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en route to Grand Junction, this city-cosmodrome, this vast Amerindian territory where spatial industry is in the hands of private entrepreneurs, insane businessmen, and the Amerindian gambling mafiosi.
    It is the derelict Las Vegas of the Orbital Paradise, the last Free City, the newest Space Boomtown. It is the last private point of entry to the High Frontier left on North American soil.
    He has been sent there to kill a man named Orville Blackburn.
    Orville Blackburn is the Mohawk mayor of Grand Junction. He is rich, powerful, well protected. He will not be an easy target. But this man has broken some promise to the largest Russo-American mafia in the northeast.
    He is a dead man.
    The train is passing by an abandoned section of highway. A few grain silos stand in the distance like zeppelins vertically suspended by reverse gravity. The landscape is flat. The sky is deep indigo. Night is falling.
    Soon he will arrive at his destination.

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THE HOTEL LAIKA
    The Grand Junction high-speed-train station is a cosmopolitan shambles where the crowds throng like a human octopus in a city immediately reminiscent of Babel—that is, a mixture of Nero’s Rome and Hollywood Boulevard.
    He shuts down most of his multifrequency circuits almost at once, unable to deal with the onslaught of audible and inaudible signals of a million different types and from a million different sources.
    In the few minutes it takes him to get off the high-speed train, reach the immense main hall via a series of squeaky old escalators, and pass through a teeming galaxy of humanity under the hall’s vast neobyzantine dome toward the lot where the robotaxis are parked, he counts at least twenty-five different languages. He has met or seen thousands of people; seen smiles and smirks, lips tightly pursed or wide open in expressions of expectation, surprise, anger; faces stressed, impatient, neutral, and joyous. He has heard countless sorts of exclamations, laughs, quarrels, and idioms superimposed on one another in a strange Baroque symphony composed of every expletive on Earth.
    The first thing he notices is the large number of “body tuners”—devotees of genetic transformation. His implant informs him that Grand Junction has a continent-wide reputation as one of the capitals of the biotech underground. Anything can be found there; anything can be bought. Or sold.
    Especially bodies. Human bodies. For reasons the implant leaves unclear, the city and particularly a few of its “hot spots” serve as a refuge for all the body-tuning devotees who lack the means to obtain a true trans-G transformation cure in China or Australia.
    If that is the case, they come here and are operated on—for still quite substantial sums—by charlatans and doctors speedily trained in barely approved African medical schools who end most months working for one or another of the local mafias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are more than a few “damaged” among the transgenic population of Grand Junction.
    He passes several compact groups of international tourists duly escorted by their guides/bodyguards, noting among the atomized crowd the pointillist presence of “untouchables” in the terminal—the people who are not even allowed to enter the arrival area; they stand scattered and immobile, solitary in the midst of the interminable dance of humans in transit. He notes the recurring presence of genetic monsters among them—this time “naturals,” born of chromosomal mutations caused by various changes in the environment and in man himself. These natural genetic monsters are considered lower than low in Grand Junction; even a body tuner whose seedy operation has been a spectacular failure is considered to be higher on the ladder, because his/her body still has some market value. At the Metabolism and Organ Commodity Exchange, genetic monsters born of this regression of humanity are not even rated as high as slaves—which is to say, objects—since in most cases their