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  But he didn't wander through or fly away. Two years had passed and he still lived with them, still professed love for their daughter, still intended to marry her once she finished school. He guessed they finally took him seriously when they revealed the existence of Rita Jane Pandor, Dell's birth mother, a woman who remained in Dell's life, albeit far outside the day-to-day.

  Nobody offered Barrington all the details of the story, but he filled them in for himself. Dell's mother, a trans-gendered female, couldn't have children of her own. So she and Sam purchased eggs from an official bank, fertilized then with Sam's sperm, and hired a young woman as their surrogate to carry one of the zygotes to term.

  Barrington had never come across the practice before he met Dell. He'd always thought the affluent types, like those he saw zipping across the plaza in city center or riding taxis to the high-rises south of the central plaza, were the only ones to indulge in such expensive luxury. Where he grew up, trans-genders adopted children when they wanted to have a family.

  The line to the taxis moved in spurts, but they soon scooted into the back of a small sedan with a snub-nosed front and a large luggage rack on the roof. The driver took their All-Pods, registered them for an out-of-the-city excursion, deducted the fare -- half from Barrington's account, half from Dell's -- and then drove away from the station and onto a ramp leading to an exit.

  An overhead sensor registered their departure as the taxi sped away from the wall, away from the tents and trailers and makeshift dwellings that filled the rubbish-strewn fields close to the highway on-ramps. They joined the flow of buses and private cars, most of which stayed in the driver-assist lanes for the self-drive vehicles. The taxi, however, needed its human component and the driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, chin nearly touching it, his long hair flowing out from under his faded blue baseball cap.

  They passed guarded shopping malls that sprawled on both sides of the multi-lane highway; and enormous tent cities populated by day-workers, Barrington assumed, who took daily trips into the city for jobs that didn't pay enough for even a cheap dormitory. Here and there rose honey-colored walls framing the various out-of-city districts, some for retirees, some comprising bedroom communities. Such boroughs formed concentric arcs spanning the walled-in city and were as much a part of the municipality as the high-rise apartment buildings, the city center office plazas, and the manicured lawns of exclusive neighborhoods in the city's southeastern corner.

  The taxi veered off the highway and onto a feeder ramp to a secondary road leading to a red brick walled-in neighborhood There, it stopped at a closed steel gate manned by two armed guards. Unlike city cops, bedroom community police carried lethal weapons because of the dangerous bands of homeless infiltrators.

  "We could go back," Dell said, but Barrington nudged her out of the taxi. A third guard, this one without a rifle, approached them and they presented their All-Pods for inspection. He glanced at their IDs and then swiped them front and back with a wand to check for hidden weapons.

  Once he waved an "All clear" signal to the other guards, the gate swung open and Barrington and Dell walked through to a small car with two wide seats and a rigid roof. It reminded Barrington of pictures he'd seen of golf carts when people played on open turf instead of virtual fields.

  The driverless vehicle smoothly negotiated a twist and turn in the narrow road. Dell aimed her All-Pod at the control panel and sat back, eyes half shut, her breath coming in short gulps. Barrington hid his trepidation, but the luxury surrounding them as the automatic-drive cart wheeled its way deeper into the community intimidated him. Large homes. Swimming pools. High cyclone fences and outdoor patios. Small dogs running back and forth, barking. Children giggling and screaming with joy. Bushes and lawns and trees adorned the landscape.

  The cart stopped at a more modest dwelling than the ones nearby. "Hasn't changed since the last time," Dell remarked.

  A face appeared at a window of the house. But briefly. Just behind a white curtain, which parted and then dropped back in place.

  Dell led Barrington along the flagstone path to the heavy dark wood front door. Behind them, the cart scooted into a parking spot on the street.

  "She knows we're coming?" Barrington said, surprised that Dell's birth mother hadn't thrown open the door -- and her arms -- in greeting. Instead, they stood and knocked, using the heavy U-shaped hammer that rattled against a brass plate.

  "She knows," Dell intoned, and then sighed, hands clasped at her back, her fingers toying with the cloth belt knotted behind her.

