Brilliance. Part 24

Steamiest of all, the top floor was a harshly bright hive of narrow desks jammed together. Scores of people were packed in around them, each squinting into a sewing machine or cutting lengths from fabric bolts. The sound was a hundred woodp.e.c.k.e.rs at once. Most of the men had stripped off their shirts and worked bare-chested or in wifebeaters, their skin glistening. A fan the size of an airplane turbine spun sluggishly, stirring air that reeked of chemicals and cigarettes and body odor.

Cooper started down the aisle, heading for the office in the back. Shannon followed. "Weird," she said.

"It's a sweatshop."

"I know. It's just, it's like the United Nations. I've seen sweatshops full of West Africans, Guatemalans, Koreans, but I've never seen them all at the same place."

"Yeah," Cooper said. "Schneider's an innovator."

"An equal opportunity oppressor?"

"Not really. It's still pretty much one subculture being exploited."

"What do you mean?"

"They're all abnorms. All of them."

"But..." Shannon stopped. "How? Why?"

"Schneider makes terrific IDs," Cooper said, shifting the heavy duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. "He specializes in abnorms who want to live as normals. High risk, but big money. Those who can't pay work it off."

"Making cheap clothes."

"Making cheap copies of expensive clothes." Cooper nodded to a woman three desks down. Hair the color of cigarette smoke was pinned in a rough knot at the back of her head. She wore odd gla.s.ses, like two jeweler's loupes mounted in granny frames. As they watched, she slid a shirt from a basket on her left side, laid it across her table, kept one hand moving to dip into a cardboard box for an embroidered logo half an inch across, which she placed precisely and then affixed with swift, measured st.i.tches before sliding the shirt into a basket on her right side and reaching back to take another from the basket on her left. The whole process took maybe twenty seconds.

"Is that the Lucy Veronica logo?"

"Beats me." He started moving again, and she followed.

"So how long does it take to pay for a new ident.i.ty?"

"A couple of years. They need regular jobs to make a living. They're nurses and plumbers and chefs." He paused at the end of a row, looked both ways, moved on. "It's only after they finish that they come here, work six or eight hours off their debt."

"You're saying they're slaves."

"More like indentured servants, but you've got the idea." He glanced down the aisle and saw Schneider talking to a dark-skinned guy twice his weight. "This way." No one paid them any attention. Part of the ethos of the place; no one here wanted to be acknowledged. After all, that's what they're working toward. Brilliants going blind over menial labor, st.i.tching knockoff clothing so they can earn the right to masquerade as normal.

Max Schneider was a scarecrow, six and a half feet tall and cadaverously thin. His watch was expensive but his teeth were a wreck. Cooper figured that for a choice, believed the forger found an advantage in the discomfort it caused other people. Or maybe he just didn't give a d.a.m.n.

The worker he was talking to was big, fat layered over muscles. His skin was Caribbean black, but Cooper read the tension in him as crackling waves of sickly yellow. "But it's not my fault."

"You introduced the guy," Schneider said. "He was your friend."

"No, I told you, just a guy I met. I told you that when I brought him here, I said I didn't know him, you asked if I was vouching for him, I said no."

Schneider waved his hand in front of his nose like he was clearing away a smell. "And now he gets in a bar fight, gets arrested? What if he talks about me?"

"I didn't vouch for him."

"I should just cut you loose. End our arrangement."

"But I've only got three weeks left."

"No," the forger said. "You've got six months left."

It took a moment to hit, then the man's eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his pulse jumped quicker in his carotid. "We had a deal."

Schneider shrugged. If he was cowed by the size or fury of his employee, he didn't show it. To Cooper, he looked like a man completely in charge, a man who could take or leave the world. "Six months." He turned and started away.

"I didn't vouch for him," the man repeated.

The forger spun back. "Say that again."

"What?"

"Say that again. Say it." Schneider smiled with stained teeth.

For a moment Cooper could see the guy was thinking about it, that he was thinking about saying it and then grabbing Schneider by the neck and squeezing, crushing his strong fingers together. He saw the weight of a thousand injustices bearing down on the abnorm, and the urge to throw them all off at once, to surrender to the momentary pleasure of pretending there was no future.

And Cooper had to admit he kind of wanted the man to do it. For his kind and his dignity.

But the moment pa.s.sed. The big man opened his mouth, closed it. Then, slowly, he dragged the chair out from his workstation and settled heavily in it. His shoulders slumped. Scarred hands reached for a pair of shears and a bolt of denim, and with a practiced cut, he gave away half a year of his life.

"You," Schneider said, as if he had only now noticed Cooper. "The poet."

"Yeah." He didn't extend a hand.

"You need something?" The forger looked Shannon up and down dispa.s.sionately.

"New ident.i.ties," Cooper said.

"Already? I made you ten last time. You burn them all?" Schneider's brow wrinkled. "That's reckless. I don't work with reckless people."

"It's not that. I need something better."

Schneider snorted, then started walking, gesturing for them to follow. "My work is flawless. The seal, the microchip, the ink. You can look at the edge under a microscope and swear a brand-new card is ten years old. My code rats match my work to the government d-bases. There is no better."

"But this time I'm crossing the border."

"Doesn't matter. They'll work. Mexico, France, the Ukraine, wherever."

"I'm not going to any of those places."

