, who had won the jackpot three
years ago, but if he was, why was he living in the Weekend?

       From inside the shop Tony could watch the passersby stop and stare at the
screen, and he would make vicious fun of them. Their bovine faces. Their fantasies.
“Two kinds of tramps,” he’d say, holding up one finger. “The unfettered, free spirit.
Ultimate individual, self-reliant, not owned by anyone.” He held up a second finger.
“Then you’ve got the broken parasite feeding on the labors of good citizens, a
beggar and prostitute, thief, and hustler. Social deviant who must be controlled,
limited, quarantined. They ought to freeze them all and forget the defrost.”

       Erno wondered what kind of tramp Tony considered Erno to be. He had a lot
of time to think about it, because mostly he had no work. He was what they called
“poor.” All the people living in the Weekend were poor, even the shop owners that
the other hotel residents spoke of with envy. Tony had stacks of cash, they told him,
hidden away. Erno did not know what to believe.

      Mostly, being poor was a matter of finding enough to eat and to pay the rent,
and then sitting around with nothing to do and not much energy to do it. Poverty
was boring. Even though Erno had spent most of his adolescence feeling ignored
and underutilized, he had never felt this useless. He sat in the labor pool all morning
and the Café Royale all afternoon.

        This morning in the street outside the labor pool, a woman in shabby clothes
peddled hot biscuits from a cart, and another, no older than Erno’s little sister
Celeste, sold jump blood in plastic bags. Inside, forty men and women sat on plastic
chairs; some were eating biscuits they had bought outside, others played cards. The
muñeco slouched in his cube off to the side with his feet up on his desk; if people
tried to talk with him he just opened one lazy eye and cracked a bitter joke. His white
shirt and detachable collar were pristine, as if he expected to move up soon, but his
demeanor belied that expectation. Down on the Miracle Kilometer, beyond the last
pressure wall, the wealthy had their homes in the park. Erno had walked down there
one time, ogling the large, clean banks of buildings, the conspicuous waste of water
in the fountains, the lush hanging gardens. The muñeco would never live there. None
of them would.

       It reminded him a little of the apartments on the ring wall back at Fowler, but
at home living in such a nice place was not a matter of having money. And here, even
the rich had to breathe the same bad air, and they made people sit in a room waiting
for work when they could just as easily register workers online and call them by
remote.

      Erno joined the crowd before the video wall watching the replay of last night’s
hockey game against Aristarchus. He sat next to Rudi, an old man he had worked
with several times. “Any work today?”

      “Not unless you’re a dog.” Rudi’s cracked voice bore witness to too many
years breathing agglutinate dust. “Fucking dogs. Who can compete with a dog?”

      “Dogs are trustworthy, all right,” Erno said. “But people are smarter.” He
glanced up at the screen. “How’d the Gunners do last night?

       Rudi snorted, which turned into a racking cough. He leaned forward and his
face turned red. Erno slapped his back. When the cough at last petered out, Rudi
drew a shuddering breath and continued as if nothing had happened, “They’re
getting paid to play that game? Professionals.”

       The video, subjective from the POV of Gunners’ defenseman Hennessey
Mbara, showed him cross-checking an Aristarchus forward into a high parabola out
of the rink. The forward bounced off the restraining netting, landed on his feet, and
deflected a chest high pass from the center past the Gunners’ goalie. The siren
wailed. People in the labor pool shook their heads, smiled grim smiles. They stuffed
another stick of mood gum and complained about the coach, the strategy, the star
forward who was in a scoring slump. The goalie, according to the regulars, had lost
all hand-eye coordination.

     Erno was still musing over Rudi’s comment. “Where does that word come
from—’professional’? That makes it sound like, if you claim to be something, that
makes you more than someone who just does that thing.”

      Rudi looked at him sideways. “They’re freaks, they get paid big money, and
they’ve got no balls anymore, and they’re going to be dead before they’re fifty.”

      “Yes, but what about the word? What does a professional profess?”

      “Erno, please shut up.”

