Lázaro y Antonio
                                  by Marta Randall

In our January issue this year, Marta Randall made her return to our pages with
a tale of magic realism. Now she takes us into space—specifically, one little nook
of it known as the Curve....
                                        ****
      It starts
       Sure Lázaro was broke, but he still wasn’t interested in rolling drunks, not
even rich belligerent Academy chilito drunks. This one had shown up last night with
some pendejo brotherhood, too many to take on, but tonight he was alone and still a
dick so Lázaro had no qualms about holding Antonio’s new foxleather jacket while
Antonio whacked the guy’s fright-coifed blond head, just precisely so. The kid fell
into the alley, all bonelessness and fat, and Antonio had his wallet out and popped
his com and wasted the chip, all within thirty seconds. Lázaro observed with
admiration: it was always a pleasure to watch a master at work. A couple of minutes
after the kid had stepped into the alley to take a leak, Antonio and Lázaro strolled out
together, Antonio wriggling his shoulders a little to seat the jacket and smoothing
back his black hair. Lázaro admired that, too.
        The Curve was quiet for a Friday night. Paychecks had come out last week
and would come again next week, but those who had money tonight were not the
kind to waste it on the bars and bitches in the Port’s seedy arc. The solid citizens
were all at home Northside, with their families and their big screens and their hot
dinners. The chilito wasn’t an exception, he was a tourist, which was why Antonio
felt free to relieve him of his cash and com. Tourists were warned to stay away from
the Curve, warned that the spaceport cops wouldn’t protect them once they left the
port by the Southside gate. There was always someone who couldn’t resist the
challenge. The ones who could take care of themselves had a good time and no
harm done, but dicks like this one were easy pickings.
      “So, how much he had?” Lázaro asked.
      Antonio shrugged. “Dunno, bro. We get to Celia’s, I’ll tell you. Not gonna
paw it out here. What, you some kinda tard?”
      “Hell no,” Lázaro said, but his outrage was faked. He was some kinda tard
and he usually admitted it. It made life easier.
      Celia’s was almost empty. Two old birds sat at the bar, staring into their
glasses and not saying much. Krumholz, who owned Celia’s, was in a generous
mood and had cranked up the sound so everyone could enjoy his beloved ancient
techno. Lázaro didn’t like it because he couldn’t follow the melodies, but Krumholz
was always good for a drink and a place to hang out for a few hours without being
hassled. Now Lázaro followed Antonio to a booth near the back. Krumholz came
over and slapped at the table with his rag.
      “You guys freeloadin’ again?” he demanded.
      “No, man, we got scratch,” Antonio said with lazy confidence. “I wanna beer,
and another for my ‘ssociate.”
       Krumholz snorted but went back to the bar. Antonio waited until he came
back with the drinks, collected a five, and left. Each took a ritual sip of beer before
Antonio slid the wallet onto the table. The two men regarded it with approval. It was
a nice one, made of some fine-grained leather, probably real, tanned a pleasant light
brown with fancy designs burned into it along the edges and a complicated glyph on
the front. Most tourists just used paper folds from the change houses: no thumbs
allowed on the Curve. This guy either traveled a lot or wanted people to think he did.
Lázaro tapped the wallet and, when Antonio didn’t object, touched it again.
      “Whazzat?” he said.
       “It’s the, what you call it, the picto for some fancy-ass school off near the
Hub.” Antonio used one fingernail to flip the wallet open. Sheaves of plastic
decorated the insides under the lip of the billfold. Here’s the thing about plastic and
chips: a chip’s this bitty thing and kinda private, but plastic, hell, you can flash that
around and impress everyone you can get to look at you. Antonio snorted. Lázaro
knew that Antonio had plenty of plastic himself and wasn’t dazzled by this lot.
      When Antonio opened the billfold, he cursed with surprise and jerked his
hand back.
      “Yeah? What?” Lázaro whispered, leaning away from the table.
      Antonio lifted the lip of the billfold again and started sliding out the bills.
There were a lot of them, more than either man had ever seen in one place. Lázaro
whistled under his breath.
      “Hijo de la madre, man,” he breathed. “You think they’re real?”
       Antonio dropped a napkin over them. “How’n hell do I know?” he muttered,
and stuck his fingers in the billfold again. This time he brought out scraps of paper.
Sales receipts, tickets, notes in a language neither man recognized. The last one held
a series of numbers. Lázaro squinted at the paper and muttered the numbers. “One
one two three five eight one three two one three four five five eight nine.” He looked
up. “Mean anythin’ to you?”
      Antonio shook his head.
      Lázaro thought for a long moment. The numbers were almost familiar, like
voices so far away that you can’t understand them. He shook his own head. “You
gonna gimme some of the cash, man? I mean, I held your coat and all.”
       “Sure, what you take me for?” Antonio’s fingers got busy under the napkin.
