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Falk hadn't warmed to Eighty-Six much. The climate of the Shaverton region, at whatever time of whatever year it was, nudged at the comfort limits of hot and humid. It was one of those places – and Falk had been to a few – that wasn't a natural fit for occupation. It was a tiny margin of variation, almost a nuance thing, but just because the atmosphere wasn't technically inimical to human life, it didn't naturally follow that people ought to live there. Outdoors, it was too hot in an odd way, and too bright. There was an odd saturation to colours.

  Indoors, everything was too cold. Everything smelled of air-con and a ubiquitous, lemon-scented twang of Insect-Aside.

The driver took him to the GEO. It was the name of both the corp and the serious glass mast the corp occupied in the land skirts of the massive Terminal. From the executive offices, employees of Geoplanitia Enabling Operator could see the heavy-hipped ferries banging up and down out of the arrestor silos on the Cape, serving the vast drivers lurking invisibly, upstairs at the edge of space.

  There was a bar in the basement, flushed with sickly lighting, piped music and a funk of bug spray, and fitted out with Early Settlement Era furniture, undoubtedly repro, woven from wicker-effect polymer lattice. The place made up in business what it lacked in soul. There were distinct currents separating the crowd: non-local correspondents and affiliates, sorted by old acquaintance or network loyalty; GEO employees; locals work-ing the room, shilling everything from sources to sex in order to leverage a little network expense account action.

  Falk got talking to a GEO exec at the rail of the marbleeffect bar. The exec was ordering a tray of drinks. It was a colleague's birthday. As the barman filled the order, a casual question or two got the exec to admit that the mood was downtrend among GEO staffers. The dispute (even after two beer-effect drinks, the exec was on-message enough not to refer to the situation as a "war" or even a "conflict") was having non-advantageous outcomes for the corporation. Development contracts were overrunning or remaining unfulfilled, SO grants were being withheld and GEO's share price had dipped badly on the home market because of public perception. GEO had substantial holdings on Eighty-Six.

  "Our share value is in the shitter," the exec said, "and our corporate rep is floating there right beside it. The public thinks we're driving this dispute through corporate greed. It's like Sixty all over again."

  "Except," said Falk, "this isn't a big post-global company taking the blame for what turned out to be fundamentalists terror-bombing settlement pharms."

  "Fuck you know about it?" the exec asked.

  "I was there."

  "On Sixty?"

  "At the end, yeah."

  The exec nodded, and folded his mouth down in a shape that indicated he was quite impressed.

  "Big pharm got the blame on Sixty until it finally came out that there was some pretty nasty activism going on. That's not the case here, is it? This dispute has been triggered by the aggressive policies of corps like GEO. Please don't compare it to Sixty unless you know what the fuck you're talking about."

  The exec offered to buy Falk a drink and took him to meet his colleagues. They were a sallow bunch who plainly spent too much time indoors in the tailored environment of their corporate glass mast. Falk had never understood that. He looked like shit because he spent too much time aboard drivers where there was no outside to step into. But if you've gone to live and work on another planet for a five- or ten-year rotation, or forever, why the fuck didn't you ever go outside? Why the fuck do you stay inside your mast? You might as well be on a driver. You might as well have stayed in Beijing.

  They wanted to know about Sixty. He gave them a short but embellished version, romanticising his own hardline newsman cred. They all oohed and aahed in all the right places, like they knew from bullshit. They all nodded sagely at his tough yet sentimental verdicts.

  Three of them were due to leave in a week, six years shy of their contracted finish. Two more were going the following month. There were, he learned, whole floors of the mast unoccupied. Some had emptied since the start of the dispute, as GEO reposted staff to other, less controversial settlements. Others had never been filled. The GEO glass mast had been standing for just twenty years. There was a real possibility that it would be closed and sold off before the corporation that had paid for its construction had properly inhabited it.

  Falk listened to them rabbit. It was automatic, just warming up his journo muscles. They weren't saying much that was interesting beyond the state of the mast. They were worried about their futures, about their careers. They were fretting about where they might get posted, and what the bad press was doing to their stocks and bonuses.