      Erno shut up. He had never gotten used to the way men here considered every
conversation to be a competition.
       The voice of the muñeco broke in. “I need six certified remote Integrated
Object Printer handlers for D’Agro Industries.” The men and women in the room sat
straighter in their chairs, the card games stopped. “Frazielo, Minh, Renker, Wolfe,
Marovic, Tajik. Have your prods ready.”

       The laborers named all checked in at the window, ran their forearms through
the scanner, and were let through the bubble where they would be hustled by cart out
to their posting. They left a score of grumbling unemployed in their wake. Behind
Erno, one of the card players threw in her hand, the cards sliding across the table
and floating slowly to the floor. “I’ve had enough for today,” the woman said.

       The room began to clear out—this late in the day there was little chance of any
other work coming in. Erno stood, stretched his legs, touched Rudi on the shoulder
and left. The old man just sat there. Erno couldn’t imagine a worse place to be at
Rudi’s age than the waiting room of the Mayer labor pool. Unless it was the
debtor’s freezer.

       He wandered back toward the Weekend. When he got there, rather than
continue on to the hotel, he slid into a seat on the patio of the Café Royale, a small
patch of level concrete a couple of meters square, with yellowed fiberglass tables
and tube chairs. The other buildings of Calle Viernes had grown up around it, leaving
the café a little pit in the shadows. For ten centimes you could buy a tumbler of wine
and sit and talk with the other unemployed. From the back came the smells of
yeastcake and fried onions that made Erno’s stomach growl. An onion sandwich
cost a quarter.

       Erno counted his change. He had exactly seventy-two centimes. He poked the
coins around the palm of his hand, his finger gliding over the raised profile of
Friedman on the two quarters, Smith on the two dimes, Jesus on the two pennies. He
ordered a wine and watched the sparse traffic on the boulevard: pedestrians, electric
carts, messenger dogs.

       A trio of loiterers at the next table were arguing. “They make big money on
earth,” insisted one of them, slender and with orange hair.

       “Earth! You couldn’t stand up for ten minutes on earth,” said the burly one
with the shaved head.

     “GenMod takes care of that,” the third said. “Denser bones, better
oxygenation.”

       These guys didn’t have the money to buy new slippers, let alone therapy. As
Erno listened to their aimless blather, Luis Ajodhia came by and sat at his table. Luis
was tall, slender, and wore tight silver pants and a loose black shirt. When he smiled,
his wide mouth quirked higher at one corner than the other, and his eyes closed to a
squint. When Luis asked him for money after the first time they slept together, Erno
didn’t understand what he was talking about.

      Today Luis leaned in toward him and whispered in Erno’s ear. “I’ve got a
business proposition.”

      “I’m not a bank, Luis.”

      “You only need forty ducats to get in on this.”

      Erno laughed. “I don’t have forty ducats.”

      “Don’t kid me. You came here with money, Cousins money.”

      “In that you are mistaken.”

       “You don’t have forty? So how much do you have, sweet boy?” Luis tapped
his long fingers on the scarred surface of the table.

     The men in the emigration conversation were still going. “The Polity on earth
knows how to run a society.”

      “Yes, they run things. That’s the problem. Laissez faire for me.”

       “You go one step outside the standard here and the corporation will let you
faire in the freezer.”

      “I’m not afraid of the freezer.”

      Besides his now sixty-two centimes, Erno had only the one ducat thirty on his
bracelet, which he owed Anadem. “What’s the proposition?”

     Luis looked at him through those squinted eyes, as if assessing whether Erno
was worth his confidence. “I know who’s going to win tonight’s hockey game.”

      “And how do you know this?”

      “I spent last night at the Hotel Serentatis with the forward for the Aristocrats.
He told me that the Aristocrats were going to throw the game.”

      “Why would he tell you that?”

     “I have means of persuasion, dear boy. The odds are running 6-1 against the
Gunners.”

      “And if the Gunners lose?”
         “They won’t lose. I know this, Erno.”

         “And now that you’ve told me, I know too. What do I need you for?”

         “You need me because I know the bookies, and can get the best odds.”

      As Erno and Luis haggled, Alois Reuther twitched by the café. He wore his
blue suit and puffed nervously on a cigarette in his new left hand. The three men who
had been arguing immediately got up. “Alois, old friend,” said the shaven-headed
man. “We’ve been waiting for you. You need to come with us.”

