Bug Trap

Reflections from neon and LEDon lights washed across the rain-soaked night streets like smears of wet paint. They looked like they might be scribing out encrypted messages in obscure calligraphies, useful information there for the deciphering. Maybe even directions out of my present difficulties.

There was no time to stop and study such phenomena. A box was closing around me, iron sides grinding inexorably closer.

I knew this part of the city pretty well, most of the secret places and hidden sanctuaries. But so did those who were on my ass and after my head. The NYPD had exerted varying degrees of control over this patch of turf since the days of horse-drawn paddy wagons, and their badge-bearing minions knew it the way a hunter knows the patch of woods just outside his back door. The Chrome Lords lacked the law’s sweeping history, but easily matched the cops in street-nav, numbers of troops, and weapons. Two sides, polar opposites, closing in with the same objective: to find and crush what was trapped between them.

That would be me: Giorgio Lennon Phale. Posto handle: Glyph. Age: twenty-seven. Employment record: spotty. Legal history: problematic. Prospects: not to be envied.

Does the anvil cooperate with the hammer?

That was a question worth a wordup in any number of places, but I didn’t have time to put it out. My career as a posto would have to stay on hold until the time—if I lived to see it—that I wasn’t caught between the hammer of the Chrome Lords and the anvil of the police.

As a posto I’m an enthusiastic malcontent who mixes street art, graffiti, sloganeering, muckraking, ad-jacking, and the politics of outrage as a vocation. In other words, a dedicated semi-pro troublemaker. I’d made myself a whole pile of it this time. My mentor, old Slippery Jone, Mistress of the Subversive Koan, always said that if they’re not trying to find you to buy you off or work you over, then you’re not trying hard enough. Pride points for success, except that I’d managed to piss off both sides of an issue badly enough that both wanted me bagged and slabbed.

If this was success, then receding back into relative obscurity was beginning to have a nice ring to it.

I was crouched low, peering around the corner of a building and down a cross street, wishing I had Deacon Recon out and scouting for me. A spotter of his caliber might have helped make surviving the night undamaged something more than a vaguely theoretical possibility. But the cops had twanged and tanked my phone, so calls for help—other than pointless screaming—were not an option.

I’d crammed myself into a lovely bit of shadow. Being brownish of skin and inclined toward nightside sartorial style helped me blend in instead of standing out like an albino dressed in sequins, and being not particularly tall or wide meant I made a smaller target.

Around the corner, half a block ahead, two street beasts styled up in enough studded leather to wrap a cab stood picket, gleaming chromed clubs in hard, tattooed fists. The idle palm-slap of metal against flesh was intimidating in its suggestion of ready violence, but actually kind of helpful in the way it broadcast their location.

I dug into one particular pocket of the vest under my soggy coat. A familiar, sweetly illegal shape filled my hand: my dummystick. I pulled it out and found the controls I wanted by touch alone. Once it was set, I pointed it around the corner and fingered the trigger.

An invisible beam of sonic and electromagnetic waves leapt out to tickle and override the spielbox in front of a used clothing store. Instead of calling out to past and potential customers passing by, the dummied spielbox blared out a purposefully snotty cry of, “Hey! Copsucker!”

The shaven heads of the streetbeasts rotated like turrets, tracking the jibe. I swung the dummystick toward another storefront, prodding that one’s spielbox to blare, “Over here, copsucker!” Shrill, mocking laughter followed that taunt.

A diversion is a terrible thing to waste. I was already on the move, the sound of my sneakers splashing through the puddles masked by the dummied store. I was halfway across the street and thinking I was going to make it when an NYPD street spook suddenly materialized from a dark doorway. The cop’s form seemed to shimmer into existence as his—no, check that—her bulletproof nanocamo changed into uniform blue. It was when her hood went transparent, revealing an unsmiling woman with black skin and spiked yellow hair, that I nailed down her gender, and recognized her as the same cop who’d already popped up twice before on the edge of my search for safety.

Her regulation stunwand was pointed in my direction. That wand is related to my dummystick the same way a Glock is related to a Nerf pistol; mine could tickle, hers could deliver a knockout punch that would leave me pants-peed and drooling.

I jinked left and low, aware of a third element entering the equation: a delivery truck rumbling up the street toward me, and maybe offering a ticket out of my situational roach motel.

The copette let out a cry of “Halt!” in a voice cranked up to ear-bleed level by her comm unit. The official rule was warn first, shoot second, and what a jackpot, this finestette was actually following it.

Halting was the least appetizing option in a gutter-sludge assortment. The order to halt caught the attention of the Chrome Lords. Shaved heads turned. Dull eyes fixed on me, brightening at the sight of prey. They started toward me, the steel cleats of their boots clacking on the wet asphalt.

They didn’t seem aware of the cop, probably because their small, drug-addled reptile brains were unable to process more than one input at a time. But I saw the cop take notice of them, forcing her to split her attention.

The truck was almost on top of me then, a long blast of its horn proclaiming the driver’s warning that there would be no slowing or swerving for anything, least of all some scraggle-ass human speed bump. Not with cargojacking a very popular career path in the big bad city.

I stepped back like an experienced taxiodor, the blunt steel bumper of the truck bulling through the space I’d occupied just a second before. Then, calling on my inner ninja monkey, planted my feet and leapt, grabbing hold of the side of the truck body.

Although not going that fast, it was still trucking along at a sufficient clip to make it all I could do to hang on. But desperation can be an almost magical magnetic force, and I kept my ride.

The truck left the cop behind and swept past the two Chrome Lords. I loosened one hand long enough to give them a proper one-fingered wave good-bye.

My feeling of triumph proved to have the lifespan of a single crystal flake in a hot crack pipe. The truck’s horn let out an angry blat. I looked forward, meeting the driver’s gaze in the rear-view mirror.

The driver showed me a dough-faced, stubble-jowled scowl, making a motion that was easily enough translated: Get the fuck offa my truck!

I beamed him my most winning smile, loosening a hand to hold up five fingers, the biggest number I could manage. Five miles. Five minutes. Five blocks. Five fill in the blanks, that’s all I ask.

For just a moment it seemed like my winning ways and obvious charm had won out. The man did smile.

The bad news was his smile was a prelude to reaching for the big red gitback button on the truck’s dash.

I’d spent enough teenage time boardhiking to know what the gitback was for and what it would do. The driver held his hand poised over it, grin widening crazily.

Please don’t, I begged, shaking my head.

The hand inched closer, and when it was just the thickness of a buck soyburger—sans bun—over the button, I knew I was going to have to jump.

I made the sad puppy eyes. Couldn’t you at least slow down a bit? I tried to beam the message to the driver, a simple, heartfelt plea for a watered-down act of kindness.

The biodiesel engine snorted and roared as the driver laughed and floored it.

Options gone, I pushed off, turning around and bracing for impact, eyes sweeping across the blurry asphalt like I might be able to locate a chunk that happened to be soft as a mattress. As I jumped, the driver, out of sheer dickness, whacked the gitback. Crackling snakes of static electricity discharged all across the outside of the truck, a few questing heads managing to bite me in the ass.

I hit hard, but better than I could have ever hoped, worn sneakers skidding across the wet and oily blacktop like skis on fresh-packed powder, the sort of slick bit you’d only ever see in an old Jackie Chan chopp’emup.

I laughed out loud as I slid to a stop, feeling like a total action hero, the couple of burnt spots on my butt hardly counting in the cosmic order of how badly such a dismount could have gone. I’d gained almost three blocks thanks to the hitch, leaving the two stomp-booted Chrome Lords way behind. The yellow-haired cop in the spook suit was probably still somewhere back behind them, blocked from pursuit by five hundred pounds of slow, mean meat.

My happy dance got knee-capped when three more members of the gang boiled out of an alley half a block away. As the truck sound lessened I realized I was hearing sirens coming from what sounded like every direction.

I took a deep breath and took off.

Sometimes life is like an arcade game where you get just one token, and if you lose, you die.

That would make a great wordup, but I was beginning to think my days of stepping on power toes as a posto had reached toe tag city. There were Chrome Lords everywhere, and where they weren’t, the gaps were plugged with cops. That yellow-haired spook-suited finestette seemed to be everywhere, blocking every move I made.

If the gang got me I’d be stomped so badly I’d fit in a pizza box with room left over for extra toppings. If the cops got me I’d be looking at a probable resisting-arrest beating, a likely holding cell rendezvous with the sort of cell troll who would regard his tender new roomie as a tasty bedtime snack, and a guaranteed verdict of being guilty of something. The longer I eluded my pursuers the more I was torquing them off, and at this point surrender was some flavor of suicide.

My bag of tricks and options was empty. My utterly unplanned pinball through the back streets had brought me to the edge of a Bug Trap zone, and that trap was beginning to look like my only available escape route.

The Bug Traps had a lot to do with the way America—and for that matter, the rest of the world—was right then. We’d worked our way out of a pretty bad stretch when everything that wasn’t in the toilet was teetering on the rim, into something like peace and stability. Some wars ended. Terrorism was getting policed into the margins. The economy had started chugging along. Actual steps were being taken to deal with the rapidly degenerating environment.

Then the Bug Traps appeared. Overnight, and out of nowhere.

What they were was no secret. Messages began appearing on various media outlets, slick and jam-proof off-world infomercials announcing the SETI grand prize. Members of an alien race who called themselves the B’hlug had come to our solar system and taken up residence on Venus, that planet chosen because we didn’t seem to be using it, and it was comfortably out of bomb range. The B’hlug declared themselves a peaceful and benevolent race, looking forward to having some earthlings come on out to check out the very nice place they had built for us so we could all get to know each other better.

To facilitate this process, humans being comparatively backward in the space travel game, white cylinders about the size of a UPS truck stood on end began appearing all over the world. Want to visit us on sunny Venus? Just step into one of these transport booths and leave the teleporting to us.

The rational planetary demographic was tickled, amused, and intrigued by this invitation and its meaning. We were not alone, and the other guys sounded kind of interesting.

Of course those level heads are rarely in charge, or get to stay in control when what the paranoidocracy decrees to be the shit hits what they define as the fan. This reactionary xenophobic fringe went full-out foam-mouthed, bug-eyed, howling batshit. Never ones to scruple at such charming niceties as logic, fairness, intellectual honesty, or any of the other stains they wanted washed out of their concept of a proper society, they and their darlings immediately began seizing power, blasting themselves upward on a blaring cacophony of shrieking propaganda, gibbering hysteria, and extravagant threats calculated to make any fence-sitters on the alien issue stain their shorts and fall off on their side.

The New Order formed, attacks were immediately launched on what the mouthpieces of the new regime called the Bug Traps.

They set new low water marks for failure. Various attempts to remove or destroy the transport booths got precisely nowhere. Armies—America’s and those on foreign soil—tried to break in so they could go kick the evil ETs off “our” planet, which meant Venus. They might as well have declared war on gravity. One heavily decorated general with a history of ending wars was able to go into a Bug Trap. A week later a two-word message from him appeared in the Oval Office: I resign. Over in the Middle East, where some denizens take their backlash against outsiders seriously, a group of fundamentalist mullahs with a typically weak grasp of science and reality managed to incite a group of fanatics into nuking one.

At the conclusion of this Elmer Fudd fatwa, sitting in the giant crater surrounded by glassified sand was the portal, barely smudged and fully functional.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about the aliens. The government line was so luridly cartoonish it had to be a lie, meaning the Bugs were probably not the slavering baby-eaters and virgin-defilers certain fact-impaired media outlets insisted they were, even without a single chewed baby or weepy deflowered virgin to back up their recitations of official talking points.

Walking into a Bug Trap and seeing what happened next had never been something I’d planned on trying. Not so much from lack of curiosity but because there were too many causes and issues to posto for right where I was. Big Brother needed snotty little brother kicking him in the ankles every chance possible. My focus and industry had of course led to my present situation. So much for the virtues of a solid work ethic.

“There he is!” A rising clatter and rumble of boots followed the shout. Decision made: Hello Venus, good-bye Earth.

I bolted for the police barricade around the Bug Trap.

Warnings blared, triggered by proximity sensors. “Warning! This is a Prohibited Area! Anyone approaching the alien artifact is subject to severe penalties!”

I considered myself duly warned as I hurdled the concrete barricade. I was halfway across the open area between it and the Bug Trap when the first gunshot sounded, a round cracking off the ground just in front of me. I focused on the black door-shaped area on the face of the trap, trying to will myself there. I knew it wasn’t the sort of door you’d find in a house or a store, but some sort of exotic field. Certain people were allowed to pass through, others were rejected. Soldiers, suicide bombers, sociopaths, and fundamentalists might as well try to walk through a brick wall.

Would I, a moderately outlaw, rather subversive, more or less dedicated troublemaker be on the alien A List? If not, I was screwed.

Another bullet passed by my head, so close I could hear it zip by. The spike of relief I felt at being missed snapped off when something slammed into me from behind.

I went down, arms flapping as if I could fly instead of fall. I hit hard, desperately trying to gain ground in a spastic scrabble. Rubber bullet, I mentally chanted. I hope that was a cop firing rubber bullets.

There was a wide white apron around the Bug Trap. Supposedly when you reached that you came under Bug protection. It was two body lengths away, the Trap itself thirty feet beyond. I writhed toward this promised safety like a Tazed caterpillar, tensed against another shot.

A prickling sensation washed over me as I crawled onto the smooth white stuff surrounding the trap, and for a second I was afraid I was feeling my soul splitting from my body like a banana squeezed from its peel.

“You are safe now,” intoned a voice from someplace above me. Was I hearing angels? I didn’t hear harps.

This was followed by a barrage of gunfire. I cowered with my hands over my head—like that could help. Amazingly enough, not a single bullet reached me.

When a second fusillade began, urged on by a lot of cursing, and still nothing was reaching me, I had to twist myself around and look.

A dozen Chrome Lords were at the barricade, armed with everything from handguns to full auto drive-bys. When they saw their quarry—me—staring at them they went nuts, doing their best to blow enough holes in me to give them a clear view of the Bug Trap behind me. The bullets flashed into sparks as they hit an invisible wall rising up from the edge of the white apron. The aliens had to be protecting me. That was nice of them.

