That was a long time ago.

The guard finally pressed the release b.u.t.ton and the wire gate slid back, allowing Maria to walk through the barrier, across another stretch of wasteground, and up on to the steps of the King Building. It was a tall structure, impressive even in this city of skysc.r.a.pers. When Maria raised her eyes to look at it the sight made her dizzy. Black gla.s.s rising forever through the cold night. But Maria didn't want to feel dizzy tonight. She didn't want to raise her eyes any more. She kept them aimed down, focused on her feet as she walked slowly up the steps to the building. Taking them one at a time, saving her strength. Not thinking about the pain.

Maria concentrated on thoughts of dancing and the smoky sunlight of the west coast. Looking back on it, those had been the good years. They had also been the years when President Norris launched the economic opportunity initiative. Local Development was one of the slogans. It meant if you didn't have a job you stayed exactly where you were until they could find one for you in your neighbourhood. No need to travel in search of work. The TV campaigns showed Okie migration of the 1930s. Skinny children eating apples in the back of skeletal Model T's. The modernday Republican administration recycling dustbowl propaganda.

Those were also the years that saw the redevelopment of the inner cities in California. Maria observed pretty quickly that redevelopment seemed to involve bigger and better barriers between her part of town and the richer suburbs, along with the private police forces expanding and acquiring newer and more devastating weaponry, some of it even approaching the quality of the stuff used by the big gangs.

Maria knew a scam when she saw one. Local development meant that the homeboys got to stay at home. Forever. You could see the rest of the world on your TV set. If you stepped outside your neighbourhood you'd get a bullet or a dog or a groundtoground missile that floated like a ghost and thought carefully about where its target went. A missile that could lock on to a heat image of your car and track it around five rightangle turns before it snaked up the deadend alley where the trash cans formed a barricade and you couldn't get out again. Then it locked in and came screaming towards you and detonated in your engine block, blasting the streering column up through your spinal column.

Maria always wondered what Jerome's last thought had been. She wondered if maybe he'd been thinking of her. More likely he was cursing the approaching missile and wishing he could get at some of the hardware in his trunk. Knowing Jerome.

When Jerome died Maria decided that it was time for her to get out. Alone if necessary.

Maria's friends didn't give a d.a.m.n. They were all young and living under the thunder. Life meant partying with beer and blow and listening to Black Leader. None of them read the newspapers. Neither did Maria. But she could read between the 425 phosphor lines on her TV screen. She saw the government's ads and she saw the evening news, which was much the same.

She knew what was coming. She didn't have time to dance any more. She was making plans.

Maria managed to leave California just before the economic migration laws really clamped down. Even then, if she'd tried to drive out of LA in her car she would have been intercepted and turned back. But instead Maria sold the car and caught an earlymorning bus to the airport with a group of women, mostly middleaged, who worked there on the cleaning staff. Maria was waved through the checkpoints with them, a big plastic shopping bag just like theirs in her lap. Only instead of cleaning gear Maria's bag contained the triage of a lifetime's possessions.

All the security teams at the checkpoint saw was one more coloured woman in a bus full of them, headed out to keep the blood off the airport floor. The real cleaners knew exactly what Maria was doing but they kept their mouths shut. A clan of women with varicose ankles, hands and lungs shot from the industrialstrength poisons they used for cleaning.

Maria paid for her airline seat with cash. As the jet taxied for takeoff she let herself cry a little. For Jerome and the baby growing inside. She flew out of LAX, heading east, as far as she could go. Heading into the future. As she reclined in her economycla.s.s seat, spinning her earphone dial, trying to find some music with a little bottom to it, a little strength, she swore one thing. Whatever happened to her she would never clean floors for a living.

New York was a gamble, a chance to find work and a better way of life. Maria thought anything had to better than home with the police helicopters slicing through the sky every night and the understreets being built and the endless drug wars where the worst gang you could imagine was always being displaced by ones that were worse still.

So she arrived in the east, landing at Kennedy, riding the subway in and stepping out of the station to be swallowed in the endless winter. With the climate going to h.e.l.l all over the world they'd begun to get snow in LA on a regular basis. Maria thought she'd be ready for the cold weather. But nothing could have prepared her for that first city winter, sitting beside a searing hot radiator in a room with the windows painted shut. Icicles hanging down on the red neon sign outside the bar where she drank in the evenings. Sometimes getting drunk enough in there to dance, on her own, by the candycoloured light of the karaoke unit. Cars outside chewed the dirty snow into rivers of slush. Maria slipped all the time when she walked home drunk, keeping her eyes on the shadows. It took her months to get the knack of walking on ice.

