Both-Way Game

by Harden Grace

      Pled had just the one molecule to collect. Locked in a quartzite lattice in the High Sierra deserts. Only one particle meant only one payout. Not enough to get him out of the hole. But better than no payout at all. Most of the molecules had been concentrated within a hundred clicks of the internment site; they usually were on a job like this. Molecules don't travel as much as you'd expect. The Centre's Accumulation Group had already cleaned the internment dense-pack. Freelancers like Pled chased the scatter.
      He left the Bay Area Metropole in time to beat the UV peak. The rig had shields but he didn't put much stock in them. It was just before sunrise when she appeared on the horizon, a long silhouette, like a shadow without a body. She was unavoidable, standing on her head, facing east, in the middle of what passed for road. Pled had to stop.
      A wave of dust from the rig floated past her. She flipped herself right-ways and slid her feet together. Through the warping haze of the shield tints, she seemed like one of those Japanese animation girls, stringy and sexy, with a smear of red clay across one hollow cheek. She blew a wisp of hair from her forehead, turned from the rig, and began to walk away.
      Pled fumbled with the rig's fickle door. He kicked the release panel, conjuring a thin trail of smoke and a whiff of electrical fire. The door groaned open. He yelled for the girl.
      "What do you think you're doing out here?"
      "Whyn't you mind to your owns, mister," she said coldly, before heading out again across the empty basin.
      "You can't stay out here. You'll fry like an egg." She didn't stop. "'An egg,' I said. C'mon, get in. We need to find shadows; you can show me where." She turned back. Her eyes twinkled with something; maybe hunger; maybe just the sunrise.
      "Where do we go?" she asked.
      "The desert Sierra, west side of the Pit," he said.
      She stepped over the baked hexagons of earth between them until she was close enough to whisper. "I won't fuck you, if that's what you're thinking."
      Pled had an authorization in his payout for a guide, and food enough for two in case he found one. Maybe she'd be useful. Know her way around. But now, strapped into the harness, she seemed vulnerable. He tried to find her face reflected in the glass beside her. She blurred. He asked her name.
      "Neesphor."
      "Like the angel?" He seemed to breathe the question.
      "It's an old family name. I really don't know."
      She scanned him across and back. "What are you supposed to be?" she asked.
      "I chase molecules."

      Sure, there were freelancer spins. Of kliocydes that haunted the chase. Deep-deep spooks or regenerated silicants or even fleeting, vengeful ephemera. It all depended on who was turning the spin. But always they were guardians of the molecular past, creatures that split freelancers down the middle with Teflon-streaked razors and smiled while their insides bled into the sand. Paranoid inventions, of course. Freelancers stumbled. Fell off the bent wreckage of the Eiffel Tower. Or drowned in the bitter-cold Bering Sea. Pled remembered a freelancer who'd been mauled by lions on a Congo Sector chase. You don't need kliocydes baiting sanguinary beasts to do you in. Just wrong place, wrong time. Nothing more.
      He glanced at the girl.
      "You an orphan?" he asked her.
      "Not anymore."
      "What does that mean?"
      "I'm too old to be an orphan. I used to be an orphan. Now I'm just alone."
      Pled geared a variable transponder to wander the AM frequencies. Pointless remnants of ancient transmissions reverbed across the empty desert. Plutonium waste abandoned deep beyond the frontier offered enduring half-lives to the fractured flux. A deep voice crackled, "This is a wake-up call, America." Another pleaded, "El mundo es todos fantasmas; encontrar esperanza en Dios." Then unalignable babble. Pled shut the transponder down. They climbed through the desert in silence.

