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for her. She dropped the towel and took her glass. She drank, combed her hair, followed him to where he’d set dinner.
    “I’m going to try to get a job in one of the policorps,” Steward said after they’d eaten.
    Ardala looked up at him and crossed one leg over the other. Behind where she sat on a white plastic chair, a self-polarizing window resisted the sun, darkening the view of a bright aluminum-alloy expressway headed south to Phoenix.
    “You don’t have the money to buy in, right?” she asked. “You could do okay on their exam, but your knowledge is fifteen years out of date and you won’t be in the two percent they take for free. What’s left is terran indentureship, and that takes years.”
    “An Outward Policorps. Starbright seems like a good one. Into transportation. I think I’d like to travel.”
    Ardala frowned and reached across the table for a Xanadu, a blend of marijuana and mentholated tobacco. She flicked on a lighter. “You haven’t been listening.”
    “Yeah, I have. But I just want to get into space. I’ll figure out a way.”
    She drew on her cigarette and looked moodily out the window, where the brilliant serpent writhed its way to the Valley of the Sun. With her thumb, she rubbed an invisible smudge between her eyebrows. “Is space all that great?” she asked. She held out her cigarette.
    “It’s where things are.” Where, he thought, the answers are.
    She looked at him. “Where Natalie is?”
    Steward didn’t answer. He took the cigarette and drew on it deeply, welcoming the invasion of THC and carcinogens. Xanadus were one of the worst things in the world to smoke, since holding in the marijuana smoke gave the tobacco time to poison lung tissue. The Canards, being what they were, had loved Xanadus for just that reason.
    Ardala sighed. “Okay,” she said, “I’ve got some material in my office. It’ll help you study for the tests. Maybe you’ll get lucky and qualify for waste disposal tech on Ricot.”
    The name of the artificial planetoid sent a cool thrill through Steward’s nerves.
    “Ricot’s all right,” he said. There were answers there.
    *
    The next morning, after Ardala left, Steward worked the weights in the condeco’s health club, showered, dressed, decided he didn’t want to breakfast alone. He didn’t like the look of the coffee shops in the condeco: too much stained wood, soundproofing, tasteful music, conservatively dressed professionals reading the type of scansheets that weren’t forbidden by the constitution. He headed north into the old city and found a coffee shop with a broken holographic sign that read friendl es rest rant in tow . The booths were upholstered in bright orange Jovian plastic, and the waitress was an overweight woman who greeted him with a scowl.
    After eating, he smoked a Xanadu with his coffee and watched the scowling waitress cope with a Chinese visitor who thought her chicken fried steak was supposed to have something to do with chicken. The Chinese woman thought she was being cheated, but her English wasn’t up to expressing her outrage.
    Steward leaned back in his booth and grinned. He’d made the same mistake the first time he’d visited the United States.
    The problem resolved itself with the appearance of the manager, and Steward finished his coffee. He strolled around the old town, watching the battered old storefronts, the people, old men selling lottery tickets and scansheets, young hustlers wearing T-shirts with liquid-crystal displays that advertised their product: software, literature you couldn’t get in condecos, drugs. Steward remembered scenes from Marseilles, the way the street had seemed more intense there, the dealing more critical—even the colors had seemed brighter. He sensed that these people were just going through the motions—it didn’t matter to them. America hadn’t had a war in 100 years. These people hadn’t been on the edge of starvation for months at a time; they hadn’t had to deal