Out on Blue Six Read Online Free PDF Page B

people.
    STUDENT : I never knew that. Thank you, computer.
    C LIMATOS: Thank you for accessing me. My pleasure. Always at your service, Lux Jonathon.

Chapter 2
    T HE SLEEP-POD WAS NOTHING more than a pay-by-the-day biotech coffin so small she had to crawl out through the entrance iris to turn around. It was wedged up on the twelfth level of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel, which was nothing more than a two-hundred-meter cube of girders, sleep-pods, and corrugated tubeways that offered temporary shelter to some six and a half thousand migros. And one yulp, Courtney Hall, thanks to the Ministry of Pain’s Emergency Shelter Section. The migros were not a caste that Courtney Hall had ever encountered even in the mixed-caste environment of Kilimanjaro Complex, though she recalled dimly from her social anthropology lessons that they were a caste of migratory laborers who drifted across the city in and out of casual employment. The harassed-looking yulp who had handled her case at the Department of Housing had assured her that her personal compatibility ratings, though not ecstatic, were higher with migros than with any of the other castes offering available accommodation in that locality at the time. Woken once again from fitful sleep by the voices from the adjacent pod where an entire family of mother, temporary father, grandmother, and two children and one fosterling lived in conditions of near-to-collapsar density, she wondered just how low those personal compatibility ratings had been.
    She hated migros.
    She hated their clattering, angular music that blasted from their angular radios. She hated the loud angular voices outside in the warren of tubeways as workers came off-shift from their water-processing plants and underground agrariums. Even more, she hated their conspicuous silences because when she could not hear them, she knew they were talking about her, muttering words like “transcaster” and “castebreaker” even though the harassed woman from the Department had made it quite clear that Cizzen Courtney Hall was resident with the full cognizance and approval of the Ministry of Pain until such time as the Environmental Maintenance Unit restored her home to habitability. She hated the way the tiny, wire-thin children stared at her every time she heaved herself like some fat mollusk out of the sleep-pod so she could lie with her feet where her head had been. She hated the continuous urinous smell from the sleep-pod waste-digester, and the thought of having to excrete where she lay outraged her yulp sensitivities almost as much as did the soft, muscular vibration of the quasi-living sleep-pod against her skin. She loathed remaining cocooned but loathed to go out more. So she remained a hermit in her pod, waiting for tomorrow when, for the first time, she could look forward to going to work, wondering when the Environmental Maintenance Unit would get round to patching up the hole the Love Police had blasted in her apartment wall. She thumbed in vain across the video spectrum in search of some channel that was not limited to wholly migro entertainment (almost exclusively long and exceedingly complex dramas drawn around the migro’s transitory plug-in, plug-out social order)—flick flick flick: same faces, places, races—until she came to the conclusion that migro entertainment was the only entertainment that the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel Lares and Penates system was sanctioned to narrowcast.
    She wished she had Benji Dog back. At least he would have been something to talk to. No famulus. She felt very naked, as if she had slipped through the sustaining fingers of the Compassionate Society and had not been missed.
    She tried once again to sleep, only to be woken by the vaguely obscene sensation of the sleep-pod’s synthetic flesh molding itself to her body contours. Her screaming fit woke the migro family next-pod and brought them peering in through the