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sobbing.
    Little Worker gently approached. She touched him tenderly. He jumped.
    “Mister Michael,” said Little Worker, “everything is all right now.
    “You and I are alone.”
     
     

 
    COCKFIGHT
     
     
    I will allow as how bein’ a waste gipsy is not the most settled way of life, nor the easiest on the nerves. And it’s surely no career for a married man—as Geraldine never tires of remindin’ me.
    But I ain’t married. And I never listen to Geraldine.
    Anyway, what’s so rough about the life? First off, there’s the constant travel. You got to learn to keep as little in your kit as a blind Bhopal beggar and generally stay as loose as a Bull’s balls. Your in-demand ass is always bein’ faxed around the globe, from one hotspot to another, whenever some muni or fabrik or werke or abe gets to feelin’ a tad guilty and decides they’re gonna clean up a little piece of the big, big mess they’ve all made durin’ the last filthy century.
    Some of these places ain’t so bad, in terms of relaxin’ when the job’s over for the day. When we were in Milan, Italy, for instance, reamin’ out their toxic sewers where some asshole way back in ’86 dumped twenty tons of assorted pollutants and contaminated the whole city’s water supply, I was able to do all kinds of cultural things, like visitin’ churches, and seein’ The Last Supper (considerably improved, in my opinion, since they sprayed the restorative bugs on it, despite all the juicer critics sayin’ it looked digitally enhanced), and checkin’ out the architecture of the Eye-tie chickenhouses. (One was in a real palace, and some of the girls was supposed to be real princesses. It was just possible, too, cuz I remember that when Monaco was forbsed-over and trumped-up, there was a whole generation that had to latch onto jobs real quick.)
    Other times, you’re gonna find yourself in the ass-end of nowhere, some god-forsaken place that makes Robert Lee, Texas (my birthplace), look like New Orleans at Mardi Gras. I have shivered at fifty below with no audience but dumb greasy penguins, cleanin’ up an Antarctic oil spill, and baked my sandy britches at one hundred plus, decommissioning a Mideast CBW plant. And both times there was nothin’ to do after your shift except play flashcards, get wiped on needlestrength-one tropes, and spill atmosphere with your fellow gipsies. (Maybe summa the talk might lead to bumpin’ uglies with one of your fellow gips, if that’s what fills your receptors, but I try to stay away from the gals that work in the same line as me, they all bein’ as familiar and excitin’ as your elderly mustache-wearin’ aunt or some old-maid grade-school trope doser.)
    It’s times like these that you tell spine-tinglin’ kings and barkers about all the shit you have seen. Times when the rems was sleetin’ around you thicker than fleas on a junkyard dog, knockin’ your chromos loopier than those of a two-headed snake, and you were wrasslin’ a hot core. Times when you were standin’ waist-deep in some stinkin’ swamp full of PCB’s and dirty antique motor-oil and industrial solvents and God knows what-all, and you seen the snout of a mutant Amazonian ’gator barrelin’ toward you faster’n the Orient Express, and you barely had time to raise up your force-multiplier for a single blow before the ’gator was on you.
    But surprisin’ly enough, the net effect of all these after-hours horror stories is not to discourage us gips, but rather to make us feel special and important. After all, who else has such a vital job as us? Cleanin’ up this poor abused planet is—or should be—society’s number-one priority, after all, and they ain’t invented a robot yet that’s smart enough or tough enough to do what we do, or take the shit we endure. Imagine some hunk of heuristics pokin’ its sensors into the hells we gotta enter, without fryin’ its CCD’s and Crispin’ its boards. As for the splices, the union keeps them