doing harm to others,” she says. She raises the aquaball she still carries under one arm. “Probably it caught me thinking about what I want to do with my mermaid. I was remembering how we planned to eat sushi at my birthday party.”
“It’s a pet, not a snack. Try to be good.”
When Iris tilts her head back, she sees iridescent bubbles with people in them, hundreds of feet above her, floating here and there, pulling free of the clouds and drifting to earth. The sight of them—gleaming like ornaments on some impossibly huge Christmas tree—gives her an ache. She always thought someday she would ride in one herself.
Hammered-bronze doors open into the stairwell. Flights of black glass plates climb the walls, around and around, in a spiral that goes on into infinity.
“Get on my back,” Chip says, sinking to one knee.
“The last time someone gave me a piggyback, I was probably six,” she says, “someone” being her father.
“The last time I gave someone a piggyback,” he says, “was twenty-three years before you were born. The Spoke was still under construction then. I’ve never been up to the top either.”
She straddles his back, puts her arms around the plasteel of his neck. He rises fluidly to his full height. The first step lights up when he steps on it—and the second, and the third. He bounds up them in an accelerating series of white pulses.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“I came online one hundred and sixteen years ago, almost a century before your own operating system began to function.”
“Ha.” They’re moving so fast now that it makes her feel queasy. Her Monowheel doesn’t go this fast at top speed. He leaps three steps at a time, keeping a steady, jolting rhythm. Iris cannot bear to look over the glass retaining wall on her right, cannot look at the black nautilus swirl of steps below them. For a while she is silent, eyes squeezed shut, pressing herself into his back.
Finally, just to be talking, she asks, “Who was the first person to put a coin in your meter?”
“A boy named Jamie. We were close for almost four years. He used to visit me once a week.”
“That’s where the money is,” she says. “My dad had repeat clients, too. There was a woman who used to cut his throat every Sunday at one. She bled him dry, and he did the same to her—took her for every cent she had. How much did you squeeze good old Jamie for before he got bored of you?”
“He didn’t get bored. He died, when malware infected his enhanced immune system. He raved about cheap Viagra and Asian women who want English-speaking husbands for two awful days before the infection killed him. He was thirteen.”
She shivers, has heard horror stories about corrupted bioware. “Awful.”
“The price of being alive is that someday you aren’t.”
“Yeah. My meter is running, too. Isn’t that the whole point of birthdays? To remind you the meter is running down? Someday I’ll be dead, and you’ll still be making new friends. Carrying other girls up other stairways.” She laughs humorlessly.
“However old I myself may be, consider that in a very real sense my own life happens one token at a time, and there are sometimes days, or even weeks, between periods of activity. I’ve outlived Jamie by a hundred and three years in one sense. In another he spent far more time doing and being. And in still another sense, I’ve never lived at all—at least if we agree that life means personal initiative and choice.”
She snorts. “Funny. People pay you to come to life, and people paid my dad to die, but you’re both professional victims. You take money and let other people decide what happens to you. I guess maybe that’s most work: being a victim for hire.”
“Most work is about being of service.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Some work is about lying down for others, I suppose,” he says, and she realizes he is leaping up the last flight of stairs to a wide black glass landing and another set of bronze doors. “And some work is about lifting people up.”
He opens the doors.
A dying sun spears them in a shaft of light, seals them in dusky amber.
7.
At first it doesn’t seem there are any walls. The Sun Parlor at the top of the Spoke is a small circular room beneath a lid of BluDiamond, as transparent as breath. The sun rests in a bed of bloodstained sheets. A bar of black glass,