A Place so Foreign Part 7

I gave the door my shoulder and shoved, and it swung back, complaining on its hinges. On the other side was the still-familiar dark of our 1975 apartment. I stepped into it, and closed the door behind me.

"Lights," I said, and they came on.

The old place was just like the day we left it. It wasn't even dusty, and as I heard the familiar trundle of the robutler, I knew why. My Pa's easy chair sat in the parlour, with a print-out of the day's _Salt Lake City Bugler_ folded on the side-table. I walked to one wall and laid my palm against it, the familiar cool gla.s.sy stuff it was made of. "Window," I said, and wiped a line across the wall. Wherever my hand wiped went transparent. It was a sunny day in 1975 -- 1980, by then, but it would be 75 in my mind forever. Under the dome, Greater Salt Lake was warm and tranquil. I saw boys my age scooting around in jet-packs, dodging hover-traffic.

Pa liked to open a big, square window when he came home, and sit in his easy chair and smoke a stinky cigar and read the paper and cluck over it -- "Well, well, well," he'd say, and "How _about_ that?" Sometimes, he'd have a tumbler of whiskey. He'd given me some, once, and the stuff had burned like turpentine and I swore I wouldn't try it again for a long, long time.

I sat in Pa's easy chair and snapped up the newspaper, the way he used to.

"Panorama," I said, and Pa's square window opened before me. "Whiskey," I said, and "Cigar," because I was never one for half-measures. The robutler trundled over to me with a tumbler and a White Owl in its hover-field. I plucked them out. Cautiously, I put the cigar between my lips. The robutler extruded a long, snaky arm with a flame, and lit it. I took a deep puff, and coughed convulsively. Unthinking, I took a gulp of whiskey. I felt like my lungs had turned inside-out.

I finished both the whiskey and the cigar before I got up, taking cautious puffs and tiny sips, forcing myself.

My head swam, and nausea nearly drowned me. I staggered into the WC, and hung my head in the oubliette for an eternity, but nothing was coming up. I moved into my old bedroom and splayed out on my bed, watching the ceiling spin. "Lights," I managed to croak, and the room went dark.

When I woke in the morning, the walls were at half-opacity, the normal 0700 schedule, and I dragged myself out of bed.

The robutler had extruded the table and set out my breakfast, ham and eggs and a big bulb of milk. One look at it sent me over the edge, and I left a trail of sick all the way to the WC.

When I was done, I was as wrung-out as a washcloth. My head pounded. The robutler was quietly cleaning up my mess. I started to order it to clear away breakfast, but discovered that I was miraculously hungry. I ate everything on the table and seconds, besides, and had the robutler juice my temples and clear away my headache. I dialed the walls to full transparency, and watched the traffic go by.

The robutler maneuvered itself into my field of vision and flashed a clock on its chest-plate: 0800 0800 0800. It was my old school-alarm. It snapped me back to reality. My Mama was going to whip me raw! She must've been worried sick.

I stood up and ran for the door. It was closed. I punched my code into its panel, and waited. Nothing happened. I calmed myself and punched it again. Still nothing. After trying it a hundred times, I convinced myself that it had been changed.

I summoned the robutler and asked it for the code. Its chest-panel lit up: BAD PROGRAM.

That's when I started to really worry. I was near to tears when I remembered the emergency override. I punched it in.

Nothing happened.

I think I started crying around then. I was stuck in 1975!

I'm not a stupid little kid. I didn't spend much time pewling. Instead, I went to the phone and dialed the police. The screen stayed blank. Feeling like I was in a dream, I went to the teleporter and dialed for my old school and stepped in. I failed to teleport.

Reality sank in.

All outside services to the apartment had been shut off when we moved out. The only things that still worked were the ones that ran off our reactor, a squat armoured box on the apartment's underbelly. The door in New Jerusalem worked, but on the 1975 side, it needed to communicate with the central office to approve any pa.s.sage.

I thought about sitting tight and waiting. Mama would be sick with worry, and would check the barn eventually and see the shot bolts. She'd speak to Mr Johnstone, who would send a telegram to Paris, and they would relay the message to 1975, and _voila_, I'd be rescued. I'd get the whipping of my life, and do extra ch.o.r.es until I was seventy, but it was better than starving to death after the apartment's pantry ran out. I felt hungry just thinking about it.

Still, there was a better way. The null-gee doughnut that our apartment was spoked into had a supply of escape-jumpers, single-use jet-packs with a simple transponder that screamed for help on all the emergency channels. I could ride one of these down into Greater Salt Lake, wait for the police. The more I thought about this plan, the better it sounded. Better, anyway, than sitting around like a fairytale princess, waiting for rescue. In my mind, I was the rescuing type, not the kind that needed rescuing.

Besides, there wasn't much better than riding around in one of those jet-packs.

