"Never been there," Lawrence had to admit.
"But you know about Man-U?" the driver asked anxiously.
"I've heard of them."
"Of course you have. Most famous team on the planet I access every game. I installed a horizontal hologram pane in our apartment so I can watch the whole pitch. My wife doesn't like it."
"No kidding?"
"Yeah, she wanted a new sofa. I access through membranes as well. The last three seasons I've paid the team's media agent for multi-player-viewpoint feed. It costs, but it's worth it. This way I can see what's happening on the ground as well as get an overview. I like to stay with Paul Ambrose as my viewpoint when the first eleven play, he's got good ball sense."
"Sounds great."
"First eleven only play once every four days. I have to make do with second eleven and third eleven in between."
"Uh-huh."
"Afternoons, I access the under-twenty-one side. Sometimes I have to record them when I'm working. My friends in the other cabs, they have fun trying to tell me who wins. I turn my datapool access off and they drive up next to me and shout the result. I always have to shut my ears those afternoons. One day, when I save up enough, I'm going to Europe to watch them play live. My wife, she doesn't know that."
"Really." They had cleared the spaceport to merge with the short highway into town. To his left, Lawrence could see the thin strip of protected mango swamps running along the coastline. On his right, suburban apartments had colonized the land almost up to the foothills.
"You just down from Quation?"
"Yep."
"Your wife not meet you?"
"Not married."
"Wise man. You enjoy yourself while you still can, my friend. When I go to Europe, I won't take my wife. So you got anywhere to stay tonight?"
Lawrence could have returned straight to barracks; it wouldn't have cost him anything. But the whole fleet was on four-week leave, and the bonus pay for the campaign was sitting in his bank as well as the whole nine months' back pay. He'd made no plans at all. Some of the other single guys on the starship were talking about sailing between Pacific islands and raising hell on every beach resort they landed on. Colin Schmidt had invited him on a tour of the casinos in Hong Kong and Singapore. Others promised Perth still rejoiced in its claim to be party capital of the Southern Hemisphere, an easy train ride away. "No," he said. "I don't have anywhere to stay." He pressed the window key and let the glass slide halfway down; wind and highway noise rushed in. Up ahead the glare of lights from the Strip was already flickering through the town's outlying buildings. Lawrence laughed at the sight of the gaudy neon and holograms beckoning him back greedily. He'd never been so perfectly content. No cares, no obligations, plenty of money and lots of time to spend it in. Life didn't get much better.
"I know some places," the taxi driver said, giving him a hopeful sideways glance.
"I'm sure you do. Okay, what I want is a decent hotel, maybe one with a pool. Not too expensive, but somewhere with a wideband datapool feed and twenty-four-hour room service. And where they don't mind me bringing a guest home for the night. Got that?"
"Ah!" The taxi driver nodded happily. "I know just the place."
The hotel was just on the seedy side of its two-star rating. But it did have a pool, and Lawrence's second-floor room had a tiny balcony that looked over the gray geometrical sprawl of southern Cairns. He checked in and wandered down the nearest shopping street, a broad glassed-over concourse whose bargain customers had successfully repelled the bigger chain stores from investing. He bought some clothes in the small shops. Nothing too sharp, just something that he could wear out on the Strip, and that didn't have a Z-B logo.
He scored with a girl early on that night. A great roundabout walker in her late teens, out on the road with her friends, backpacking their way around the coast of Australia. She was pretty, and slim, with olive skin and her dark hair arranged in tight braids that had colored phosgene beads dangling on the end. When she moved her head quickly, they twirled round like a rainbow halo. He sweet-talked her away from her friends before they all hurried back to the hostel and their prebooked cots. She was fascinated that he'd actually been born on another world, appreciative of the classy foreign bottled beer his money bought, and showed a keen interest in the fact he'd spent months away from Earth.
"Deprived, huh?"
"I guess you could say that," he admitted. "The natives weren't very friendly."
Back in the secluded shadows in his room she screwed like an energetic kangaroo, pounding away up and down on top of him. For the first hour he was sure the dilapidated old bed was going to give way under them. He poured more of that expensive beer over her chest and licked it off before she pushed his head down between her legs. They accessed a thrash-rock feed and tried to fuck in time to the thumping music, eventually collapsing in howls of laughter as the codpiece-endowed vocalist screeched out lyrics about giving his baby some hardassed lovin'. Room service delivered club sandwiches with more drink, and they sat cross-legged on the sagging mattress feeding each other. Then they watched a non-i comedy show before fucking again.
She left first thing in the morning to join up with her friends. They were heading farther north, hoping to get some casual work in Port Douglas to pay for the next leg of their great middle-class adventure. By midday Lawrence had to think hard to remember her name.
That next night, it was another girl. She liked highballs instead of beer, and electric jazz rather than rock, but she was just as randy.
The whole of his first week passed the same way. Sleep during the day. Have a decent meal in midafternoon. Take a walk before the evening started. Hit the Strip after the sun went down. Some days he ran into other squaddies from the fleet, and they'd have a few rounds together, maybe shoot some pool or spend an hour in one of the game arcades. He never got drunk; there was no percentage in that, given his endplay. Once or twice he went out on a club's dance floor. Each time it was because the girl was keen to dance first.