But it was one shot too late. There was blood on the smooth white ground under me. It was soaking the front of my clothes. There was quite a bit of it. As if my brain had been waiting for the proper visual cue before reacting, pain blasted through me. I moaned as the world began to spin.

No other option than to continue on. I tried to shove back the vertigo. Getting to my feet took a tremendous effort, and once up I wavered, jelly-legged and woozy.

More yelling erupted at the barricade, contradictory demands to come back and to go let the Bugs eat my ass. A police drone swooped in, belly-mounted spot lighting me up. Speakers blared commands to Halt! and Back away from the artifact right now!

A movie zombie shamble got me to the doorway. I turned back for one last look. A couple dozen screaming and cursing Chrome Lords now ringed the barricade. Two NYPD drones buzzed angrily overhead. The copette in the spook suit watched impassively from a nearby rooftop.

I gave it all the finger, got myself turned around, and more fell than stepped into the Bug Trap.

My first impression was of whiteness. Absolute and unrelieved whiteness.

Now I was standing at the bottom of a vast snow-white bowl, the sides curving up and away from me in some distance too ill-defined to measure by eye, seeming to merge with a white ceiling far above. I flashed on the image of a spider at the bottom of a bathtub in an all-white bathroom. I was seeing something similar to what it might see, only with fewer eyes and no particular urge to snack on flies.

And about the same clue quotient as to where I was, and what it all meant.

Then I noticed something strange and wonderful.

I wasn’t in pain anymore. In fact, other than being a bit weirded out, I felt pretty damn good. I checked myself over. The bullet wound was gone. A ragged hole went through my shirt, vest, and coat where the decidedly non-rubber bullet had passed through me, but there was no hole in my hide, and all the blood was gone. Moreover, my clothes were dry. Even my socks and sneakers.

A quick further personal inventory told me that all my tools and toys were still with me. I even had my phone, though I had a funny feeling that calling for takeout Chinese might just be pointless.

I pulled out the phone anyway and almost placed a call to Jimmy’s Noodle Kaboodle. Two things stopped me: Was this a chicken or shrimp situation? I wasn’t sure. Besides, there had to be a smarter move than that.

But what? I’d been presumably transported to Venus and given some first-rate medical treatment. The place I’d ended up didn’t look anything like the alleged probe pictures the government spread around to prove the planet was such a hellish place only monsters could live there. Was I supposed to walk around and start exploring, like in a game? Stay put and wait for a tour guide—or the ET Emeril who would be preparing me for dinner? At least I wasn’t a baby or a virgin.

I was starting to put my phone back in my pocket when it began playing the theme song from Close Encounters. Not a song I’d ever loaded in it.

I put the phone to my ear. Nervously. “Hello?”

“Good day, Giorgio Lennon Phale, most commonly and familiarly known as Glyph. Welcome to Venus.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said. The voice on the other end sounded human, with the smooth, educated, weighty diction you’d hear on a PBS documentary.

“You’re entirely welcome. This is a courtesy call to let you know that a facilitator will be joining you shortly. We do this because not everyone reacts well to surprise.”

“Consider me warned,” I said. My next words were chosen carefully, like half-price California rolls at a downscale sushi joint with giant cockroaches for wait staff. “Will this facilitator be, ah, human?”

“Does that matter, Glyph?”

“I guess not.” Except it might. People on Earth still had no idea what Bugs looked like. All we had ever been shown were obviously artificial avatars. The question had been posed many times: Why can’t we see you? The answer was always the same: You can. Come on out and take a look. I had always figured this was some sort of curiosity test, one I’d flunked up to now.

“Very good. Orientation will now begin.”

“Which means?”

“It means we have a talk, and get to know one another,” said the same voice behind me.

I nearly dropped my phone, lurching around toward the source of the voice.

Where there had been an expanse of eggshell nothingness, there was now a white desk. A white straight-back chair faced the desk. And behind the desk was…

…Gumby?

“Have a seat,” Gumby said in that voice that made me expect a pledge break or an explanation of the sexual habits of penguins.

“Sure. Thanks.” I shuffled toward the chair, keeping a wary eye on the entity across the desk.

“Not too scary looking, am I?” Gumby said.

“Not really,” I replied, screwing a smile on my face and struggling to look and act cool. The aliens look like Gumby?

“Hardly any resemblance to the creatures from Alien one through thirteen, is there?”

That earned a nervous laugh. “Not much at all. You’ve really seen those movies?”

Gumby nodded. “Sure. We’ve studied a whole bunch of your art and media. A personal favorite among my kind, alien-wise, are the invaders from Mars Attacks!”

I was amazed to find myself discussing classic movies with a person from another planet. That amazement was nothing compared to what I felt when Gumby suddenly sort of whirled and turned into one of the fishbowl-helmeted, bare-brained aliens from the Tim Burton flick.

“Ah,” I said, trying to pretend there hadn’t been anything the slightest bit freaky about what I’d just seen—and was seeing. I had to reach hard for a snappy comeback. “Uh, so have you banned Slim Whitman just to be on the safe side?”

The alien made a soft popping sound. “We haven’t banned him, but we’re not big fans. We much prefer Roy Orbison.” The creature sat forward, elbows on the desk. “I’ve let myself get sidetracked, Glyph. Pardon me for not introducing myself. My name is Orchid.”

“You have a human name?”

“That’s the closest English equivalent to my real name.”

“The flower or the color?”

“Both.” The alien whirled again. It was like every molecule making it up unmoored itself, turned white, played super high-speed Musical Chairs with its fellow molecules, then settled into a new shape when the music ended.

Now I was staring at Princess Leia, complete with hair buns. In the white robe, not the brass bikini.

I didn’t lose it and mostly managed to not stare at Leia’s tits. “So are you a, you know, male or female?”

More of that popping sound. “Why? Are you going to hit on me, Glyph?” Orchid/Leia batted her eyes at me coyly.

That brought me up short. “No, I just—” I got it then. “You’re laughing, right? With that,” I mimicked the sound. “Popping noise.”

“Yes, and please forgive me. I am not laughing at you.”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter if you were. Is laughing, um, universal?”

Leia/Orchid nodded approvingly. “Among organisms who possess the spark of sentience, yes.”

“So is that why you guys came here? To see if we know any good jokes?” An idea so absurd it might just be possible.

Orchid laughed again. “Who knows, maybe we did.” Another whirl, and when it ended I was facing Mr. Spock. Middle-late period, from the second movie. “Now, your coming here was not exactly voluntary, was it?”

“Not exactly,” I admitted uneasily. Now for hard questions.

“You were being pursued by both a gang and the police, correct?”

“Yeah.”

One Spock eyebrow rose. “You seem to be something of a troublemaker. This was not your first brush with the police, or anywhere near the first time your actions have put you in danger, or at loggerheads with society.”

No point in denying it. “I’ve had people take the things I said and did the wrong way.”

“Will you make trouble here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, answering honestly. “I mean, I owe you guys. You gave me a place to escape to and seemed to have fixed me up from getting shot. Thanks for that, by the way. If I wasn’t here I might be dead. But…”

Orchid/Spock whirled into the Tommy Lee Jones character from Men In Black. He frowned forbiddingly. “But what, Glyph?”

How to explain the pressure that is always inside me? “The thing is, when I see or learn about something I think is wrong, I have to do something about it.”

“By, among other acts, defacing public structures with various combinations of words and artwork.”

I smiled sheepishly. “Some of them are so butt-ugly they’re pretty much deface-proof.”

A whirl and now the Terminator filled the space behind the desk, a grim expression on the parts of his face that didn’t reveal metal. He said nothing, and that one red eye bored into my skull.

I managed to keep from cringing. This sort of thing always seemed to happen in job interviews too. Not the whirling thing, but somewhere along the line I would manage to scare or piss off my interviewer. Not a smart move in this case. There probably wasn’t anything keeping Orchid from zapping me right back to the cops and Chrome Lords.

The silence stretched on long enough to become uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.

“Well,” Orchid said at last, whirling into Gandalf. “This has been interesting and educational.”

“For me, too,” I said with a weak smile, wanting to get back on Orchid’s good side. Not sucking up, just making nice.

“Good. Now please stand up.”

I did as I was asked, trying to hold on to that smile.

“Please turn around.”

I felt a spasm of panic. “You’re not going to cap me, are you?”

“We don’t cap people,” Gandalf said. “At least not in the manner you’re talking about. Now turn around.”

Hoping Gandalf/Orchid didn’t turn me into a toad, I obeyed. Now there was a white wall just a few feet behind me. In the wall were two matte black doors like the one that had brought me to Venus. One was marked with a big red X, the other was unmarked.

“You will see similar doors when you join your kind in the Hoop,” Orchid said. “The door with the X will always lead to the same place. Back to your world, and the gate you used to come here. Though you can, by intention, instead end up at the gate nearest the one that brought you out. That’s a provision for those in your situation, ones who might be facing a less than friendly homecoming. Any questions?”

I had head full. “Where does the other door lead?”

“Somewhere else.”

I waited for more information. None came.

“That’s it?” I turned to look at Orchid, seeing that he—or she—had whirled into the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Orchid shrugged, shedding straw. “That’s it. You don’t like where you are, go through a Mystery Door and end up someplace else.”

“Someplace here on Venus.”

Orchid/Scarecrow grinned and spread his hands. “Probably.”

“You’re not giving me much to go on.”

“What do you want, a yellow brick road?”

I examined the doors doubtfully. “So I’m supposed to just walk through and hope for the best?”

No answer.

The desk was gone. Orchid was gone. The only things left to prove any of it had been real were a few stray pieces of straw. As I watched they sank into the white floor and disappeared.

I faced the doors again. Took a deep breath and walked through the unmarked door to wherever.

I had no idea what to expect when I went through that alien doorway. All I could do was brace for the worst, as if ducking into a bar notable for the multiple chalked body outlines on the sidewalk out front.

Still, that didn’t quite prepare me for stepping out into the middle of a grassy field and having a red-faced demon coming straight at me, screaming bloody murder and waving a sword.

I let out a yell—a glass-cracking shriek, actually—and dodged to the side, tripping over my feet, going down and eating turf.

The demon swept past me, slamming into another demon, this one with a horrible blue face. As they went at each other with their swords I realized that they were people in bamboo armor, wearing masks, and wielding rattan swords. I’d landed in the middle of a small but frenzied battle, over two dozen of the demons whirling and screaming and trading blows.

“What the fu—” I began, swallowing the rest of my query and almost my tongue at the sound of a huge gong. The battling demons disengaged and stepped back, bowing formally to each other.

The demon warrior who had nearly run me over strode back to where I sprawled. Offered a gloved hand.

After a moment I took it, letting the demon help me to my feet. “Thanks,” I mumbled. As I dusted off my clothes the demon pulled off his bamboo helmet, dropped it to the ground, and pulled off his mask.

I took a step back, not so much reality-slapped that the warrior was a woman, but at the face behind the mask. Her face, like mine, was the creamed coffee color of mixed race, except in the places where it was the pink of scar tissue. The scars mapped out the left side of her face in thin twisting forks and dead ends, several of them disappearing under the black patch covering one eye. Her hair was a close-cropped brown burr broken by more scarring.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Didn’t break anything when you fell?”

I shook my head, staring even more now. “Uh, no.”

Her smile turned fierce and faintly mocking. “Not used to seeing anyone as pretty as me?” Her voice was soft, but held a dangerous edge, like velvet wrapped around a straight razor.

I lost my battle with a second growing impulse and started to giggle. “It’s, I mean, you look—” Giggling dissolved into helpless laughter.

The woman’s face went smooth and still, all warmth frozen away.

I held up my hands, struggling to get a handle on myself. “Sorry,” I gasped. “It’s just that—” I wheezed for breath. “It’s just that you look like a really badly dubbed movie.”

Her expression thawed. “Oh, that.” Her voice began to synch with the movements of her mouth. “Better? I was speaking Chinese—bad Mandarin to be exact—until you popped up. Our hosts provide the translation.”

“Hosts? You mean the Bugs?”

Her gaze was cool, and more than a little intimidating. Then she gave a slight shake of her head, as if deciding to let something go, turning her back to me. “Help me get this stuff off, will you?”

There were wooden clasps holding the back of the armor shut. I started working on them. All around us the other warriors were helping each other shed their armor. “So what was the battle about?” I asked.

“Exercise. Blowing off steam. Fun.”

It hadn’t looked like fun to me. “The Bugs don’t mind you fighting wars?”

“This wasn’t a war, just violent choreography. Dance for non-sissies.”

Which presumably meant me, who had somehow ended up playing lady in waiting. I got the last clasp loose, stepped back. “There you go.” She shucked off the armored top, began removing the stuff protecting her legs. When she turned back to face me I was staring again.

I pegged her age at somewhere in her late thirties. Her body was that of an athlete, trim and muscular. In great shape. Except that her left arm beyond her elbow was clearly artificial, one of the newer generation of smart prosthetics. Her left leg was also tan nanolastic from the knee on down. The tight black tee and baggy gray shorts she wore did nothing to hide any of that, or more scars, mostly on her left side. On her feet, both of them, were sturdy hiking boots.

“You just out?” she said.

I tried to pretend I hadn’t been gaping like an Iowa tourist in Times Square. “Uh, from Earth?”

She cocked her head quizzically. “Is there someplace else to come out from I should know about?”

“Any—” I shook my head. Managed an unconvincing smile. “Sorry. I’m still a little, you know, disoriented.”

She smiled back as if she believed me, but her smile looked slightly forced and wore a shadowing of tiredness. Like I presented a problem she would have preferred to duck.

I felt like I should apologize—though I wasn’t sure what for. Before I could think of something to say she clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough to make me stagger.

“Okay, kid, let’s get your ass oriented. You got a name?”

“Glyph.” I bit back the urge to tell her not to call me kid.

“Posto handle?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Cute. You can call me Trub.”

The door had dumped me in an open field surrounded by low vegetation on two sides, jungle on the others, grass underfoot, and the air clean and fresh. In the distance I could see several widely scattered clusters of low broad white cylinders, some with thatched roofs. People moved between the buildings. There were trees and birds and a gaggle of kids running around. It was like something out of a movie shot somewhere oriental and rural.