  They waited. Barrington knocked again. When the door opened, the greeting they received from the tall and robust woman on the other side of the threshold didn't strike him as welcoming and warm.

  "You're early."

  "Sorry, Rita," Dell said.

  The woman stared at Barrington, at eye level with him, her bare upper shoulders showing well-defined muscles, the tendons of her neck adding to her appearance as an ageing athlete fighting off the incursion of years with strenuous exercise and attention to diet.

  "Rita Jane Pandor," she said. "Rita is fine, but not Ms. Pandor."

  Barrington started to introduce himself. She waved him off, gestured that they enter. Together, Dell and Barrington stepped down to a carpeted room with abstract art -- colorful and full of shapes, but lacking people or recognizable objects -- on the walls; padded stools and odd-shaped round chairs were scattered about, and glass tables with blue-green tops reflected a beam of sunlight coming in through the high windows. Archways leading to other rooms of the house stood at each corner of the main room.

  "Big," Barrington muttered, unable to stop himself from voicing his observation. From the outside, the house looked small, but he could see that the sunken living-room belied that casual observation.

  "Left over from when I was married and had the kids," Rita said, her curly brown hair jiggling across her furrowed brow and around her ears. She expelled a half-laugh, half-bark sort of sound.

  Barrington didn't want to pry, but Rita seemed determined to explain herself.

  "I got the house when we divorced. He got our two boys, but I pay for their schooling while he pursues his dream of teaching fifth grade science."

  Barrington put a smile on his lean face, looked at the low stools and bean-bag chairs.

  "I was just finishing some work," Rita said. "Be right back. Sit down. I'll send in Felix with drinks."

  Barrington plopped into one of the round chairs. It absorbed him. Dell drifted to the other side of the room and lowered herself onto a padded stool, knees tight together, skirt tucked under herself. Felix turned out to be a human butler. Barrington had expected a robotized serving cart, like the ones in the cafeteria at the motor pool.

  "He's my one vice in terms of luxury living," Rita said when she returned. "Felix, I mean. I'm glad to give him the job and he's glad to have it. Right?"

  "Yes, Rita," the butler said, his long face betraying nothing of what he might think or feel. Dressed in a drab dark gray suit, he seemed to effect the image of butler as derived from old videos. He carried a tray with glasses of iced tea, sugar and sweetener in orange packets, and a small pitcher of milk. He bowed when he served Barrington and Dell, eyes lowered.

  Barrington looked around the room, at the shimmering artwork on the walls, at the glass ornaments hanging from the high ceiling, and at the large high-def video screen that took up most of one wall. It played a night scene, without sound, a scene of running animals in a meadow, the moon prominent in the dark sky. In the Bazaar, some enterprising pop-up appeared now and again with folding chairs, guards for security, and a huge screen to show HDV to paying customers. Illegally patched into a streaming service, pop-ups led a casual existence. They disappeared after a night or two, always keeping ahead of official scrutiny, only to show up somewhere else days later, as though engaged in a kid's game of tag-you're-it.

  "So you're the dashing Paul Barrington," Rita said once the butler left the room. "I'm surprise
d Dell latched onto you. From what I've heard, you don't have the best of prospects in your line of work."

  Barrington cleared his throat. He'd expected this sort of attack, but not right from the start. He'd thought the woman would ease into it. "Perhaps not the career track you had as a lawyer," he said. He assumed she worked most days from her house, writing briefs, reviewing cases. How often did she venture into the city? What demands did her job make on her? Some people, he thought, liked the daily grind, every day a work day, their careers more meaningful to them than anything else in life.

  "We're not talking about me," Rita said. "It's you. How old? Twenty-two? Where're you going in life?"

  Barrington told her about his prospects, elaborating on how interested he was in moving up the ladder at the municipal motor pool. He didn't want to work more than three days a week, but he pretended that he wanted to be a supervisor someday, one of those 24x7 types who made a lot of money being on call to solve problems at any time of the day or night.