      All around the old lodge, the Sierra were nothing but scarred mountains. Not long after the turn of the century, fires had burned up most of the timber and what was left of the towns. Drought had already killed the resorts by then. The deep lake went dry and rivers trickled sand down empty beds. When the fires began, anybody still around relocated without being asked. Pled unloaded the equipment and hurried across strips of sunlight, making for the haphazard dark of the ruined lodge.
      Against the east wall, a tram from an antique cable-rig lay on its side; the floor had been cut out and set up like a lean-to against the sun. Pled brushed away shards of glass and set his case against a rusty corner. He felt eyes wander across the hair of his neck. He spun around, finding only the empty lodge. He took a breath and shook down a shiver. A piercing whistle overhead brought it up again.
      High on the west wall, perched in a shadowed corner, Neesphor was watching the distance past the Pit. Vulturine, she scanned the horizon. She might have been an old-past vampire. Or worse.
      She leaned out from the shadow. "When do we chase the molecules?" she called down.
      "Molecule," Pled corrected. "There's only one." He leaned into a thin shade along the wall and looked up at the girl. "We'll wait and go after sunset. Can you get me to the Shirley Lakebed?"
      "Is that where it is?"
      He nodded.
      She slipped from her corner and vanished.

      Neesphor ran her hands over her cropped brown hair, pulling at the too-long bangs in front. Pled rummaged through his case and handed her a cold o-bento. She pulled the lid and stuffed a handful of rice and seaweed in her mouth. Pled was plugging the extractor into the generator when the girl said, "My parents died around here."
      He wanted to ask the how and when and where, but watched a tear cut the dust on her cheek. Pled pretended to busy himself with the nav-board on his terminal. He watched as she rolled herself onto a blanket and rocked herself to sleep.

      Pled knew there were freelancers who believed in kliocydes. They said Centre authority conspired a both-way game to keep the rehistories fluid. It was propaganda economics: Create the demand, then block the supply. Centre biosquads cloned teams of hybrid silicants to keep the particles of ancient spin locked down. Freelancers were sent into the chase already condemned. He fired a scan orbit around the girl. She processed up authentic flesh. She had the right ingredients, at least. He moved across the tram and watched the even movement of her curled chest. Her stomach expanded into her center, then receded. A slash of too-tan skin was exposed where her shirt had ripped. Gently, Pled dusted a skin cell from her hip. Her output came clean.
      One more check to be sure. He pulled a long, clear tube from his case and, from the tube, a long, pin-prick sensor. He knelt beside her and geared to slide the pin-prick into a frontal lobe. Her eyes flickered and snapped open. She flashed backwards into a long crouch. She held her weight over one bent leg in a mean arabesque. She blinked hard.
      "I thought you might need another blanket," Pled stammered, the needle behind his back, "I didn't mean to wake you."
      She stepped uneasily from the corner. Pled pulled a heliofyrian stage from his case. Neesphor moved to sit before the blue-and-orange flames. She turned her palm over and back again in the holo-fire, mesmerized by the light-play forgery.
      Pled set the extractor beside a low pile of equipment and rummaged for more food stocks. He pulled two noodle boxes from the bottom of his case.
      "Why would anyone want just one molecule?" she asked, blowing cool a thick twist of noodles.
      He looked at her across the tram. Then told her what he should have kept to himself. He explained how the freelancers were chasing an old-past divinity, gathering him up bit by molecular bit. Centre authority was going to realign a god from the ancient spins. The girl stared deliberately into her food stock, as if unwilling to face this explanation. Pled had seen this reaction before. You couldn't help but imagine the myriad coincidences that aligned you just so, puzzled together your finished identity. "Realignment is tricky," he told her. She stared through him. "Especially," he said, "with this old-past god Jesus Christ."
      "Wait," she burst out, "I know this spin. The old woman who took care of me in the no-parent shelter used to turn it. It's old-past religion, way-back stuff." She tugged at her bangs as if this might pull a memory. She flashed clear eyes at Pled. "But there can't be any molecules. The old woman spun that this one went to Heaven whole."
      "But the tracers possibled a positive dense-pack in the Old Babylon Sector,"
      Pled told her, "Centre wants to realign a second coming."
      Neesphor stirred her noodles.
      "Why?"
      "They want to stop the killings."