Except that the sky was white instead of blue, and it seemed to be only a mile overhead. Way off I could see curving white walls that swept up to become sky. Ahead and behind the world seemed to curve down and away, like now I was inside a terrarium under an overturned bathtub.

And it was warm, far warmer than it had been back in New York. But I was reluctant to take my coat off. Several of my things, and consequently several parts of my identity, were in its pockets. I felt a powerful need to hold on to that. The decidedly non-urban surroundings weren’t in my comfort zone. When you feel out of place it helps to at least feel like you’re ready to bug out at a moment’s notice.

Several of the warriors had gone to hang their armor on wooden racks along one side of the field, then begun drifting away on a path leading into a cluster of heavier vegetation. Trub told me to follow her as she parked her own armor, then led us onto that same path. It wound through the trees as aimlessly as I felt tagging along, listening to Trub talk to one of the male warriors about some obscure technique used in their battle.

We emerged into another clearing. What looked like a mutant Tiki bar stood at one end, and there were wood and bamboo tables and chairs scattered about, several already in use.

Trub lifted an arm, catching the eye of the happily busy Japanese man behind the counter. She held up two fingers. He nodded and shouted, “Hai!”

She claimed an unoccupied table. “Take a load off, kid,” she said, dropping heavily into one chair. I sat down more cautiously, checking out the surroundings. I smelled hot grease and food, saw men and women gabbing as they ate and drank. So they had diners on Venus. I guessed that made sense.

A young Korean boy hustled over to our table, balancing an overloaded tray. Smiling shyly, he put down two big ceramic mugs and a leaf-covered bamboo platter heaped high with what looked like deep-fried rice balls. They smelled good enough to start my mouth watering, making me realize I hadn’t eaten in hours.

“Thanks, Kim,” Trub said as the boy bowed, then hurried off to serve other customers. She pushed one of the mugs in front of me, keeping the other for herself.

“What is it?” I said, watching her take a slug and then peering into my mug.

Trub wiped her mouth with the back of her artificial hand. “Rice beer. Brewed right here in Rice City.”

I took a cautious sip. It tasted weird, like a mix of ginger ale and sake. “Rice City is what, a village? I mean, be real, this doesn’t look like much of a city.”

This seemed to amuse Trub. “Oh, so you’re in charge of defining what a city is?” She popped a rice ball in her mouth, her one good eye hooding in pleasure as she chewed.

“I just meant, you know, there aren’t any big buildings. No concrete. Not that many people.”

She swallowed, took another sip of beer. “Tell you what, kid. You’re new here, so let me give you the basics. Venus 101. Then you can ask questions and I’ll try to answer them. That work for you?”

I shrugged. “Sure. I guess.” I didn’t like being treated like a gomer, but as far as this place was concerned, I was one.

“Then eat and listen. But watch for the red balls. Don’t try them unless you got balls. Now, Venus is a planet. A globe. You know latitude from longitude?”

There were three kinds of rice balls, the size of doughnut holes, each with a different colored dot on it. Red, green, and black. “Doesn’t everybody? Longitude lines run from pole to pole. Latitude is around the globe, like the equator.”

“You got it. Now imagine two latitudinal lines, one per hemisphere, each one a few degrees away from the equator. With me so far?”

“I’m trying to keep up.” I picked out one of the red-marked rice balls. I had balls, after all.

“Now imagine those lines as actual artifacts, shaped like bicycle inner tubes or hula hoops. Each one a hollow torus about five klicks across and roughly 30,000 klicks in circumference.”

I scowled at her. “Wait a minute, you’re telling me each tube is, uh, around two miles across, and, um, nearly nineteen thousand miles long?” I popped the rice ball in my mouth, then froze mid-chew as nuclear heat exploded on my tongue.

Trub grinned. “More or less. Drink some beer. The reds are kinda spicy. Black and green are milder.”

“No fuckin’ way,” I croaked, spitting the burning coal out before it could melt my teeth.

“Okay, somewhat milder.”

“I mean nobody can make something that big.”

“Our hosts can. Took them a week. We’re in the northern Hoop; they’ve reserved the southern one for their own use. Our Hoop is broken into twelve hundred individual segments, each segment not quite sixteen miles long. That’s plenty big enough for each segment to hold several different small communities. Rice City is bigger than most and kind of spread out, with a couple thousand citizens. There are three other towns in this segment, but Rice City is the largest. A lot of segments are still empty at this point. People tend to cluster, and a lot of them stay near the place where they first arrive.”

I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around that. Rather than argue the improbability of an artifact as humongous as she was describing, and my argument would have been crippled by the fact that I obviously wasn’t in Kansas anymore, I jumped on another point.

“By arrived you mean where they get put. Or dumped.” I’d sure been dumped.

Trub ate a couple more of the red marked rice balls, studying me thoughtfully as she chewed. Thoughtfully enough to make me antsy. That one good eye of hers had something of the security camera lens about it, like you’re being watched as a shoplifter when you are only shopping. I tried to act unconcerned and sampled one of the black rice balls. It was pretty good. Spicy, but not insanely so.

“Placed is really the best way to describe it,” she said at last. “You see, our hosts are pretty damn good at reading affinity and intention.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re saying they can read our minds?”

“Not really. They’re just good at sensing the ways people lean, and what they might do and like. Why, is mind-reading a problem?”

I stared at her in disbelief. “You don’t mind having aliens in your head?”

She laughed. “Let me tell you, after having a fist full of shrapnel in your skull, anything less hardly counts.”

I shook my head, dissatisfied with her answer. And, truth be told, a little freaked. This was too much weirdness to scarf down at a single sitting. It was nearly as indigestible as one of those red rice balls.

“I can’t believe any of this,” I said, then managed to damp down the shrill edge in my voice. “Giant tubes as gerbil runs for humans. Friendly brain-sucking. Sorting people like change or recyclables. I mean, if they’re such hot shit, then why am I here in Crouching Tiger land with you?”

The one-eyed woman seemed more amused by my attitude than put off by it. She helped herself to a couple more rice balls, then drained her mug.

“Kind of a hard case, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a chump,” I said stiffly.

“Good for you. So tell me, are you tough?”

I almost snapped back a glib answer, but looking at this woman who had survived such terrible injuries made me think twice.

“Tough enough, I guess,” I said at last. “I’ve spent ten years as a posto in New York.”

“Good for you.” She stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute. Eat a bit more. Finish your beer. You’ll need it.”

“For what?”

Instead of answering, she strolled toward the bar, detouring a couple times to trade complicated handshakes with fellow combatants. They all seemed to know and like her.

I glommed a handful of rice balls, picked out the dangerous ones and put them aside, then ate some of the ones left. As I munched I studied Trub. Being a guy, and so far unable to get any other sort of handle on her, I focused on her ass.

It was a fine example of that perennial favorite. Shapely but, I suspected, far firmer than average. There was a serious jock vibe in the way she moved, a centeredness and easy physicality that didn’t seem the slightest bit hampered by her fake arm and leg, and one missing eye. In spite of the scars there was something off my normal charts hot about her.

It was a surprise to be getting dicksignal from a woman who had to be a decade older than me and looked like she’d lost a hatchet fight. I figured maybe it was my near death experience giving me a taste for Corpse Bride.

Much as I hated to admit it—even to myself—I was totally lost, stuck in a place where the turf was nothing like the kind I was used to and the rules weren’t the ones I was used to bending. Trub seemed to be inviting me to tag along with her for a while. That offer had its attractions. In spite of her ball-busting attitude she was interesting, and even able to shake my spray can a bit. She seemed to know her way around.

Trub reached the Tiki bar counter and leaned against it, chatting with the Japanese man behind it. Having grown up in a part of the city with a substantial Asian population, I had no problem telling Japanese from Chinese, Korean from Vietnamese, Thai from Cambodian. Half the people around me were ethnically Chinese. Most of the rest were an Asian medley, except for two men whose tattooed faces marked them as Maori, and a scattering of whites.

All living in a village called Rice City. Put here on purpose? Why? I had serious issues with the concept of some higher power deciding where people would live, and who they would live with, stacking them like blocks of ghetto Lego. Though I had to admit that nobody I could see looked or acted like a prisoner or internee.

The man behind the counter passed Trub a battered leather and canvas bag. She slung the strap over her shoulder, bowed deeply toward him, then sauntered back over to where I waited.

I almost got up but didn’t. Then wished I had as she stood there staring down at me, looking amused.

“You see something funny?” I said.

She shook her head. “No more than I see in a mirror.”

“Riddles for dessert?”

“We’re done eating. I’ve got places to go and things to do. You game for riding shotgun?”

“What sort of things have you got in mind?”

“Oh, this and that. The usual.”

I knew I was being challenged. She was basically saying, Think you can keep up? And of course adding, kid.

I couldn’t help be aware that the people at the tables around us were grinning and nudging each other like they all shared a joke. One in which I was surely the punch line. But it was too late to back down.

I stood up. Knocked back the dregs of my beer. “I got no other plans.”

“Glad to hear it.” I noticed that she was wearing a plain white ring when she lifted her hand and touched the ring to her neck. A thin pearly disc about as big around as a donut appeared on her breastbone, just below the hollow of her throat. The disk clung there, shining softly.

“Break’s over,” she said to no one in particular.

What sounded like heavily sampled classical music featuring alien instruments and a chorus singing in Martian came out of nowhere. Trub listened intently, nodding.

I realized that she was talking to the Bugs—or at least listening to them. Which seemed to mean that she had a direct line to them, and had just told them her break was over. That led to the conclusion that she was some sort of agent of the Bugs. Or maybe a collaborator. It might even be possible she was one herself, whirled up into banged-up girl form.

The space opera soundtrack ended.

“Check,” Trub said. She gave me the eye. “You ready, kid?”

“For what?”

“For whatever happens next.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know Alice In Wonderland?”

“Sure.”

“We’re about to go for a cruise down the rabbit hole.”

Before I could ask what that meant, she raised her voice and said, “Transport.”

I jumped as a black doorway came out of nowhere in front of us, connected to nothing and hanging in the air like a black velvet sheet pinned to an invisible clothesline.

“Let’s go,” Trub said, starting toward it.

“Where?” That came out as more of a plea than the demand I’d planned.

“I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

I took a last look around, and with all eyes on me, followed her to and through the door.

We stepped through into a gloomy space lit by narrow shafts of light coming through the leaf-thatched lattice roof overhead. The air was even warmer than it had been in Rice City, and it carried a sweet, heavy scent, dark and mysterious.

I barely had time to take all that in before a linebacker-sized no-neck dressed in a loincloth and armed with an enormous wooden club came at me, snaggle teeth bared in what was definitely not a welcoming smile.

I let out a crack-voiced curse and stumbled backward, hoping the door was still behind me and would take me back to Rice City.

The door was gone. I fetched up against a wall. Suddenly Trub was there between me and the man with the club. He snarled and swung the weapon, grunting with effort, clearly intending to make a home run with her head.

She dodged the blow with a move that was pure kung-fu ballet in its grace and precision, at the same time burying her artificial hand in his bulging gut. The blow folded him over bug-eyed.

She stepped back lightly. The man dropped to his knees, clutching his belly and gagging.

“Don’t get up,” she said mildly. “I know the way.” She glanced back at me. “Come on, let’s go see Poppa Poppy.”

When she said that I was finally able to place the smell: the beguiling reek of opium, a smell that occasionally wafted from the back rooms of certain cribs in one part of the city I haunted.

I followed her as she stepped around the guy she’d felled and toward a wide doorway leading deeper into the shadowy structure. Two more big men armed with clubs suddenly filled the opening, blocking our way.

Trub paused, looking them over like a cat offered a pair of tasty mice. “I’m going in to talk with your boss,” she said in the tone of voice someone might use telling a restaurant hostess that she had a lunch reservation. “You’ve got two choices. Either I go past you, or through you.” A smile that had more than a little crazy in it. “Doesn’t much matter to me.”

They checked out their compadre on the floor. He was still flopping and gasping like a walrus in need of the Heimlich Maneuver. One punch. The lady had a wicked left.

“We won’t forget this, bitch,” the one on the left growled as he stepped aside.

Trub laughed. “And here I didn’t think you people learned.”

“We’ll learn you,” the other blustered, but he too moved back out of her way.

“This is your lucky day, kid,” Trub said without looking back. “You get to meet one of the biggest slimeballs in this stretch of the Hoop.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet any slimeballs, figuring I already knew plenty of them. But staying out there with the two door-thugs wasn’t that appealing an option either. They were already eyeing me like a safe, convenient outlet for their frustration.

“Why not?” I said, trailing behind as she pushed past the guards and through the doorway. It was even darker on the other side. The opium reek thickened.

As my eyes adjusted I was able to get a better look at our surroundings. We were in a large circular room with a conical ceiling. There were low pallets on either side of the door we’d just come through. Slumped figures filled some of these rude beds, puffing pipes or staring vacantly into dreamland. At the far side of the room was a raised dais piled high with cushions and pillows. An enormously fat man lolled atop them, tended by half a dozen young women and men, all naked. The fat man’s hairy body glistened with sweat and oil, shining in the light of small braziers. A braided black beard grew from his broad face, and perched on his shaven head was a garland of bright red poppies.

He watched us approach with heavy-lidded junkie eyes, and if our arrival provoked any reaction at all, it was one of mild bemusement, like we were an especially interesting hallucination.

“To what do I owe this tremendous honor,” he said in a low, silky voice when we stood before him. The movements of his mouth didn’t match the words I heard, and somehow I knew what I was hearing was being translated from Turkish.

Trub stood there gazing down at him. Her distaste showed in her tightened lips and the fixity of her stare. I had a feeling she was keeping a serious chunk of anger in check.

“You broke the rules,” she said at last.

“The rules,” Poppa Poppy repeated. A shiver snaked along my spine at the way the man voiced that simple word. He made it sound like some tender and innocent thing ripe for defiling.

“That’s right, you bloated toad, the rules. The buying and selling of children will not be tolerated.”

