1

MIKE


I woke just before dawn (not by choice: All the springs in my biological clock wore out last century) and Swiftie was sleeping on the balcony. She was there about one morning in three, lately. I lay there, looking past her to the sky, trying to remember whether the weather was turning wetter, or colder, or whatever. I'm supposed to know these things.
Swiftie rolled over, her eyes closed, her face mobile. Whatever she was dreaming wasn't fun. I considered waking her but decided she wouldn't thank me; her days probably weren't much fun either. I tried to get back to sleep but that didn't work, so I hauled myself out of bed and careened into the shower before remembering that there wasn't enough sun yet to run the purifier. I sat on the toilet for a moment, then found my way to the kitchenette and fired up the percolator. I carried two mugs back to the bedroom, watched Swiftie for a moment, then opened the French window and placed one mug near her face. Her nostrils twitched; then, a moment later, her eyes opened slowly: She stared through the window at me, and then reached for the coffee.
Swiftie was too skinny to be pretty, her hair needed a gardener, and you had to look at her face just to be sure she was female. But her eyes were—open, I guess. If you've seen statues of Buddha—bald, bulging belly, boobs, eyes closed serenely…well, Swiftie was the opposite, an anti-Buddha, half waif, half wraith. I didn't know where she was from, but her skin seemed to be brown beneath the usual stripper crust, and her eyes and cheeks looked Asian. Amerindian? Arab? Filipina? All of the above? Bangkok had been mostly under water for years, and a lot of islands were disappearing. All those people had to go somewhere, and a lot of them came here.
"Thanks," she rasped warily. Her voice was like black BritRail coffee, no sugar, late at night. I wondered why she picked my balcony so often. I lived on the second floor (or the first, in Australian), and while I didn't keep bees or cacti or a muteweiler, I was sure there were other, equally desirable squats nearby. Maybe strippers like to call someplace—well, a few places—home too. Without sitting up she reached for the mug and took a cautious sip. I'd made it light, with two sugars: I figured she could use the nutrients.
"Now what?" she asked when she'd finished. "You want me to eat out of your hand or something?"
I shook my head.
"Charity, hah?"
When did "charity" become a dirty word, at best a euphemism for "tax evasion"? I'd done a lot of volunteer work for Amnesty and Greenpeace and other organizations when I was younger and single, before the ICE Age, but I no longer mentioned it to anyone; they tended to assume I was either a sucker, a fanatic, or a spy. I said nothing.
"Don't panic," she said, making a good guess at what I was thinking. "I won't tell anyone. Hey, this is a nice place we've got, right?"
I shrugged, and smiled. I'd certainly lived in worse; I'd even done some squatting once or twice. "Squatter" has a different connotation in Australian: It was originally a farmer who couldn't afford to buy his land, and later came to mean farmers in general. "Stripper" meant something else when I was young too, but now they call them exotic dancers, and how many times a day could you say "streetperson"?
We watched each other for a few minutes, and then she sat up and stretched. If it was meant to show off her figure, it failed. "What you do for ice?"
"I run a bucket shop."
"Hah?"
"Travel agent and courier broker. I sell cheap airfares."
"How cheap?"
Okay, so there's no such thing as a cheap airfare anymore, even by zep. "Depends where you want to go."
"Anywhere."
"Here to L.A. is—"
"Not L.A."
I agreed with her. I didn't mind wearing armor, but I refused to drive it. "Seattle? New York?"
She shook her head. "Canada?"
"Vancouver? A thousand ice, but you'd need a passport—which means a Worldwide Identification Number. Montreal's twenty-five hundred ice, a passport, a visa—and a literacy test in French. Parlezvous français, mademoiselle?"
She smiled sourly. "A few words, but I can't spell 'em for merde." She stood, grabbed the bulging bag she carried everywhere, and looked over the balcony. "Hey, I gotta get to work 'fore the trashman cometh. See you 'round, winner."
