The Water Thief (11 page)

I
had
changed. Irreparably. And in a way
far more pronounced than I had thought. And it would only grow more obvious.

There were a
host of other problems too. I couldn’t stomach managing perception anymore—not
for Ackerman, not for anyone. I could stick to the basics, report innocuous
mistakes like spelling errors or factual inconsistencies, but I wouldn’t be
able to make a living on that for very long. And it was only a question of time
before somebody suspected something. Heck, Retention could already be on me.
Linus, Corbett, or even Bernard—they could all be undercover agents. Even if
they weren’t, there wasn’t a single one of them who wouldn’t turn me in if they
thought they could profit from it.

There was a
clock on me now. If I didn’t do something, the question wasn’t whether I’d get
myself into trouble, but when.

“I’m proud of
you, Charles. You’re ready to be a Gamma now. It’s going to happen for you, I
have no doubt. You’ve evolved; you’ve reached the next stage. Congratulations.”

If there was anything
I was sure of, it was that I was never going to be a Gamma.

I had found Kate, but I still
didn’t know what had become of Sarah Aisling. I’d need money, but that was very
hard to come by in large quantities. The economy ran better if colleagues spent
money instead of saving it, so savings accounts were prohibitively expensive.
Only the wealthiest could afford them. I had an escrow account, but buying out
Beatrice’s share of the apartment put that in the red.

About all I could do was secure a
large loan (at a high rate of interest). It didn’t matter; I had no intention
of paying it back.

I called a cab and went to the
library. Though they didn’t advertise the fact, the truth was that the Galt
Intercorporate Library was one of the most profitable corps in history. They
offered two things no other library did. First, in addition to carrying
practically every legitimate text ever written, they also had an extensive
catalogue of pornographic, perverse, and subversive literature.

Second, they didn’t monitor their
clients or report their activity to any other corp… anywhere. That level of
anonymity was worth almost any price, and the library knew it.

At any given time there were about
a half dozen corps trying to shut them down, get them to restrict usage, or to
monitor their customers. Negotiations on these issues almost always ended in
violence, so the Galt maintained a small but effective military force.

Perimeter bollards and Jersey
Barriers surrounded the entire building. Behind those was a twelve-foot chain
fence, with razor wire and machine gun nests. The only gate had more security
than the Atlas train station. It was UltraSec, if such a word existed.
Scanners, chemical detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs all stood between the
outside world and the library. The building itself was a huge concrete
structure with a three-foot-thick steel blast door.

Despite all of this security, they
prided themselves on expediency. From the line it took only ten minutes to get
inside.

I soon found myself standing in
front of real books, ancient tomes from corporations and governments alike,
computers with faster access to data than I had ever dreamed. The heretical
works of John Stewart Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes could all be found in
their own, original words.

An open terminal gave me access to
Sarah Aisling’s records, more material than I could possibly go through. Her
market value was pennies, and her status was listed as “detained.” The case had
been escalated less than a day after my report, and they transferred her to the
Citadel. I’d never be able to scrape together enough to learn her fate there.

But Kate was Sarah’s friend, and
might know what happened, maybe even know of a way to help. I looked up
Katherine Wolfe in every personnel directory I could, but I couldn’t find her.
She had been filling in, and since she didn’t work for Ackerman—or the rental
agency for that matter—I had no idea where to even begin looking for her.

That left me with the Arab woman.

I found a list of the rental
company’s employees. One by one I pulled their work licenses and found an Arab
woman with dark skin and curly black hair named Jazelle. I hadn’t gotten a good
look at her, but she looked like the right one. Her contact information was the
same as the agency’s, so I just printed her license.

I rushed home and, rummaging
through my old boxes, managed to find my very first Ackerman ledger, an old
Epsilon piece of junk. I was supposed to have turned it in when I got a Delta
contract, but kept it for sentimental reasons. It was deactivated, and even if
it weren’t, the firmware probably couldn’t even log into CentNet. But it might
survive a cursory examination. I put on the dirtiest, dingiest
clothes—moth-eaten and stale—that I could find.

I had never been in LowSec before,
but I knew the stories: rape, murder, and even cannibalism. It was all Epsilons
and NullCons. The police couldn’t make any real money cleaning up crime, so
stations were few and far between. Only a few broken-down fences and barbed
wire, between LowSec and NullSec, kept out the barbarians in the wild.

I took a cab to Capital City’s
western gate. I hadn’t traveled that way in years. You could actually see the
gradient, watch the city dissolve. Houses became duplexes, condos became
apartments, lawns became patches of dirt, and windows became smashed shards
with bars over them. By the time I reached the fourteen-foot wall encircling
the city, homes were missing entire walls, rooms and roofs—all held together by
rope, plastic bags, and rotting wooden beams.

The city wall looked like hell. The
beige paint had chipped off and there were scorch marks from detonated mines
all along its length. Still the razor wire was mostly intact, and the wall did
its job. Sniper towers, spider mines and Bouncing Betties were ready to cut
down anybody stupid enough to try to go over the thing.

“So many people,” said the driver,
“trying to get in here. They want our jobs, our money. Forget earning a living,
they want to break in and steal one.”

The rate was a flat thirty caps to
get into Capital City—enough to keep out the riff-raff. You could get out for
free—they didn’t even check your credentials. Still I saw a line in both
directions.

“Who the hell is trying to get
out?” I said, as we slowed and pulled in behind the car in front of us.

“Day-workers, mostly. Low and
NullCons. They don’t have a contract, so they’re slave labor. Karitzu
protections don’t apply. Some of them get—what, maybe thirty-five caps a day.”

“But it costs thirty just to get in
here.”