I stared. This drugged-out blob was buying kids?

Poppa Poppy roused himself enough to lift one hand, lazily waving away Trub’s accusation. “I am an honest merchant.”

“You are a lucky merchant,” Trub answered sharply. “If it were up to me, you and your whole operation would be nothing more than a rancid grease spot.”

A wide, toothy smile, smug and superior. “But it is not up to you, is it?”

Trub crossed her arms. Although outwardly composed, I was sure what she really wanted to do was vaporize the fat man, blasting him into deep-fried suet. “You think you understand the rules well enough to break them without earning any punishment. No surprise, your brain has been turned to dog shit. So one last time, let me explain something about the rules you refuse to get. Are you paying attention?”

A languid shrug. “I listen.”

“Good. If I were to slaughter you and every one of your minions, burn this place to the ground, and put your head on a pole in the middle of the ashes, then I would have broken the rules.”

“Yes, you would,” Poppa Poppy breathed with a smirk. “And the rules are so important to you.”

“If I did that, I would be rebuked. Told to try to please be a little more low key next time, and asked to take down your head down because it was so butt ugly. That would be the extent of my punishment.”

“You would not—”

“Shut up,” Trub snapped. “You have no idea what I might do when I’m pissed off. Have you heard the story of how I got this eye patch and lost this arm?” She held up her prosthetic.

“I have heard stories.” Poppa Poppy held out his hand. One of the young men passed him a loaded pipe. He studied it, then lifted it toward his lips. “Wild stories. Made to frighten the credulous.”

Trub slapped the pipe out of his hand, moving so fast she was a blur. “Well, listen up. I’ll give you the short version because you’ve smoked your brain too badly to have an attention span.” She paused to see if she had his undivided attention. She did. Had mine too.

“I was in Lebanon. There was a bomb. It went off. I lost an arm and a leg and an eye, not to mention some other odd bits. The bomber was a shithead, even by the standards of his kind. He snuck in to groove on his handiwork. When he turned me over I stabbed him in the throat with the shattered bones sticking out of my arm, dragged myself on top of him, and drowned the son of a bitch with my own blood.”

This was related in a flat, passionless voice that seemed to drop the temperature on the room by fifty degrees. I believed every word she said. That hadn’t been a brag or a scare story, but a stone cold recitation of history. I even remembered hearing the story from the news five or so years before. Trub was that woman.

Poppa Poppy believed her too. His color had gone bad, and fresh sweat covered his face. He managed a queasy, unctuous smile. “I assure you, there is no reason for violence.”

“That’s my call.” She turned to look at me. “See that curtain over there? Go through it. Bring back whatever you find behind it.”

“You cannot intrude on my privacy like this,” Poppa Poppy protested as I moved to obey. I couldn’t imagine not doing as she asked.

“Shut up. If I want any shit from you, I’ll squeeze your head.”

There was a doorway hung with tattered fabric. One of the ever-present bullyboys moved to bar my way. I forced myself to stare the man straight in the eye, hoping Trub’s mojo extended to me. The guy was big enough to chew me up like a fifty-cent burrito and spit out the rat bones before burping.

The guard scowled and bared his teeth.

“Better move,” I said. After a few long seconds he did.

I pushed through the curtain into the room beyond.

“Aw shit,” I mumbled. There were two children in the room. Naked children in a crude wooden cage. A girl about nine, so skinny I could see every rib, and a boy about four just as thin. A chunky woman in ragged nurse’s scrubs slouched in a chair by the door, presumably to watch them. She stared at me with blank glassy eyes as I came in, looking unsure whether I was real or a pipe dream.

I turned my attention back to the kids. They stared at me with the wide frightened eyes of animals in a trap.

“Hi, guys,” I said as I approached the cage. I squatted down in front of the door, dredging up a smile that made my face hurt. “My name is Glyph.”

They didn’t respond, watching me like I was a closet monster that had come to get them. I realized they were probably drugged. The fumes alone were enough to waste anyone who breathed them.

I took a quick look around the gloomy, dirty room, then turned my attention to the inside of the cage. There were no toys, no books. Just a pile of rags to sleep on and a bucket for a bathroom. They were in a holding pen. I didn’t want to think about what they were being held for.

“This place is pretty gross, isn’t it?” I said gently.

The girl whispered, “Yes.” The boy nodded soberly.

“Want me to get you out of here?” While my impulse was to just break them loose and drag them away, I couldn’t begin to guess what they’d gone through on the way to ending up in a cage. So I wanted them to have a say in what happened to them.

“Can we go home?” the girl asked.

“You sure can,” I said. I didn’t know whether that was true or not, but was going to do my damnedest to make it so. I stood up, taking hold of the heavy wooden bar across the cage door. One of the big thugs must have put it there; it was all I could do to get it up and out of the way. Once the door was unbarred I opened it. “Come on, kids, let’s get out of here.”

The girl had begun huddling in on herself, self-conscious about her nudity. I took off my coat and emptied its pockets into my vest. I held it up, offering it to her.

The girl crept out, and I helped her into the coat. It hung to her ankles. She hugged it to herself gratefully. The boy only came as far as the door. Scared. I didn’t blame him.

“Would it be all right if I carried you, big guy?”

After a moment the boy nodded. He bolted to me, holding up thin arms.

“One piggy ride coming up.” I hoisted the boy up and settled him on one hip, then took the girl’s small hand. I led them back toward where Trub waited. The woman watched us go by, smiling dreamily and drooling.

Trub glanced in our direction when we came through the curtained door, her scarred face hard and cold. The girl froze and the boy whimpered when they saw her.

“It’s all right,” I said soothingly. “She’s our friend, like a pirate superhero. She came here to help get you away from this bad man.”

Trub met my gaze for a moment, her face impassive, then turned her attention back to Poppa Poppy. “You have been warned,” she said. “If I have to come back here again I will break you.”

The drug lord regarded her though heavy-lidded eyes. “If you come back again I will have an army waiting to meet you.”

She smiled, pleased by the threat. “Go for it, smokebrain. You take the gloves off, so will I. Nothing would make me happier.”

This warning delivered, she came over to where I waited with the children. She called for transport, then the four of us went through the door that appeared, away from the dark and dreadful lair of Poppa Poppy.

Bright light smacked me in the face, making me squint, and fresh air washed over me. I sucked it in greedily, trying to clear my head of the narcotic fumes I’d breathed, and the nastiness that had crawled into my lungs. The boy on my hip hid his face against my shoulder, and the girl mumbled something I didn’t quite catch.

Trub had transported us to a wide spot on a path leading through a lightly wooded area. This time the vegetation looked, to my untutored eye, more like what you’d see in Central Park than in a travelogue. Ahead of us, on a low rise, was a cluster of the low round buildings that seemed to be standard on the Hoop. The largest of them had a crude wooden scaffold built over it, and atop that framework was a big wooden cross. The idea of a church on Venus seemed pretty strange, but then again the whole idea of churches had never particularly resonated with me.

Nearby was a sign reading NO ADMITTANCE TO PURITY WITHOUT PERMISSION, and beside it a crude ceramic bell.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Edge of a hamlet called Purity. Same segment, toward the opposite end, about six klicks away,” Trub said, studying the village with the frown of someone contemplating trash on their lawn.

“So who was Jabba the Hut?”

My reference earned a faint smile that faded quickly. “His real name is Jamal Papadopoulos. He’s half Greek, half Turkish, all dirtbag. He’s got himself a sleazy little poppy growing and processing operation going, trading what he produces for what he needs—” A glance at the kids, who were still clinging tightly to me. “Or wants.”

“Who the hell would trade children for drugs?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer to that terrible question. There were always willing participants for both ends of such a dark bargain. I’d postoed about a gang doing just that a few months before, raising such a stink that the cops finally moved in and stopped the trade.

She jerked her chin. “You’re about to find out.”

I looked up the path toward the village. Four people were approaching.

“You didn’t ring the bell.”

Trub snorted. “I didn’t need to. I don’t need to play their little keep-out game either, but this is me being nice.”

The man in the lead was big—football player big—with the stiff authoritarian bearing of someone with a fetish for spit-shined jackboots. Set jaw, smile-proof face, eyes as soft as the buttons on a uniform. He was wearing a heavy black jumpsuit, macho black boots a gangie would be proud to street, and on a chain around his neck was a big wooden cross. He reminded me of General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove.

“Who’s the big guy?”

“Calls himself Pastor Pureway.”

Two women and a man trailed behind him, dressed in shapeless gray robes. Their thin faces all wore the same guarded mix of hope and fear. When they saw the children their expressions brightened, and they started to rush forward. Pureway stopped them with a single word.

I looked to Trub for some clue as to what was supposed to happen. She was staring at the General Ripper rip-off. It was obvious that she wasn’t any fonder of him than Poppa Poppy, and I had a feeling that her being nice wasn’t going to last long.

“What is your business here?” the big man demanded, planting himself in front of Trub. His tone was brusque and challenging, and he looked down at her like a half-naked pole dancer who’d snuck into his choir.

“I’m returning two prodigals to the fold,” she said. “Though prodigal probably isn’t the right term. They didn’t run away. They were sold to Poppa Poppy by one of your devoted parishioners.” There was just as much confrontation in her voice, and just as much distaste, with an extra added edge of sarcasm.

Pastor Pureway’s frown deepened. “You are mistaken. None of my flock would do such a thing.”

“You are either a liar or a fool. No, I take that back. You’re both, and we both know it. Your repulsive little cult might as well live in a prison camp. No surprise people would want to escape any way they can. Being here sure makes me want to get fucked up big-time.”

His upper lip curled and his face reddened with anger. “You are a sinner, coarse and unredeemed.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Trub agreed with a grin. “Much as I’d love to spend the rest of the day pissing you off, I’m a busy woman and I’ve got more dirty jobs to handle after I finish with you. So here’s the deal: When your people sell their children, children you condemn as being lesser beings since they weren’t conceived by your brain-damaged rules, the stink is on you since you’ve set yourself up as the one in charge. Breaking the rules like this will not be tolerated. If it happens again you will be punished.”

The man drew himself up stiffly. “Only God rules here.”

Trub laughed in his face. “Yeah, right. Like it or not, the B’hlug are in charge here. They can send your puckered butt back to Earth any time they want, and it’s only their fascination with just how stupid people can act that’s keeping you here. They provide your air, your light, and most of what you eat and use. You are here on their sufferance. They are tolerant—far more tolerant than I am. But the mistreatment and selling of children will not be tolerated. By me or them. That’s the law here. Period.”

The cult leader wasn’t having any of it. “We follow the dictates of God, not alien heathens.”

“No, you make shit up and call it commandments.” She got right in his face. “I swear, if this happens again I’ll ship your ass back to Earth and dump you in the worst place I can find. I’ll empty Purity and scatter everyone in it all across the Hoop, arranging it so none of them ever find any of the others. Now get out of my way so I can talk to these kids’ families.”

The big preacher stared hard at her, lips white and muscles jumping in his jaw. Trub was a foot shorter and weighed half as much but radiated such furious energy and coiled menace that he had no choice but to back down. He turned abruptly and stalked back toward the village.

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Trub’s face softened, but only slightly as she turned her attention to the two women and one man who had accompanied their leader. They shrank back, tense and frightened as arrestees before a hanging judge.

“I know it wasn’t you who sold these poor kids to Poppa Poppy.” She pointed at one woman. “You, Sandy, it was your husband Clay, and I know Purity rules say you can’t have any say in what he does. You two are their aunt and uncle, tried to stop him, but failed. I’m releasing them back to you. But I warn you, unless Clay quits huffing what Poppa Poppy is selling because he can’t cope with the way that charlatan runs things, he’s going to do that or something even worse again.”

“I’m so sorry,” the kids’ mother said in a small voice. She could not look directly at Trub, but peered fearfully out from under hanging bangs. Her face wore a look I had seen before, seen too much when I did some posto for a women’s shelter.

“Then do something about it!” Trub’s voice was harsh enough to make them flinch. “Grab these kids and take a mystery door somewhere else. Get away from this cheapjack pulpit-thumper while you still have some self-respect left. He’s no holier than you or me; he’s a sadistic control-freak and a bully. If you want to let him ruin your lives, I can’t stop you. But there isn’t the slightest goddamn thing righteous about putting children in danger.”

I had kept my mouth shut so far. Not that I didn’t have things I wanted to say; my tongue was nearly bloody from being bitten. I was baffled by Trub’s returning the kids to the very people whose knothead beliefs had put them in danger. I wasn’t going to say anything about that in front of these lames, and thought maybe I wouldn’t need to if I helped Trub drive her point home.

“I just got here today,” I said. The cult members seemed to find it easier to look at me than Trub. She stared at me blankly, as if mildly surprised I could talk.

“Just a few hours ago I had a whole gang trying to kill me. They almost did too.” I shook my head. “Poppa Poppy makes them look like a bunch of Muppets. He’s a monster. He’s—” I tried to summon an image that would resonate with them, that would bang their brain like gongs. “He’s the Beast. You get me? The Beast.”

I paused to let that sink in. They were staring at me wide-eyed, and the two women’s hands now clutched the heavy crosses they wore around their necks, as if my naming the Beast could summon him, and the crosses could save them.

“Listen to me,” I said, making sure I had their full attention before continuing. “That man will take whatever pleasures he wants from these or some other kids’ bodies, and he will eat their souls, slurping them down like raw oysters. And your souls will be eaten at the same time if you do nothing to prevent it.”

My spur of the moment sermon delivered, I risked a quick peek at Trub to see how she was taking my butting in. Her face was harder to read than psychedelic Arabic.

After a moment she spoke up. “I can take you away right now. Take you and these kids someplace safe, someplace nice. Your choice.”

The adults would not look at me or Trub. They wouldn’t even look at the kids, who were still clinging to me, silent and forlorn. The girl was old enough to understand that her fate was being decided. The little boy looked ready to cry. I had a hard time looking at them; it was too much of a heartbreak.

“I…” the man began.

We waited for him to say more.

Finally he shook his head. Having said nothing, he was done talking. His face and posture exuded curdled shame.

“We will try to protect them,” the aunt said, with so little force no one was reassured.

