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facility and directed her how to hire the assistants she was
allowed—just enough help so she could sleep and acquire food and personal
maintenance goods, for the petcare facility served all three shifts. There was
a com-pin so she could be contacted by customers or assistants at any time, a
cashchip for operating expenses, and an ID set. Her ID set.
    Fast work.
    She picked it up, fumbling the slick bifold set. Employer
information on one side, personal history on another, a large recent image of
herself—source unknown to her—and a fourth side that sheened blankly but held
all of the set’s information and more in digital. She looked at the image. It
showed her from the head up but somehow managed to capture her scrawniness
beneath the patched duster’s vest-over-coveralls she wore. Mementos covered
that vest, from crew patches to a tiny shell found only in a single place on a
single planet. Mementos hung within her hair, an unimpressive dark brunette
never given the opportunity to go sunstreaked, but long enough to hold beads
and twists of woven goods. The tactile hair of a woman who encountered very few
mirrors.
    Her appearance clashed with the purple border around her likeness,
the one that proclaimed her as a perm job worker. A purple border she’d never
thought to see on her own ID set, not after being dragged into the duster’s
life while she was still young enough that her first minor’s ID lived in the
back of her underwear drawer.
    Dragged into it, maybe. But I embraced it. The very
involuntary nature of my introduction to the life taught me a duster’s way is
the only way. People think we’re crazy, bouncing infinitely from station to
station to planetside to station. Space dust. But in reality we’re the wisest
of them all. They count on their lives to continue as they know them. We admit
up front that it’ll never happen that way, and make the best of it.
    The duster bar was easy to find from her new location; she’d
been there often enough before she was hit by the zipscoot. Like most stations,
Toklaat was a glorified cylinder with travel tubes down the open axis, from
north to south and back again, with east and west split according to function.
East-side housed station maintenance and services; west-side housed the
residences and personal services. Dusters worked the eastern station-side jobs,
clung to station corners, slept in station nooks.
    Now Shadia worked and lived in the west.
    The duster bar, considered both a personal service and a
duster accommodation, balanced on the border between east and west. With the
com-pin tucked away in her vest pocket, a duster’s ubiquitous utilities under
the vest, and a small advance on her personal cashchip, Shadia stood at the
edge of the bar nursing a featherdunk and considering her situation.
Calculating how long it might take. . .
    “Out ’tending, are you?” said a growly alto voice in her
ear. “You take that duster rig off someone, ’tender? You someone’s mag-bound
little perm?”
    Startled from her reverie, Shadia jerked around to discover
herself flanked by two women whose musculature and vest pins marked them as
cargo-loading dusters. Not a worry. Dusters left their own alone. “I’m no
pretender.”
    Quick as that, one of them grabbed her arms, spilling her
drink, while the other fished around inside Shadia’s vest until a search of the
many interior pockets offered success. The creditchip, the ID set. “Looks like
your ’set to me, ” said the growly one. “Didn’t anyone ever warn you that
the only thing worse than a perm in a duster bar is a ’tender perm in a duster
bar?”
    Shadia kicked the woman who held her, a pointy-toed kick
just below the knee, snatching her ID set back as she spat a long string of
blistering duster oaths. She didn’t fight, she didn’t get drunk, she didn’t
join the ranks of the dusters’ practical jokers . . . but she
had a vocabulary to make even a growly-voiced cargo loader blink. And while