But it didn't take Maria long to learn that they had understreets in New York, too. You couldn't see them but they were there. Her money ran out quickly and when it did the heat in her room was cut off. Maria alone in her room, at three in the morning, New York wintertime, dancing to keep warm.

When a job finally came up, she grabbed it and held tight. She'd held on to it all these years.

The door shut behind her, cutting off the wind howl. Maria wiped her feet with care on the corrugated rubber matting then took off the plastic shoe protectors she wore; she knew what it was like having to clean up muddy footprints. On the far side of the lobby above the elevators an entire wall of black marble was devoted to the directory for the King Building. Corporate names and logos, followed by floor numbers, glowing in whatever colours were deemed to convey quiet power and wealth this year. Most of the logos were holograms but Maria knew a few of the cheaper ones were neon.

Maria walked through the warm lobby of the building and put her ID card into the elevator control console. The information on the card, along with the thin film of body oils that composed a fresh thumbprint, were sucked into the slot and pa.s.sed into the building's nervous system. The computer that handled the alarm, evacuation and security procedures considered the information it had received, searched its memory, and came to a conclusion. It sent an elevator down for Maria and carried her up to the seventythird floor. Maria didn't even need to push a b.u.t.ton. And if she had entered the elevator and pushed any b.u.t.ton other than 73, the elevator would have stopped between floors, doors sealed, and kept her there until the security guard could be dragged away from his bootlegged copy of MacPet to check her out.

On the seventythird floor Maria unlocked her storage locker and trundled out the heavy trolley with its soft wheels. She checked her equipment, then went back to the elevator to continue up to 74. She would start there then methodically work her way down to 72, tidying offices, wiping screens, making sure any hard copy had been thoroughly shredded.

And, of course, cleaning the floors.

Maria pushed the trolley past the executive squash courts and the private gym and male and female saunas, the rubber wheels squealing as she manoeuvred it. The expensive leisure facilities all around her were dark and silent. Empty but with all the doors open. No need to keep anything locked. Not with security as tight as it was. She got back to the elevator and found that it was gone again. Sent up or down on some mysterious errand devised by the building's control system. While she was waiting for it to arrive she checked the trolley. The big plastic drum of industrial cleaning fluid had almost run out. She'd have to buy a new one before the weekend.

Sometimes when she was working late, like tonight, Maria's mind would just switch off, trusting muscle memory for the work at hand. In her brain other, more complex, memories were operating. Flashes of being young and the way she'd danced. Bas.e.m.e.nt shaking like an earthquake. She still had nostalgic dreams of dying that way. Quickly and violently in the sunshine. Outside. Not like this. In a metal honeycomb in a cold city. In darkness with the cancer eating away, doing its own cleaning routine in a further darkness inside her. The paramedic who'd diagnosed her had also given Maria some basic counselling. He'd suggested that she try to visualize the cancer, give it an image. Like a crab or a shark. Maria said she visualized it as a drain which she poured money down. The pain was bad tonight, but manageable, thanks to the chemicals. The chemicals were expensive but there was no choice. You had to keep working, for the money. If a portion of the money went straight into pain relief, that's just the way it was.

It was a tradeoff.

Life was full of tradeoffs.

Like the way Jerome made her feel when he was alive, and the way he'd made her feel when she heard he was dead.

Or like poisoning her body with decades spent bent over cleaning fluids, triggering the cancer and dying before her time, in pain. But with enough money to get her son out of this city. You could still get people out to Canada if you could guarantee support finance for their first three years. Maria almost had enough money put away. And if she died the insurance policy would pay off the balance.

Maria wasn't scared of dying. She wasn't scared, but she didn't like to think about it much. Looking ahead, into the darkness. If she did think about it she visualized snow whipping around big buildings, a lot of empty s.p.a.ce in between, and cold air. Forever. She preferred to look back and remember the dancing. Now as she bent down and loaded the floor polishers, checking their EPROMs and switching them on, she could lose herself in those memories. The simple mechanical routines of her job didn't break her revery.

What broke it was the cat.

A small grey cat, its close short fur almost silver in the glow of the lights on her cleaning trolley. At first she thought it was one of the laboratory animals that had escaped from 51. Then she remembered that the Butler Inst.i.tute hadn't had any laboratory animals for years now. They didn't need them. The cat turned to look at her as it walked through the doorway into one of the stock acquisition offices.

The cat's eyes were flakes of strange flat shine, gleaming blue, then green, then yellow as the angle of its head changed, looking at her in the darkness. They looked more like the status lights of an unusual machine than the eyes of any living creature. The cat disappeared around the doorway with a flick of its tail. Maria followed.