“Will you move away?” Trub demanded.

“We—we will try.” This came out even less convincing that her promise to try to protect them. “Can we have them back now?”

I looked to Trub for instructions. She nodded curtly.

Although it was the last thing I wanted to do, I handed the little guy over to his uncle. The girl let go of me but didn’t go to her mother or aunt. She stood there by herself, lost inside my coat, shivering with the effort it took to hold back tears.

Trub stared hard at the three adults with that one good eye, then spun on her heel. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she growled, then began walking fast, taking the path away from the village on the hill.

I hurried to catch up, taking a last glance back over my shoulder just before the path curved. The three adults and two children were together, but if there was even one single spark of joy in it, I couldn’t see it.

Trub kept walking, fast and determined. I didn’t need to be a mindreader to tell that she was trying to cool off, to put some distance between herself and the mess we had just left behind.

After a few minutes I couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Was that the right thing to do?” I asked, carefully keeping any hint of blame out of my voice.

“Probably not,” she said tonelessly.

“Then why did you do it that way?” Again sounding confused rather than accusing. Because I was confused. According to what she’d told Poppa Poppy, the Bugs gave her the juice to do damn near anything she wanted. Yet she had done very close to nothing.

She glanced my way, and I could see that she was working hard to keep her irritation in check. “So what should I have done, kid?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know the full range of what you can do, or even what you are in all this. Are you like a cop or something?”

“Or something,” she said with a mordant laugh. “That’s me.”

“It sounds like the, uh, aliens give you a lot of leeway.”

“They do. Maybe too much.”

“What you told Poppa Poppy. You really did survive a bomb and kill the bomber, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. The exertion cost so much blood I almost didn’t make it.” Another grim laugh. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And the threats you made. You could crush Poppa Poppy like a bug, couldn’t you?”

A slow nod. “Without even working up a sweat.”

“You could have taken those kids away, placed them somewhere else. Exiled that peckerhead minister with a snap of your fingers.”

“I came closer to it than they’ll ever know.”

Suspicion confirmed. Which left me with a question that had to be asked. I did my best to pose it in a way that wouldn’t get me hurt.

“Now don’t take this wrong,” I began. “I’m not pointing any fingers or making any sort of judgments. I’m new here, and I’m just trying to figure out how things work. But if you could do those things, and wanted to do those things, then why didn’t you do them?”

She shook her head. “Figure it out, kid.” She raised her voice. “Transport.”

A door appeared in front of us.

“Come on,” she said.

I followed her through it, wondering what I was missing.

Stepping through a door in one place and coming out somewhere miles away was giving my sense of reality a wedgie. In spite of that existential crack-bind I couldn’t help thinking that one of the doors would sure have come in handy when I’d had the cops and Chrome Lords hunting me down.

The sense of dislocation I felt every time was partially due to having not even a crumpled gum wrapper of an idea what it was like in the Hoop. I was flying blind.

This time we emerged on the top of a high, wide plateau. Once again there was a settlement, a mix of white round buildings and others made from natural materials, what had to be at least three hundred of them widely scattered and separated by trees and gardens.

Forest surrounded the plateau, fading into flatlands and the bare white stuff that the Hoop was made from. For the first time I was able to see one end of a segment. The white glowing ceiling and soft white walls came together in a flat blank surface maybe a mile away.

The view would have been scenic, and the feeling of the place idyllic, except that there was a wood and white-stuff wall running all the way around the rim of the plateau, and there were people in wood and bamboo armor guarding that wall.

“This isn’t another war game, is it?” I said. The tension in the air was palpable; the faces I saw were lined with worry.

Trub shook her head. “Nope. Come on. We’re going to talk to the Mayor of High Vista.”

“That’s what they call this place?”

“Yeah,” she said, starting toward where the biggest cluster of men and women were at the wall, near a big gate.

The view was amazing. “It fits.”

The mayor was a tall black man in jeans, short-sleeved white shirt, and rubber clogs. He was near the gate, arms resting on the wall, gazing down at what lay below.

“How are you doing, Homer?” Trub called as we approached.

He turned toward us, and his craggy face lit with a smile. It was the smile of a man who was very tired and more than a little relieved. “We’re hanging in there, Miss Trouble,” he said in a thick southern drawl. “For now, anyway.”

The light dawned on a small thing: Trouble. Of course. That’s where Trub came from.

“Cyrus and his boys getting ready for another attack?”

“They sure are. Take a look at what they’ve whomped up this time.”

Trub went to the wall and peered over. I did the same.

Near the base of the plateau, maybe two hundred feet down, were a couple dozen people in their own homemade armor, armed with spears, clubs, and longbows. In the midst of this odd attack force stood a medieval siege engine. A wooden catapult over thirty feet tall.

Trub let out a low whistle. “That’s new.”

“And worrisome,” Homer agreed. “We’re thinking Cyrus found himself some sort of expert in old-time weapons to help build that thing. They dragged it out this morning and have been fussin’ with it ever since. I’m thinking they’re close to using it on us and causing some real damage.”

I had to agree with his prediction. The catapult had a sinister air, like the Spanish Inquisition’s version of a howitzer. I wasn’t an expert on such weapons but did know they’d been popular for hundreds of years. That suggested they were probably pretty useful to their owners.

“Why are they attacking this place?” I said, directing my question at Trub.

“Because—” She paused, cocking her head. A deep frown appeared. “On it,” she said.

“On what?” I asked.

“Emergency.” She laid her real hand on Homer’s arm. “Would you please fill Glyph here in on your problems? I’ve got a hot situation to deal with. I’ll be back before Cyrus and his tribe get their shit together.”

“I surely hope so,” he said. “I called for help ‘cause I believe we’re surely gonna need it.”

“Trust me.” She raised her voice. “Transport.” A door appeared. She stepped through it and was gone, the door disappearing after her.

Homer gave me a curious look. “I never knew Miss Trouble to be much for partners.”

“I’m not sure what I am,” I said, “But I know I’m not a partner. I ran into her when I first got here. She took me in tow, and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind ever since.”

Homer laughed and nodded. “That’s our Miss Trouble for sure, a whirlwind on the hoof. So you’re just out?”

“I got here only a few hours ago.” Though it felt like days. Time flies when you’re totally confused.

“So how much do you know about how this place works?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Know what a wishing well is?”

I shrugged. “A waste of change?”

Homer shook his head, grin widening. “Not here on the Hoop it ain’t. Come on, I’ll show you.”

I followed him to an open area in the middle of the plateau. In the center of this plaza stood a waist-high white cylinder roughly ten feet across. It was made of the same white stuff used to build seemingly every part of the Hoop. When we reached the artifact a noticeably attractive Latina woman was at the far side, staring at the blank white top of the column, her lips moving silently.

“Is she praying?” I asked quietly.

“In a way,” Homer said with a chuckle. “Watch.”

A ripple appeared in the flat hard surface of the squat column, the solid stuff acting like it was turning liquid. Something began pushing its way up through, finally emerging to sit atop the once again solid surface.

“That’s a copy of The Cat In The Hat,” I said, stating the obvious.

“One of my personal favorites,” Homer said with an approving nod. “Read it to my kids a hunnerd times. She’s got two little ones she wants to distract, and the Cat can do it.” The woman picked up the book, flashed us a shy but brilliant smile, then headed toward one of the houses.

Homer parked a hip on the edge of the column—of the wishing well. It was solid enough to hold him up. “There’s plenty of folks all around the Hoop who grow and make things,” he said. “People being people, you’d be hard pressed to stop ‘em. Our hosts provide plenty of stuff to make that possible. Trees that fall into boards when you ask ‘em to. That white stuff you see everywhere can be handled endless ways. It will shape like clay, and harden like iron. You can stick a seed in it, have a plant in a couple days, food from that plant in a week, or a whole tree bearing fruit in a month or so. But a lot of things we need to get by come from these here wishing wells.”

“So how do they work?”

“Miss Trouble says everything here runs on some kind of super-duper nanotech. As for the wells, you just go to one and describe and visualize what it is you need. Like Minna there just did, getting that book for her kids. She described it well enough to get herself a copy.”

I was starting to get the picture. “So this well is what those people with the catapult want. Right?”

“They sure do. See, there are wishing wells all over the place. So many you’re never more than half a mile away from one. But nearly all of ‘em are about the size of a fifty-five gallon drum sawed in half, only a couple feet across. Big ones like this one are scarcer’n hens’ teeth.”

“And that makes them valuable.”

“Bound to, I guess. A big well like ours can serve more people at once, and produce larger stuff than a regular one could squeeze out. Like, back home I was a chef. Well, a cook, anyway. Still am, I guess. You know what a Garland range is?”

I had done several stints in restaurant kitchens over the years, a career as a posto paying even less than being a poet. “Sure. It’s a big honking stove like you’d find in a commercial kitchen.”

Homer beamed with pride. “Well, I wished me up one a while back. Flat-top, double oven, eight burners, salamander, the whole nine yards. I got no idea where the gas that runs it comes from, but man oh man, can I cook with that baby.”

I thought about the difference between what could be gotten from a small well to one this large. Big difference. “So you guys are being attacked because the people down below want access to—or possession of—this well.”

“They had access to it. They lived here. Thing is, they had two big problems. Wishing is a bit like cookin’; some folks is just naturally better at it than others. The man who started all the trouble wasn’t very good at it, and neither were his friends. To make matters worse, they kept trying to wish up weapons and other bad shit. They banded together into a sort of gang, though they called themselves the po-lice, trying to take over this well and keep everyone else away from it.”

“But you managed to throw them out.”

“We did. We’re not proud of it, but we didn’t have much choice.”

“How’d you do it?”

He grinned. “I wished us up cases and cases of wine and whiskey. The good stuff, gallons of it, and we threw one hell of a party. Once Cyrus and his people were well and truly bombed we rounded them up, hogtied them, and hauled them down to the bottom of the hill. They’d already started a wall—that kind always does. We finished it. They’ve been trying to get back in ever since.”

“So how long has this been going on?”

“Over nine months now,” he said with a sigh. “They got a camp out there, them and their wives, so we don’t dare go down. They have their own regular sized well so they needn’t be hurting for anything, and if they were, they could head on out through a mystery door and try to find another big well.”

I shook my head. Of course they didn’t do anything that rational. It appeared that Venus had been set up to give people a fresh start. It also appeared that some people couldn’t be busted loose from the stupid groove with anything short of explosives.

“So that’s how we live now,” Homer continued. “They go away for a few days or a couple weeks, hatch some new plan of attack, come back and take another run at us. They were gone a month this time. You saw what they came back with.” His shoulders slumped wearily, and his gaze was distant and haunted.

“A lot of us folks here on High Vista are refugees. All most of us want is a quiet, peaceable life. A place to be with our families, set down some roots, let some scars heal. Instead we have to guard this place around the clock and fend off attacks like this new one.”

“That’s a damn shame.” I really meant it. There in the center of their community, by the well, it was quiet and peaceful. Maybe not the sort of place that needed a posto like me, but that might not be so bad either.

“We surely think so.” He stood up. “I’d best get on back to the gate. I do hope Miss Trouble turns up soon.” He scowled. “But hell, where are my manners? We like to think we’re a hospitable folk, and here I go being a poor host. I’d fix you something, but we’re short on time.”

He turned back to the well. Stared into it, lips moving silently.

Ripples appeared almost immediately. Four objects pushed up through the surface and stopped moving once they rested atop the well. Two bottles of Dr. Pepper, and two paper bowls of pork rinds. Homer nodded in satisfaction. “That’ll do, I guess.”

Homer handed over a bottle and a bowl. My eyes went wide in amazement. The bottle was cold, ice cold. The pork rinds were still hot and smelled heavenly, just like the ones you can get fresh-made from certain ethnic stores.

“Anyone can do this at a wishing well?” I said. I had just seen God’s Walmart, the take-out window of the Universe.

“Well, that depends,” Homer said, collecting his own soft drink and bowl of rinds. “The better you can describe and visualize something, the better the result. It took me a lot of tries to get that there Dr. Pepper to taste right. As for the pork rinds, they ain’t real pork—our hosts aren’t real crazy about us eating animals—but the taste and texture will pass, I think.”

“So you’re real good at this wishing stuff?”

“I guess I am.”

I shook my head in wonder. “It’s like making something out of nothing.”

Homer laughed. “I was chef at a soul food joint before Hurricane Tonya. That’s what soul food is, my man. Making something good out of next to nothin’.”

We returned to the wall near the gate. On the way Homer filled me in on how some other things worked on the Hoop, and I asked questions between bits of crispy pork goodness and slugs of soda. I couldn’t believe how good that soft drink tasted. The flavor was sharper and more vivid than anything I’d ever had back home. It was like Homer’s memory of it—and consequently his recreation—radically outdid the original.

As for the wells themselves, the very idea was seriously gooning me out. I couldn’t help thinking about the difference wishing wells could make back on Earth. Food, clothing, water purifiers, medical supplies; an endless shopping list of things that would be available for those who needed them the worst. Why hadn’t the Bugs given them to people?

Then I got it: They had given wells to humans. But to have them we needed to come out to Venus. What a raw deal, forced to come to a place with clean air. A place that wasn’t overcrowded and subject to increasingly violent weather. A place where the rain didn’t burn your skin, where the coastal areas weren’t being swallowed up by rising oceans, where the threat of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, killing droughts, and flash floods hadn’t gotten so bad that the news more often than not led with the weather. On most of Earth, food was either very expensive and very good, or very cheap and almost guaranteed to put you in an early grave. If you ate at the bottom of the food chain your tissues ended up so saturated with chemicals that when you croaked from what you ate, embalming would be redundant.

What would happen if wishing wells appeared on Earth?

I was getting a good look at how it would play out in many parts of the world. Certain people would try to seize control of the wells and use them in ways contrary to their reason to exist. If wells showed up on Earth, before a year was out there would be well-slavery, well-pimping, well-extortion, and worse. The people in charge back there would take this great boon and turn it into another tightly controlled, punitively priced commodity that benefited the few by depriving the many, and this monopoly would be managed by force of arms.

Just like someone was trying to do on High Vista.