       Alois’s lenses rotated as they focused in on the men. He attempted to push
past them. “No, I don’t.”

      “Au contraire,” said the orange-haired man, putting his arm around Alois’s
shoulder and guiding him toward the alley behind the café. “Mr. Blanc worries about
you.”

         “Your finances,” said the first. “And your health.”

      “For instance, this hand,” said the third, taking Alois’s hand in his. “Has it
been properly attached?”

     With that they disappeared around the side of the building. In a minute came
sounds of a beating. Erno got out of his seat. Luis did not move.

      Nor did anyone else in the café. Erno circled around to the alley and saw the
three men crouched over Alois’s body in the shadows. “Hey!” Erno shouted.
“Stop!”

     The men looked up indifferently. “Where is it?” one of them asked the other,
who was kicking around the trash in the alley.

         “I don’t know. It bounced over here, I thought. Why did you have to take it
off ?”

         “Just find it.”

       A cloud of security midges was accumulating over their heads. Their tiny
loudspeakers all spoke in unison, making an odd AI chorus: “In all disputes,
entrepreneurs must relate to one another with complete transparency. Wait here until
the settlement agent arrives.”

       The bald man reached into his blouse pocket and tugged out a card. He held it
up to the monitors. “I have accumulated a Social Deviance Credit,” he announced.
      “And your colleagues?”

      The small man flashed his own card. But the orange-haired man did nothing.
The bald man confronted him. “What? Don’t tell me you’re out of SDC.”

      “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

      “Fuck!” said the small man.

       “Fuck,” said the big man. “I don’t know why I married you. Let’s go.” They
straightened and pushed past Erno into the street.

      “Why are you—” Erno started.

      “Mind your own business,” the tall man said as he shouldered past.

      Erno knelt over Alois. His shirt was torn, his leg was bent funny, and his hand
had been torn off. A trickle of blood ran from his scalp, but he was breathing. Erno
ran back to the café. Luis was talking to the manager. Erno returned with a wet towel
and held it to the unconscious Alois’s head. In fifteen minutes a bored settlement
agent came by and loaded Alois onto an electric cart.

      “Is he going to be all right?” Erno asked.

      “Was he all right before this?” the agent said.

      “Where will you take him?”

      The agent ran his reader over Alois’s good arm. “He’s insured. I’ll take him
to Holy Dividends HMO.”

      “What about the men who beat him?”

       The agent calmly surveyed Alois’s semi-conscious body. “On the violence
scale, this probably isn’t outside of one standard deviation. You want to make a
statement?”

      “Uh—no.”

      “Good day, then.” The agent climbed onto the cart and drove away, Alois’s
handless arm dangling off the side.

      Luis emerged from the bystanders and pulled Erno back to the table. “So, are
you done wasting time? This information is only valuable until game time.”
      “They just beat him up.”

      “You don’t have anyone who’d like to beat you up?”

       Not yet, Erno thought. But next week he could be Alois: if he paid all he had
against his rent, he wouldn’t have enough left to feed himself. He couldn’t even sit in
the café unless he bought something. Maybe he could put Ana off with one ducat on
account, but any way he looked at it, in another week he would be destitute.

     He could sell his possessions. He had the spex he had brought with him from
home. He had his good suit, some other clothes. A few tabs of IQ boosters. “I can
maybe raise some money.”

       “Go do it. I’ll meet you back here at 1600. I’ll have to lay off the bets at a
couple of different bookies or somebody will figure out something’s up. We need to
get the money down by 1800. By midnight we’ll be counting our winnings.”

      Erno left the café and went back to his room. He got the boosters from his
drawer and stuffed them into an inner pocket. He put on his worn slippers, then
folded his good ones up inside his suit, and tucked the suit under his jacket with the
spex, hoping he could get them past Anadem. He left the hotel for the pawnshop.

