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deformities render them virtually incapable of performing the smallest task. For a long time, Grand Junction’s human garbage tried to survive in the darkest and most isolated corners of the station, relentlessly hunted by the city’s sanitary police, before being finally shoved to the periphery, where, it is said, they all ultimately disappeared, kidnapped by some gang of renegade doctors or a mafia black-market clinic that quickly harvested whatever parts might be recyclable.
    He also meets two very beautiful women. The first is a piquant brunette with green eyes and a Louise Brooks haircut, translucent frontal antennae, and pointed ears like Peter Pan. She loiters coquettishly on the balcony of a small cafeteria filled with newly arrived travelers, selling drinks laced with various meta-amphetamines that are legal in the autonomous Mohawk territory. He comes across the other girl a bit later, their paths crossing as he descends the wide escalators—whose green walls remind him, falsely or not, of an old swimming pool from his childhood—on his way to the enormous exit hall. She is a young blonde, hair knotted in an upturned plume, blue eyes vibrant with bemused intelligence, dressed sportily but with the grace of a woman who can wear anything and look good in it. She bears no obvious outward signs of transgenic modification, but that is meaningless—indeed, Plotkin knows this better than anyone.
    Their eyes meet briefly, just for the time it takes for a bird to die of exhaustion in full flight. Then their paths diverge forever, like atoms scattered in outer space.
             
    The city map is a prosthetic extension of his memory, superimposing itself on the concrete reality of the thousands of individuals who converge and diverge here, in a machine without even the slightest remainder of human tissue.
    So he knows that the Grand Junction terminal is not the
real
terminal; not really the end of the road.
    The real terminal is the cosmodrome itself.
It’s on the other side of the city—actually, the other side of the county. There are direct lines of communication between the arrival station and the departure astroport, but they are only for maintenance, security, or people possessing special puce cards approved by the Municipal Consortium that manages the city and spatial activity.
    From the Enterprise train station, where, under immense holograms of the mythic
Star Trek
vessel as well as an enormous replica of the prototype shuttle with the same name built by the Americans in the late 1970s, the MagLev™ monorail line crosses paths with the old Amtraks of Canadian National, and from the Enterprise aerostation, where the giant zeppelins of the regular transamerican lines hover alongside electric airplanes belonging to this or that genetic-engineering tycoon, thousands of men and women stream each day. Of this teeming mass, very few will reach their true destination—the sharp point of their destiny. The cosmodrome.
Cape Gagarin.
    For it is not so easy to gain access to this Holy of Holies itself, even with tickets costing 75,000, 125,000, or even 250,000 Pan-Am dollars apiece, according to whether you choose to travel on an old, rebuilt Soyuz with an antique Atlas Centaur shoved up its ass or, even worse, a locally built fireball perched atop a fifty-year-old Japanese H-4, or an ancient American orbital shuttle purchased from NASA and partially refitted, or a Texican airplane-missile hybrid, or a good old Chinese capsule from the twenties coupled to a modern Brazilian launcher.
    No, even before you obtain this ticket, the price of which is fixed according to a complex reckoning system approved by the UHU, you must often wait for years. Therein lies the guile of the economy that regulates the city. Some people have been waiting since the private cosmodrome opened, when the space industry had not yet been crushed by global terrorism, and when the Amerindian and Russo-American mafias, intelligently located in a