Schneider stopped. Squinted. He leaned over the shoulder of an Asian girl, maybe twenty-two, watched her fingers spin beads onto delicate filigree. Schneider shook his head, sucked air through his teeth. "Too big," he said. "Your s.p.a.cing is too big. Do it right or you're useless to me."

The girl kept her eyes down, just nodded, began to unstring what she had done.

Schneider said, "You're going to Wyoming."

"Yes."

"You're a twist. You don't need an ID. You can walk right in."

"I don't want to be myself."

"Which self?" Schneider smiled his hideous smile. "Thomas Eliot? Allen Ginsburg? Walter Whitman? Who are you, Poet?"

Cooper met his eyes, returned the smile.

"New Canaan Holdfast is not like other places," Schneider said. "The security there is very strong."

"Very strong" was an understatement of epic proportions, Cooper knew. While the NCH had an open-door policy to immigrating gifted, Erik Epstein and the rest of the Holdfast government had a justified paranoia about being infiltrated. And with the planet's largest concentration of gifted in a single location, they had quite literally the best people in the world securing their borders. DAR agents were allowed in New Canaan-it was still American soil, after all-but only if they identified themselves openly. A few had pretended to go native after badging in; all had been apprehended and politely escorted out by men with prominently displayed sidearms.

"Can you do it?"

"You'll need complete ident.i.ties. Supporting information in every major database. Recursive consumer profile generation."

"Can you do it?"

"They will catch you eventually. The protocols will change or the search functionality will improve or you'll screw up. And you don't look right. Too much water fat."

"Can you do it?"

"Of course."

"How much?"

The forger sucked his teeth again. "Two hundred."

"Two hundred?" It was an outrageous price, several times what he had paid before. Paying for these would wipe out most of the cash he'd acc.u.mulated over the last six months of being a bad guy. "You're kidding."

"No."

"How about one hundred?"

"The price is the price is the price."

"Come on. You're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me here."

Schneider shrugged. It was the same movement he had given earlier, when he had added six months to an indentured servant's term. A move that said take it or leave it, it didn't matter to him.

Cooper dropped the duffel on an empty work bench, yanked the zipper, and began to count out bundles. Criminal etiquette would have been to do it in private, but he didn't care. Let one of these people jack the forger. Not his problem.

"Here. These are bundles of ten thousand." He pushed the stack of twenty across the bench. Then he reached into the bag, pulled out two more bundles, and dropped them beside the others. "And that's for the other guy. The one you cheated out of six months."

Schneider looked amused. "A n.o.ble gesture."

"He gets his ID tomorrow. Same as us." Cooper laid a hand lightly on the stack of money, tapped his fingers. "Yes?"

The man shrugged.

"I want to hear you say it."

"Yes," Schneider said. "Tomorrow morning. Now," he waved a smell away again. "There is work."

Cooper spun on his heel and walked out, Shannon slipping like his shadow. He pushed through the aisle, down the steps, out the door. The night was cool, and he sucked the air deep, stalked to the car. Shannon let almost a mile of pavement slide beneath their wheels before she asked the question he'd seen her wanting to. "Why did you-"

"Because I don't like the way he doesn't even hide the way he sees us. As livestock, or slaves."

"A lot of people do."

"Yeah. But with Schneider, it's truly impersonal. He could watch you burn to death and not make a move to pour water. It's not hate, it's..." He couldn't think of the word, couldn't put his finger on what exactly it was that so pushed his b.u.t.tons. "I don't know."

"So paying for the guy was to show that you were Schneider's equal?"

"Something like that. Just to make him notice, I guess. Shake him."

"But it didn't. You were still livestock. Like a cow learning to dance; it's amusing, but it's still a cow."

He didn't have anything to say to that, just drove in silence for a moment.

"It's kind of ironic, actually," she said. "Those clothes were knockoffs of Lucy Veronica's new line. You know her stuff?"

"I know her name. She's gifted, right?"

"Jesus, Cooper, pick up a magazine. Her styles have reinvented the fashion industry. The way she sees things-she's spatial-changed everything. Her clothes are fetishized by socialite women. And those rich women are fetishized by middle-cla.s.s suburban chicks, who want to be like the socialites, but can't afford original Lucy Veronica. So what do they do to get the next best thing to couture designed by a brilliant? They buy a knockoff sewn by a brilliant. In a sweatshop."

"Yeah, well, Sammy Davis Junior got to be in the Rat Pack, but that didn't mean we had racial equality."

Shannon half nodded, a noncommittal sort of gesture. He read her desire to launch into rhetoric, but instead she leaned back, slipped out of her shoes, and put her bare feet up on the glove box. "Anyway. It was nice of you. Paying for him, I mean. A nice thing to do."

"Well, what the h.e.l.l, right? Got to help each other out." Realizing as he said it that he meant it, that it wasn't just a line to play her. He was finding things murkier out here than he had expected; the relative clarity of his position at the DAR didn't seem to translate. But you're still with department. Don't forget that. "Anyway, it wasn't really my money." He looked over at her, putting on a smile. "Turns out, I'm a pretty good thief."

That got a laugh-he really liked her laugh, full-spirited and adult-which morphed into a yawn.

"Tired?"

"Dodging sniper fire, riding on top of a train, touring a sweatshop-it'll wear a girl out."

"Wuss."

"I rode. On top of. A train."

It was his turn to laugh. "All right. We'll find a couple of beds."

"I know a place we can go. Some friends of mine. We'd be safe."

"How do you know?"