I felt like telling her that I'd done some Dumpster diving myself, back in the eighties, behind the Club Med in Eilat; but what the hell, for me, it'd been because of a temporary setback and something of an adventure, not a way of life. Besides, it was probably 'fore she was born.
* * *
In case you ever wondered, being a travel agent wasn't exactly a high-pressure job, though I was probably busier than most: If you wanted the best prices on a one-way ticket, you came to me. Besides, I had itchy feet up to my armpits, and I speak bits of seven languages and twenty-some accents. Like Shakespeare said, who's gonna hire a skinny cook?
I'm qualified, too, of course. Cheap travel gets a lot harder when you turn thirty, thanks to visa restrictions and similar bullshit, so I tried settling down, married Angela, took an agent's course, and, having a green card and an American prefix on my WIN, got a job with the Australian Tourist Bureau here. We moved around the country every time Angela found a better job, and when we split up, I tried going back to traveling and teaching, but by then I was forty-two, most of Asia and South America and Africa had been hit hard by the greenhouse effect and the economic downturn, the UN was bankrupt, and work overseas, even volunteer work that only fed and housed me, wasn't easy to find. I hadn't gone far before I decided to turn around and come back to San Francisco. Now I owned my own business, and a mortgage, and it looked like I was stuck here.
Two mornings later, Swiftie was on the balcony again. This time, it was the alarm clock that woke me; Swiftie was already awake, attacking a burned loaf of bread with a switchblade. I thought of offering her another coffee, but that would have meant letting her in, and that—well, if the cops found out you'd had strippers in your house, you could forget about Victims' Aid or insurance payouts. So could your neighbors. Legally, it's sort of like inviting a vampire to visit. So I left the window one-way and soundproof, and stomped off showerward.
I wondered, as I walked to work, just how many strippers there were in the city, what percentage of the population. I couldn't find any official figures, and I'm not sure I'd have believed them if I had. Where do you look for an answer? Walk down the Haight or Market and you see more strippers than citizens, but how much time do citizens spend on the streets? They telecommute, on average, four days out of six; they only socialize with people inside their building, or via computer; everything they need and most of the things they know or think they want are delivered to them. Some don't leave their homes anymore; they live in what used to be one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, and probably still is, but they never see it. Nihonmachi was sealed so tight it looked like Stonehenge, and Nob Hill was more like a mountain fortress.
Christ, I must be getting old.
* * *
"How was work?"
"Okay. What'd you do with your day?"
"Went to Saint Vincent de Paul's. They let you read the old books free, unless you're a winner." She chuckled. "Course, I had to hit the Mission for a shower first. I feel like a salted herring."
I laughed. "You read a lot?"
"Got fuck-all else to do, and those places are warm." She sipped at the cup of coffee I'd given her. "Did you ever read a science-fiction story where the future got so bad everyone went to hide in the past?"
"Probably," I said after a moment's thought. "It's an old idea; they even used it on Star Trek."
"What about if we never really left Earth, but invented time travel instead?"
"Uh-huh. The End of Eternity."
"What if time travelers couldn't take their bodies with them, but had to borrow them?"
I had to think about that one. "All the Time in the World? Arthur C. Clarke?"
"What if the bodies they borrowed had to be dead? I mean, just dead—taking over the bodies at the moment of death."
"No," I replied a moment later. "I don't think I've read that one."
She grinned. "Then I guess I'd better hurry up and write it."
I blinked, then nodded. Writers had been starving on other people's balconies for centuries: I guess if you had to starve on a balcony anyway, you might as well convince yourself that you could be a writer.
She astonished me by actually beginning to write the piece, using an unreliable ballpoint pen found in the street and the backs of assorted handbills. She read it to me through the window. It was set a few centuries from now, but there had been few major scientific breakthroughs. There'd been no contact with aliens, spaceships still traveled much slower than light-speed, most guns still fired bullets instead of rays, and her time-travel mechanism had been a spin-off from the space program: a braintaper that could download a human mind into a brain that had been flat-lined by their suspended-animation process—or, it was later discovered, into any other recently dead but undamaged brain, as long as they knew the precise time of death. Longevity was cheap, and near-immortality possible, but most people on Earth seemed too bored to bother with much life extension. Life on the outer worlds—enclosed bases in this solar system, new settlements farther away—was shown as more tightly regimented and less physically comfortable, but exciting. Space travel, unfortunately, was still expensive, and the offworlders accepted only those they needed. It seemed a pretty bleak future for most, despite its material comforts, but Swiftie assured me the story had a happy ending. I commented that this would make it more salable—most published SF is obscenely optimistic—and she laughed. "Sell it? How?"