“Yep. They get five—take home.”

It’s
their own fault? They just need to work harder?

“Slaves?”

“Sex trade, mostly. You want to
have sex with a twelve-year-old boy, it’s hard to do if he’s got a contract.
Well, it’ll cost you a lot anyway. But null contracts, they’re starving to death
out here. Fifty caps will buy you the right to do anything you want to
anybody.”

“How many people are out here?”

“Eh…” he said, waving his hand.

As we approached the gate, I saw a
small car coming the other way. The guards stopped it, and the driver began
arguing with the officers. One of them came around to the back, pulled out a
revolver, and shot the trunk open. A man burst out and made a dash for the city
line. The agent calmly raised his pistol and took aim. A shot rang out, then
another and another. The man fell to the ground. Meanwhile three other agents
had pulled the motorist out of the car and begun beating him.

The driver looked at me through the
rearview. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This happens all the time. At least a few
times a week. It’s not dangerous, they’re careful not to hit anyone of value.”

“Are they going to kill him?”

“Nahh… They’ll come close, and then
send him back as a warning. Won’t do any good.”

We crossed through the checkpoint
and into LowSec.

The place looked a lot like I had
imagined, like the pictures I had seen on television: decrepit stone, brick,
and wooden buildings; dirt, filth and debris strewn everywhere. Nothing I had
seen, though, did justice to the smell: mildew, rotting cabbage, fetid milk and
raw sewage. Broken windows were covered with garbage bags, and water trickled
from all sorts of places—broken downspouts, clogged gutters, and hydrants.
There probably wasn’t a fire company within fifty miles; the buildings weren’t
even worth a day’s pay.

“Let me out a few blocks from the
address.”

“Sure… Don’t want the wife to know
you’re coming down here, eh?”

“Something like that.”

I got out of the cab, and the
driver sped off. Not until then, unshielded by the four corners of the car, did
I really understand that I was in LowSec.

I looked both ways down the street,
but I didn’t see anybody. LowSec was supposed to have a huge population, but it
was empty. Maybe, I thought, the place was so huge that some areas were
deserted while others were social and economic hubs. Maybe the driver just
dropped me off at an inauspicious spot.

I hadn’t gone more than a few steps
before I stepped in excrement, my first conclusive proof of life. I walked over
to a rusted lamppost, leaned against it, and tried futily to wipe it off.

 
Two blocks down I heard panting. Down a small
alleyway was what looked like a wire fox terrier standing beside a dumpster.
The dog’s coat had once been pretty, fluffy and white. But now it was muddied
and patchy with mange. He was missing most of his teeth, and one infected eye
was swollen shut. Despite all of this, he tilted his head and wagged his tail
when he saw me.

Then I noticed the boy hiding
behind the dumpster. He was ratty and skinny, his clothes an earthen brown and
his face muddy. The dog returned his attention to the lad, who was smiling and
holding out a piece of flesh. He licked the child’s hand, and the boy knelt
beside him. His tail started flying around, and he licked the boy’s face wildly
as he nuzzled the creature close.

Suddenly he slipped a noose over
the dog’s head. As it struggled, a band of children came out from an open
doorway and grabbed the animal. It was emaciated, but had enough meat on it to
feed them for a night. The boy slung the mostly dead dog over his shoulder, and
they darted into an abandoned building.

I looked back down the long street.
The sun would be setting soon. I wondered if I was close enough to a radio
tower for my ledger to work, maybe call a cab. The agency was supposed to be
only a few more blocks down, but I couldn’t see any offices or businesses
around.

I continued down the street, and
noticed more children following me. They were hard to see—never really coming
out from behind buildings and stoops, creeping back into the shadows whenever I
turned to look. But they were there. Despite all my efforts to blend in, they
had known from the moment I arrived that I didn’t belong. Maybe it was the cab,
a LowCon company, but still from inside the City. Or maybe it was my shoe—why
would anybody out there even bother wiping it? I worried that they were
considering how plump I was, and how long I could feed them for.

I’d been hearing noises for some
time, but it wasn’t till then that I began paying attention to them. They had
started with what sounded like whispering, or the rustling of trash in the
wind. But these kids had, no doubt, told their friends, brothers, sisters and
parents about the spoiled brat MidCon bumbling his way through their
neighborhood. I noticed tapping too—banging coming from pipes and lampposts—a
coded signal echoing for blocks. Without electricity or phones, still everyone
within two miles knew I was there. As I approached each new block I could see
the odd person or two glaring out at me.

Where they had earlier taken some
pains to hide themselves, now they didn’t seem as discreet. It worried me. I
picked up the pace, but still couldn’t find the agency. It hadn’t even crossed
my mind till then that the address could easily have been fake.

I was about to dart into the
nearest building when I caught a glimpse of the agency’s black and yellow
rental sign under a crust of grime and benzene-soot.

It was a converted Laundromat.
Inside, baked into the walls, were the silhouettes of nearly two dozen washers
and dryers. An emphysemic old man sat far in the back, playing solitaire,
drinking a urine-colored liquid from an old olive oil bottle, and coughing up
phlegm. The fan nailed to the ceiling had no blade-guards, and it oscillated
with a horrific grinding noise.

A man sat with his feet up on a
long desk, which ran lengthwise down the room. He was bald, with hawk-like eyes
and a thin nose. He saw me, but if he could tell that I didn’t belong, he
didn’t show it. He casually got up and flicked his terminal on.

“It takes a minute to warm up. Can
I help you?”

“Yes, I rented a friend, Kate. My
name is Charles Thatcher.”

“Oh yeah, the overages. Long night.
She didn’t screw up anything, did she?”