  His Scotch-effect drink was crappy but welcome after the abstinence of transit and acclimation. He got a little buzz cooking and felt good about himself. He arranged his face so it looked like he was interested.

  He kept an eye on a nearby table where some network boys had clustered. One of the faces looked familiar, like a very old, careworn version of a man he had once known, an older brother, a father.

  "Falk? Is that you?"

  He recognised her voice, but not her face when he turned to look at it. She was carrying a lot of mass, even more than she had when he'd last seen her. Like her voice, her smile hadn't changed.

  "Cleesh."

  He got up and hugged her. His hands didn't meet. She smelled of nutrition bars and the sugar-plastic aftertaste of diet control packs. There were little flesh-match patches covering the constellations of surgical plug excisions dotting her scalp, the side of her throat and her slabby upper arms where they showed beyond the sleeves of her
Cola
tee.

  Falk hadn't seen her since Seventy-Seven, and even then only on screen.

  "How are you?" he asked.

  "I'm wealthy. Really wealthy," she laughed.

  "Look at you. You unhooked."

  "Had to," she replied, looking him up and down. "Doctors said I had to. Can't circle forever. Freeks
^®
you up. I needed grav time."

  "But circling's what you do, Cleesh," he said.

  "I know. I'm not an in-person person. But it was that or die, so I thought I'd spend a little time in the company of normal gravity, drop a gazillion sizes, make sure I don't go cardio-pop."

  She eyed him head to toe again and grinned.

  "Look at you, though, Falk. You're like a bird. We're like the pedia entry for sublime and ridiculous."

  "Hey, I'm at my fucking physical peak," he objected.

  "You look like shit. But shit that I'm pleased to see," she replied. "Buy me a drink."

He'd known her for years, but the core of their relationship was a sixteen month assignment to Seventy-Seven. Cleesh was a data wet nurse, feeding, supplying and managing the newslines from a can station circling at twenty-nine miles. She was the most able and clued-in editor-engineer he'd ever worked with. They'd become friends, but he'd never met her in the flesh. She never unhooked from the plug network and left her no-grav home. Prolonged no-grav fucked you up, sooner or later. It made you bone-light or flesh-heavy, sometimes both. No matter how well sunlight, clean air, fresh water and food were simulated, they were still simulated, and it poisoned you eventually. Diabetes, SAD, muscle wastage, organ failure, obesity, eczema, there was always some kind of price.

  They talked. He became aware of how twig-scrawny his wrists were compared to hers. Perhaps he had been riding the drivers too long.

  "You're here to cover the thing that isn't a war?" she asked.

  "Of course."

  "You got an in? They're freeking
^®
tight about the press free-associating with servicemen."

  "I've got a hot ticket pass," he said. He took a sip of his Scotch-effect. "Settlement Office accreditation. Access."

  "Of course you have," she smiled. It was the friendly, reassuring smile he'd seen via hi-res boxes a million times.

  "They've arranged some visits for me. I saw some SOMD desker." He brushed his palms together, lit up the tiny screen of his celf and opened the document Fanciman had posted him.

  "Two days' time, a look at Mitre Sands, then a visit to Marblehead." He showed her the celf's little display in the cup of his hand.

  Cleesh pursed her lips and wobbled her head from side to side.

  "What?" he asked.

  "That'll just be handled PR stuff. Mitre Sands is a pretend camp they use to show everyone."

  "It's not pretend."

  Cleesh was drinking a tall glass of NoCal-Cola. She turned the glass by the rim with her thumb and fingers like she was cracking a safe.

  "Okay, but it's a stores dump, dressed up to make people feel like they're visiting something authentic. Marblehead, that was hot, just not any more. It's tourism, Falk. They'll show you a wall with hard-round holes in it. They show it to everyone. Four days' time, you'll be sitting here telling me how they showed you the wall with the hard-round holes in it."

