"There's a whole lot I don't like about him. Right now, however, we have more important things to deal with." She shifted her attention to the five s.p.a.ceMil soldiers standing unarmed and uncertain in the square. "I'm Flossa Manderos, Mayor of BackGate. This is Sergeant Billem Simmons, s.p.a.ce Military Forces, Medical Discharge. As you can see, he is very much alive, as are the other thirty-five 'resettled' war casualties you were told we'd murdered. The mission you're on is based on a lie, which is not your fault. You are also severely outnumbered and seriously outgunned. So here's the deal. Surrender right now and you'll be released unharmed."

There was a scant moment of silence before the "deal" was unanimously approved. Two of the soldiers headed back toward the s.p.a.ceport; the other three asked for sanctuary. No one asked what would happen to Spinacre.

"Milhouser dropped by this morning on his way to his office."

Flossa input a last number into her datapad, chuckling even as she did so. "Checking on plans for the wedding again?"

"Not this time," Billem replied as he double-checked the tally and signed off on the bar receipts. "He thought we'd be interested in the latest communication from Central."

"And..."

"The formal charges he filed against Spinacre have been tabled."

Flossa looked up, c.o.c.king her head to one side. "Do we need to start making arrangements to disappear the kid?"

Billem grinned. "Not unless he can't handle the promotion they handed him. Captain Milhouser has been named permanent second-in-command of Ysbet Tertiary, until such time as he chooses to request rea.s.signment and independent of whoever gets a.s.signed command. His second piece of news was that the new Commander is due any day now and has sent word ahead that she'd like to meet with Backwater's leadership at your earliest convenience. He said she stressed that it was a request and only at your convenience."

"Interesting. What's his take on her?"

"He thinks you'll like her. He does."

Flossa nodded and made a note to herself. "I still don't understand why Spinacre did what he did or why he seemed to hate BackGate so much."

"It might have something to do with the fact that he was a bit less than forthright with s.p.a.ceMil regarding his background. Such as the fact that he was born Mickey Spinner, father unknown, and grew up outside the s.p.a.ceport on Keslinger. In a house very much like this one run by his mother."

"Fancy that. Here I was thinking the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was just your basic nutcase b.u.g.g.e.r, and it turns out he had issues."

"Which doesn't keep him from being a nutcase," Billem chuckled. "But that's not why the charges were tabled. No need to court-martial someone who's been permanently consigned to the Violent Patients Installation on Lector 2."

"I do love it when things work out," commented Flossa before returning to the datapad.

"Flossa, there's something I've been wanting to ask you."

The woman looked up, her lips together in contained amus.e.m.e.nt "Yes?"

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you take us in... you and the town... the way you did?"

Flossa leaned back in her chair and smiled. "A guy walks into a wh.o.r.ehouse." She paused, and when the only reaction from Billem was a raised eyebrow, she continued. "He's a shiny new private, headed out for his first war, and it's the last planetfall before the fun and games start. So he and his buddies all have twelve-hour pa.s.ses and the predictable desire to make the most of those twelve hours.

"Saint Magdaline alone knows why he picks the girl he does; she's young-a couple of years younger than he is-and not doing much in the way of trying to sell herself. But he puts his money on the counter, takes her by the hand and they go to her room. A little while later, he comes out-alone-and asks how much for the night, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his buddies, who've finished their business and gotten down to serious drinking. Between what he has in his pockets and what he borrows from his buddies, he pays the fee and disappears into the back. The next time his buddies see him is right before lift-off."

"And probably ragged him for months thereafter."

Flossa nodded. "Probably. And would have ragged him even more if they'd known what actually happened in the girl's room. It was her second night in the business. The first night-well, let's just say that the customer who won the auction had been none too gentle. The boy may have been green, but he wasn't dumb, and once he found out about it, he bought up her time to give her a night to recover. They talked most of the night, and that was all. Except for him holding her as she went to sleep."

There was a long moment of silence, until Flossa, speaking very softly, added, "I never forgot that kindness, Billem. I've owed you for that for over twenty-five years. I'm just glad that things came around so I could pay the debt."

"I'll... be... d.a.m.ned." He reached out and took one of Flossa's hands, raising it to his lips and laying a gentle kiss on her fingertips. Whatever he started to say was interrupted by the cheerful din of arriving employees. As he levered himself up and reached for his crutches, he leaned over and whispered, "Let's work on balancing the books after closing time."