Seven days after he landed, his bracelet pearl received a message from fleet administration ordering him to report to the base. His application for starship officer college had been processed. He was going to be forwarded to Amsterdam for entry assessment.
He sat up in bed, holding his glasses up in front of his face, reading the message again with a slow-growing sense of delight. His life was finally coming together the way he wanted. His father, Roselyn, Amethi, that was paying his dues. He'd earned his place on Z-B's starships.
The girl lying in the bed beside him lifted her head and peered around the hotel room in classic morning-after confusion. She blinked at Lawrence. Her expression changed to one of recognition. "Hi," she grunted.
"Morning."
"Good news?" She nodded at the glasses he was holding.
Lawrence considered the question. The obvious thing to do would be blurt out the assignment, tell her about what it meant to him. It was the kind of thing that should be shared, leading on to a happy day spent together, perhaps a good meal with a bottle of champagne. But, truthfully, the only person he could tell who'd appreciate what it meant was Ntoko. And he was pretty sure the corp wouldn't want his own family vacation interrupted by a babbling Lawrence Newton bragging how he was leaving the platoon behind.
That was when he admitted to himself just how lonely he'd become. There really was nobody to call. Nobody on this whole planet who knew him, nobody who cared about him.
He dropped the interface glasses back on the bedside table, then pulled the sheet back off the two of them. A few blades of morning sunlight had crept round the curtains, falling on the bed to illuminate their bodies. The girl gave him an uncertain little smile as he gazed at her. For all of their intimacy during the night, he felt nothing, no connection, no urge to try and make it work. The only reason she was here was for sex. He didn't even feel guilty about that. She'd been eager enough.
To think, after one night with Roselyn he'd been ready to spend the rest of his life with her. God, how stupid had he been back then? Talk about being straight off the farm. He could teach her a thing or two now.
As always, that treacherous little thought sprang up: I wonder what she's doing now.
"Nothing important," he said brusquely, angry with himself for the weakness. Then he rolled closer and put his mouth over the girl's ear, and in a throaty demanding whisper told her what he wanted from her. With a slight show of reluctance she positioned herself over the edge of the bed the way he instructed, so he could celebrate with her the only way it was ever going to happen between the two of them.
Lawrence took one of Z-B's twice-daily flights from Cairns to Paris, a big subsonic passenger jet that refueled at Singapore. From Paris he transferred to a train that whisked him across the heavily forested European countryside to Amsterdam. He arrived at the old Central Station that backed on to the harbor in the middle of the city.
Cairns with its eternal heat had made him forget it was only spring in the Northern Hemisphere. He pulled his full-length coat on as he walked out of the station, but didn't bother to do it up. The sun was shining out of a clear sky, wanning the air.
Outside, Prins Hendrik Kade seemed to be a twenty-lane road given over entirely to bicycles. He'd never seen so many of the machines in one place before. They were all the same silk-white color, with the city emblem embossed on the central spar. Bells rang all around him, making him twist his head about in alarm. Twice he had to jump sharply out of the way as cyclists sped toward him. They obviously weren't going to swerve.
Optronic membranes threw up a city map, and he set off down Dam Rak, the long broad road opposite the station. Trams trundled along rails embedded in the cobbles. He'd never seen machines that looked so ancient, although they were in perfect condition. It was good to be walking through a city and for once not have to be on guard. Quation had not given Z-B a joyful reception. But here, the citizens smiled warmly when they saw his mauve uniform.
He wasn't surprised. According to the briefing he'd downloaded from the company memory, Z-B was a heavy investor in Holland. And where their primary installations were based sprang up a host of smaller companies to provide support, both specialist and general. The country had a high prosperity index, even by European standards.
His first hint of disenchantment came right outside the officer college. Z-B's Amsterdam headquarters, containing the college, was a big five-story stone building that was eighty years old, though its exterior had been crafted in nineteenth-century bleak, with tall vertical slit windows. Squatting across a broad cobbled square from the fortresslike Royal Palace its architecture was more than appropriate.
A small group of demonstrators were clustered around some kind of stall twenty meters from the main entrance. Potatoes were baking in what had to be the most primitive oven on the planet, a cylinder made out of solid iron. Charcoal glowed behind a grate on the front end, while a black chimney stack at the rear made the whole thing look like the boiler from some kind of steam engine. The sign above the stall was offering the potatoes with a dozen different fillings. Very cheaply, too, Lawrence noticed. There was an emerald-green circle at one end of the sign, with a stylized white bird emblem in the middle, its wings swept wide.
None of the pedestrians filling the square seemed interested in buying the potatoes. The demonstrators, mostly young people, were singing in none-too-tight harmony, which was presumably putting off the prospective customers. Lawrence didn't know the song; it seemed to be some kind of folk chant, with the ragged voices rising defiantly for the chorus:
Give us back to ourselves
Take back your money