He brought his hand out, palm down, and slid it over to Lázaro. The money moved
from Antonio’s palm to Lázaro’s with the ease of long practice. Lázaro peeked at
the bills and grinned and put them in his pocket, the inside one right over his hip.
       A few minutes later they finished their drinks. Antonio palmed the bills and
plastic into his jacket pocket and left the paper scraps on the table. When his back
was turned, Lázaro scooped them up and tucked them away. He didn’t know why.
       At the corner, before they parted, Antonio dropped the wallet into a trash
mouth. The mouth gargled for a second, flashed, and the wallet was gone. Then they
hit each other’s shoulders in farewell and went their separate ways.
                                         ****
       One one two three five eight
       Lázaro sat at the table in his squat and counted over the bills again. There
were enough to last for a couple of months, if he was careful, didn’t binge, made his
food instead of buying it—hell, he could even pay his rent ahead and still have some
cash left over for a new jacket, maybe foxleather like Antonio’s. It was getting cold
out there.
       Or he could blow the whole thing in a week, roistering along the Curve like
any other fool with a pocket full of cash and enough whiskey and drugs in him to
make sure that he didn’t have a care in the world, or didn’t recognize them. He
grinned, thinking about that and about the cathouse above Papa Carlisle’s. It didn’t
matter that he’d spend a week in lockup, jonesing until the last of the drugs washed
out of him and left him back in the pale beige world with nothing in his pockets and
not even the memories of the drunk to sustain him. A good drunk was its own
reward.
        He had piled the paper scraps beside the money and now he went through
them again. The lettering looked like it ought to be familiar but it just barely wasn’t,
like something seen through wavy glass. The only numbers were on the scrap that he
had read. They were hand-written and strung together to form one long chain. The
next numbers in the sequence were 144233 but Lázaro didn’t know why he knew
that. It felt like how it felt when old garbage came up from the back of his brain, stuff
he’d rather not have, from a life that he couldn’t remember. He pushed the paper
around with his forefinger. Too many numbers to be a passkey. Maybe some form
of ID or an account number. He could pay for time on public access and search, but
he wouldn’t get anything useful although he didn’t know why he knew that.
      He pondered this as he broke off some soup and nuked it. This being the first
day of his current riches, he had determined to stretch it out as long as he could
before he fell, as he knew he inevitably would, into the delirium of the Curve. It
bothered him that the number sequence wasn’t just gibberish, it bothered him that he
couldn’t let it go. He pushed the numbers out of his head and thought about the
plastic Antonio had palmed but wouldn’t use. Plastic was trash but it caused trouble.
Antonio knew what to do with it; by now the plastic was probably out-system
somewhere, making mischief in places that Antonio and Lázaro and even the drunk
kid had never been.
       The soup was pretty good. He dunked the heel of a bread loaf into it and
counted out the bills again. One one two three five eight one three ... maybe the
numbers didn’t mean anything alone but pointed to something else. Like, maybe, the
next numbers in the sequence. Or pointed to a pattern. Images grew into his
consciousness, patterns starting and growing and turning on themselves to the
rhythm of almost but not quite 1.618 from the zero square where you started to the
one square to the two square to the three square to the five square to the eight square
and on and on through the matrices of the Continuum, each square turning into itself
to the next square in a dance folding and doubling until you reach, you reach, you
reach....
       Damn, Lázaro thought. He grabbed up the paper scraps and shoved them into
his ancient trash mouth. Nothing happened. He hit it on the side and finally it grunted
and flashed, and the papers whooshed into gray ash and disappeared. Lázaro
returned to the table, grabbed another hunk of stale bread, and slammed it into the
soup. Drops of broth scattered over the table, balling up in the accumulated dust.
       Screw all of it. He’d spend the money on the biggest, loudest, longest drunk
anybody in the Curve had ever had. Yeah. As soon as he cooped out a bit so he’d
be fresh and ready for action. He could start at Papa Carlisle’s and work his way up
one side of the Curve and down the other, and end up at Papa’s again but upstairs
this time. Or he could start upstairs at Papa’s and snag him a honey and have some
company up and down the Curve. Yeah. Yeah, that.
       He pushed the soup bowl aside, where it settled against a growing collection
of crusted plates and crawling green food wrappers, and rolled onto his shelf.
Tomorrow. Early. Up one side and down the other. That would make all this
damned clarity go away.
                                        ****
      Domes, bubbles, and arcs
       First, the Port dome’s not really a dome, it’s an annulus but everybody calls it
a “dome” so what the hell. The top’s open and the sides only come up about a
thousand meters because the designers figured that was enough but of course it
wasn’t. So the ships go in and the ships come out, and the gas and garbage spills
into the Port and down the outsides, too, like this thick crap soup. The Port dome’s
about half a klick thick and inside are offices and subways and hotels and all the
stuff you need to run a good respectable Port, but it isn’t enough space. It never is.
You’d think they could’ve figured that out but they never do.