The cat was nowhere to be seen. But even if it had been sitting at her feet Maria wouldn't have noticed it. She was looking at the man.

He was a small man, busy at the computer.

He didn't seem at all surprised to see her.

'Excuse me. Do you have clearance for this area?'

The little man looked up. 'I've got clearance,' he said, 'but only because I've hacked into your security system. I'm an intruder.' He winked at her and went back to his typing for a moment before stopping again. His head turned suddenly to the left, moving stiffy, like a bird's. He was staring intently at something on the desk surface. It was as if he'd just spotted it at the edge of his vision. He swung around on his chair to face the desk and picked up something that was lying on it among the pens and papers, a large envelope.

'What's this?'

'Company envelope.'

'I thought there would be a bee and an eye on it.'

'You can't print it on there.' The envelope was completely black.

'You can't address it to anyone, either.'

Maria kept her eyes on the man as she casually moved away from the computer where he was sitting. 'It's for keeping doc.u.ments in. It's got to be black to stop visual penetration, reading the doc.u.ments inside.' She moved a good distance away. She knew most of the people on these three floors by sight. The little man didn't belong here. 'You know, satellites, that sort of thing,' she said, thinking quickly. Could he be some kind of senior executive? Some kind of software genius from the Butler Inst.i.tutes in Cambridge or Eindhoven? He was weird enough. If the man had tried any kind of a story or snow job on her she would have hit the alarm already. If he made a move towards her she'd hit it. If he tried to run she'd hit it.

The small man looked at the envelope, smiling. 'I like it, he said. 'I think I'll keep it.' He put the envelope into a pocket of his jacket, then turned back to the computer screen and started working away again. His concentration complete, not pretending that Maria wasn't there or anything, but just wearing this polite little frown and occasionally glancing up at her. As if to say, Sorry I'm so busy. Just wait a minute and then I'll be happy to talk to you.

The cat was back now, circling her ankles, sniffing at them. Maria felt obscurely ashamed of those ankles; the old skin and the varicose veins. You should have seen my legs when I was dancing, she thought. 'I could punch the alarm,' she said. 'Any time I want.'

'I don't doubt it,' said the man. Now he looked up and smiled. 'I wonder if you're going to, though.' Maria couldn't stop herself liking that smile. It should have been easy. All she had to do was remember how Jerome used to smile the same way. Full of mischief and h.e.l.lraising. Smiling just before he did the sort of thing he enjoyed best. The sort of thing that eventually got him killed.

'Why don't you sit down?' said the man.

'I don't think so.'

'Sit down. You're in pain.'

Maria remained standing where she was. 'What makes you think that?'

'The way you hold yourself,' said the man. 'The way you move. How long has it been bad?'

'A long time. But it won't go on too much longer.'

'No,' said the man. He knew what he was talking about. He even sounded a little sad, sorry for her.

Maria took a clean tissue from her pocket. It was a soft piece of intricately folded tissue paper with a j.a.panese watermark. Despite every effort to make the King Building a selfcontained environment, the outside atmosphere got in. Car exhaust, ash and industrial dust leaking in through the window seals and air conditioning. This soft paper was used for wiping city grit off the screens of the computers.

Maria used it now for wiping her eyes. The little man sat, unmoving. It had been a long time since anyone had managed to get in under her radar like that. She blew her nose and wadded the screen wipe, squeezing the wet tissue hard in her fist. The shape of her fingers was moulded into the tight wet paper. She threw it across the room, crashing it dead centre into a wastepaper basket full of corporate brochures. The sound made the cat jump. Maria felt the need to throw something else as well. Preferably something with sharp edges and heavy. Dead centre in the little man's smug face. Tears were the last thing she needed now. You built a wall between yourself and your emotions, and that was the only thing that kept you going. Without it Maria knew she'd be one more weeping bag woman living in the sh.e.l.l of a 1989 Mazda or a shaky frail old woman in a terminal ward selling her blood to the young junkies and hookers in the adjacent beds.

The little man was watching her, aware that something was up. Sensitive to what was going on in her head. Jerome had been that way, knowing her moods like a dog that could sniff the weather, knowing when a storm was approaching. Maria kept the anger out of her voice when she spoke.

'You said you were an intruder?'

'At the very least,' said the man.

'Then I'd better tell you about the security in this place. It's pretty tight. You can do whatever you like, but I'd advise you to just sit back and relax. If you make a run for it they're happy to use what they call ultimate force. That's what the security is like around here. And I'm going to call them now.'

'You don't have to do that.' The man was watching the screen again.

'I think I do.'