I cycled the emergency lock into the doughnut, unracked a pack and a jumpsuit that looked like it would fit me, and suited up. The packed whined as it powered up and ran through its diagnostics. I checked the idiot-lights to make sure they were all green, feeling like a real man of action, then I stepped into the exterior lock and jumped, arms and legs streamlined, toes pointed.

The jet-pack coughed to life and kicked me gently, then started lowering me to the ground. The emergency beacon's idiot-light came on, and I heaved a sigh of relief and got comfortable.

The flight was peaceful and dreamlike, a slow descent over the gleaming metal city. I was so engrossed with the view that I didn't see the packjackers until they were already on me. They hit me high and low, two kids about my age with tricked-out custom jet-packs with their traffic beacons broken off. One snagged my knees and hugged them to his chest, while the other took me at the armpits. A voice shouted in my ear: "I'm cutting your pack loose. This is a very, very sharp knife, and when I'm done, I'll be the only thing holding you up. _Don't squirm_."

I didn't even have the chance to squirm. By the time the speech was finished, I was separated from my pack, and I spun over upside-down, and watched it continue its descent, straps dangling in the wind. My hair hung down, and blood filled my head, reawakening my headache. Reflexively, I twisted to get a look at my kidnappers, but stopped immediately as I felt their grips loosen. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed.

The three of us dove fast and hard, and I tasted that second helping of breakfast again before we leveled off. I risked a peek, then squeezed my eyes shut again. We were speeding through the lower levels of Greater Salt Lake, the unmanned freight corridors, impossibly claustrophobic, and at our speed, dangerous.

We cornered tightly so many times that I lost count, and then we slowed to a stop. They dumped me to the ground, steel traction-plate. The wind was knocked out of me, and I was barely conscious of the hands that untabbed my jumpsuit, then began methodically turning out the pockets of my clothes.

"What the h.e.l.l are you wearing, kid?" one of them asked. It was the same one who'd warned me about squirming. Hearing his voice a second time, I realised that he was younger than I was, maybe ten or eleven. Even then, it didn't occur to me to fight back -- he had a knife sharp enough to cut through the safety strapping on my pack.

"Clothes. I'm from 1898 -- my Pa's an amba.s.sador. I don't have any money." I struggled into a sitting position, and was knocked onto my back again.

"Stay down and you won't get hurt," the same voice said. It was young enough that I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. Small hands pressed into my eyes. "No peeking, now."

Another set of hands systematically rifled my coat and pants, then cut them loose and gave the same treatment to my underpants and shirt. I blushed as they were cut loose, too.

"You really don't have any money!" the voice said.

"I said so, didn't I?"

The voice said a dirty word that would've gotten it beaten black-and-blue back home, and then the hands were gone. I looked up just in time to see two small figures jetting away upwards.

I was naked, sitting on a catwalk above a freight corridor, three-quarters of a century and G.o.d-knew-how-many miles from home. I didn't cry. I was too worried to cry. I kicked my ruined clothes down into the freight corridor and pulled on the jumpsuit.

Some hero I was!

It was hard work, climbing staircase after staircase, up to the shopping levels.

By the time I reached a level where I could see the sky, I was dripping with sweat and my headache had returned.

Foot traffic was light, but what there was pretty frightening. I'd gone walking in 75 before of course, but Greater Salt Lake was a big place, and there were parts of it that an Amba.s.sador's son would never get to see.

This was one of them. The shopfronts were all iris-open airlocks, and had been painted around to look like surprised mouths, or eyes, or, in one fascinating case, a woman's private parts. Mostly, they were betting shops, or bars, or low-rent bounceaterias. Even in 1975, the Saints had some influence in Salt Lake, and the bars and brothels were pretty shameful places, where no respectable person would be caught.

The other pedestrians on the street were mostly off-worlders, either s.p.a.cers in uniform or extees. In some cases, it was hard to tell which was which.

I kind of slunk along, sticking to the walls, hands in my pockets. I kept my eyes down, except when I was looking around for a public phone. After several blocks, I realised that no one was paying any attention to me, and I took my hands out of my pockets. The sun filtered down over me, warm through the big dome, and I realised that even though I'd gotten myself stuck in 75, been 'jacked, and left in the worst neighbourhood in the whole State, I'd landed on my feet. The thought made me smile. Another kid, say Oly, wouldn't have coped nearly as well.

I still hadn't spied a public phone. I figured that the taprooms would have a phone, otherwise, how could a drunk call his wife and tell her he was going to be late coming home? I picked a bar, whose airlock was painted to look like a brick tunnel, and walked in.

The airlock irised shut behind me and I blinked in the gloom. My nose was a.s.saulted with sickly sweet incense, and stale liquor, and cigar smoke.

The place was tiny, and crowded with dented metal tables and chairs that were bolted to the floorplates. A woman stood behind the bar, looking hard and bra.s.sy and cheap, watching a soap opera on her vid. A s.p.a.cer sat in one corner, staring at his bulb of beer.

The bartender looked up. "Get lost, kid," she said. "No minors allowed."