      So after the Port dome went up they built this lean-to partial dome that tilts up
against the Port dome like a crescent cupping a bigger arc: the Curve. It was
supposed to be just warehouses and megas, not living space, so they didn’t attach it
to the Port dome very well and now the Curve pulls away from the Port dome a little
more every year, and a little more gas and garbage falls into the Curve but nobody
seems to give a damn.
       Northside, there’s the Bubbles with the residentials and parks and stores and
crap like that. Inside the Port dome there’s a whole separate dome called the Island
that was management and politics before the plague came. You can forget about all
that. This story isn’t about the Bubbles or the Island or the plague, it’s just about
Lázaro and Antonio and the Curve. Oh yeah, and it’s about Jane, too, a little bit.
                                        ****
      Jane
       The next morning he wasn’t drunk or hung over which was kind of too bad
because it meant he could see okay. Papa Carlisle’s crowded up against an edge of
the Curve, next to where the port dome came down into the dirt and under where the
arc of the Curve dome lay up against the bigger dome but not quite, so weather crept
in. Today there was bright, sunny weather falling through the dome joins, and that
was too bad too because Papa Carlisle’s didn’t do well in sunny weather. It
shabbied up all the scales and feathers.
       Lázaro came through the front shimmer. Papa was up already, wearing a face
ferocious in its cheerfulness until he saw Lázaro and the cheerfulness fell away, as
did the extravagant mustache. Papa turned back to its card game and turned her
sweet, sexy face into the usual mirror.
      “Hey,” Lázaro said, his feelings hurt. “I got scratch.”
       Papa turned back to him. The flat mirror face grew one eyebrow, which rose
into an arch. “Yes?” Papa said. “Where did you find money, you useless junk-diver?
Were you relieving inebriated personages of their superfluity of cash?” Papa hadn’t
grown a mouth, so the words came out of the air behind it.
      Lázaro squirmed. “Not me,” he said, clinging to the half-truth. “Look, I got
scratch and I wanna spend it, maybe with ... with ... who you got today you can rent
to me? Not too shaggy,” he added with haste. “I don’t want be seen with no skant.”
      Papa waved this away. “Today I am honored by the presence of Mistress
Anastasia of the Fourteen Mysteries, the lovely and talented Stephen Comelightly,
and—” Papa paused. “And—we can call her Jane.”
      “Jane,” Lázaro breathed. “Jane.”
      The mirror grew lips, which smiled and shouted, “Jane, darling. Descend.”
       “Wait,” Lázaro said, panicked. “I ain’t got that much scratch, I mean, I gotta
save I ain’t paid up my rent and—”
      And by then it was too late, because a brand-new Jane was there and smiling
at him as though she knew that he did so have that much scratch and that she scared
him pale and that it didn’t matter because, after all, she was Jane and they had been
married for twenty years and he still loved her like fury even though he couldn’t quite
remember anything else about her. But Jane did that to you, had always done that
even way back when he was a—was a—was a what? He almost had it for a minute
before it pixelated and was gone, leaving just Jane.
        “Children,” Papa said, smoothing a mustache that grew somewhere under her
tilted eyebrow and beside his still-smiling lips. “Go.”
      They went.
                                        ****
      You dance a box
      By noon he found himself telling her all about it. They sat over a plate of
spaghetti with meatballs in the back room at Giancarlo’s, sharing a fork and a beer
and a glass of wine which mostly Jane drank, and he told her about Antonio and the
rude drunk Academy asshole and the money and
      “...three five eight one three two one three four,” he whispered.
     Jane’s pretty eyes went wide. “The Fibonacci sequence,” she said, and he
nodded because of course that is what it was. “A space grid?”
      “I dunno. Maybe. Yeah.” Lázaro looked at her. “Jane? Why do I know that?”
       “I don’t know,” she said, touching his hand. “I just met you this morning,
remember? But that’s what it is, yeah? I mean, launch’s zero and you follow the
numbers until somehow you’re off into the Continuum, zero one one two three five
eight thirteen twenty-one ... don’t need to be a space jock to know that.”
      “I ain’t just no space jock,” he muttered. She touched his hand again.
      “Of course you’re not, Lázaro. Of course not.”
       That’s when Antonio came in, waving his flash and wearing his foxleather
jacket over his shoulders, in that suave way he had. Lázaro waved at him. Antonio
looked over the bar along the side wall and the tables in front of it, already crowded
with tourists and spacers and a couple townies come to the Curve for rough trade
along with their lunch. He had that lazy picking-and-choosing look on his face.
Lázaro waved harder and for a moment it looked like Antonio was gonna ignore him
before he saw Jane and came over like she was reeling him in.
      Antonio got all smoothly and snakely and put his ass down on the bench
beside Jane so she had to scootch over but she was smiling because that’s what
Jane was, a whore, and whores give people what people want. Lázaro didn’t mind.