"Well, you'd need to finish it, and wurp it—"
"Where would I get a wurpressor? I was lucky to find this fuckin' pen!"
"I have a computer. If you finish it, do a draft I can read—"
"And how do I get paid? I don't have an ICEcard, and I can't get one without a WIN."
"I'll get it put on my card, and you tell me what you want bought."
"You can do this?"
I doubted it'd ever become an issue—they say more people write short stories than read them—but what the hell. "Used to do a lot of it. When I was a lot younger, even when cash was legal, you could hardly ever get paid in cash. Then it started getting harder to find a job—even a few days' picking fruit—without some proof you were a citizen. They called 'em Social Security numbers here and Canada, Tax File numbers back home—"
"Home?"
"Oz. Australia. Anyway, these numbers were the ancestors of the WIN. So first time I bummed around the States, I only took jobs that paid cash and didn't ask too many questions. Got paid half the going rate, and half the time I didn't even get that—I mean it wasn't like I could go to the cops. Next time around, things were tougher, so I borrowed a Social Security number from a friend of mine, and he cashed the checks for me."
"Nobody wondered why he was getting all these checks for different jobs?"
"He was a writer, and a part-time vagabond himself. His income was sort of Heisenbergian: unpredictable, but not statistically significant. The IRS didn't hassle him much."
Swiftie smiled. "What about you? You a writer?"
"Nah, not really. I used to do travel articles, wrote stuff for some of the guidebooks. Didn't pay much, but it scored me the occasional free feed." Suddenly I wondered what I was letting myself in for. I'd never heard the term used in America, but "swifty" is Australian for a trick, a fast one. "But I think I still have some writing paper somewhere, if you want it."
* * *
We e-mailed the story off a week later. We had a small disagreement on the title: She'd called it "Refugee," which is the second most frequently used title in SF, so we changed it to "YesterDei." Apart from that, I edited it very slightly—her spelling was consistently bizarre—but we'd agreed that it was going to be her work, even if it was my WIN on the title page. I wanted to use her name for the byline, but she wouldn't tell me what it was. "We could pretend I'm half Vietnamese, half Sioux," she suggested. "Call me Hai-Lee Ill Eagle."
I would've thrown something at her if she hadn't been on the other side of a shatterproof window. In the end, we compromised on the safely neuter Lee Bird.
Swiftie celebrated by bringing a girlfriend "home." It took me a few minutes to realize what was happening: All I could see, at first, was Swiftie's army-blanket poncho and motley jeans, a mop of Manhattan-sunset-colored hair, a black coat, and a recycled beach umbrella. Strippers, it seemed, never completely removed their clothes, for fear that someone might steal them.
Swiftie poked her head up and looked straight at me, grinning, even though she couldn't have seen or heard me through the window. Watching the women feasting on each other, I realized how little I actually knew about Swiftie. I still didn't know her name, how old she was, where she was from. I mean, I'd slept with a few girls I hadn't known any better, but Swiftie and I had been talking for months.
Swiftie brought four different women home that fall—or maybe it was more, wearing four indistinguishable costumes. They were all skinny, at least from the waist up, with thin, scratched arms and mud-wrestler's legs, and hair apparently cut with a Swiss Army knife—one with saw, file, toothpick, and wire-stripper blades. One was tiny, as flat-chested as Swiftie herself, and probably even younger; one had jagged scars across her belly, and breasts that looked like dirty socks; one had been badly shaved and was growing out blond; one was chunky around the hips, with a broken nose but all her teeth; the youngest-looking had bright blue eyes and breasts like little fists, and the improbable name of Cannon.