New planet, same old shit. Maybe we should have been named Homo incorrigiblus.

Homer’s good mood went DOA when we looked over the wall at the attack force below. “Appears they’ve almost got their act together,” he said heavily.

“Sure looks that way,” I agreed. “What’s that stuff they’re loading in the catapult’s basket?” It was a bunch of white spheres, some the size of baseballs, some as big as bowling balls.

“Hoopstuff cannonballs. Remember how I told you that here you can dig up the ground and shape it like clay? Leave it exposed to light and air for a piece and it turns hard as rock. I got to give them props for this one. I figure they plan to use that thing like a cross between a mortar and a shotgun. Start raining loads of stuff down on us so we have to take cover. Keep us pinned down long enough to get in the gate and really start raising hell.”

“What would happen then? Would they just capture the well and throw you out?”

Homer just gave me a long pitying look.

Yeah, duh. They wouldn’t be satisfied with taking control of the big well and the community around it. They’d want revenge for getting the boot and being kept from what wasn’t theirs.

“Where the hell is Trub?” I grumbled. The catapult basket was loaded, and there was a growing pile of extra ammo building beside it.

Homer shrugged. “Hard to say. That lady does get around some. I’m sure she’s doing her best to get back to us.”

I had to wonder if she was trying hard enough. I watched the activity at the bottom of the hill, wondering how she would deal with the situation. What I’d seen of her methods so far gave me the idea that she’d use the least amount of intervention possible. I was pretty sure she could scare them off… but if that was true, why hadn’t she done it before now? Maybe she’d try to buy them off. But what could she offer that would make them give up their prize?

That question set off an ideagasm, one that made me laugh out loud.

“Hang tight,” I told Homer. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes.” I turned around and ran back toward the wishing well.

“I need a white flag,” I said, rejoining Homer at the wall.

He stared at me like I’d asked for a feather boa and high heels. “You’re not thinking on going down there, are you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

“Now why would you want to do that?”

Great question, brain damaged answer. “So I can convince them to call off their attack.”

A long pause as that improbable plan was absorbed. “How you going to do that?” he said at last.

“With a whole lot of luck, and even more bullshit.”

The nearer I got to the ragtag army at the bottom of the hill, the more I had to wonder when I’d lost my mind.

None of this had anything to do with me, but then again not everything a posto takes up as a cause affects him or her personally. Homer and his people were in danger, and Trub wasn’t there now that they needed her. She could probably handle this with one hand tied behind her back.

I should have waited. I knew that.

But I hadn’t, and there was too late to return to High Vista. My approach had been noted, and a half dozen arrows were pointed at me. I had no idea whether the guys holding the bows could shoot straight or not. I was willing to bet that if I turned my back I’d be the guest of honor at target practice, and didn’t want to help them improve their aim.

It wasn’t much of a skullbuster to figure out who was in charge. It was the sort of guy who always ends up in charge when a gang of a certain kind of men rallies around a really bad idea. In this instance it was a sixtyish, overweight, red-faced, white guy whose badges of office were the biggest mouth, fanciest armor, and tallest helmet. Cyrus.

“Howdy, gentlemen,” I called, keeping a harmless idiot smile on my face as I made my way to the bossman.

“Who the hell are you?” Cyrus demanded sharply.

“My name is Glyph.”

“I don’t know you. You weren’t on High Vista before.”

“Nope, I wasn’t,” I said, unable to resist adding, “I’m a stranger to these parts. A door dumped me up there just a while ago.” I didn’t see any point in mentioning that Trub had come through that door with me. Somehow I doubted dropping her name would get me a warmer reception.

“So why the white flag? Are you here to join us?”

“Hell no. High Vista is nice, but not my style. Never much wanted to be a soldier either. But when I heard what the issue is here I figured I could save you a whole lot of trouble, and maybe some pain.”

Cyrus was staring at me like I’d asked to take his Lexus out for spin to test the crash bags. He looked sour and impatient at having to deal with interruption when victory was finally within his grasp.

“You better start making sense real quick, boy,” he growled in his best Maximum Leader voice. “The only ones going to feel pain is them.” He jerked his thumb toward High Vista. “And maybe you.”

“Give me a break, man. I’m here to do you a favor.” I put my hands on my hips, adopting the pose of an art lover at a museum as I took a long look at the catapult. “Very cool work, dude. Work of art. One big problem. It won’t work.”

“Bullshit. It sure as hell will work,” snapped another man who had been standing by and listening in. A short, tubby guy with thick glasses, scraggly Fu Manchu, and geek written all over him.

“Oh, I’m sure it will fire just fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the place up there is bulletproof.”

“Bullshit,” Geek said.

“‘Fraid not. You know the guy in charge up there, the tall black dude?”

“Homer,” Cyrus spat the name, lips twisting in distaste.

“That’s him. You know how good he is at pulling stuff out of that big-ass wishing well?”

“He does okay.” Cyrus’s voice dripped with ill-concealed envy, like Homer regularly whipped his ass and took his lunch money every time they played golf.

“Well, he wished himself up a piece of Bug tech. A sort of invisible shield that will deflect anything fired at the place.”

“Bullshit,” Geek proclaimed, deploying his one word answer for everything. “That’s not possible.”

“Possible,” I shot back. “Don’t you dudes get it? The reason the Bugs give us things through the wells is because they want to hear us ask for them, like us giving treats to a dog if he begs or does some other trick. Our wishing for stuff lets them see how we think about things, how we perceive and ideate them, how we use imagery and language to define objects. You know Homer can get pretty much anything he wants, like that big-ass stove? The Bugs love him because they love the way he thinks and talks. They’re into him enough that they’re not going to let anyone hurt him. You’ve attacked that place before, right?”

I didn’t wait for an answer, but drove the last rhetorical nail in the rickety structure I was building. “You think it’s just bad luck your other attacks have failed?” I shook my head. “Wake up, guys. The deck is stacked against you, start to finish.”

I watched the scowl on Cyrus’s face deepen as I spun out my line of bull. I was making it up as I went along, but as I spouted this stuff I realized that I might have accidentally fallen over the truth while giving them the Glyph version of how the wells worked. The Bugs would learn tons about people from their asking for things.

Finally, Cyrus shook his head. “Even if what you say is true, we can still knock down those walls and take High Vista back.”

“I say you’re wrong, but for sake of argument let’s say you’re right. That still leaves one big question: Why bother?”

They were all looking at me like I was crazy. And maybe I was. Because I was actually enjoying trying to bernie these boobs. It was like talking my way into protected or restricted places so I could gain intel, or posto right in the guts of the beast, talking my way out of jams with cops and property owners and others who took offense at my work. That was part of the grinwhack of being a posto. It’s a high like no other. I was getting a big gulp of it, sweet and fizzy as Homer’s Dr. Pepper.

“What I’m saying,” I continued, “is why settle for this well when there’s an even bigger one out there for the taking?”

“Bullshit.”

I rolled my eyes, thinking Geek really had to work on improving his vocabulary. “Wrong, chump. I’ve seen it.”

Geek was shaking his head. “I say you’re a liar.”

Cyrus finally spoke up, playing wise leader. One whose greed never slept. “Why should we believe you?”

“Don’t care if you do or not,” I said, letting a touch of annoyance creep into my voice. “This isn’t my fight. All I know is that there’s a well three times the size of that one out in another segment, ripe for the taking. I figured you guys might be interested since you have a thing for big wells.”

Geek was plucking at his boss’ sleeve. “I’m telling you, he’s lying.”

“Bite me, Trek-boy,” I said, reaching into my vest.

A half dozen bows were suddenly drawn and pointed at me by men who wanted to look like heroes in a Robin Hood movie, but more closely resembled over-age dissolute Cupids.

“Ice down, guys,” I said. “I just want to show you what I’m talking about.” I pulled out my Cybernado Rollox, snapped it open and flat. Tapped the corner to bring up the menu I wanted. “Here. Check it out. Seeing is, as they say, believing.”

The Rollox displayed the image I’d taken of the well at the top of the hill. An image I’d shopped to make it look like it was somewhere else, and the size of a backyard swimming pool. It was a hurry-up hack job, but I was pretty sure it would fool rubes like these. My clothes might have come from Sally’s, Goodwill, and the occasional dumpster, but my software always cuts the edge and leaves it bleeding.

Cyrus snatched the device out of my hand and stared at picture of the well. His band of butthead brigands clustered around him like adolescent boys around a pornie. Eyes went wide, and the general comment was some flavor of Holy shit!

Geek wasn’t going to let it go. “It’s a fake,” he bleated pitifully. “Has to be.”

“Fine,” I said, reaching to take my Rollox back.

“Now just hang on,” Cyrus said, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand and keeping a firm grip on the Rollox with the other.

Things were kind of hanging there in the balance when a new factor entered the situation.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Trub demanded as she stepped out of a door that materialized out of nowhere.

I had only a couple seconds to figure out what to do, and the moves I made were mostly impelled by the accusing tone in Trub’s voice. That, and her appearing right within reach. Okay, and from having seen far too many bad movies.

I used one arm to grab her around the neck and shoulders, reaching into my vest with my free hand. Quickdrew my dummystick and jammed it up under her jaw.

She tensed, and I had the impression of having just taken hold of a human-sized stick of dynamite in the fleeting moment before it detonates. I knew she could easily throw me off, beat what landed into a bloody pulp, and was a heartbeat away from doing just that.

“You tell them,” I growled in my best tough-guy voice. “Don’t make me hurt you the way you hurt Poppa Poppy.”

The amount she relaxed was fractional, but enough to tell me that my message had been received. “Tell them what?” she said sharply.

“There, on my Rollox. I told them about that giant wishing well on the other side of the Hoop.”

“What about it?” she said after a pause long enough to make me afraid she wasn’t going to play along.

“You can’t keep them from taking it over.”

“Maybe not,” she said grudgingly. “One big problem. These dildoes couldn’t find six good brain cells if they put all their heads together. No way they’ll ever find it. Can you take them there?”

“Not directly. I can’t control doors the way you can. So you have to drive.”

She shook her head as much as the dummystick under her jaw would allow. “Not a chance, kid.”

“Why not?” Cyrus demanded.

Trub stared at him like a steaming turd on the hot fudge sundae of her life, saying nothing.

He stepped in closer and put his face right in hers. “You can’t keep us from that well. Nobody else has taken it, have they?”

“Not yet.” She smiled. “But I could fix that real fast.”

“You’d do that?”

“Bet your ass I would.”

“Why? What’s the problem with letting us have it?”

“You’re the problem, you old toad. I don’t like you or your merry band of sore losers.”

Cyrus tried for a steely stare that just came off Nixon-shifty. “You’ll like me even less if you don’t take us to that well. Right now.”

Geek still wasn’t buying it. “I’m telling you,” he wailed. “It’s a trick!”

Trub laughed. “That’s right. It is.”

“See! I told you!”

“The bitch is lying,” Cyrus growled. “Men! Surround her!”

The bandits closest to us lifted their bows and spears and clubs and other primitive implements of mayhem. They growled to show how dangerous they were. If it hadn’t been for the sharpness of the blades and weight of the clubs, I might have laughed. They still looked more like a dinner theater pirate gang than any sort of armed force. But I knew even armed morons could do a lot of damage. In fact, they usually did. We call it history.

“I think you better take us all there,” I said, pushing my dummystick harder into Trub’s jawline, hard enough to bring her up on her toes.

“All right,” she said, sounding angry and resentful. “But I warn you, you’re going to regret this.” She raised her voice. “Transport.”

A door appeared, hanging in the air near the catapult.

I didn’t know what Trub had up her sleeve, whether this was an escape route for us, or a trap for them.

“We’ll go first,” I said, starting to frogmarch her toward the door. My thinking was, if it was a trap I ought to make it look safe for the rats to go on a cheese raid.

“No, we will,” Cyrus said. “I don’t trust that woman one bit. She’s a liar and a trickster.” He raised his voice and started bellowing orders. “Men! Get formed up! Lehman, your squad will take the lead. We put these two in the middle. The rest of us will bring up the rear.”

They got themselves more or less organized, then started trooping through the door. Cyrus directed operations from a safe place in the rear, his pet geek beside him and still whining that this was all a really big mistake.

I hoped he was right.

The door took us to a wide plain somewhere near the middle of what I had to assume was a different segment. Rising up in front of us was another white hoopstuff plateau, the top about three hundred feet up and accessible by a long switchback path. The hilltop looked to be even wider than the one where High Vista stood. The light was low in the segment, down to the level of a clear night with a full moon.

The lower light made it easy to see that something at the top of the plateau was glowing, shining brightly enough for light to reflect off the ceiling far above it.

All eyes were on the plateau and the promising radiance. I saw awe in the faces of some of the men, greed in others. Cyrus’s eyes were narrowed in calculation. Geek looked confused and woebegone, like a kid whose Christmas stocking contained only Santa’s rap sheet for molestation.

This moment, rife with wild surmise, ended abruptly when a person appeared at the edge of the plateau, staring down and back at us.

Cyrus rounded on me, face gone red with fury. “I thought you said nobody had taken this well!”

“Nobody had, last time I saw it.”

“I put a door up there,” Trub said with a mocking laugh. “I’d rather see someone else get it than you assholes.”

“You sneaky bitch,” he hissed, raising his hand to backhand her in the face.

“She must’ve just opened that door,” I put in hastily. “There can’t be that many people up there. Yet, anyway.”

Already several of the High Vista exiles had begun edging toward the path leading up the side of the plateau, the urge to get up there and check out their prize stronger than what passed for discipline. Others were muttering that they had better get moving and take what was theirs.

Cyrus lowered his hand, jaw working. He wanted to hurt Trub, but fear of losing his prize was just too strong. He raised his spear, let out a yell. “Men! Take that hill!”

It was the Alpo version of the dogs of war unleashed. They began stampeding toward the path, shouting and brandishing their weapons. The last one to go was Geek, who shot Trub and me a look like we’d stolen his pocket protector and mocked Spock before taking off after the others.

Once they were a safe distance away I let go of Trub and stepped back, watching closely to see what she would do. At best she might chew me out for interfering, at worst kick my ass up around my ears. I really wasn’t expecting an attaboy.

