Up Against It - M. J. Locke [123]
Among the flow of people emerging from a nearby spokeway lift, Jane moved onto the main thoroughfare and entered Heavitown’s noisy maze of shops and kiosks and plaza markets. Like most low-gee-adapted folk, she had a slow, swaying gait in this three-quarters-gee area. She moved to the right with the other adapted pedestrians, and the nonadapted foot traffic streamed past.
Her improved mood didn’t last long. People were staring at her, and her bad-sammy cache was filling up. With a spike of irritation, she turned off her waveware—it wouldn’t stop the bad-sammies, but at least she wouldn’t have to see them—and paid attention to her physical surroundings instead.
Everyone was warmly dressed. Along with the usual parkas and sweaters, Jane spotted plenty of people wearing makeshift cloaks made of blankets, or wearing double or triple layers of clothing. The younger children waddling after their parents or older siblings were bundled so thoroughly they looked like stuffed sausages; people huddled on benches and blew into cupped hands. Jane was once more thankful for the thalite undergarment she wore.
Thinking of the undergarment made her think of Tania. And Funaki. There were others who would be worrying about her, smatterings of concern amid the outrage. She should answer them.
Later, though. Later.
Buildings and stairways bordered the wide avenue, which swarmed with foot traffic, trolleys, robotics, and vendors’ stands. Here, looking along the length of the Promenade, you could see the station’s curvature: the shops and apartments and the avenue with its embedded rails curved upward out of sight. In the distance, pedestrians and vehicles climbed up gentle slopes to disappear above.
On a typical day she could navigate through Heavitown’s markets by smell alone, and today her nose revealed more to her about the city’s troubles than her resource reports had. Most of the scents were the usual ones. It wasn’t so much that. Multiethnic food aromas emanated from vendors’ kiosks and open-front cafés on the cool eddies. Ordinarily they would make Jane’s mouth water. Tortoise Palace, the discount housing wares shop; the tobacconist, Pipe Dreams, from which issued the smell of fresh pipe tobacco and cannabis, both still legal out here on the frontier.
She spotted Tarts, the coffee shop, with its irresistible mingling of aromas: fresh bread, cookies and pastries, and coffee. Some of its patrons carried their purchases next door to Tarts, Too, the virtual bordello, which had patio seating in front of its plate-glass windows. In the glass-front walkways there paraded an assortment of escort sapients, of both sexes (and some made-up genders), as well as anthropomorphized beasts, fantasy creatures, and monsters; all naked or semi-naked; provocative, aggressive, or coy. The place was packed. Bizfolk and miners crowded around the entrance. A knot of protestors waved flags and signs around the fringes, mocking the customers; denouncing Tarts, Too’s use of sapients as sex toys. Next up was the flea market, with people’s life histories up for sale, and then came the fruit stalls, holding rows of crisp, succulent produce straight from the city’s Mrs. Veggie tanks. Selection was sparse today. The range of choices was going to get sparser before this crisis ended.
Threading through all the usual market smells was the usual people-smell, only today it was stronger than usual.
Treeway and faraway folk did not bathe nearly as often as city folk did. Water, like everything else but vacuum, was scarce in space. And when you spent a lot of time encased in body armor, wrangling rocks and big machines and jetting around out in the Big Empty, thousands or even millions of kilometers from the nearest shower stall, body odor and oily hair were, well, inescapable. During her rock-hopping days, Jane had been no different. You got used to it, and stopped noticing