Flossa's answering chuckle held antic.i.p.ation that made the one-legged man grin.

BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN.

Jody Lynn Nye

Hap stared up at the big screen of the vidscreen with his mouth hanging open. A smiling, elegant lady was enjoying a dainty bite of Orange-O's from a glistening crystal dish. She looked about his own age, twenty-two, but her blond hair was shining and golden, not dusty taupe like his, and her blue eyes gleamed clear and bright. He followed the silver spoon full of gleaming red circles all the way up to her pink lips, which rounded pleasantly around the bowl of the spoon, then imagined the tangy goodness of the smooth-textured O's as they burst upon the tongue. He'd never tasted any Orange-O's, but that was what the announcer said eating them was like. His own tongue traced its way around his mouth, wishing he had some Orange-O's. They must taste better than anything: Sugar Star Bursts, YogoLinks, Zanzibars, even chocolate. He'd never had any of those, either, but he wished with all his heart he could.

"Come on, youngster!" Merg ordered him. The stocky sixty-something tilted his shaved and scarred head toward the corridor. "We've got to fix that d.a.m.ned conduit, or the whole place is going to be hip deep in sludge by second shift."

Reluctantly, Hap pulled himself away from the screen, just as the woman took another taste of Orange-O's. His watering mouth dried up in a hurry when he got a whiff of the leaky pipe waiting for him around the corner. Reality bit, if gingerly and with fingers pinching the nose shut against the smell.

Not much of the elegant food he saw advertised on any of the Station's vidscreen channels ever got down to Belowstairs. Certainly not in its original form, and not to the likes of Hap. He hungered for it. Oh, he wasn't hungry in the literal sense. He had plenty to eat; the powers that be wouldn't let anyone starve, however inconvenient they might be. The Earth-Gov Convention of 2265 dictated that every human being was ent.i.tled to basic elements of survival: shelter, air, water, food, clothing and education. At the very lowest levels of society, those were basic, indeed, amounting to just better than exposure, suffocation, starvation and ignorance. Delta Station, orbiting Proxima Centauri along a major shipping route, was far enough from Earth that few inspectors ever came to see how well their program was working. They took the word of those Upstairs that everybody was being cared for. Vids showed the clean dormitories the dispossessed lived in, the well stocked cafeterias where they ate, the cla.s.srooms where their minds were fed. Those were just as much fantasies as any of the soaps Hap watched, nothing like the garbage-filled corridors and storage chambers where everyone staked out a piece of floor they sometimes had to defend with their lives.

Hap could sleep on anything. At the moment he had a piece of shock insulation that had been removed from a damaged airlock Upstairs. It lay in a plastic shipping case that had been used to bring a couch for some rich person to the station. He wore a shipsuit that mostly fit, and had good boots that had come off a corpse that had been strangled and dumped into a disposer unit on a higher deck. It was the food that griped him.

Nothing was wasted Belowstairs. He and all the other misfits and rejects lived on what was essentially treated and reclaimed sewage. Everything dumped by the folks who lived Upstairs went through the recycler. It was broken down into its elemental particles, reformed into 'recognizable' food, and available at the push of a b.u.t.ton by the folks Belowstairs. Comestibles, anything without heavy metal or toxic components, could be recycled nearly infinitely. The common joke was "First they eat it, then we eat it. Then we eat it again." Newcomers, the recent down-and-out, got sick when they heard that, but the ones born down there, like Hap, didn't like it, but were used to it. The only vestige of the welfare state that supposedly existed was that when someone got sent Below, the daily rations available in the food machines were increased by one. Whether the person to whom they were a.s.signed got to eat them was left open to chance or muscle.

In an effort to keep the undercla.s.s out of the way of the privileged, only one lift on each side stretched between the decks that kept the station functioning and those facilities enjoyed by the upper cla.s.s. The crew who maintained the engines and power and sanitation plants came down infrequently, either under an agreed truce or accompanied by a troop of armed guards. Traffic only came from one way; you couldn't get on the lifts without an identification chip, and you couldn't get an identification chip without a job, and you couldn't get a job without an identification chip, and you couldn't apply for a job unless you could get Upstairs to the employment offices.