       The front of the shop was filled with racks of plasma shirts, boots, spex,
jewelry, sex implants, toys; in the back were older and odder items: paper books,
mutable sculptures, ugly lamps, antique drugs. A little boy sat on the floor playing
with a wheel on a wire armature. Several other people were ahead of Erno, waiting
for their moment with the woman behind the counter. Erno sat on a bench until his
turn came. He went up to her and laid the suit and slippers down. Beside them he put
the spex and the boosters.

      With her index finger she pushed the spex back toward him across the
counter. “Worthless.”

       She picked up the suit by its collar, shook it out. It had been one of Erno’s
prized possessions back at Fowler, dark synthetic silk, cut to look just like a dress
suit of the mid-twentieth century. She laid it back on the counter, ran her fingers
along the lapel. She looked up at Erno. “Two ducats.”

      “Two ducats! You can’t find a jacket like that anywhere in the colony.”

      “That, my friend, is not an argument in its favor.”

      Erno sighed. “All right.” He pulled off his bracelet. “Take this, too. I’ve got
one-thirty on it in cash.” He hesitated, rotating his mother’s ring on his finger. Finally
he pulled it off and set it on the counter. “How about this?”
      It looked so small, sitting alone there. The man behind Erno leaned over his
shoulder to see. The silver setting of the ring shone in the soft light; the turquoise
was rich blue.

      The proprietor held the ring up to the light. “This is earth turquoise?”

      “Yes. My mother’s family came from New Mexico. That’s on earth.”

      She gave him a withering look. “I know that.” She put the ring back down. “I
can give you twenty ducats.”

      Erno picked the ring up. “No, thanks.”

      “Thirty. That’s as much as I can offer.”

      “Forty,” Erno said.

     After a moment the woman nodded. Reluctantly, Erno handed her the ring.
“Keep it in a safe place. I’ll be back to get it later tonight.”

        “I won’t be here. Come in the morning, when we open.” The woman offered
him a cash card, but he insisted on currency. She counted out four fabric ten-ducat
bills, each with its video of the Heroic Founding Speculators on its face, and a few
singles and change; Erno stuffed the money into his pocket and fled the shop,
almost tripping over the boy on the way out.

      Back at the café, Luis was waiting. “Have you got the money?”

       Erno looked around the café to make sure no one was watching, and put the
bills on the table. He took the coins from his pocket, reserving only a quarter. It
came to forty-six ducats and ninety-eight centimes. “How much have you got?” he
asked Luis.

      “Twenty-three ducats.”

       For a moment Erno was annoyed; why was Luis coming to him for money
when he couldn’t even match what Erno contributed? But then he got over it. They
both were taking a chance, and it didn’t matter who took the bigger. At 6-1 he would
clear 281 ducats. That would make all the difference in him getting out of the rut that
was the Weekend

       Luis scooped up the bills. “Right is right, then. I lay this off, and when we win
I give you 225.”

      “What?” Erno said. “Should be more than that.”
       “Ten percent for information, and ten for risk,” Luis said.

       “What risk?”

      “I got to lay this off at three different bookies, my son. I try to lay it off all at
one and people going to notice.”

       It was after 1600. “Then we better hurry.”

       “You wait here.”

       “Luis, I trust you but I’m not crazy.”

       Luis protested, but gave in. They first went to a shop that Erno had always
thought was a virtuality center. He watched through the doorway, and ten minutes
later Luis came back smiling, with a tag. “Twenty-five down on the Gunners, at 6-1.”

      The next place was in the colony center, the business district with the efficient
shopfronts and mentally-augmented security. Luis left him at an arcade and went into
a gold-fronted building of algorithmic design that dated back thirty years or more.
Erno wandered around the plaza reading the quotations inlaid into the pavement. He
stood for a while on “In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right,” by
someone named Hobbes. He was loitering on “I don’t believe in a government that
protects us from ourselves—Reagan,” trying to avoid the gaze of the security
midges, when Luis returned. This time he was not so cheerful. “I could only get 4-1.
Bastards are too upscale to give odds.”

       The third bookie was a single person, a large man in a black jumpsuit standing
on the street outside the warehouses near the railgun airlocks. Erno insisted on going
up with Luis. The man smiled when he saw them. “Luis, my oldest and best friend.
Who’s your mark?”

       “My name is Erno.”

