hear."
"Too bad for the governor, then."
"The police came by. Two constables looking real serious. Asked if anyone had been in, getting a van in shape to head out fast. You know, someone who was maybe trying not to be found."
Ramon nodded, staring at the van. His throat felt tight and the thick beer in his belly seemed to have turned to stone.
"What did you tell them?"
"Told them no," Griego said with a shrug.
"There wasn't anyone?"
"A couple," Griego said. "Orlando Wasserman's kid. And that crazy gringa from Swan's Neck. But I figured, what the hell, you know? The police don't pay me, these other people do. So where do my loyalties lie?"
"Man got killed," Ramon said.
"Yeah," Griego agreed, pleasantly. "A gringo." He spit sideways, then shrugged, as if the death of a gringo or any other kind of European was of no great consequence. "I'm just saying it because I'm not the only one they're asking. You taking off, they may take that the wrong way, give you a hard time about it. Just keep that in mind when you supply up."
Ramon nodded.
"They gonna catch him, you think?" Ramon asked.
"Oh yeah," Griego said. "They'll have to. Bust a gut to do it, if they got to. Show the Enye that we're a justice-loving people. Not that they care. Shit, fucking Enye lick each other hello. Probably lick the governor and get pissed off if he doesn't lick them back. Anyway, he'll make a big show out of the trial, do everything to prove how they got the right guy, then put him down like a fucking dog. You know, whoever it is they decide did it. No one else, there's always Johnny Joe Cardenas. They've been looking for something to hang on him for years."
"Maybe it'll be good that I get out of the city for a while, then," Ramon said. He tried a weak smile that felt as obvious as a confession. "You know. Just to avoid misunderstandings."
"Yeah," Griego said. "Besides, this is the big one, right?"
"Lucky strike," Ramon agreed.
When he started up the van, he could feel the difference. The lift tubes seemed to chime as he lifted up into the sky, all of Diegotown, with its unplanned maze of narrow streets and red-roofed buildings, below him. Elena was down there somewhere. The police too. The body of the European. Mikel Ibrahim and the gravity knife Ramon had handed to him, just handed to him. The murder weapon! And slumped in a bar or a basement opium den - or maybe breaking into someone's house - Johnny Joe Cardenas, just waiting to hang.
And Lianna, maybe, somewhere in the good section by the port, who didn't think of Ramon anymore and probably never would.
Ramon's thoughts were interrupted by the pulsing hum of a shuttle rising up into the thin and distant air. Another load of metal or plastic or fuel or chitin for the welcoming platform. Ramon spun the van north, set it for proximity avoidance, and headed out alone, leaving all the hell and shit and sorrow of Diegotown behind.
Chapter Three
It was a warm day in the Second June. He flew his beat-up old van north across the Fingerlands, the Greenglass country, the river marshes, the Oceano Tetrico, heading deep into unknown territory. North of Fiddler's Jump, the northernmost outpost of the metastasizing human presence on the planet, were thousands of hectares that no one had ever explored, or even thought of exploring, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.
The human colony on the planet of S?o Paulo was only a little more than forty years old, and the majority of its towns were situated in the subtropic zone of the snaky eastern continent that stretched almost from pole to pole. The colonists were mostly from Brazil and Mexico, with a smattering from Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean nations, and their natural inclination was to expand south, into the steamy lands near the equator - they were not effete norteamericanos, after all; they were used to such climates, they knew how to live with the heat, they knew how to farm the jungles, their skins did not sear in the sun. So they looked to the south, and tended to ignore the cold northern territories, perhaps because of an unvocalized common conviction - one anticipated centuries before by the first Spanish settlers in the New World of the Americas - that life was not worth living any place where there was