Space Stations

“Always pick somebody smaller than you who looks nervous and afraid,” Amparo had explained to a couple of her younger friends who were visiting a few nights ago. “Best luck I've had is with students who look like it's their first time away from home, or with old people. They're so scared of getting hurt that they'll give you their codes as soon as you ask.”

Alonza thought of the time when her mother had come back to their room with three necklaces and two jackets bought with the credit and codes of a stolen identity bracelet.

Usually Amparo might be able to make one or two purchases before a victim came to and reported a bracelet stolen, but there had been more loot that time. Amparo had been in the middle of her sixth transaction when she had seen that funny look in the merchant's eyes that told her that her stolen credit was now blocked and that a security guard was on the way.

Always know when to run: Amparo had often told her that.

She had gone far enough by now. Alonza looked back; she could no longer see the place where she and her mother had been. There was a recycling bin to her right, but too many people were loitering near the shiny metal receptacle. She turned away and kept going until the corridor branched into two more long gated hallways. People were lining up at the gates for the suborb flights.

At last she came to a stretch of gates and waiting areas that were nearly empty of people.

She hurried to the nearest bin and dropped the stolen bracelet into a slot, then continued down the long lighted passageway. Her feet were beginning to hurt. Amparo had traded a stolen belt for the shoes, which were made of synthaleather, but the leather had molded itself to its former owner's feet and had never fit Alonza's very well.

She was far enough away from the bin now. Alonza moved toward one of the empty waiting areas and sat down on one of the smaller cushions, wondering how long it would take Amparo to find her.

“Stay in one place,” Amparo had always told her, “and sooner or later I'll find you.”

Alonza sat there, listening to the announcements in Anglaic, Arabic, Espaqol, and other languages. “Twelve-twenty suborb to Toronto, gate fifty-two, now boarding.” “Two zero five, suborb to Damascus, gate forty-seven, now boarding.” “Sixteen thirty-one, shuttle flight to the Wheel, leaving at thirteen-oh-two from gate ninety-five.”

The Wheel! Alonza thought of the space station high above the Earth and was soon lost in a familiar daydream. Someday, when she was older, she would board one of the shuttles and travel to the Wheel herself, to wander its curved corridors and loiter in its lounges before boarding a torchship to another place, maybe Luna or the Islands of Venus. Her daydream was formed mostly of images and experiences drawn from a mind-tour called “Journey to the Wheel,” one of the mind-tours anyone was free to call up without having to spend credit, even people like her and her mother who had to live on Basic and steal anything else they needed. Most of the free mind-tours she had seen bored her; either they were designed to teach some sort of skill like homeostat repair or else they were filled with action scenes that tired her out and were often hard to remember later.

But “Journey to the Wheel” was different. It kept her interested even when there wasn't really that much going on, when she was feeling and seeing what it was like to travel in a shuttle, floating weightlessly up against the harness that held her to her seat while viewing the distant pale circular tube with spokes that was the Wheel. The end of the mind-tour always left her with a tired but happy feeling of expectation, of feeling that something wonderful was about to happen to her.

Maybe people who went to other places, who didn't just do their traveling with bands around their heads so that the cybers could feed them a mind-tour's images and sensations, had that kind of happy feeling all the time. She imagined leaving the room she shared with Amparo and never having to return to the maze of apartment buildings, cubicles, and shacks where the homeostats rarely worked and the air was always too hot and smelled of sand and dust. Maybe—

“Going to Shanghai, child?” a woman's voice said in Anglaic.

Alonza looked up. A woman with short dark hair and a kindly smile was gazing down at her.

“No,” she replied hastily.

“But this is the waiting area for that suborb flight.”

“I'm waiting for my mother,” Alonza said. “She told me to wait here.” She glanced down at her hands and saw, too late, that she had forgotten to pull the long sleeves of her tunic over her wrists. The woman would notice that she was not wearing an identity bracelet.

But the stranger did not look down at her hands, but instead continued to stare at Alonza's face.

“I see,” the woman said.

“She didn't want me to get lost,” Alonza added.

“Of course. Well…” The woman turned away and sat down on a cushion near the wall.