  "And you," Rita said to Dell. "Aren't you trying for the habitat?"

  Dell flushed.

  "Your mother told me you were accepted to the academy."

  Something dropped in Barrington's chest, leaving him with a hollow feeling, his fingers tingling. This was a surprise.

  "It's just the local branch," Dell said, addressing herself more to Barrington than to Rita. "A two-year program."

  "Yes," Rita said. "And four more after that if you get into the national academy. It's a good future, Dell. What about you, Paul? Are you interested in living in the habitat? I'm sure there's a track for mechanics like yourself."

  Dell said, "Paul didn't get in." When Rita nodded, her thick lips pressed together, Dell added, "The quota was full. For national. And the municipal slots were all taken up."

  "Sounds like you two have some reconciling to do," Rita said, and sat back in her rigid, high-backed chair, arms across her chest. "Getting married as soon as you finish school, Dell, doesn't fit your other plans. You're only 20. You've got a future."

  They sat in silence, which Barrington didn't know how to break, a silence interrupted by Rita's butler bringing more snacks, more cold tea.

  The conversation veered to the mundane, Rita and Dell doing most of the talking. Barrington added little, his mind reeling with what it would mean if Dell went to the Academy, even just the local, in-state campus.

  Later, when they rode a cart back to the main gate, Barrington said, "I didn't know we'd be ambushed like that."

  Dell kept her head bowed, chin tucked in.

  "When were you going to tell me about the academy?" he asked.

  "It's the local school. I'm not going national. I don't intend to go national. I don't want to live on the habitat. I don't want the rest of my life spent off-Earth."

  "But you didn't tell me about the academy," he insisted, certain that Dell had some motive for keeping it from him.

  "My parents made me," she blurted. "An academy degree might help me find a good office job. And we'll need it when we get married, Paul. Really. That's all there is to it."

  He wanted to believe her. He kissed her cheeks, just below her eyes, stayed her tears and held her close. He still needed to establish himself at the motor pool and increase his off-grid earnings at Jake Stern's shop.

  "That means we'll live with your parents for another two years," he said.

  "Married or not, we'd be living there anyway," Dell said. "We don't have a lot of choices."

  #

  Barrington worked slowly, distracted by the constant noise in the nearby central plaza, the fast marching police with shields and visor-down helmets, telescoping steel clubs raised. The robots kept up their usual pace, but the human workers in the motor pool didn't and the manager, Barrington noticed, didn't seem to care. He and a few others sat in their glass enclosed office above the garage floor, their heads close together at times, voices raised so that their yelling rumbled against the transparent walls, and all of them on their All-Pods making calls.

  Outside the garage, the police in ragged columns fast-stepped towards the rising noise of a crowd, the incoherent voices suddenly arranged into a chant of "Don't take our jobs. Don't take our jobs."

  Barrington tried to work on the three-wheeled vehicle standing amidst scattered tools, spare support rods, electrical harnesses that needed end-clips soldered in place, and circuit boards set straight up in a plastic tray. This was his specialty, these lightweight and simple electric cars designed for zipping around the central plaza. He knew the circuits by heart, knew every component and every link. He could test the circuit boards quickly and efficiently, but, like his co-workers, he opted to work slower than any of the robots assigned similar tasks. He didn't want to make a mistake.

  A new vehicle rolled into the garage, pushed by two men in police uniforms. They guided it into a repair bay. The wrap-around plastic window in front of the driver's seat showed cracks across its middle, and the plastic saddle bore rips and tears that exposed the underlying padding. Both rear tires were flat, the rubber torn loose.

  Three robotic arms rose from the floor, its claws snapping at air. One claw quickly pulled circuit boards from the motor compartment and shoved them into a testing station, a multi-slotted bus programmed to emulate various vehicles. Its other two claws removed the tires. Grinding gears and twisting metal filled the garage with squeaks and bursts of sharp scrapes. Sparks flew when the robot started cutting into the motor cage beneath the driver's seat.