Her face gave nothing away as she said, “Transport.”

A door appeared. I was relieved when she beckoned me to follow her. At least she wasn’t going to leave me there to deal with the mongrel horde.

We came out atop the plateau. Before us was what looked like a huge blue-lit swimming pool, obviously the source of the glow seen from below. There was nothing else up there other than a wishing well about the size of a kitchen trashcan, and a PortaPotti-sized column that was just that: an alien outhouse.

“So what is that?” I asked.

“Mineral pool.” She gave me a sidelong look with her one good eye. “This was my favorite place to come for a quiet soak or swim. I’m sure going to miss it.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “I’ll find another, or get them to make one.”

I took another look around. “There isn’t anyone here.”

“Nope. I just had someone step through to be seen. They’re already gone.”

“A decoy.”

A nod. “Or bait.”

I followed her to the edge. We peered down the path. Cyrus and his gang were halfway up the hillside, letting out fewer shouts and war cries as they got winded from the climb.

“They sure are going to be disappointed,” I said.

Trub nodded. “And pissed off.”

“Can they get back? To the area around High Vista?”

“No, they’re going to stay in this segment for a while. The doors won’t let them go anywhere other than Earth for a year, and even after that no door will ever take them to High Vista’s segment.”

“You can do that? Set rules for the doors?”

“I sure can.” She turned back to gaze wistfully at the pool, as if saying good-bye to it, then looked my way. “Ready to move on? There’s more work to be done.”

“Sure. After I do one last thing.”

“What’s that?”

I let out an ear-splitting whistle. Cyrus and his men looked up. Saw us standing above them.

I gave them the finger.

They started moving faster, wanting to come get me, but by the time they arrived Trub had called another door, and we were long gone.

Trub took us back to the catapult.

“Now what?” I asked. I spotted my Rollox on the ground, lost in the confusion. I grabbed it, rolled it back up, and stuffed it in my pocket.

“We clean up some loose ends. Here, give me a hand.”

The catapult had wheels in front and a skid in back, like an old moveable cannon or artillery piece. Trub had us shove on the back part, turning the weapon so it was no longer pointed at High Vista. Once we’d repositioned it to her satisfaction, she gave me a small smile. “You want to do the honors?”

I stared at her in surprise. “You mean fire it?”

“Sure. We wouldn’t want to leave a loaded weapon laying around, would we?”

“I guess not.” The firing mechanism was simple enough, almost elegantly so. Poor Geek. He’d built a pretty gnarly weapon and never gotten to see it put to use. I pulled the safety pin, then put my hand on the trip lever. “Say when.”

“Fire when ready, Mister Glyph.”

“Bombs away.” With a sound like a monster bass string being plucked, and a groan and a whump from tension being released, the catapult fired its load high up and far into the distance. From up on the plateau came the sound of cheering.

“Wow,” I said. “I’m impressed. They could have hit High Vista for sure. Done some damage, too.”

“Major damage.” She studied the weapon. Nodded to herself. “You know, I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“I want it cocked and loaded.”

That didn’t make any sense. “Why?”

“Just because. Come on, give me a hand.”

There was a windlass to put tension on the part I guess you’d have to call a flinger bar. We started winding the tensioning rope up. It was easy at first, but got harder as the flinger bar was bent further and further down. I was finding it harder work than Trub, who did over half the work with none of the grunting and groaning that was coming from me.

Once the catapult was cocked, we loaded the basket with more of the hoopstuff ammo. Trub told me what she wanted in the basket, pointing out particular missiles. As we worked I decided it was time to ask straight out if I was in trouble or not.

“So,” I said, “You’re not mad at me for tricking those clowns into going away?”

She dropped a sphere the size of a melon into the basket. “I can live with it.” A glance my way. “Why did you get involved?”

I shrugged. “You weren’t back yet, and I was afraid they’d attack before you could get back and stop them.”

“Why did you decide to scam them? You had to have faked that picture before you went down the hill.”

“It was pure run what you brung. I couldn’t beat them up or scare them off. I figured by only option was to use their own dumbshit mentality against them. You know, social engineering and a bit of situational judo.”

She put in another sphere the size of a bowling ball. “How did you know I’d cooperate when you grabbed me?”

“I didn’t. But I sure hoped you would.”

“I guess you got lucky.”

“I guess I did. Thanks.”

She dusted her hands on her shorts, then touched the disc at her throat. When she took her hand away there was a small white ring in her fingers. “Here,” she said, holding it out. “Put this on. Doesn’t matter which finger.”

I took the ring. It seemed to weigh nothing. “So what does this mean?” I said, fitting it over my left middle finger. “That we’re engaged?”

She laughed. “You should be so lucky. Now step back a bit.”

Once I’d retreated a few steps a door the size of a small building materialized directly over the catapult and began descending. The weapon disappeared into the door, and when the door reached the ground it disappeared.

“You did that?” I asked.

“Sure did.”

“Where did you send it?”

“To the base of the hill where we just sent Cyrus and his buddies.”

The woman had a wicked sense of humor. “They won’t like that, their own weapon pointed at them, freshly loaded, and ready to fire.”

Mock surprise. “You think?”

“Oh yeah. They’ll have to either destroy it—Geek will freak out at that—or disassemble it and hump it to the top of the hill.”

“Should keep them busy for a while.” Her smile faded. “Okay, fun’s over. Come on, more dirty jobs waiting.”

I had to hustle to keep up as she headed out along a well-worn track leading away from the place Cyrus and his followers had used as an attack base. Five minutes of brisk walking through a lightly wooded area brought us to a collection of ramshackle huts and lean-tos.

These rude housing units were arrayed around a central fire-pit, a standard-sized wishing well next to it. Trub went to stand by the fire-pit, then called, “Sarah. Better come out and talk to me.”

After a minute a tall, thirtyish, big-busted blonde came out of the biggest hut. She looked hard and mean and had a haughty air in spite of being dressed in a smudged and threadbare powder blue pants-suit, misshapen sandals, and a string of pearls. Her fingers were covered with rings and she carried a spear. She looked like a society princess on the decline toward feral bag lady, or a trophy wife who had lost most of her silver plating.

“What the hell do you want?” she asked in a voice as melodious as the clash of trashcan lids.

“Wrong question, Sarah,” Trub said. “The right one is, what do you want?”

This Sarah, who I was willing to bet was Cyrus’s other half, clearly didn’t like Trub or riddles. “What are you talking about?”

“Cyrus and his so-called men are gone.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Gone how?” Other women had appeared in the doorways of the shacks, watching and listening. They too looked like refugees from some Mad Maxed-out gated community, dressed in boutique strut that had been reduced to ragged shuffle. Their faces were as cold, closed, and grim as militant vegans stuffed in a meat locker.

“They moved on to another segment.”

Sarah shook her head. “Cyrus wouldn’t give up on getting back what is rightfully ours. I know you’re on the side of the Bugs. Did they help you run him and our men off?”

Hearing this horrible woman call the aliens Bugs made me take a mental vow to try to stop calling them that.

Trub ignored the woman’s question. She turned my way. “I should introduce you, Glyph. This is Sarah Crook, Cyrus’s second wife. Their last name fits. The two of them ran here just ahead of the law. Cyrus was skimming from an investment fund, and Sarah was financing some very nice lifestyle improvements with donations to a not-for-profit she’d gotten her claws in.”

“Those were just mistakes,” Sarah said coldly.

Trub laughed. “And you made them. Trying to take over High Vista and their well was another. One more and you’re out.”

Sarah looked like she had a mouthful of vinegar. “I don’t have to listen to any of this,” she sniffed.

“No,” Trub agreed cheerfully. “But it might be a good idea. My associate here is going to offer you a deal. A door that’s good for four days is part of that deal. Glyph, tell our lucky contestant what she can win.”

I eyed Trub uncertainly, wondering what the hell she was doing putting me in charge of a situation I didn’t begin to understand. She just smiled, making a go for it gesture.

“Ah, all right,” I stammered. “You get, well, you get a door.” I tried to make this sound like fresh news, desperately racking my brain for what to say next.

“The deal is, and I think it’s a good one, you get to choose. Your choice is staying here, or going to rejoin your men. Through the door.” As I said that, one appeared at the edge of the village. Had I made it? If so, I was clueless as to how.

“That’s a, you know, one way door to where your men went. It will stay here for four days. So you have that much time to decide whether you want to stay here or go join them. And you can use a regular mystery door to go someplace else. Maybe start a new life.” Sheer mean-spiritedness and class prejudice made me add, “Maybe go start a nice little gated community or something.”

“That’s a better deal than you deserve,” Trub said. “Take it or leave it.”

Sarah made a twinkling, ring-studded fist. “We’ll get you for this, bitch. You and those stinking Bugs.”

Trub didn’t look worried. “Hey, you heard the man. You don’t like it here, there’s a door back to Earth about five minutes’ walk from here. You could probably find a good lawyer to keep your fat ass out of prison, though it doesn’t look like you could really afford to pay one.”

“No prisons here,” Sarah said.

“Not yet.”

“No hospitals, either. Too bad, because I think you’re about to get fucked up even worse than you already are.”

It was then I noticed that the women of the encampment had begun quietly boxing us in. There were a couple dozen of them, armed with clubs and homemade knives. They didn’t look like they planned on throwing a nice tea party, or of they did, we were going to be filling for the sandwiches.

I was getting the impression that I never wanted to see or be anywhere near whatever it was that might scare Trub.

She noted the growing level of threat impassively, then turned her attention back to Sarah. “Listen,” she said, sounding more tired than worried. “That chucklehead you’re married to and his gang of greedy dimwits is gone, and they’re never coming back. You can go join them, or you can take a door somewhere else and see if you can find some man with low enough standards to take you. You have four days to voluntarily relocate. After that you are going to be taken out of this segment, and I might just send the leftovers off to start a colony of harpies. I really don’t care where you go. Nothing you can do is going to change that.”

“We could take you hostage. What would the Bugs give us to get their precious Bug-fucker back?”

Trub shook her head. “Honey, I don’t think you want to find out.”

Sarah’s smile sent my testicles scurrying for cover. “I think we’ll take our chances. Right, girls?”

There was a growl and grumble from the women surrounding us.

Trub sighed and turned her head. “Glyph, you play bimbo-wrangler.”

I almost wheeped Me? but managed to choke it back in manly self-defense; these women would jump on any weakness like a sale rack of designer shoes.

“Ladies,” I said, turning to face a particularly disgruntled and wilted nosegay of womanhood. “You’ve got this all wrong.”

A skinny, club wielding Barbietroid in patched slacks and a ragged blouse snarled, “Yeah, how?”

“Trub can’t stop herself from getting right in your faces, it’s just the way she is. What she didn’t tell you is why your men left. They went to take possession of an even bigger wishing well than the one on High Vista.”

“Bullshit,” the woman snapped.

I figured I’d just met Mrs. Geek.

“No, really.” I pulled out my trusty Rollox and showed them the image I’d used to fake out the men. Chances were these women were smarter than their men—it was hard to imagine them being any dumber, but they had hooked up with that gaggle of losers. So maybe they’d take the same bait.

“That’s what they went after,” I announced. “Your men made Trub and me take them to it. The, um, Bugs have to write it off now. Trub is pissed, and she’s taking it out on you.”

“He’s lying,” Sarah said.

“Sure, fine,” I said. “Pass up the chance to get in on what your men have. Your not getting a share just makes Trub happy.”

While I’d been talking, some of the other women had redeployed to get a look at the screen, studying the image like a fashion layout in Vogue.

Now to pile it on. “Just think of what a well like that could get your men. Besides all the great stuff that could be gotten from it.”

“Like what?” This from a lean black woman armed with a crude but unnervingly dangerous looking hoopstuff machete.

I rolled my eyes. “Yo, sister, what do you think? Any women they find are going to latch onto them for piece of that well.” I turned and pointed at a woman picked at random. “How long has your husband had you living in this dump, stuck here after he and his buddies bought you the boot from up there?”

Her upper lip curled. “Almost a year.”

“You probably had it pretty good up there, right? Until that greedy slob Cyrus convinced your husband to help him grab it all for himself. Now you’re going to let him dump you for some babe who wants what you should be getting?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Sarah cawed. “He’s trying to trick you.”

The woman stuck out her chin. “Shut up. It’s your fault we’re here, you pushy bitch.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, Crissy Nyland!”

“I’ll talk to you any way I want! We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you and that pig of a husband of yours talking our guys into joining his stupid scheme. We ended up with nothing. Now we don’t even have our men.”

Sarah sniffed. “Not much of a loss in your case.”

I jumped in before things got out of hand, though in some ways I wouldn’t have minded watching a catfight civil war get started. Problem with that, people would get hurt, and odds were I’d be one of the first casualties.

“Ladies, ladies,” I said in the best jolly game show host voice I could muster. “No need to fight. The door is right there. All you have to do is use it. Go find your husbands. Go get your fair share before some well-slut beats you to it.”

Six of the women did just that, heading for the door. They were keeping their weapons. I had the feeling that certain guys were very soon going to be trying to talk their way out of primitive vasectomies. Several of the other women were wavering, including Mrs. Geek.

“Looks like your gang is deserting you,” Trub said with a laugh calculated to punch Sarah’s buttons. “Probably tired of being bossed around by a pair of incompetent crooks.”

“You scar-faced whore,” Sarah snarled, swinging her spear around and launching herself at Trub.

Without thinking I leapt toward Trub to help.

Trub blocked the spear’s blade with her artificial hand, the wooden shaft hitting nanolastic with a sharp crack!

I lowered my shoulder to tackle Sarah in the side. One of the women crashed into me first, knocking me down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her lift the club she carried.

Before I could duck everything went white.

The next thing I knew I was floating in a featureless white capsule. I freaked and tried to throw myself against the side of it. It was like trying to hit something underwater.

Suddenly Tinker Bell appeared in front of me, wings beating in a sparkling blur. “Calm down,” she said. “No need to panic.”

“Orchid?” I said uncertainly, pretty sure I recognized the voice.

“That’s me. Now take it easy, guy. Everything’s all right.”