On nights when she was alone—by now she was sleeping on the balcony two nights out of three—Swiftie would sit there and…masturbate. She seemed fascinated by her own breasts, small as they were. I suspect this was, at least partially, an act for my benefit. Actually, I stopped watching after a few weeks. This sort of teasing had never really grabbed me; if it had, I would've subscribed to AdultCheck. Besides, I had a daughter about her age. I also stopped watching her with the women, except sometimes for Cannon, who, unlike the others, seemed to know she was being watched, and who also seemed to be Swiftie's favorite. She reminded me of a girlfriend I'd had when I was teaching in Korea; she had been skinny enough to be the Grim Reaper's daughter, and I was dumb enough not to realize at first that she wasn't doing it to be fashionable. She died in a student protest a couple of years later, when I was in Bangkok. Anyway. Cannon wore a collection of patches that had once been held together by denim dungarees, a costume more honored in the breach than the observance. One night, I tried on some of my old jeans and discovered that I'd put on some weight. Correction: some fat. So I went through the closet and found outfits for Swiftie and Cannon. I mean, winter was coming, and they needed them more than I did.
* * *
"Mike?"
"Yeah?"
Swiftie had spent the night alone again. I didn't ask where Cannon was. "You said ‘Refugee' was the second-most-used name for SF stories. What was first?"
"‘Homecoming.'" I used to wonder what that said about SF writers; then I started to wonder what it said about the SF readers. I never did think of a good answer. Swiftie nodded, and then asked. "Why don't you go home?"
"Never been there."
"Hah? What about Australia?"
"I don't know." I sipped at my coffee, reminiscing. "This town isn't my home, but I like it." I looked across the street and nodded at one of the old "painted lady"-style houses. "I can't afford to live in one of those—wish I could—but at least I can look at them. Beautiful buildings, kept up just because they're beautiful, even though it'd be more economical to tear them down and build high-rises, earthquake zone or no. Even the new buildings are being designed to blend in with those—okay, they're imitations—but at least they try, they care."
"I don't understand."
"My mother lives in a place almost exactly like this, in Fremantle, Australia. My father lives in another, in Belfast. My ex-wife lives in New York, in—"
"I think I can guess," she said dryly, "but I still don't understand."
"Vagabondage," I explained. "I was a traveler, a tourist; wherever I was, I always had to be somewhere different. And now there's almost nowhere that's different, where you can wake up and look out the window and know where you are." I stared into my coffee, as though there were some answers in it. "For most people, I guess, home isn't a place at all. It's a time. What about you?"
"Hah?"
"Where's your home? Here?"
She turned, looked out toward the park, and shook her head.
"Don't want to talk about it?"
"Some other time."
* * *
We received a contract for the story two days after Thanksgiving: Payment, they assured us, would be on publication, some time in the next eighteen months. They paid six cents a word, the same rate as twenty years ago. Swiftie was delighted, and I offered to give her the money immediately. "How do you want it? Food? Clothes? A sleeping bag?"
"Electronics."
"What?"
"Electronics. Chips, wires, that sort of crap. I'll tell you what I need."
"Electronics?"
"It's a hobby."
I stared at her, and then noticed that bag she carried everywhere. It was bulging more than it had in summer. "What are you making?"
Swiftie shrugged, and looked away.
"Remote control? Lock pick?" No answer. "Icebreaker?"
"What if I am, hah? What're you going to do?"
What was I going to do? I mean, reprogramming the ROM on an ICEcard should take more than a few scrounged circuit boards and Laser Shack LCDs, right? And, even if she succeeded, the International Credit Exchange wasn't exactly a bosom friend of mine.
But what if she failed? Seven-to-ten planting trees or cutting kelp? "What is it, Swiftie?"
"A new life. Okay?"
I backed down. "Okay, okay. Tell me what you need."