       While Antonio sweet-talked Jane, some spacers at a table near the bar made
big juhla, yelling and slamming mugs on the table where they flashed out so the beer
jumped into the air all on its lone. Lázaro liked it when they did that. He watched and
finished off another beer himself. By now he was getting fuzzy around the edges and
so was the world. One more and he’d be flying, so he ordered it and downed it and
when he looked across the table he saw that Jane and Antonio had disappeared
somewhere. Anything Jane made while away from Papa’s was hers and Lázaro
didn’t begrudge her a little walking-around money. Besides, by then the flying was
happening, the backwards and forwards inside his head matching the backwards and
forwards inside his mind. All the comforting fuzziness came back like he lived in a
world that he couldn’t just quite almost touch, but it was okay now because he was
backwards and forwards and flying and he didn’t care.
      So he let himself fly over to the spacers’s table and took a chair and slid it up
between a couple of them and waved his hand at the barkeep and waved at the table
to order another round. The barkeep blinked and buzzed and the spacers looked at
each other and moved over for him.
      Lázaro took a deep, happy breath. “Yo soy un Fibs,” he announced.
     “The hell,” said the spacer with captain’s bars, but she said it grinning. “No
way you ain’t no Fibs, knocker.”
       “Te lo juro,” Lázaro said. The waitress floated a tray full of drinks over and
everybody grabbed. Lázaro stuck a bunch of bills in the waitress’s navel, which
went green. He liked doing that. “You start at zero and you dance a box,” he said
with authority. “Then you dance a box, then you dance a box, then you dance a box
until you’re solid gone. Whoof! Just like that!”
      The captain laughed. “You are so fulla shit,” she said. She lifted her drink to
him. “Danke.”
        The table had finished drying itself by now, so Lázaro, who was about to
illustrate by drawing boxes on the tabletop with beer, instead just ran his index finger
in an imaginary square, joined to a square, joined to a square.
      “It’s the numbers,” he told them. “It’s the numbers and dancing, numbers to
boxes to places to time to something, something I don’t remember ... but I
remember the numbers. Except,” he said, compelled by an engineered honesty, “I
don’t know how to use it anymore but I remember I did use it, but then I stop
remembering it at all.”
       “Skitte,” one of the spacers said with cheerful contempt, and they all went
back to yelling and drinking. The numbers fell out of Lázaro’s head and he was
happy to sit with them, like he belonged at the table, like he was still a Fibs and the
yelling and drinking were home somehow, except they weren’t.
      “Hey, Fibs, we’re dry,” one of the spacers shouted to him. Lázaro started to
raise his arm but somebody put a hand on his wrist and stopped him. He looked up
and back at Antonio and Jane. Antonio always was kinda fast and here he was done
and his hair combed back and bein’ his buddy. That Antonio didn’t miss a thing.
       Now he shook his head at the spacers. “I think my bro Laz has bought
enough,” he said. “What you givin’ him in return, just you let him sit here? You think
that’s some kinda big deal? You show some respect.”
       “Like hell,” the captain said but she didn’t sound mad. “Your ponyboy says
he’s a Fibs. Don’t take kindly to that, mockin’ the trade.”
      Antonio made a big sigh and put his head to one side, like he was
exasperated. “First off he ain’t my ponyboy, he’s my bro. And second, he was Fibs
on Mi Fregado Suerte.”
      “Like hell,” the captain said again. “Emiliano Corazón’s ship? No way. That
was one stand-up balls-on smugglin’ bastard. They caught him and scrapped the
ship years ago.”
       “Laz,” Antonio said. “Show her your arm.” Lázaro started rolling up his right
shirt-sleeve and Antonio cuffed him lightly on the side of his head. “The other one,
cabron. With the writing on it.”
      Lázaro did and held his arm out so everyone could see the numbers and
symbols under his skin. Once all that stuff had moved and had lights and color, but
that was a long time ago and now it was just a washed-out kind of blue. The spacers
crowded around to stare, then backed off and stared at his face instead.
      “Hell,” the captain said again, quieter. “What happened to him? He wasn’t like
that when he was Fibs on the Suerte—not if he’s the one who navved Castle Peaks.”
      “There an’ back,” Antonio said. “Come on, Laz, let’s get goin’.”
      When Lázaro stood he staggered a little with all the beer, so Jane put his arm
over her shoulders to help him walk. He waved goodbye to his new friends but the
captain caught up with them at the door.
       “Man, what happened to him?” she demanded. “I heard the Freddies found
the ship, said some lyin’ skitte about a cargo and jumped the ship when they got
aboard. Ditched Corazón out on some asteroid.”
       “Yeah,” Antonio said. By now they were out on the Curve and somehow it
had gotten to be late afternoon so it was darker and the place looked a lot better.
Giancarlo’s was almost in the middle and the Curve curved back on both sides until
it disappeared behind the port dome’s arc. Lázaro smiled at Jane, who smiled back
and put his hand on her boob.