       The man’s smile grew very broad indeed. He had a video tooth. “What can I
do for you?”

       “Need to lay down some money on tonight’s game,” Luis said.

       “It’s late. They drop the puck in twenty minutes.”

       “You want our money or not?”

       “I always want your money, Luis.”

       “So it is. We’ve got twenty ducats we want to put on the Gunners.”
      The man arched an eyebrow. “Entrepreneurs. I’ll give you 2-1.”

      “Two to one?” Erno started.

     “Been a lot of bets in the last hour laid on the Gunners,” Black said. “Must be
some access of team spirit, I think. Odds going down like a horny Cousin.”

      “Shit, team spirit. You can’t—”

      “2-1, Luis, declining as we speak. Maybe you want to bet a different game? I
can offer 7-1 on the Shackleton game.”

      Luis pulled the bills out of his pocket. “No. We’ll take it.”

       Erno was calculating what the reduced odds would cost them. He was going
to say something, but Luis had already handed over the cash and received the tag.

      “See you after the game,” Luis said.

      Black nodded, and smiled. “I’ll be here, darling—” His tooth gleamed rose,
then blue. “—if it should prove necessary.”

      On their way back to the café, Erno asked Luis, “What was that about? 2-1?”

      “The word must be out. Too many people must have bet the Gunners.”

      “You shouldn’t have bet that last twenty.”

      “Relax. We still double our money. We’re just lucky we got to the other
bookies before the odds came down.”

      Erno bit his tongue. The whole thing smelled. He felt in his pocket for his last
quarter. No rent. No job. His mother was dead and he’d pawned her ring.

       They went back to the café and ordered two wines. Erno let Luis pay. By the
time they got there the first period had started: they watched on Tony’s front
window across the street. The Gunners were skating with more energy than they had
showed in a month. They spent as much time in the Aristocrats’ end of the rink as in
their own, a distinct novelty. They scored first, on a blue line slapshot. They kept the
Aristos off balance with brutal fore checking. Erno sat on the edge of his seat. At the
end of the first period, during a power play, the Gunner forward leapt over the
crease, soaring over the defender who was trying to check him. The center slapped a
shot into the air that the forward deflected with the blade of his stick over the
goalie’s right shoulder into the net. The arena exploded with cheers. Erno leapt out
of his seat, flew three meters into the air; Luis caught him coming down, swung him
around and hugged him. The sudden physical contact startled Erno; he realized he
had not been touched by another human being since the last time he and Anadem
had had sex.

       “You see!” Luis shouted, kissing him. What a strange place this was. Sex was
rationed, money was rationed, sex was worth money, and money was sexy. Erno
thought about what he would do with his winnings. After getting back his ring he
would go to the clinic and make sure Alois was all right. And then he would, one
way or another—even if he had to pay for it—what did they call it?—”get laid.”

       Thirty seconds into the second period the Aristocrats scored. The second
period was fought out at mid-ice, with few clear shots taken by either team. It began
to worry Erno that the Aristocrats were playing as well as they were. They did not
look like a team that was trying to lose. When he mentioned this, Luis replied that
probably it was only a couple of players that were in the bag for the game.

      “Why didn’t you say that before!”

      “What did you expect? It doesn’t take a whole team to throw a game, Erno. A
couple of key plays will do it.”

       In the third period the Aristocrats put on a furious rush. The puck ricocheted
off the dome of netting; flying passes deflected by leaping front liners ended on the
blade of a forward just hitting the crease, and only inspired goalkeeping by the
Gunner netminder kept his team ahead. Five minutes in, the Aristocrats executed a
three-carom shot off the dome that was slapped into the corner of the net by a
lurking forward. A minute later they scored on a fluke deflection off the skate of a
defenseman. Aristos up, 3-2.

       Falling behind seemed to inspire the Gunners, and they fought back, putting
several good shots on net, that the Aristocrats’ goalie blocked. Erno could not sit
down. He paced the café, hitting the concrete so hard with each step that he floated.
When the clock hit ten minutes remaining he turned to Luis and said, “I can’t stand
this.” He left and hurried down to the arena, hoping to get inside. But though the
doors were open a uniformed chimera stood outside.

