Accept no substitute. Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head. Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life here and a better world now.

In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper-class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage, and chased it with something generic from a departure-lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co. outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snowcapped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.

Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger olй, wiped his fingers, and went.

He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.