      Antonio said, “Bastards don’t mind stealin’ when it’s them doin’ it, and don’t
believe in capital punishment, but they sure as hell believe in gettin’ even.” There was
a pause while he stared at the captain and she stared back at him, and something
came up between them because she nodded and Antonio nodded, and Lázaro was
happy that his friends were getting along but the flying was going away and he
wanted more.
      “Mira, Antonio,” he said, “quiero mas cerveza.”
      “Yeah, bro, just a minute.” Antonio kept staring at the captain.
     “The crew,” she said. She didn’t sound like she was flyin’ either anymore.
“What happened to the crew?”
      Antonio put Lázaro’s free arm over his shoulders so Lázaro was bracketed by
two people he cared about. The captain looked at his face and looked away again.
       “You know that stuff they make, brings back your memories? I mean,
everything you want, all the time? Cleans out all the sticky junk in your brain like
blasting sludge off an engine? That stuff?” The captain just looked at him. “Yeah,
well, before they got to that they found a way to make the sludge. You’d think they
ain’t got a use for that, brain-gunk, but they ain’t about to let nothin’ go they can
squeeze some use outta it.”
      “The crew.”
       “The crew,” Antonio said, agreeing. “Laz’s brain, he’s got so much sludge in
there he can’t remember nothin’. Sometimes something comes up but he don’t
know what it is half the time, an’ don’t know what to do about it.”
      Antonio took a deep breath. Lázaro’s hand had gone slack so Jane put her
hand over his and cupped his fingers around her breast.
        “Last year he remembered a week of training, like it was yesterday. That’s
gone. Right now all he can remember is good times, and he’s havin’ fun. Year from
now, maybe two, he’ll forget how to breathe, or his heart’ll forget how to beat, and
that’ll be that. ‘Cause the Freddies, they don’t believe in no death penalty. So they
ain’t killin’ him, they just shot him up and chipped him and dumped him here.”
      “And you’re his jailer,” the captain said.
       “He don’t need no jailer,” Antonio said. “He’s chipped. There ain’t no way
out of here.”
       With that, Antonio and Jane moved him down the street. Lázaro looked over
his shoulder at the captain. He had told her something, important maybe, but he
couldn’t remember what it was. After a moment he stopped trying to remember and
waved good-bye. She just stared back.
                                        ****
       A halcyon interlude
       So anyway, Lázaro got to fly but he didn’t get to spend a week doing it and
didn’t get to spend any more of his scratch either, because Antonio took it away and
said he’d give it back in pieces. For a little while this made Lázaro mad, before he
forgot that he had the scratch at all and was just happy that Antonio gave him money
when he wanted it. Jane went back to Papa’s but sometimes Antonio let Lázaro buy
her out for a couple hours, and they went up and down the Curve and had spaghetti
at Giancarlo’s before she and Antonio went away to do some nookie-nookie but
they always came back. Papa Carlisle let Jane go out cheap on account of he knew
Lázaro couldn’t fuck but what she did when she was out with him, that wasn’t
Papa’s business at all, so everyone was happy.
      So Lázaro’s finishing the spaghetti and finishing his beer, and this woman
comes and sits across from him and says “Yo” like she knows him, and they talk
garbage for a while before Antonio comes back alone and sees her and sits down.
      “I figured you’d be back,” he said. “Did some research?”
      “Ain’t much else to do, workin’ short hauls around this penjamo.” She put
her beer down. “Corazón’s last run.”
      Antonio nodded.
       “Don’t know what he was runnin’, but rumor says he stood to make a killing
from it.”
      Antonio nodded again.
      “Which wasn’t on Mi Suerte when he got tagged.”
        “So probably he dumped it,” Antonio said. “And it’s still sittin’ there,
somewhere out there, just waitin’ for someone to come bag it. You ain’t the first to
think it.”
     “And your friend here, if you ain’t lyin’ and he was Corazón’s Fibs, he
knows where it is.”
      “Knew where it is,” Antonio said.
      Lázaro looked from one to the other. “Knew what, Antonio?”
      “Go on,” Antonio said to the captain, ignoring Lázaro.
       “They got the cleanin’-up memories stuff. So why not just get some for your
buddy and clean up his memory, and we go out after the schatz.” She leaned back.
“Fifty-fifty, you an’ me. I cut my crew into my half, you cut your buddy into yours.
Win win.”
       Antonio shook his head. “You can’t do it. MemMax’s red-list Hub only, and
even if you find it it’s hella expensive and you ain’t got that much scratch, not for
enough to do some good. Little dose, all it’ll do is get him unfuzzed for maybe a
day. You want my help, you get enough so he’s never goin’ back to this. Got me?”
      The captain looked at him, then away, then back, then pushed her chair away
from the table and stood up. “I’ll find a way,” she said. “Don’t you go sellin’ him to
anyone else, hear?”
       Antonio just laughed. “You the only bitch crazy enough to think that’ll work,”
he said. “Don’t worry. Me an’ Laz, we ain’t got nowhere to go.”