      “Can I get in?” Erno asked.

       “One ducat,” the chimera said. His ears were pointed, his pale face smooth as
a baby’s, his ancient brown eyes impassive as agates. His uniform sported green
lighted epaulets and a matching fluorescent belt. Attached to the belt was a stun
baton.

      “Please,” Erno said. “There are only a few minutes left.”

      “You may enter if you have credit.”
      Erno could hear the crowd inside, shouting, occasionally cheering. He paced
back and forth, staring at his feet. If he had any credit he could just walk through the
door. But his bracelet was gone. He had given everything he owned to Luis Ajodhia.
How could he have been so stupid?

     Suddenly a huge roar burst from the arena doors. He ran over to the guard.
“What is it? What happened?”

      The chimera cupped a hand over his ear. “The Gunners tied the game. A wrap
around goal.”

      “How much time is left?”

      “Two minutes and fifty-two seconds.”

      “Please. Let me in.”

      “No.”

       Erno walked in circles. His scalp tingled and his ears rang. He closed his eyes
and took a deep breath. Please score, he thought. Please score. He looked up at the
roof of the lava tube. The air was hazy here, the light from the heliotropes dimmed
down to twilight. High up on the catwalks a couple of kids were screwing.

        Erno kicked the pavement with his frayed slipper. Cheers came from the
opened door. Erno could imagine the crowd, standing now, shouting, shaking their
fists at the players. The last two minutes were taking an eternity. If they went to
overtime, Erno did not think he could stand it.

       Then came a huge gasp, an oceanic groan, punctuated by shouts and cries of
anger, even despair.

      A couple of minutes later the first of the people began to exit the arena,
cursing, arguing, laughing bitterly, or completely silent. As she passed him, Erno
heard one woman say to her surly companion, “Well, at least they played a good
game.”

       Luis was not there when Erno got back to the cafe. Erno snuck back into his
room and threw himself onto the gel mat. He lay on his back with his hands behind
his head and stared at the ceiling. Three bugs were fixed motionless up there,
microcams trained on him. No one, he reminded himself, cared enough to be
watching. The ceiling was made of regolith adobe, so old that it probably had been
constructed by people instead of RIOPs. Those swirls and grooves, laden with dirt,
had been brushed into the surface by some long dead hand. How many people had
lain in this room and stared up at this ceiling? How many had been as broke as Erno?
How many people had shouted rage and frustration at each other in this room, how
many had made love here, how many children had been conceived, how many plans
made and abandoned?

       Well, he had to plan now. First thing he had to plan was how to get his things
out of the hotel without Anadem seeing him. If he tried to carry a bag out, she would
know at once that he was jumping. Which meant that he could take only what he
could wear.

        There wasn’t much left anyway. He stripped and put on his two remaining
shirts, and his jacket, and shorts beneath his trousers. He began sweating, and he felt
like a fool, but in the mirror he didn’t look too absurd. He stuffed his notebook into
one pocket, his spex into another. He still had his quarter, his last money in the
world.

      Outside his room the light that Alois had made miraculously brighter by his
touch that morning had burned out. One floor down he heard laughter coming from
Tessa and Therese’s room. When he hit the lobby he found Anadem sprawled on
the chaise in her office.

      “Your rent!” she called.

       “Back in five minutes!” he said, saluting her as he walked out. He hurried
down to the café hoping to find Luis. Night was falling: the heliotropes were masked.
Music blared from the back—staccato drums and pipes, a song he remembered
from home, the popstar Cloudsdaughter’s “Sunlight or Rock.” The café was
crowded, talk was loud. But when he asked around, Tony said Luis had not been
there since the afternoon.

      Suddenly the weight of the day, and of the last six months, came down on
Erno so heavily that his knees buckled and he sat down on the pavement. He put his
head in his hands. Through the buzz of conversations came Cloudsdaughter’s
sweet, mocking voice:

      But you were sadly mistaken

      And the truth came as a shock

      About which one was stronger

      Sunlight or rock.