  The uniformed police stood back, away from the sparks and the noise, the fast-moving robotic arms and claws. One of the managers rushed out from the glass-enclosed office, down a short flight of steel steps, and approached the police.

  "That's your problem," said one of the cops. His jumpsuit showed streaks of grime and dirt, grease across his lower back and something else dark and sticky on his legs. His companion's uniform bore similar testament to a fight or, Barrington surmised, being dragged across the concrete by the mob.

  "Then you're not sending nobody?" the manager screamed at them. "We got to handle this on our own?"

  The police shrugged and walked away, the more beat-up looking one waving dismissively at the manager. Barrington didn't mean to, but he caught the cop's eye at that instant. They stared at one another across the concrete floor. More sparks flew from the fast-working robot disassembling the three-wheeled vehicle they'd brought in for repairs.

  The manager threw Barrington a quick look, and then strode back towards his office, head down, hands on the railings as he bounded up the steel steps. Inside the glass room, he again conferred with his colleagues. One of the men had been Barrington's instructor during his two year stint at tech school, where he'd earned his degree. The other two he'd never seen in the garage before. He guessed they were sent by the city.

  Which meant one thing, he suddenly realized, and turned to the closest co-worker, an older man who'd been at the motor pool for five years and still hadn't graduated from grunt work to something more meaningful. He pulled boards, slotted them in the test bus, ran the prescribed diagnostics and replaced faulty units.

  "You ever seen those guys before?" Barrington asked.

  The co-worker shook his head. He didn't look up.

  Barrington prompted him with, "Will? Will? You don't know who those guys are? In five years you -- "

  "I don't go looking for trouble," Will rasped.

  Another worker on the line piped up. "Corporate types. White shirts. Good shoes. They don't get dirty coming here unless there's something big going on."

  Outside the garage, the noise of the mob erupted again with a new round of chanting. "We want our jobs. Don't take our jobs."

  Four police appeared at the open doors. They joked with one another, slapped hands and backs and shoulders. One rhythmically slapped his palm with his extended baton. Another stepped apart from the rest, hands on his hips, blood on his long sleeves, his back to everyone.

  One of the White Shirts, a beanp
ole of a man Barrington saw on the garage floor several times before, stepped out of the office. Head shaking, he ignored the workers gawking at him and walked past the police, head down and moving back and forth, as though in denial. Moments later, shouting profanities, another one of mangers walked out of the office. This one, Barrington knew. Al Jenks. The supervisor. He always greeted the workers by name, always had an ill word for the robots laboring silently and diligently in their work pit.

  Jenks' shouts grew incoherent. Spittle sputtered from his mouth. He dug his hands into his thick brown hair and pulled. He shook, as though enraged. One of the police put an arm across his shoulder, not in a friendly manner, but forcefully, holding him back. With fits and starts, and soon joined by a second policeman, Jenks left the garage.

  Three men continued looking out from the glass-enclosed office. One of them lifted a plastic microphone to his lips. His hand shook. The loudspeakers in the ceiling squeaked, but then a voice came through, a voice that trembled.

  "This garage is now closed. All electrical staff, including movers and testers, have been provided a two-week severance and the customary 45 day period to find new work."

  Barring stared at the men in the office. His All-Pod buzzed. He unzipped his overalls and pulled the All-Pod from his shirt pocket. Gold rings on a black background flashed. A bank report icon blinked at him.

  "There're still wheelies that need fixing," someone said. Others on the garage floor repeated what the first man had said, while the robots continued their labor, arms waving, a circuit flying up and out of the motor compartment, into a test bus, and then into a trash bin or back into the vehicle.

  The mechanics working on car bodies, lubricating and adjusting, changing tires or making other body repairs looked over at the electricians section, then at the glass-enclosed office, and then back at their work. Uninvolved, Barrington thought. They still had their jobs. He looked at his fellow testers, the three older men who manhandled non-working tricycles into the garage and onto the work bays. Two young apprentices stood with their heads together, whispering to one another before darting out of the garage. Maybe they still had time to re-enroll in school and keep safe from exile.