                                       ****
       Floating like a yuck parade
        After that there was a long time when nothing much happened. The weather
that leaked in beside Papa Carlisle’s got hot, then it got damp, then it got cool, then
it rained like hell and the street flooded so all the mud and garbage and boosters and
prophs and dead cats came floating through like a yuck parade. Days like that,
Lázaro stayed home. Lately he’d been spending a lot of time back when he was a
kid right out of school, before he hooked up with—with—well, never mind. Being
right out of school was like swank, lots of money to send home and money in his
pocket and good friends and once they all climbed a mountain together, got the gear
and hired a guide and went on up the sucker to the very top where there was hardly
any air and it was cold as sin, and he and Jane made love in the snow at the top of
the world. It was great, like it all happened yesterday, and Lázaro had a good time
telling his furniture all about it, telling the jokes and laughing at them, and sharing
around the hike food, and saying what his dad said when he called him up from the
top of the world and that made him cry a little but it was a good cry even if he
couldn’t remember why he did it.
       When Antonio showed up Lázaro thought he was the guide and told him they
were running low on food and when was it going to stop raining at the top of the
world anyway? Antonio went away and came back with food and made Lázaro eat
some hot stuff and go to bed. When he woke up Antonio was gone and so was the
top of the world and he didn’t remember what it was that he missed, only that he
missed something. Maybe it was the rain, because there wasn’t any now and the
mud was drying up with crap sticking up out of it so he had to walk around it real
careful ‘cause some of that stuff, it got on your foot it could hurt you. He kept
walking anyway, trying to find a place that would take him back to the place that he
remembered that he couldn’t remember. He walked all the way to where the Curve
got skinny and dark and stopped in a pile of garbage against the port dome, then he
came back on one of the side streets but nothing made him remember anything. He
slept out a couple of times. Maybe more. There was maybe someplace else he was
supposed to sleep, but maybe not. It made his eyes hurt to try to think about it.
       One morning he thought he found the remembering place so he came through
the shimmer into Papa’s. Papa scowled with only half her face on and then a woman
came down and took his hand and led him away.
       “We’ve been looking for you for days,” she said. “Are you all right? Stop,
turn around, let me see you, damn, Laz, you scared the shit out of Antonio an’ me,
we thought you’d gone off and died somewhere, where you been?”
       Lázaro wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. The words were there, he just
couldn’t make them work, couldn’t remember how to make his mouth make them.
Jane started crying and took him upstairs to her room and called Antonio. Lázaro
just sat with his hands folded in his lap and the only thing he could remember was
that everything he had to remember was gone. It was all dark and cold and hollow
and he didn’t like it but when he stood to go the woman grabbed his arm and told
him he couldn’t leave, and that made him angry so he hit her and she fell away so he
went out the door and someone he almost knew came and pushed him back into the
room and locked the door.
      “You okay?” the man said to the woman. The woman nodded and stood and
put her hand alongside her face where she was bleeding a little. Lázaro didn’t know
who had hit her but if he found out he’d make them real sorry.
       Then a voice with no body started shouting and the man in the room cursed
and he and the woman took Lázaro away to another place and a second woman
came and they all stood around looking at Lázaro and jabbering but nothing they
said made any sense to him. Something about swag and something about skunking a
deal and other stuff. The woman had a box with shiny things in it and the man talked
about what was real and the woman said it was real and did he want it or not and he
said he didn’t trust her and the other woman, the pretty woman with the black eye,
she kept crying and Lázaro kept trying to talk but the words were gone, solid gone,
and the harder he tried the more gone they were. First he wept, then he got mad
again and stood up and made fists, and the man pulled Lázaro’s sleeve up and
slapped a skinsting against his arm and then he went to sleep.
     He woke up two days later. His brain hurt. Before he could be all the way
awake, they fed him and skinned him and he passed out again.
                                     ****
      How she got it
       It’s only available in the Hub and even there you need a full croesus and
permission from the Govs carved in platinum and set with gems just to get within a
klick of it. Made from some kind of venom from some kind of bug that can only live
on a planet that got crudded to death years ago, so you can see that it’s pretty rare.
But that’s not what the story’s about, how she found it and got it and brought it
back, and we’re not stopping the story to say. She found it. She got it. She brought
it back. That’s enough.
                                         ****
       Clarity
      The fourth time he woke up, he opened his eyes and saw Antonio sitting there,
holding a bowl of hot soup. Behind him a woman in spacer’s clothes sat with her
butt on the edge of a table, arms crossed, staring at him.
      “Toño,” Lázaro said. “Híjole, me duele la cabeza como un verdadero diablo
.”
     “Yeah, well, that ain’t too surprising,” Antonio said but he was grinning like a
maniac. “Have some soup.”
      “Corazón,” the woman said, like she’d said it a lot before. She had captain’s
bars on her sleeves. Lázaro decided he didn’t like her.