       He looked down the alley where Alois had been beaten. Anadem would not
have him beaten, he reckoned. He’d just starve, be arrested, put into the freezers
until some enterprise paid his way out as an indentured worker. Erno blinked his
eyes quickly to keep back the tears.
       Something moved in the shadows. In the alley, a dog was nosing around.
Erno lifted his head, got to his feet, and went back to the dog. It was his neighbor
Brian. “What are you doing here?” he asked it.

      The dog raised its narrow white face. “Good evening, sir,” it growled. “I smell
something.”

       Something moved, scuttling beneath discarded papers. There were few small
animals in this colony, not even birds—not in this misbegotten place, where they
didn’t even have a real ecology, just people. Brian tensed, ears laid back. “Stay!”
Erno said, grabbing the collar of the dog’s shirt. He reached forward, pushed aside
the paper, and there, clenched into a fist, found Alois’s artificial hand.

      “Can I have it?” the dog whined piteously.

      “No.” Erno reached into his pocket, pulled out his last quarter, and slipped it
into Brian’s breast pocket. “Good dog. Buy yourself a biscuit.”

       The dog looked uncertain, then raised its ears and walked away, nails clicking
on the pavement.

      Erno poked the hand with his finger. As soon as he touched it, it twitched
away. In the dim light Erno could make out that the wrist was sticky with some fluid
that might have been blood but was probably something more complex. This was
not some cheap servo. It had independent power and rudimentary intelligence.

     Erno cornered the hand, picked it up and shoved it inside his shirt. It stopped
moving, but it made a bulge that he hid by holding his arm against his side. It was
warm. He could feel the fluid against his skin.

       From Calle Viernes he went down to the Port Authority. The station was not
busy at this hour, except for passengers waiting for the night train and aphasics
preparing to bed down in dark corners. On the board were listed the bi-weekly cable
car to Rima Sitsalis, another to Le Vernier, and the daily maglev to the southern
colonies—Apollo 12, Hestodus, Tycho, Clavius, all the way down to Shackleton. A
ticket to Shackleton cost sixty ducats. He didn’t even have his quarter.

       But he did have Alois’s hand. A hand in which Alois had invested a great deal,
maybe more than was immediately evident. The portal would read any standard
credit chip.

       Erno walked over to the entrance to the maglev platform. He stood up
straight, tried to act like he knew exactly where he was going, and had not the
slightest worry in the world. A businessman passed through the portal ahead of him.
Erno fell behind. He held his forearm against his side, pressing the hand inside his
shirt against his belly. As they approached the portal, the fingers of the hand began
to move. Erno did not flinch.

       He passed through the portal. The hand, under his shirt, froze. He strode
down the tube, and felt the air pressure change as he moved through the lock to the
train waiting in the airless tunnel. He stepped into the maglev. The telltale at the door
flashed green, and Erno was through.

       He moved down the aisle of the car, checking out the compartments as he
passed. Most of them were occupied by people who looked no more prosperous
than Erno. He slid open the door of an empty compartment and took a seat by the
window. Against his belly he felt the warmth of the artificial hand. Alois had stashed
at least sixty ducats in there—how much more besides? He wondered what Alois
was doing at that moment. He had probably been mustered out of the clinic as soon
as they’d patched him up. Back at Hotel Gijon, could he even open the door to his
room?

       Ten minutes later, the doors closed, the umbilicus pulled away, and the train
began to move. They passed out of the dark tunnel into the bright lunar day, and, as
the maglev swooped up into the Carpathians, the earth, in its first quarter, swung into
sight high above them. Erno still was not used to it; on the cable trip from Tsander
he had been fascinated to see the planet rise above the horizon as they came from
the farside to the near. That first sight of it in reality, only months ago, had seemed
pregnant with meaning. He was moving into a new world. And it hung there still,
turquoise and silver, shining with organic life, as it had hung for several billion years.
It was strange to imagine a world with air and water on the outside, where you could
walk out in shirtsleeves, even naked, where the sun shining down on you was not an
enemy but a pleasure. But whose gravity would press a lunar-bred boy like Erno to
the ground and leave him gasping.

      He leaned his head against the train’s window, the light of the old earth
throwing shadows on his face, and fell asleep.

      Copyright © 2006 John Kessel