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Out of habit, I locked the doors. I looked up at NNE +30 degrees to see if I could spot Comet Ixchel but there was too much smaze. Okay, here goes. I toed on the microvibration, pushed away from the car, and skated—sorry, Sleeked™—across the cement. Sleeking felt like you were doing something between ice skating and old-time four-wheel roller skating, but since your feet were flat on the ground there was a sense like you were on a buttered Teflon tray. Basically, the deal was that the treads vibrated at a very high frequency, so they’d slip around even on an ordinary road surface, and then, when the vibe wasn’t on, the action of walking on them generated electricity that they’d store for later, so there weren’t any big battery packs. I guess if they’d come out when I was seven I would have gone monkey over them, but right now they weren’t plugging my wound. Instinctively—already—I cut off the vibration with my big toes and came to a hard stop at the single doorstep. The car must have rung an alarm because before I got to the door a medium-tall Latino guy opened it.
    “. . . Uh, Jed,” he said. “Hi.”
    “Hi,” I said. It was Tony Sic.

( 4 )
     
    “H i,” I mumbled again. “Tony. Hi.” At first I hadn’t recognized him because he’d gotten a vicious crew cut. He was in shorts and a blue-and-white-striped Mérida Fútbol Club shirt with a big number 28. Huh, I thought. Huh. Wonder what’s going on. He kind of stared at me. I felt a twinge of that old-rival feeling.
    He asked how I was. I said better and asked him how he was. He said something. He seemed nervouser than usual. Were he and Marena having a thing? I wondered. She’d said she was getting married to somebody—but no way, she can’t, can’t, can’t have meant she was getting married to Tony Sic. That was too ghastly to contemplate, and I’d been contemplating some ghastly stuff lately. Although why so ghastly, really? I didn’t have anything against the guy. We were sort of competitive colleagues with the Game and I’d been terribly jealous of him when I’d thought he’d get to get downloaded into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Maya ahau, instead of me, and then when I’d gotten selected to go naturally I’d felt all guilty. He wasn’t my William Wilson, but his story was quite a bit like mine. He was a Maya speaker, he’d gotten into academics and worked with Taro, and he’d even spent some time working for one of the CPRs, the one in Ixcán that isn’t the same as Ix. Be nice to him, I thought. Remember, you’re going to kill him. Along with everybody else, of course, but still.
    Eh,
pues
. I stepped into the dry frigidity. I’d never gotten used to the benthic depth of air conditioning in El Norte. And never would. Sic motioned me to edge past him in the narrow entryway and I started to, but then he rattled a sort of nonobjective coatrack, and I said I’d keep my jacket on and there was a sort of awkward moment. We after-youed into a little sort of vestibule. There was a Geiger tube lying on the sort of radiator housing thing, charging from a big hazardous extension tentacle, and I had to get my feet over that, and then there was an orange SleekerBoard—it had kind of runners on the bottom like on a sled, and with what looked like a pretty heavy battery on its undercarriage, which I was sure Warren would deal with in the iterations to come, or would have, rather—which I guess belonged to Max, leaning precariously against the concrete-block doorjamb, and I avoided that, and then there were all the shoes, and I got around those and took three steps and then remembered it was an Asian-style house and went back. Instead of having laces, the Sleekers were spring-loaded to sort of intelligently release your foot when you toe a thingy on the side. I parked them next to sextet of Sic’s big Diadora
fútbol
shoes. Sic seemed to feel like he was being rude watching me but didn’t want to turn away from me, either, so he