The little man was impatient now, speaking as if to a child. 'You do not have to call the security guards.' He'd stood up and switched off the screen. Now he was putting on a hat. 'You don't have to call them because they're already on their way.'

Christian was in the elevator. Like Mulwray, he was still armed from the night's work. They'd got the policeman secured in the medical section on 51 and by rights they should now be having a beer and taking it easy.

It was Mulwray's last week working in the biostock section. He'd been promoted, effective as of Monday. Working in Social Acquisition with that b.i.t.c.h Stephanie. This was the standard promotion route in the Butler Inst.i.tute. You started out doing the c.r.a.p work in Bio. If you survived that and they liked you, the next step was Social. Christian had found that Bio could be a pain in the a.s.s if you worked with the wrong people. He was going to miss Mulwray. Christian had known people like him when he was in Mexico. They were always the best ones, the most fun to be with.

Christian had spent two years in Mexico during the war, with Airforce Technical Support. His job had mostly been sorting out any problems with the neural computers on the missiles. When the missiles weren't having nervous breakdowns, they were great. They had cameras fitted on the nose cones so that you could watch their flight, streaking over the villages and forests until they caught up with the columns of Mexican armour. Whenever the Mexes tried to set up a defensive position around a reservoir, the smart missiles would drop from the sky.

It was only in black and white but it was still great. Christian and the others liked to replay the missile transmissions on their VCR with a few beers in the evenings in the mess tent.

The elevator was slowing up now. Mulwray grinned at him and he grinned back. He liked the man's att.i.tude. When the door whispered open, Mulwray was the first through. They moved down the corridor, watching for movement. There was faint screenlight coming from the open doors of the offices, like light reflected off snow. And light from some other source too. As they got closer they saw it was the cleaning woman's trolley with the fluorescent bars on the side. There was a fluid container on it, open. No sign of the cleaning woman. For the first time Christian began to feel that the security alert might be something more than a hiccup in the building's control system. He could hear a sound now, coming from the door of an office just beyond the trolley. Christian was d.a.m.ned if he'd let Mulwray go through first this time. But Mulwray was already moving. Christian dodged ahead of him, jigging to the left as he went through the door, running low so as to present the minimum profile to hostile fire. He straightened up with his sidearm aimed in a twohanded grip looking towards the source of the noise.

'Oh, for Christ's sake.'

Mulwray was through the door now, holding his gun like Christian. Like Christian, he immediately began to lower it. 'Great,' said Mulwray. He glanced over at Christian and together they walked across the office, putting away their sidearms. The cleaning woman, Maria, was staring up at them, frozen with surprise. She was sitting in front of the big screen of one of the Apollo workstations, her hands still poised in the air above the keyboard. She was in the middle of keying something in. Looking guilty as h.e.l.l. Christian wanted to see what was on the screen but Mulwray was blocking his view.

'Caught in the act,' said Mulwray.

'My G.o.d,' said Maria. 'You scared me.'

'You're going to have to be more careful than that, Maria. You were ringing bells all over the network. We got a security flash down on 51.'

Christian could see what Maria was doing on the screen now. She had the E-mail slingshot open. She was typing a letter, ready for the system to shoot right across the continent. He knew what the destination was because Maria already had the address menu set up. 'Who the h.e.l.l lives in Los Angeles?'

'Old boyfriend,' said Maria. She was blushing fiercely as Christian began reading over her shoulder.

Dear Jerome, I miss you more than ever these days, in the cold out here. I especially miss you at night. I miss your arms around me and the weight of you on me 'Doesn't sound like you get all that cold at night,' said Mulwray. 'Thinking about that sort of thing.'

'Woman your age should be ashamed,' said Christian.

'Do you have any idea what a phone call costs these days?' The cleaning woman was squirming in her chair, looking from Mulwray to Christian. 'I'm not doing any harm. I've done it before.' She was trying to be apologetic, you could see, but it didn't come naturally.

'Well, don't do it again, and definitely don't do it on this node.'

'I'm sorry guys.' Maria was staring down at her hands, resting on the keyboard. Christian didn't think she sounded sorry. He thought she was keeping her eyes down so they wouldn't see her natural expression. A lot of anger and defiance. She must have been trouble when she was young. He tried to avoid looking at those fingers of hers. The nails were really short, ending way back in the skin in the top of the finger. It didn't look like they'd been chewed or anything. More like they'd been melted.

'You're going to get fired when somebody finds out,' he said. 'Unauthorized use of company resources.'