* * *
Winter hit the city like a soggy sponge, and I found myself staring into the double-barreled horror of Christmas and my forty-ninth birthday. I hadn't seen much of Swiftie since I'd bought her the stuff she'd asked for, and I started to wonder what she might be hiding from.
Christmas morning woke me with one hell of a thunderstorm, and I rolled over to watch the fireworks. Swiftie was huddled on the balcony, becoming drenched by the rain, sheltering her bag with her skinny body. I stared for nearly a minute, then draped a kimono around myself and got up to open the French window. She looked up at the sound, and I stepped aside to let her in. She hesitated, and then dashed in before either of us had a chance to change our minds. That done, we stood on opposite sides of the room, tensed, waiting.
"The shower's through there," I said at last. "Should be some warm water…"
* * *
She left her clothes hanging over the shower stall, and emerged with a towel wrapped around her waist. We tried to talk, and failed, which I guess is how we ended up in bed.
It was the worst sex I'd had in years. It wasn't a rape—she kept telling me not to stop, and if anyone was in control at all, it was her. She was reluctant to touch me, let alone kiss me, and she wouldn't let me touch her anywhere but her breasts and between her thighs. She squirmed when I went down on her, and her body seemed to come several times without it reaching her head. I rolled over, reached for a condom, checked that it wasn't past its "use by" date (I hadn't needed one in a while), and suggested she get on top. She knelt over my cock and barely kissed it with her labia, squirmed around a little until the head slipped in, gasped, and then backed away from it, not looking at me. It occurred to me that this might be her first time with a man, at least voluntarily, and I murmured something that I hoped sounded soothing. My erection dwindled, and I suggested we quit. She did.
I lay there for nearly a minute, clammy with sweat and tense in all the wrong places. She rolled over and grabbed her bag.
"Is it finished?"
"Yes, it's finished." She paused, and said, "Mike…"
"Yes?"
"You still want to know about my home?"
"If you want to tell me."
"I've already told you most of it. You remember the story?"
"The…" I found the strength to turn on my side and stare at her. "‘YesterDei'?"
"Yeah."
"What about it?"
"It's true. Some of it, anyway. That's my home. I'm a refugee."
It had to be a joke. I didn't know Swiftie well, but I didn't believe she was deranged. Or maybe she was a refugee from somewhere that had been exaggerated into her version of the future—Brazil, maybe, or Burma. Sure, writers and good would-be writers have pretty twisted imaginations, but they know fantasy from reality: they have to. "And you came here?"
She smiled. "That was a glitch, a miscalculation. Remember that we could only take over a body when it died but was still sound? My, ah, destination was supposed to die on the operating table, but they must have recorded the time wrong—only a few seconds one way or the other, but the Earth moves in that time.…
"I found myself in this body, in the back of a van. Somebody had flat-lined this woman's brain; they must have been gutleggers, hoping to sell her organs. I didn't know that at the time—oh, I knew that happened in places like Brazil, but not here—that wasn't in the history texts. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to get out of the van and find a hiding place, and they drove away a few minutes later without checking on me. They obviously hadn't expected their victims to be able to escape.
"I had to learn survival skills I'd never even dreamed about. If I'd been a citizen, I could be filthy fucking rich by now: I was only a technician in my time, but hell, what I know about the stuff you'll blunder across in the next few decades—controlled fusion, high-temperature superconductors, monofilaments, braintaping.…
"Fortunately, I also know how to transfer bodies." Her smile was becoming wider by the second, hungrier, but she still didn't seem crazy.
"And one thing about my home I didn't tell you…"
She reached into her bag, and I had a sinking feeling that I'd just been outmaneuvered. She might be faster than I was, but she certainly wasn't as strong, and she hadn't been armed—until now. My breath caught as she removed something that resembled a huge camper's flashlight with built-in radio, and probably had been before she tampered with it. "What?" I croaked.
She pointed what seemed to be the business end of the device at me. There was a flash of light so intense I could almost hear it, followed almost immediately by deep darkness, but I'm sure I heard her say, "I was male."

Copyright © 1999 by Stephen Dedman