Connecting Belowstairs's decks were staircases, slides, poles, ladders and the occasional lift. No stairs led Up. Hap a.s.sumed that Upstairs was structured in much the same way, though their lifts worked all of the time. And they didn't smell of urine and dead things. (Officially, neither did the lifts Belowstairs. Anyone caught defecating in a lift got s.p.a.ced or recycled, no appeal, but everyone took a leak in them once in a while; it was a long walk to the loos, and the shafts ran gravity-wise down toward the Core. G.o.d only knew what the base of the lifts smelled like, but as long as Hap didn't have to clean it, it wasn't his problem.) Mutants, the mentally-ill, science experiments gone wrong, you name it, they lived Belowstairs. If no one wanted to look at them, they ended up there with the rest of the trash. If they lost their jobs and their companies refused to pay for their repatriation to their planet of origin, they were 'relocated' Belowstairs. Even a few so-called rebels against society decided to make their home where they were no longer a number. Down below, they weren't much of anything. No one cared, except officially. They were an embarra.s.sment to a government that wanted desperately to pretend the undercla.s.s didn't exist, that poverty and ignorance had been legislated compa.s.sionately away. Well, Hap, thought, following Merg's grunted commands to heft the cracked and stinking pipe while he patched it with plascrete, he was there to tell them they were wrong. He'd never had a school lesson in his life. He'd learned reading and history from the kidvids. Being a cipher meant he had no one to ask why so many of the history programs contradicted one another.

"You about finished?" asked Amlin. The burly, one-eyed woman had been a guard Upstairs until she was dismissed for brutality. Now she worked for the Chief. "Himself wants to see you."

"That's not proper grammar," Hap said, and was rewarded with a backhanded slap.

"Who are you, being uppity about talking? Trying to prove you're better than someone?" Amlin asked, with a growl. "The Chief wants you, if you're so fussy. The dispenser plate on his synthesizer is wobbling. It dumped his morning coffee down the drain, so I wouldn't correct anything he says if you can't breathe vacuum."

As in any untenable situation, someone managed to take advantage of a void in order to rise to the uppermost stratum of power. In the case of Belowstairs it was more like floating like sc.u.m to the top of a sewage vat, but Gormley Parker preferred to think of himself as the chief bottom feeder. To give him credit, he wasn't acting purely out of self-interest. He did care about the other forlorn souls around him, and he always saw that they were provided for-as long as he got his share first.

All unwanted, broken, outdated and frankly obsolete technology ended up pa.s.sing under Chief Gormley's eye. The exception to castoffs from Upstairs was a food synthesizer, his bribe for releasing a shipment of the precious devices that had been delivered accidentally two years ago to the service dock instead of the goods ports above. Synthesizers broke down frequently and had to be replaced at great expense from the manufacturing colonies on Europa-Jupiter. A standoff had ensued between Gormley and Upstairs, until the powers that be threatened to invade with the full security force, gas every living being unconscious or worse, and take back the machines, but the Chief countered that before a single guard stepped out of the lift every machine would be destroyed and broken down to its component elements, and by the way, the threat was being digitally recorded for playback to every news agency in the galaxy. Would they care to reconsider their approach? How much better it would be, the Chief had said, leaning back in his reclaimed executive leather-covered armchair with his hands clasped comfortably above his round belly and his face serene, to make a deal in a peaceful manner.

The round face wasn't serene that morning.

"What took your pathetic a.s.ses so long to get here?" the Chief bellowed, as Merg and Hap came into his office, a former storage hangar. The fifteen-meter, bare metal ceilings amplified his voice, making Merg cringe. "If you don't answer me smarter the next time you'll find yourself ground up and served over ice cream!" Hap admired the Chief with all his heart, so he didn't mind the threats. Under Merg's nervous eye Hap examined the synthesizer. It was a modest-size machine, just over two meters in height and a meter wide with a hatch that opened two meters to reveal a hinged grille. It was hanging in down position, as if it had just dumped unacceptable food into the mini-disposer tank in the base. "The d.a.m.ned thing comes up when you order food, then plops down and stays there," Gormley said.

"Nothing to it," Hap a.s.sured the Chief. The two workmen unrolled their tool bags.