      They walked along a low ridge, pushing up toward the lakebed. While they climbed, Pled retraced the points of trajectory outlined in his payout memorandum. Internment dense-pack to earthworm. Earthworm to olive tree. Dispersed via black sparrow feces. Drained into ground water. Drunk from a stream by Arabian prince. Bled through mortal wound. Buried deep in sand. Then what? Pled stumbled his chant. Spilled intox no, mined. Mined as methane. Burned in Olympic flame, Winter Games, 1960. Buried by snowstorm. Swallowed by brown trout. Dropped by waterfall ...
      Bathed in faint moonglow, Neesphor stopped, turned her back on the Shirley lakebed.
      "My mother used to live out there," she said, "before the water dried up."
      Her mother had been a gator-girl. She could navigate upside-down, and dizzy and blindfolded, too, if she wanted. With Neesphor's father, a big-payout jet-boy, she flew aquaseeks for the BAM water cartels. Neesphor told this as even-versed storytime. A spin she had turned so often it hardly held meaning any more.
      "They crashed in those mountains on the far side of the Pit, a place called Heavenly." She was pointing. "That's always bothered me. Their dying in a place called Heavenly."
      Pled moved past her and stepped onto the lakebed surface. The chart indicated the particle in shallow sediment on a rocky ledge above the far shore. He pulled a set of optic wraps from his pack, and plugged them in. He crossed the lakebed, angling for the marker. Neesphor trailed in his footsteps until they stood at the base of a steep granite wall.
      "Up," he said.
      She stepped onto the rock and began to pick her way along a deep fissure.
      Pled hurried to keep up. He didn't like the height.
      Neesphor rolled onto a thin ledge as Pled strained across the last few meters. She leaned out, grabbed him by the pack, and hauled him up. He rolled over and sat against the rock. Beside him, Neesphor stood looking up the rest of the wall. A green, VR bull's-eye circled her feet.
      "Here," he panted, thumping the ground.
      The extractor clicked twice, then fell silent. Pled pulled the fiber filament from the ground.
      "Chase over?" she asked.
      Pled didn't answer. He set the extractor beside the tripod.
      "If the believers come out of hiding to see this jigsaw-puzzled god, Centre biosquads will slash them extinct, throat by throat, right down the line," she said softly.
      Pled stuffed gear into his pack. "An eye for an eye," he said.
      Neesphor turned away from him then. Turned and stared again into the distance past the Pit. When she turned back, Pled watched a single tear form, glisten in moony phosphorescence, and slip down her cheek.
      "I can't help thinking of the old woman at the no-parent shelter," she said, "What if she's a believer? What then?"
      Pled closed the short distance between himself and the girl. He reached a hand to her cheek. She flinched, but leaned her face into his palm. He wiped the tear away with his thumb.
      "I can't walk away from this particle. If I don't bring in the scatter, another freelancer will," he told her. "I need the payout."
      "But you can't be sure it's the believers who have done the killings. It could be just another both-way game," she pleaded.
      "I don't believe in both-way games."
      "Your mistake then," Neesphor shot back.
      She grabbed his wrist and snapped his arm behind him. She slammed him into the rock. He folded onto the ledge.
      Taking the extractor by its telescopic nose, she hurled it out toward the lakebed. It smashed on the boulders piled below, exploding in a glitzy spray of orange sparks.
      From all fours, Pled craned his neck to see. He reached for her with his broken wrist. "You-" he began, but she punched him in the throat. He fell back, gasping. She put a boot at the back of his knee and pulled his leg up. It snapped just below the joint. His scream echoed down the rock wall.
      She slipped over the ledge and began to move down the fissure. Pled dragged himself to stare down after her. She flashed him a hollow smile.
      At the base, she climbed over the boulders to dig the storage lattice from the remains of the wrecked extractor. A meteor flashed above the horizon. The girl held the lattice up to the moonlight. She slipped it into her pocket and disappeared into the shadows.

Harden Grace lives in San Francisco. This is his first time in print.
E-mail: hardgrace@aol.com