  "That's always how it works," he replied. "You follow their tours around at the beginning while you find your feet, then you give the guide the slip. You know that."

  "Tougher here," she said. "Freeking
^®
tough."

  "You've come here to report?"

  "Yeah. Makes a change. I thought, if Falk can do it, how hard can it be? They're not letting anyone close to the good stuff. There's a lot of people doing a lot of graft on the down low to get access."

  "A lot of people including you?"

  "But of course."

  "Have you got something, Cleesh?"

  She gave him her stern look.

  "I've been here three months, Falk. I've worked something out and it could be good. It's almost in the bag. I might share it with you, except you'll probably be here three minutes and get something better."

  "Come on, Cleesh."

  "Be patient. Work your magic. What I've got isn't guaranteed or anything. And if it boils over, it could get me rescinded forever."

  "It's that dodgy?"

  She shrugged. "I will spend the rest of my years teaching elementary ling to grade school settlementeers. Or in jail."

  "Give me something," he said. "What do you know? Is the Bloc really involved in this, or is it just a corporate shooting match?"

  She dropped her voice and leaned forward.

  "It might actually be the Bloc this time, Falk," she said.

TWO

He was a good boy. He stayed in Shaverton for the next two days, and didn't step off. He walked boulevards that were so prosaically planned their designer's lack of imagination was as plain as the rows of palm-effect trees. He drank iced tea and NoCal-Cola under the glare shades of terrace diners, and watched the flitters and bugs droning through the sunlight. The biggest bugs were known as blurds. They were about the size of sparrows, and extremely common. They fluttered about like delicate pieces of folded paper engineering.

  On the second day, he had lunch with Cleesh at a ProFood outlet on the north end of the Cape road. They sat near a big plastic statue of Booster Rooster. She brought a couple of people with her: a woman called Sylvane who was a stringer from NetWorth, and a nondescript man that Cleesh claimed worked for SO Logistics. Falk wondered if the man was her contact, and tried to open him up a little, but he was singularly dull and unforthcoming, and spent most of the time talking to Sylvane about import tariffs.

  "You know they named Seventy-Seven?" Cleesh asked Falk.

  "Officially? I hadn't heard that."

  "Yup. They called it Fronteria."

  "That makes it what? A settlement? A full state?"

  "A full state."

  "Wow."

  "One hundred and thirteenth state of the Union," she said.

  "It'll always be Seventy-Seven to me," he said. "Who the fuck thought of
Fronteria
?"

  "I know," she agreed, "it's a freeking
^®
awful name, right?"

  "What's with this 'freeking' thing?" he asked, putting down his wrap.

  "Sponsored expletive," said Sylvane.

  "It's what?"

  Sylvane was good-looking enough, but it was cameraready attractive. There was no depth to her appeal. It was all shopped and cosmetic.

  "The SO wants to control bad language on all broadcasts," Sylvane said, "especially if stuff is going to the US networks free-feed. They were going to patch in a bleepmask to cover any cussing."

  "Then NoCal-Cola stepped up and offered to sponsor an expletive for use in the zone," said Cleesh. "Freek
^®
. Like in NoCal Freek
^®
, the lime-flavoured hi-caff one. Didn't they offer to patch you when you got here?"

  "No," said Falk.

  "I told you he was special," Cleesh said to the others.

  "They actually plugged it into you?" Falk asked, uneasy.

  "Ling patch," said Cleesh. "It's a permit requirement for anyone from Associated or the indies. Keeping it clean across the networks."

  "That's how you're making that little sound at the end of the word?" Falk asked.

  "It's freeking
^®
amazing, isn't it?" said Cleesh, doing it deliberately, with relish. "I spent the first few days swearing my freeking
^®
ass off, and I can't say freek
^®
all except the sponsored word."

  "None of you can actually curse any more?" Falk asked, laughing.

  "Nope," Cleesh replied. Sylvane shook her head.

  "Say
fuck
!" he demanded.

  "Freek
^®
!" said Cleesh.

  "I don't want to," said Sylvane.