“I can’t imagine you moping,” says Toby.
“I did, though. Pain in the butt, I was. Not that anyone noticed, so I was mostly a pain in the butt to myself. Word on the street was that Katrina and the trapeze guy had headed east to make their fortune. Couple of years later I found out that they’d used the snake-and-bird motif and launched an upmarket gents’ joint called Scales and Tails. Started small, became a franchise. That was before the sex trades got taken over by the Corps.”
“Like the Scales in the Sinkhole, near the Edencliff Rooftop Garden? Adult entertainment?”
“You got it. Where the Gardener kids used to glean leftover wine, for making the vinegar. Same franchise. Anyway, saved my ass at a crucial moment, but I’ll tell you about that later.”
“Is this going to be about you and that snake woman? You finally scored? I can hardly wait to hear. Was the python in on it too?”
“Ease up. I’m trying to stick with the chronological order here. And hey, not everything’s about my sex life.”
Toby wants to say that a lot of it has been so far, but she refrains: it’s not fair to demand the whole story and then object to it, she does realize that. “Okay, fire away,” she says.
“After Katrina WooWoo disappeared from the Floating World, old Slaight of Hand wandered away in search of another Miss Direction, and maybe a more aesthetically attractive performance space that wasn’t falling into the water. I was at loose ends, which was most likely good, since – being on the lookout for the next best thing, with eyes open and ears pricked – I noticed a couple of guys hanging around who were making too much of an effort to fit in, riffraff-wise. You can tell when a man is new to his greasy ponytail, his raggedy ’stache, and his garish nose jewellery: too much face fiddling. And their pants were wrong. They hadn’t made the mistake of new ones, like Chuck, but their rips and tears and smears were too artful. Or that was my judgment. So I was on the next Truck-A-Pillar I could hitch a ride with.
“This time I went all the way down to Mexico. I figured that whatever tentacles the Rev could stretch out weren’t likely to reach that far.”
The Hackery
There was a surplus of paranoid drug peddlers in Mexico who assumed that Zeb was a paranoid drug peddler too, and that their interests clashed with his. After a few too many episodes in which men with arcane tattoos and designs of tulips razored onto their scalps gave him the full frontal scowl, plus a couple of near-misses with knives to make things clear, he moved down the map, shedding spare change all the way. For incidentals he paid cash only: he didn’t want to leave a cybertrail, even the cybertrail of someone named John and then Roberto and then Diaz.
From Cozumel he hopped through the Caribbean Islands, then over to Colombia. But although he further honed the skill of drinking with strangers in bars, and survived those lessons and a few others, nothing in Bogotá held any possibilities for him; in addition to which, he stood out too much.
Rio was another story. Its nickname then was The Hackery; that was before the mini-drone raids and the electrical-grid sabotage events that sent the truly serious operators – those who’d survived – into the Cambodian jungles to set up shop anew. But Rio then was at its zenith. It was said to be the Wild West of the web, filled with youthful bristle-faced blackhat cyberhustlers of every possible nationality. There were hordes of potential customers: businesses were spying on businesses, politicians were setting nets for other politicians, and then there were the military interests: these paid the most of all, though they also did a moderately full security check on prospective employees, and Zeb didn’t want that. But all in all, Rio was a seller’s market: quick hands for hire, no questions asked, and no matter what you looked like you’d blend in down there as long as you looked odd enough.
He was out of practise keyboard-wise, considering the time he’d spent slinging meat, aiding Slaight of Hand, ogling Miss Direction, and python-wrestling, but it didn’t take him long to get his flexibility back. Then he went looking for work. He found an opening suitable to his talents within a week.