'Come on, we'd better get back to the lab.' Mulwray's arm was on his shoulder. Christian turned away, a little reluctantly. He was tired all of a sudden. It was like that when you got ready for action and nothing happened. He wondered if Mulwray was free for a beer after work. They could go round to his place. Christian had some new videos, from the Philippines, which you had to see to believe.

When they'd gone the little man came out and sat beside Maria. 'I didn't know about the alarm on that terminal,' he said.

'Neither did I.' Maria was typing on the keyboard. 'There it is.' On the screen was an open folder containing a symbol which she recognized, although she'd never actually seen one before. A cartoon padlock with bulging Basil Wolverton eyes sticking out on stalks. A Norton Smartlock. 'They must have put that on here last week.' It was a security package and a very expensive one. The little man was leaning close beside her, inspecting the screen. He was nodding.

'Stupid of me,' he said. 'I could have avoided that.'

'No you couldn't. Anyone using this machine would have been detected.'

'Not necessarily.' The man clapped his hands and the cat came running out of the shadows and jumped. He caught the cat and held it to his chest. 'Not everyone,' he said. The cat's face was pressed close to his and as he turned to look at Maria the cat turned, too. Two pairs of strange cool eyes regarding her. 'The right person could get past it easily.'

'Stupid cow,' said Mulwray in the elevator going back down. He jerked his camelhair off his shoulders and twisted the coat into a shapeless bundle. Stuffed it tight under one arm.

'Careful you don't get creases in that.'

Mulwray let the coat flop loose. His hands were shaking a little. He smoothed out the camelhair and folded it up again, more carefully. There was a smell of sweat and aftershave in the elevator. Mulwray wasn't looking at him. Didn't want to look uncool.

Christian knew the feeling. Coming down from combat readiness without having anywhere to put all that energy. You needed an outlet. Then Christian remembered. They did have an outlet. Waiting for them down on 51. Christian was smiling as he remembered.

The man was standing at one of the floorlength windows, watching the snow. The cat was curled in his arms, like a baby. Its head was turned so it could stare out the window, too. Maria wondered if it was looking for birds. It wouldn't see any. Not in this city. 'What do I call you?' The man turned at the sound of Maria's voice. 'It doesn't have to be your real name.' she said. 'It can be like your user name on your computer.'

'The Doctor,' said the little man. He set the cat down. 'You can call me the Doctor.'

'I knew someone used to call himself the Head Doctor,' said Maria. 'That was a login name, too.' She thought of others, coming back to her vividly now from the years and distance. Names they used on the public access computer network back home. The libraries had installed shatterproof screens in concrete booths and anyone could just go in and use them, provided you didn't mind the urine stink. Maria burned joss sticks. When the lights were smashed she brought her own, fixing big flashlights to the ceiling with gaffer tape. She taught herself to touch type and then she didn't need the flashlights any more. Working at the keyboard in the dark, eyes on the screen.

'Secretarial skills,' said Maria. She said it so quietly the man, the Doctor, could hardly have heard it. But he nodded. Sitting beside her now, watching the screen images change as she typed. Maria not looking at the keyboards, her fingers knowing where the symbols were. The big openplan office seemed to have closed in around her. It was like sitting in a small concrete cubicle. Instead of toner and corporate carpeting she could smell p.i.s.s and incense.

The public access keyboards were always being ripped off, so eventually they'd been replaced with integrated units, stainless steel set in concrete. A bit noisy, but okay to use. They even found a way of making the mice theftproof. Maria remembered afternoons spent waiting for a free terminal, sitting on a bolteddown chair reading and rereading the spraypainted graffiti on the walls, boring equivalents of the user names on the system. On the public network you got to know the regulars. Cracker Cracker, b.o.n.e.r, Are you Glad To Be In America and You Can't Eat A Snake (what kind of idiots had the patience to type those every time they logged on?), Eidolon, Liberty and Kool Aid. Kool Aid had been her. Named in the memory of the one time she had been busted. Jerome's idea. Putting an LSD variant into the refreshments at a police picnic. Shame it had never come off. She remembered when Jerome had outlined the plan, telling her about it in their small kitchenette, cans of beer and a pipe on the table. She felt a ticklish sensation, excitement deep in her stomach.

The same feeling she had now.

'Okay, we're there,' said Maria.

The Doctor studied the screen. Except for the small image in the centre it was blank, pale and clean. The image was a simplified diagram of the King Building. When Maria clicked on it the tiny building opened in a burst of colours. A chaotic scatter of icons appeared, all different shapes. Maria pulled down a menu, clicked on it and the jumbled screen vanished, replaced by neat rows of type. 'Have to do that or I could never find anything around here.' Maria selected and clicked, moving further in. A new mess of files appeared on the screen.