      “Mi Fregado Suerte,” she continued.
      Lázaro scooted himself up to sit against the wall and took the bowl. “I been
drunk?”
      “Kinda,” Antonio said. He passed a hunk of bread.
      “Corazón’s last run.”
      Lázaro frowned at her. “Corazón’s last run, some chingadero ratted him to
the Freddies and they dumped him on some cagado asteroid somewhere and
trashed the rest of us too.”
       “But he had a cargo, he dumped it before the Freddies caught him,” she
insisted. “Where’d he dump it?”
       Lázaro took a bite of the bread. It was fresh and tasted great. “Toño?” he
said, his mouth full. “What’s goin’ on?”
       Antonio shrugged, leaning back in the chair. It creaked and wobbled, but it
held him.
      “She got an offer for us,” Antonio said. “She’s got MemMax, enough to fix
what the Freddies did to you. What she wants is the zero point to get to where
Corazón dropped his loot, and she’ll share it out fifty-fifty, you an’ me on one side,
her and her crew on the other.”
      “You don’t even have to come with,” she said. “Maybe better if you didn’t.
You just tell me where and—”
      “And you take off with the whole thing,” Antonio said, like he’d said it a lot
already. “What, you think we’re stupid or something? Laz can’t go ‘cause the
Freddies got him chipped and he can’t leave the Curve but I’m goin’ with. You got
a problem with that, you say it and we can stop the whole thing right here.”
      “Skitte,” she said. “Your ponyboy ain’t got enough MemMax in him to be
permanent, just enough to buy him maybe a couple weeks then bang, right back to
Stupidville. You ain’t about to stop it right here.”
      “And I ain’t about to give you the numbers and watch you fly off and hope
someday you’ll be back, neither,” Antonio retorted. “And he ain’t my ponyboy,
he’s my brother, got it?”
       They kept bickering. Antonio’s foxleather jacket hung from the back of the
rickety chair, frayed along the seams so that Lázaro could see the plastic of it.
Antonio’s slick black hair showed some gray at the roots. He had always cared a lot
about his looks, even back when they were kids. Lázaro sat up and swung his legs
over the side of the shelf. Now that the soup was gone, the room smelled stale and
close and there was nothing in it that said it was his place, no glyphs or books or
anything, but he knew it was his anyway. He recognized the stains on the wall.
       He recognized his memories, too. Being a kid, school, the Academy, climbing
mountains, the first commission, the years with Emiliano Corazón, the last run, the
bust, and what the Freddies did to him afterward. He remembered the years roaming
the Curve while more and more of himself sloughed away, and he remembered Jane,
the Jane that had been and the Jane that was.
     “How’m I chipped?” he said, interrupting their conversation. Both heads
swung toward him. “How’m I chipped?” he repeated. “Where’d they put it?”
        “It’s, like, it’s a blastoma nano.” Antonio hesitated. “It’s in your brain, Laz.
They shoot it into your artery, right about here, and it heads up to your brain and
latches on.” He took his fingers off his neck. “They know it’s there, they check for
it, ‘slong as they get a signal back they know where you are and that you ain’t dead,
and it sleeps. But you try to leave, we even try to find it, it goes malignant.”
      He pulled his mouth down and shrugged and went back to the argument while
Lázaro thought about that and about his memories. The argument kept intruding,
making noise inside his head as well as outside. Finally he put his hand out to stop
them.
       “Enough,” he said. “Here’s how we’ll do it. I’ll give Toño the zero points,
there and back, and your Fibs can run the numbers. I’ll stay here with the rest of the
MemMax, you two go get the cargo. Is Trafalgar still outside Freddie control?”
      “Oh yeah,” the captain said. “Outside and wide open.”
      “You go there, look for a company name of Chisler Chang-Himmel. They
commissioned the smuggle, they’ll still pay for it. Chang’s got a long memory. You
divide up the loot, Antonio brings our half back here, you go wherever you want
with your own cut. Agreed?”
     “Hold on,” the captain said. “Why unload it on Chang-Himmel? If it’s that
damned valuable, we could bid it up....”
       “It’s kids,” Lázaro said. “Chang’s kids, embryos. Stem cells, some of them,
others already growin’ parts. Everything in ten-year stasis. Chang commissioned
them, then welshed on the debt. Hemetica wouldn’t release them and blackballed
Chang from the other clone houses, too. Chang’s pretty desperate for spare parts. I
been out for what, four years?”
      “Five,” Antonio said.
        “Five. Chang still wants them and nobody else does ‘cause they’re tailored.
You want to unload them, you got only one market but that market’ll pay big. You
take the stuff to Trafalgar. Chang’ll want a recognition code—Toño’s gonna carry
that. And part of the price is Chang gives Toño a ride back. You get the money, you
split the money, you split. Nobody gets a chance to screw nobody.”
      “Stem cells,” the woman said. “About how big a payload?”