"It'll be the activator chip," Merg said, as they searched for a replacement. Hap nodded. They had plenty of those. Whenever a machine was dumped Below, scavengers descended on it for usable parts. Hap and Merg were part of a good-sized force employed by the Chief to keep the technology running. Anyone else caught h.o.a.rding parts was subject to a gang beating, all the while the Chief gave his speech about deploring violence. Hap understood that a certain amount of force was necessary to keep order Belowstairs. When subtlety failed.

"Hah!" the Chief said. "You see that!" He pointed at the vid on the wall opposite his desk. "We're on the news!"

Hap glanced up from his work. Some well-dressed woman was ranting. "We've got to do something about the disgusting situation! The sc.u.m inhabiting our lower levels..."

The scene changed to a view of Belowstairs. Hap recognized it as stock footage. That's all Upstairs had. They might control the government, the media and the supply line, but their influence stopped at the dividing deck. The last time that they'd tried to send a cameraman down to get some fresh footage, he'd been swarmed the second his lift hit bottom. Hap and his mates had stolen everything he had brought with him, leaving him naked in the elevator except for his ID. Yeah, same old vid, he reflected, seeing a mutant shuffle from one side of the screen to the other. Poor Domble, with no more brain than a drinks dispenser, looked fearsome and disgusting with his shrunken skin and gigantic teeth. He'd been dead about five years now.

Belowstairs was useful for diverting attention. Hap and his mates noticed that whenever one politician attacked another for some legal lapse, the next thing you knew, the opponent would be on yacking off at Belowstairs.

"...damaging precious systems vital to human existence..."

"Who do you think keeps this place running, you stupid time-waster?" the Chief yelled, throwing an empty beer bulb at the screen.

Upstairs didn't like to think about that truth. But short of 1) giving everyone Belowstairs official jobs (and, hence, IDs), 2) eradicating them all (which would create opprobrium for Upstairs all over the human-settled galaxy and in alien systems with beings rights), or 3) collecting everyone Below and sending them all somewhere else, Upstairs had to acknowledge it had an ugly boil on its backside. As much as possible it pretended the problem of homelessness did not exist. To tell the truth, that suited everyone Below just fine. But Hap wanted to see Upstairs. He dreamed of having a job and living in the upper levels. He'd been watching station vids all his life. He knew just how wonderful it must be, to be clean all the time and to eat something before anybody else had.

"Dammit," Merg said, sticking his arm down the disposer chute. "I dropped my spanner." Hap leaped to help him. They leaned the synthesizer over on its side. Hap upended it and shook it until Merg could reach his tool.

"Quiet!" bellowed the Chief. "I'm listening!"

An announcer had replaced the politician on the screen. "...reports from Earth of a breakthrough technology: organic circuitry. Based upon theories of human brain development, scientists have at last come up with a means of growing functional systems that can learn emgrams. It will revolutionize all electronic system, agglomerating all components flawlessly..."

"What's agglom... ?" Hap began to ask.

"Bunching them all in a ma.s.s," the Chief said. "Shut up."

"So far, however, the process has been slow. Only one small sample of the finished product has been successfully produced. Scientists will be meeting with manufacturers later this week on Delta Station to talk about means of growing more, quickly but accurately. The demand is expected to be worth over eight billion credits the first year alone."

"Whew," the Chief said, flicking the audio down with a gesture. "Wish I had some of that. Don't you?"

"You bet I do," Merg said.

"Yeh," Hap said, thinking what he could do with eight billion credits, or even eighty credits. He'd have orange silk cushions in his crate-no, he'd build a hotel, with rooms as big as the Chief's and all of them full of silk cushions. And real food from Earth, lots of it, in storage compartments everywhere, so all he'd have to do was reach out any time he wanted.

The Chief saw the dreamy look on his face and laughed. "Go on, get out of here, boy!" he roared.

"I'm so excited to meet you," Perry Antonio, president of Techgen said, shaking hands with Min Haseen. Tall and broad-shouldered with a born executive's thick head of red-brown hair just beginning to silver at the temples, he towered over his guest. The slim, dark-haired woman slid into the seat he indicated for her at the big oval table in the executive suite of Techgen headquarters on Deck J. "Thank you for coming all the way out here to the Station."

"It's a pleasure," she said, nodding to the others. She had soft, dark eyes and a little pointed chin that made her look delicately elfin and childlike. "I've never been on a s.p.a.ce station before. It's been an experience. Fun, in fact."