“What about Trub?” I wailed.

“Don’t worry about her.”

“But they—”

“Really, she’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” Orchid crossed her tiny arms before her tiny bosom, looking me over and smiling. “So, my friend, are you having fun yet?”

“Am I—” I shook my head. “Look, can’t I go back and help her out? She was pretty outnumbered back there.”

“Gotten kind of fond of our Trub, have you?”

“Uh, sure. I guess.”

“So what do you think of your Hoop?”

“I haven’t seen that much of it, and most of that’s been bad spots.”

Tinker Bell whirled into Kermit the Frog, who hung there, feet paddling slowly as if treading water. “True. Trub’s been taking you on the ‘meet the pukes’ tour. Sorry. But enough about you. What do you think about us?”

I struggled to shift mental gears. “You mean your, uh, species?”

Kermit shrugged. “You could start there.”

“But I’ve only met you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Pretty sure,” I said uncertainly.

“Interesting.” A tiny clipboard appeared in one of Kermit’s flippers, a pencil in the other. He licked the tip of the pencil and made a notation on the clipboard, then regarded me askance. “Any second thoughts about your answer?”

“My brain hurts,” I sighed.

“Points for the Monty Python reference. You may be a lumberjack after all.” With that Kermit vanished, leaving the tiny clipboard hanging in the air. It sprouted a tiny propeller, flew to the side of the capsule, merged with the white stuff, and was gone.

“My brain hurts,” I said again.

“It would be a good idea to sit down, or your butt will too.” Orchid’s voice seemed to come from every surface of the capsule.

“Why?” I asked, trying to pull myself into a sitting position.

“Because,” Orchid said.

“Welcome back, kid.”

“Back where?” I mumbled, looking around and trying to figure out where the hell I was now. One second I’d been inside that capsule and trying to sit on thin air, the next I was sitting beside Trub. We were perched atop a low hill, surrounded by rolling, unformed white terrain on all sides. In front of me the Hoop narrowed and curved down into the horizon.

“Unused segment about a quarter of the way around from High Vista. I come here sometimes when I need some peace and quiet. I thought you might need a break.”

“Thanks.” It was peaceful, white, and silent. It occurred to me that I’d never experienced quiet like this back in the city. There was always some sound somewhere: muffled voices; the buzz, whirr, and beep of electronics; distant sirens and engines; the guts of the city rumbling.

I looked Trub over, relieved to see that she appeared unhurt. “You okay?”

“Better than okay.”

“You sure?”

A loopy grin. “Oh yeah. I cleaned Sarah’s clock and slapped some hurt on a couple of her girls. Sorry to send you away when things were getting interesting, but I didn’t want you getting banged up.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“No problem.” She gestured toward the ground between us. “I grabbed some brunch on the way here. The mug is coffee. Be careful, it’s still hot.”

As soon as she mentioned the food and coffee, I started smelling it. There was a woven leaf bowl, a Venusian takeout container filled with what looked like deep-fried fritters. I helped myself to one, took a bite. My mouth filled with the taste of banana and spices.

Trub took a sip of her coffee, smacked her lips. “Yeah, it was definitely worth a detour through Upper Jolta.”

“Through where?” I asked, putting down the fritter and picking up my own mug.

“Segment area they call Upper Jolta. Couple things you have to understand about the Hoop. Quite often people end up in a specific segment not on the basis of race or nationality or religion, but because of affinity. Take Jolta. There are people there from Kenya. From Hawaii. From Ethiopia and Turkey, Seattle and Brunei and dozens of other places. The Jolt veers toward total anarchy on a regular basis because they don’t agree on politics or religion or social norms or much else. But they share one unifying focus and fixation: that’s the breeding, growing, processing, and then the brewing and consuming of the best coffee in the universe.”

I took a sip of the hot liquid. My taste buds began singing a hallelujah chorus. “Jeez,” I said hoarsely. “They might just get there.”

“I’m sure rooting for them. You saw Rice City. They’re into rice like Upper Jolta is into coffee; for them, rice is like a religion. There are two communities turning into wine drinkers’ paradises. One place is building a giant library. There’s a town that wants to become the porn capitol of Venus, and another where the main industry is constructing crossword puzzles. These places trade back and forth—once you’ve been here a while you can get mystery doors to take you certain places, and wells can tell you where to go on the Hoop to find certain things. Centralized and scattered, almost everything people did back on Earth is being done here, with some using the advantages this place offers to take it to the max.”

I put down my cup. There seemed to be a hole in her explanation. “That’s real nice, but there’s something I don’t get. Back home the—” I caught myself before I called them Bug Traps. “—transport booths supposedly reject some people. Ones who are too militant, too violent, too criminal, too crazy. So how did people like Poppa Poppy and that preacher, and Sarah and Cyrus make it through?”

“They weren’t that bad when they came here.” She spread her arms to take in the unformed terrain around us. “This place offers a fresh start. A place to rebuild your life from scratch, leaving behind a lot of the baggage and limitations that had kept you down. Some folks take that and run with it, but not everybody runs in a straight line.”

That made sense. Some people ruined their lives after winning the lottery, or went bad after gaining some position of power.

“So why do, uh, our hosts allow Cyrus and Poppa Poppy to get away with such nasty shit?”

“Are you suggesting that the B’hlug should play Big Brother?” She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “I thought you posto types were against that sort of thing.”

That made me think, and think hard. A slug of the excellent coffee helped. While I worked that out, Trub helped herself to the food. She ate with gusto. She seemed to do everything with gusto. It occurred to me that she was happy with what she was doing. It was hacker happy; she’d growl and groan, bitch and moan, but she would fling herself into a problem totally, and it was the solving of that problem—no matter how hard—that brought her pleasure. Only she was hacking the Hoop.

“So,” she said after a couple minutes. “Light starting to dawn, kid?”

“Maybe a little. There are regulations, but they’re as simple and minimalist as possible. The, ah, B’hlug want to see how we act and behave with as few rules and controls as possible.”

“You got it. Take Poppa Poppy. He wants to grow drugs, stay loboto, trade them for what he needs and wants? That’s not a good thing, but it’s allowed. But trading drugs for kids? Not here. Same for Pastor Pureway—whose real name, by the way, is Dickie Mangle. He wants to create a mean little cult based on lies? He can go for it. People want to join? Hey, it’s a free planet, and stupid hasn’t been outlawed. They smarten up and want to bail? There’s a doorway to someplace else just waiting. There are some fairly nasty places here on the Hoop—affinity runs both ways—but on the whole people are using their new lives here to do some very cool things. It’s a decent place.”

“Because you help keep it decent. So come on, what are you, really? You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes I’m a cop, sure. Sometimes a go-between and mediator. A troubleshooter and peacekeeper. Sometimes judge and jury.” She chuckled. “But what I mostly am is busy.”

“I see that. How many places are you keeping track of?”

“Hundreds. Sometimes it’s individuals, sometimes communities, sometimes whole segments.”

“Sounds like a big job. You can’t be the only one doing it.”

“There are a couple others. We’re spread pretty thin.”

“I bet.” Considering the sheer size of the Hoop that was something of an understatement, like one cop per borough or one security guard per mall.

Trub drained her coffee, stuffed a couple of the leftovers in her satchel, then stood up. “Ready to get moving?”

“I guess.” I finished off my own coffee and climbed to my feet. “Where are we going next?”

“You’ll see.”

I peered at her. “Is this whole never giving a straight answer part of your job or just a bad habit?”

She laughed and winked her good eye.

“I’ll never tell.”

I figured our next stop would be another trouble spot.

I had to wonder why I was getting this crazy tour, from this particular tour guide. Maybe because they had me pegged as a potential troublemaker, and this was their subtle way of warning me what I’d be facing if I got out of line.

I sure didn’t want Trub as an adversary.

In fact, I was starting to think of her as a friend.

We arrived someplace where it was really dark. Dark, and much smellier than the inside of Poppa Poppy’s crib.

“Lights,” Trub said.

The floor under us began to glow, softly at first, then more brightly. It was more white hoopstuff. The stink reminded me of something, and then there was this low background sound, like—

“We’re back on Earth,” I said in surprise. “Right?”

“You’re pretty sharp, kid. We’re back in the bad old Big Apple.”

“So why are we here?” I tried to think of a reason crazy enough to make sense to Trub and the B’hlug. “To get bagels?”

“A nice bagel would be good, but that’s not it. Any other ideas?”

I tried to read her scarred face, failed. “I’ve, um, been rejected for Venus?”

She shook her head. Not that. A relief… I guess.

“You… you also troubleshoot here?”

That made her laugh. “Hell no! I’ve got more than enough to keep me occupied back in the Hoop.”

“Wait, I’ve got it! You’re trying to confuse me!”

Her smile was kindly, maybe even fond. “Not on purpose. We’re here to meet someone.” She raised her voice. “Roberta, you here?”

“All along,” said a low husky voice from one of the dark corners.

I watched a vague gray shape materialize from the gloom, take human form, then with a shimmer of nanocamo turn into a New York City cop. A particular cop, the black woman with the spiked yellow hair who had so dogged me in the hours before I ended up in the Bug Trap.

Trub grinned. “How you doing, sistra?”

The cop shrugged. “You know how it is. Win some, lose some. Keep moving and don’t look back.”

“I hear that. Well, I’ve got to tell you, you sure know how to pick them.”

The cop—Roberta—turned to peer at me like a misparked car. “I admit that he’s a pretty ragass specimen, but the pickings are pretty slim.”

“Well, I’ve brought him back to you.”

Roberta didn’t look overjoyed. “I think I would have preferred some of Lee’s rice beer.”

“Maybe next time. Besides, there’s nothing keeping you from going out and getting your own.”

A shrug. “I’m pretty busy, Trub.”

I broke into this strange girltalk. I had a lot of questions, but what I’d just heard sorted one in particular to the top of the pile. “You’ve been out there?”

Roberta nodded. “Yeah.”

“And you came back here?”

“Man, can’t slip nothing past you, can we?”

Trub laid a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, we shouldn’t bust your chops like this. Think of it as an occupational hazard.”

“Yeah,” Roberta agreed glumly. “Like getting shot at and shat on.” She shook her head. “If it weren’t for the glamour I might just start getting dissatisfied.”

Trub faced me squarely, her expression turning serious. “Here’s the deal, Glyph. You’re being offered a job.”

“With the NYPD?” I said uncertainly.

Roberta shook her head. “Somehow I don’t see you fitting into dress blues.”

“That’s good. I don’t see me being a cop either.”

“Affinity,” Trub said. “I’ve kept mentioning it, right?”

“More than once.”

“Well?”

I tried to figure out what she was getting at. Only one idea came to mind, one that had to be wrong. I wasn’t going to just blurt it out, but sneak up on it.

“I ended up following you around to see what your job involves…”

An expectant stare. “And?”

“To see if I could do it too?”

“Damn,” Roberta drawled. “He is smarter than he looks. A good thing too.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hands. “This is crazy. I’m not a cop. I’ve never been a soldier. I’m a posto!”

Trub shook her head. “You don’t need to have worn a uniform. What you need is a sense of right and wrong and a willingness to pitch in when bad stuff seems to be getting the upper hand. An unease with authority. An ability to think fast and talk even faster.” She glanced at Roberta. “The siege of High Vista is over. This guy scammed Cyrus Crook and his merry band of dickheads into going chasing after an imaginary giant wishing well. Things got a bit out of control when he tried to deal with Sarah and her girls, but he done good. My advice, don’t play poker with him.”

“But things did get out of control,” I protested. “That one woman nearly got me. I’m not strong or tough like either of you. Let’s face it, I’m the least macho one here.”

“Hey,” Trub said, “we all have limitations. Me, I have to work hard to keep myself from kicking ass first and asking questions later. You, on the other hand, need to work on your head-knocking skills.”

“That’s where I come in,” Roberta said. “You’re going to be my student for a while. I’ll teach you basic police skills. Tactics. Self-defense. Weapons and hand-to-hand combat. When I’m done with you there’s a chance you might be half as bad as Trub or me. Not much of one, but we’ll try.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why aren’t you on the Hoop working with Trub? Didn’t you like it out there?”

The policewoman smiled. “I liked it just fine. It’s just I still have work to do down here. Part of that work is helping move along people who ought to find their way out there. I figure working here a few more years, then going up permanently rather than commuting.”

Every time I thought I had a handle on the situation it turned to soap in the shower. “Commuting?”

“Sure. I have an apartment in Soho, and a little hideaway in a sparsely inhabited segment. Can you believe it? I get better phone reception in the Hoop than here in Queens.”

“So am I going to be here, there, or where?”

“Both,” Trub said. She stuck out her hand. I took it. “I gotta run. See you somewhere down the rabbit hole, right?”

“Uh, sure. Thanks, I guess.”

“You’re welcome.” She called for transport, stepped through the door that appeared, vanished.

“Well, stud,” Roberta said, “you’ve had one mind-fuck of a day, haven’t you? Chased, shot, beamed to the Hoop to hang with Trub, and now dumped on my doorstep.”

“I sure have.” Her recap reminded me of the problems that had sent me into the Bug Trap. “What about the Chrome Lords? And your friends on the force? How am I going to hide from them?”

“Won’t need to.” She gestured toward the white ring on one finger. I realized that she was wearing one too. “Thanks to the tech in that thing, even your own mother wouldn’t recognize you. But you do have to drop that handle.”

“Any suggestions? Just don’t say kid. Or stud.”

“We’ll figure out something. One other thing. I think you had better stop with the posto.”

I shook my head. “Not happening. In fact…”

I pulled out my Rollox, whipped up a quick wordup. Synched it with my dipstick. Pointed that at the nearest wall.

Ka-whuff! It blasted out a cloud of nano-ink, slapping a posto.

The message, in ornate letters a foot high, read: Venus needs YOU and YOU need Venus!

“Well?” I said.

“Needs work,” she said. “Come on, Tonto, we got no end of things to get done.”

I nodded and followed the policewoman back out onto the city streets. I fingered the white ring Trub had given me.

Roberta was right. There was more to do than I’d ever guessed, in more places than I’d ever imagined.

I was caught in the Bug Trap for good now.