She pulled her glove on and lifted the lap rug. The object under it, recently handled, was a purse. She removed the registration sliver, then left it as it had been— exactly as it had been, with the lap robe folded precisely as it was folded before, according to the image of it tem- porarily stored in her memory. She nudged the door closed.
Sparta stomped the snow off her boots on the covered porch and pushed through the ramshackle double doors, to be greeted by a blast of smoky air and badly amplified surround-sound. Most of the small crowd were couples, college kids on the way back from skiing. A few local males, wearing tattered jeans and threadbare plaid flannel shirts over red long-johns, were hanging out at the end of the long mahogany bar. Their eyes fixed on her as she walked boldly toward them.
The carpenter she’d overheard was easy to identify; he was the one wearing a laser-rule in a worn leather holster on his hip. She hitched herself onto the stool beside him and gave him a long, contemptuous stare, her eyes focused slightly behind his head, before turning her eyes to the bartender.
The bartender’s curly orange hair startled her. That passed quickly—he also wore a frizzy beard. “What’ll it be, lady?”
“Glass of red. You got anything decent to eat? I’m starved.”
“Usual autochef stuff.”
“Hell . . . cheeseburger, then. Medium. Everything on it.
Fries.”
The bartender went to the grease-streaked stainless steel console behind the bar and shoved four buttons. He took a glass from the overhead rack and stuck a hose into it, filling it with fizzy wine the color of cranberry juice.
On the way back he took the burger and fries from the maw of the steel autochef, holding both plates in his wide right hand, and slid everything onto the bartop in front of Sparta. “Forty-three bucks. Servee-compree.”
She handed him the sliver. He recorded the transaction and laid the sliver in front of her. She let it sit there, wondering which of the women in the tavern was buying her dinner.
The bartender, the carpenter, and the other men at the bar had apparently run out of conversation; they all stared at Sparta wordlessly while she ate.
The sensations of smelling, tasting, chewing, swallowing nearly overloaded her eager internal systems. The curdled fat, the carbonized sugar, already half-digested proteins were at once desperately craved and nauseating in their richness. For a few minutes hunger suppressed revulsion.
Then she was done. But she didn’t look up until she had licked the last drop of grease from her fingers.
She peered at the carpenter again, giving him the same cold, lingering stare, ignoring the black-bearded man behind him, who stared at her in pop-eyed fascination.
“I know you from somewhere,” the carpenter said.
“I never laid eyes on you before in my life,” she said.
“No, I know you. Wasn’t you one of them up at Cloud Ranch this mornin’?”
“Don’t mention that place to me. I never want to hear that place mentioned in my presence as long as I live.”
“So you was up there.” He nodded in satisfaction, giving the bartender a significant glance. His bearded buddy also gave the bartender a significant glance, but what it signified was a mystery to them all. The carpenter turned back to Sparta, looking her slowly up and down. “I knew it was you, just from the way you stared at me. ’Course you don’t much look the same as you did.”
“How good would you look if you’d been walking in the snow half the day?” She tugged at a strand of her matted brown hair, as if he’d hurt her feelings.
“Nobody willin’ to give you a ride out?”
Sparta shrugged and stared straight ahead, pretending to sip the glass of foul wine.
He persisted. “Get in over your head?”
“What are you, a stinking shrink?” she snarled. “I play the fiddle. When somebody hires me to play the fiddle, I expect to play the fiddle, period. How come the only people who make money in this business are creeps?”
“Lady, don’t get me wrong.” The carpenter ran a hand through his matted blond hair. “I thought everybody around here knew they made a lot more than just music sensies up there.”
“I’m not from around here.”
“Yeah.” He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. So did his buddy. “Well . . . sorry.” For a while they all stared at their drinks, a school of philosophers deep in contemplation.
The bartender absently swiped at the bartop with his rag.
“Where are you from?” the carpenter resumed, hopefully.
“Back east,” she replied. “And I wish I was back there now. Tell me there’s a bus out of here in ten minutes and you’ll make my day.”
The bearded guy behind the carpenter laughed at that, but the carpenter didn’t. “There’s no buses through here,”
he said.
“No surprise.”
“Don’t get me wrong, but I’m driving down to Boulder tonight. You could get a bus from there.”
“Don’t get me wrong.” she said. “I said you’d make my day.”
“Sure, lady.”
He seemed humble enough, but he was male and naturally he was playing the odds. That was fine with her, as long as she got within reach of civilization.
The carpenter ended up having his van drive them both all the way to the Denver shuttleport, almost a hundred miles away. He gave her no trouble during the seventyminute ride. He seemed grateful for what little conversation she was willing to give him, and parted from her cheerfully with a firm handshake.
Sparta went into the terminal and threw herself joyfully into the nearest contoured, chrome-and-black-plastic chair in the busy lobby. To her, the noise and the winking neon ads and glaring videoplate billboards, the diffuse green light that bounced off every reflective surface, were soothing. She pulled her quilted coat tight around her, hugging herself, letting fatigue and relief wash over her— she was back, back among crowds of people, with access to transportation and communication and financial services, the whole vast neural network of electronics that knit the country, the world, the colonies of space together. She could get what she wanted without making herself memorable.
And for a few minutes she could sit right here in the open and rest, not bothering to hide, confident that nothing about her nondescript appearance would attract the slightest attention.
Her eyes opened to find an airport cop looking down at her suspiciously, his finger poised at his right ear, about to key his commlink. “You been out for half an hour, lady.
You need sleep, use the hive in Five.” He tapped his ear.
“Or you want me to call work-shelter?”
“Goodness, officer. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realize.”
She looked past him, startled, in the direction of the flight announcement screen. “Oh, don’t tell me I’m going to miss this one too!” She stood up and dashed for the nearest people-mover headed for the launch pads.
She didn’t look back until she was surrounded by other passengers. There was a certain air of glumness about the belt riders, huddled in their festive plastic-and-foil vacation clothes, probably because for most of them the vacation was over; they were headed back to the reservation.
She made a discreet show of searching her pockets in distress before stepping off the rolling walkway at the first interchange and heading back toward the waiting area.
She walked straight into the women’s room and peered into the mirror. She got a shock. Nondescript wasn’t the word for her; she was bedraggled. Her drab brown hair hung in greasy snakes; there were dark circles under her eyes; her boots and pants and the skirts of her coat were splashed with dried red mud to the knee.
No wonder the cop had suspected her of being non-R.
He was right, of course—only one agency held her registration —but right for the wrong reasons, and she’d have to do something about those reasons quickly.
She washed her face, splashing it repeatedly with icy water until she was wide awake. Then she left to find the nearest information booth.
She slipped into the booth and peered at the blank flatscreen. Here, on this little flat plate and mounded keyboard, was light-speed access to anyone on Earth or in space who wished to be accessible (access to persons who didn’t want to be accessible took a bit longer). Here was access to vast libraries of data (access to protected data took a bit longer). Here were the means of making or se- curing loans, paying debts, investing, wagering, buying every imaginable kind of legal goods or services, or just giving money away (other kinds of goods, services, and transactions took a bit longer). All that was required of the client was a valid I.D. sliver and sufficient credit in a registered account.
Sparta no longer had the sliver she had stolen, having deliberately dropped it in the snow outside the door of the mountain tavern, for she had no intention of leaving a trail of illicit transactions behind her. But in the intimate privacy of an information booth—the sort of privacy only a place surrounded by crowds could provide—her lack of a sliver was not an immediate concern.