       Lázaro showed her with his hands; maybe the size of a spacer’s duffle, maybe
a bit smaller. “That’s why it’s tricky,” he said. “It’s a small box and it’s just floating
out there on some bitty asteroid, probably no bigger than the one they left Emiliano
on.” He rocked back; the shelf creaked and sagged a little. “So, you gonna do it?”
       Antonio and the woman looked at each other, then she shrugged and he stuck
his hand out and they shook on it. She went outside while the men huddled over the
table and Lázaro made Antonio memorize the zero-point coordinates and the
recognition code. When Lázaro was satisfied, he put out his hand to keep Antonio
from rising.
      “Hey, that stuff about the chip. True?”
        “Yeah, bro. All of it.” Lázaro looked at him and Antonio said, “But listen,
man, it’s not a bad life. And when this comes down we’ll have so much scratch we
won’t never have to even think about it again, we can walk on money and drink
credits and piss gold, we’ll be kings of the Curve. You remember all that scratch
you used to send home, kept us all goin’? It’ll look like mouse dicky next to what
we’re gonna have. We ain’t gonna be livin’ in no squats, either. Hell, you could buy
Papa Carlisle’s if you want, kick that skanky noface bastard outta there and have it
all for yourself.” He hit Lázaro’s shoulder. “What you say, bro? Pretty sweet,
yeah?”
      “And the stuff, the MemMax—”
      “Relax, there’s plenty. You got about half in you right now. You get Jane to
come in an’ babysit you while you finish it off. Another week, maybe ten days, and
bammo! The gunk’s outta your brain and the Freddies won’t know nothing.”
      “And if I stop now—”
       “But that won’t happen, cause the bitch’s gonna give us the rest of the drug
just as soon as we let her in again. You take it while we’re gone, and when I come
back, I tell you bro, kings of the Curve.” He hit Lázaro’s shoulder again and opened
the door for the woman.
                                    ****
      And that’s almost the way it went down
       Antonio and the numbers and the codes and the captain lifted off for the
Continuum as soon as she could gather her crew and sober them up. Lázaro stood
at the edge of the Curve dome and stared up through the gap until a ship rose into
the sunlight, then walked back to his apartment, avoiding Papa Carlisle’s. He didn’t
want to see it. He didn’t want to see any more of the Curve than he had to.
       Back in his squat, Lázaro sat with his hands in his lap and remembered,
although some of the older memories were getting fuzzy and others were already
gone. But the Curve memories were clear and strong: laughing with Antonio at
Celia’s, Papa Carlisle’s mirror face, the taste of beer and the way it made him feel
like he was flying, and Jane who wasn’t Jane but who was, somehow. He
remembered how the Curve curved inside its arc of dome and how small it all was,
and how the only sky was the little bit of it that leaked in beside Papa Carlisle’s.
When Antonio came back with all that scratch they’d still be in the Curve and none
of the memories would matter because what the hell use was it if you remembered
mountains if you couldn’t touch them?
       There was another memory waiting, an older one. He turned away from it and
the very act of turning brought it over him like a falling of light.
                                          ****
       How it works
       I don’t know exactly, I’m no Fibs and neither are you. But it starts where you
are, that’s the zero and grows square to square, from (zero) where you are to (one)
to (zero+one) to (one+one) to (two+one) to (three+two) to (five+three) to
(eight+five) and on out forever, in growing strides to the reaches of the universe, and
every right-angle step is a dimension from zero (here) where you start to
(here+up+down) to (here+up+down+backwards+forwards) to
(here+up+down+backwards+forwards+time), dancing through the dimensions and
the Fibs dances each step, hands and mind and body moving to the rhythm of phi
and the Fibs makes a turn and the boxes follow and the dimensions follow into the
other there that is the Continuum, like launching the ship out through the pit of your
guts, like sex only better because you’re it and you’re you and you’re the ship and
the boxes and the dance and the Continuum and when you’re not the dance you’re
waiting for the dance like you wait for a breath or a heartbeat or anything else that
keeps you alive because you’re a Fibonacci Dancer. You’re a Fibs.
                                         ****
       The King of the Curve
        He couldn’t dance, not without a ship, not without the Continuum, not sitting
at the table in his squat, not anywhere in the Curve, just not.
      He wondered how long the blastoma nano would take to work. He wondered
if it would hurt. He wondered if it would eat memories too. He wondered what it
would be like, living in the Curve knowing the dance was out there but unable to
reach it, ever. He wondered what it would be like to die in the Curve knowing you
were dying in the Curve.
       He couldn’t change the Curve and he couldn’t escape it, but he could change
who he was within the Curve. When he understood that, he opened the box of
MemMax ampules. There were four left, each one ready to slip into the skinsting and
apply, and when they were all gone he would be a king of the Curve. His brother had
said so.
      He took them into the reeking bathroom and broke each ampule into the
commode, and flushed them away. Then he went back to the table and sat, hands
folded, waiting to be Lázaro again.