Antonio smiled at her naivete. He went around the table, introducing the rest of the men and women at the table. The skinny, gum-chewing boy with big ears and a crest of carmine hair was Bill Imbrie, Techgen's chief programmer. Darkskinned Lu Obama was head of biochemistry. The troubled black-haired woman in the blue-white uniform was the station commander, Penelope Chinn. The rest were various technology wonks, bean-counters and government officials. Chinn, he knew, was keen to become the liaison for transhipment of the new products. Techgen needed Delta's good will, at least for the time being. They would have a very private conversation later to see if Chinn could bribe him well enough to obtain an exclusive right-of-way.

He glanced at the slender girl in a blue-white shipsuit and cap standing at the far end of the room next to an open door. No expense had been spared to impress Haseen. The finest melons, pate and caviar had been brought up from Earth, and had been arranged on platters with the best fruits and vegetables from Delta's hydroponic gardens. She stood by, ready to serve the refreshments. At his signal she came forward with a tray to begin taking drink orders.

Haseen noticed the direction of his gaze. "Is it all right if I left my things in there?" she asked, nodding toward the other room. "My transport only arrived an hour ago. I didn't have time to check into my quarters."

"No problem," he said, smoothly. "Welcome, everyone. You've all had a chance to thumbprint your nondisclosure contracts, so let's get this meeting under way."

With his back to the rest of his guests, Antonio gulped down a stimdrink at the wet bar at the side of the room. Haseen wasn't the soft touch she looked like. In fact, she was as sharp as that chin of hers. In a moment he would be giving up a substantial share of Techgen's stock in order to obtain manufacturing rights to Opalite.

"Where is it?" Haseen cried.

Antonio turned, putting the little bottle out of sight behind his back. "Where is what, ma'am?" he asked.

"The Opalite," she said, her hands shaking. She pointed at a small white plate on a small mahogany occasional table near the entrance to the hospitality room. "It was right there a moment ago. Where is it?"

"How big is it? Is it a sample?" Antonio asked. He scanned the tables for a strange container, but saw nothing but the depleted bowls of caviar and the fruit platters, nearly picked clean by the browsing conferees.

"No! It's the whole thing," Haseen replied, her eyes huge with dismay. "Three cubic centimeters, worth a hundred million credits!"

Chinn's eyebrows went up, and the two of them began to search the room.

"What's the problem?" Imbrie asked.

"The Opalite is missing," Antonio said, in a low voice.

"h.e.l.l!" the boy said, snapping his gum.

"Don't tell anyone," Antonio ordered. "Just help me look. It's an irregular lump, white embedded with sparkling colors, about this big," he held two fingers apart. Imbrie began to push plates and carafes around, looking frantically.

But the Opalite was not to be found. Tactfully, Antonio began to ask the other attendees if they had seen an object of its description, not alluding to the fact that it was valuable, nor that he and his guest were frantic to find it because it represented their two companies' financial future, only that he wanted to know what had become of it.

"A multi-colored lump?" the server asked, when Antonio finally got around to her. "Yes. I thought it was one of Mr. Imbrie's wads of gum. I thought it was kind of disgusting, sitting there on a clean plate in the middle of all this food."

"What," Antonio asked tightly, moving closer so that he was towering over the girl, "did you do with it?"

"Why," the girl said, her eyes big with fear, "I threw it in the disposer."

Antonio turned to Chinn, whose mouth had dropped open in disbelief. "Call security. Now!" He turned to the girl, plucked the ID clip from her collar, and snapped it in two. "You're out of here. Send her Below," he growled at the two armed guards who appeared at the door of the hospitality room.

"What? Why?" the girl wailed. But she was marched away. Antonio closed the pa.s.sage door and returned to the party. No one could have missed the excitement, ending in the expulsion of the food service worker. He straightened his tunic and strode forward, wearing a polite but grave expression.

"I'm so sorry," Antonio said. "There's been a misunderstanding. Shall we get on with our meeting?"

"I thought we were going to see this Opalite," said Barbara Skyler, Secretary of Technology for Earth-Gov.

"That will have to wait," Antonio said, in what he hoped would be a final tone, but Skyler, a politician, had fried bigger fish than he.

"I don't want to go back and tell the Secretary General that this was all a waste of time, or a fraud..." she began.

"No! I a.s.sure you, Madam Secretary, I hope we'll have a full demonstration soon."

"Where is my Opalite?" Haseen demanded.