F. Wilson - Dydeetown World

"Sure," I said. "Save it."

Hated irresponsible jogs. No excuse for having an illegal. A no-win situation. The only alternative to risking the kid being yanked and terminated by Population Control — a retro-active abortion, as some called it — was to give it over to the urchingangs. And that was no picnic.

Was thinking: You idiot.

My thoughts must have shown. He said: "I'm not stupid. I got sterilized. Guess it didn't take." He read my mind again. "And yes, the baby was mine. Genotyping proved it."

"And you wanted your wife to carry it?"

"She wanted to. And if she wanted it, so did I."

Earl Khambot went up a notch or two in my estimation. He could have sued for a bundle of credit — malpractice and wrongful conception and all that — and got a nice settlement. And a terminated fetus. So he passed it up. Odd to find someone who's not for sale. Can't figure some people.

"Let's get clean," I told him. "What's your angle?"

His expression was all innocent bewilderment. "I don't understand."

"Come on!" Patience was slipping away real fast. "Even if I find her for you, you can't take her back! So what's the dregging angle?"

"I just want to make sure she's all right."

That got me.

"'All right?' What's that supposed to mean?"

Didn't understand. The guy had given up his kid. She wasn't his anymore. She belonged to the urchingangs now.

"Don't you watch the graffiti?"

"Only sometimes."

Usually I just watched Newsface Four. That was my total exposure to the datastream. Didn't want to tell him I'd spent so much time buttoned up over the last half-dozen or so years that I'd got out of the habit of checking the graffiti.

"Never been too sure how accurate that stuff is, anyway. Those graffiti journalists always seem to have an ax to grind."

"They're more reliable than the datastream, I assure you."

"If you say so."

Wasn't going to argue with him. Some people swore by the underground journalists who spent their days slipping uncensored capsules into the datastream, supposedly reporting "news that won't stand the light of day."

"Then I guess you haven't heard about the two urchins they found splattered at the base of the Boedekker North building two days ago."

Shook my head. No, I hadn't. But it figured that it hadn't been mentioned on the datastream. Two dead kids with no unregistered genotypes were undoubtedly urchins. Officially, urchins didn't exist, therefore news of their deaths wouldn't appear in the datastream.

Everyone knew the Megalops had its share of urchins, but their existence was never mentioned by anyone connected with the M.A. or the official media. To admit the existence of urchingangs was to admit there was a problem, and that would lead to someone having to find a solution to that problem. Nobody wanted to tackle that.

So the urchingangs lived on in legal limbo: Illegal children of Realpeople, as real as Mr. Khambot or myself, but nonexistent as far as Central Authority was concerned. Even clones had higher status.

"You mean you want me to check and see if your kid is one of the dead ones?"

That would be easy. I'd just have to -

"I've already done that myself. She's not. I want you to find her and bring her to me."

"What 'round Sol for?"

"I just want to know she's alive and well."

Mr. Khambot went up another notch. Beneath the window dressing lurked a guy who still had a lot of feeling for the kid he'd been forced to dump on the street. There was a real human being under all that make-up.

Didn't like the odds of locating a particular kid among the urchingangs, though. Kids were picked up as infants and had no identity outside their particular group. The one I was looking for would have no idea that she was Little Khambot, and neither would anybody else.

"I don't know…" I said slowly.

He leaned forward, hovering over the desk. "I've got prints — finger, foot, and retinal. Even have her genotype. You've got to find her for me, Mr. Dreyer. You've got to!"

"Yeah, but — "

"I'll pay you in gold — in advance!"

"Guess I could give it a try."

Went down to the Battery Complex that afternoon. Three years ago, according to Khambot, he had left the kid near the base of the Okumo-Slater Building where it arched over to Governor's Island. Before heading down there, I'd stocked a big bag with bread, milk, cheesoids, and soy staples. Now I stood and waited.

Gloomy down here at sea level. The calendar said summer but it could have been any season for all the sky you could see. The tight-packed skyscrapers with all their show-off overhangs did a great job of keeping the seasons out. Their shadows blocked the sun in the summer, and the heat leaking from their innards nullified the cold of winter. No day or night, just a dank, perennial twilight.

Far above I could see the gleaming southern face of the Leason Building looking like something from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Outside every window that opened — and some that didn't, probably — hung an overloaded window box festooned with green. Window gardening was the latest rage in the Megalops. Strange on some buildings to see blotches of green poking through their holographic envelopes. Recently started a little plot right outside my own compartment window. And why not? With the price of fresh vegetables, it made excellent sense to grow your own wherever you could. And if you were on the north side or on the lower levels in perpetual shade, you grew mushrooms.

And further down, way down here in the shadows, the urchins grew.

Thought about what it must be like to have to give up your kid. Didn't think I could ever do that. I'd lost Lynnie, but that was different. She was taken from me by her mother — one day I looked around and she was gone. But at least I knew she was alive and well. Better than having her in an urchingang. And a hell of a lot better than having Population Control terminate her for being excess.

No reprieve for a kid who went beyond replacement value. The state extended the old Abortion Rights laws to itself and dictated mandatory termination in utero. If the kid was somehow carried all the way to term, the child was terminated post-term. You couldn't even trade your own life for the kid's. No exceptions. The C.A. was ultrastrict on that. Only way they could make the Replacement Quota stick was to enforce it across the board. If news of one exception — just one — got out, there'd be chaos. The population would be up in arms and the whole Alliance would come crashing down.

Maybe it had all been necessary a couple of generations ago, what with the planet on the brink of starvation and all. But times were better now. Population had dropped to a more manageable level, and with photosynthetic cattle in Antarctica and the deserts, and grain shipments coming in from the outworlds, food was getting steadily more plentiful. Wondered if we had to keep up the quota system. Maybe the C.A. was afraid that loosening up even a little bit would lead to a people explosion, the biggest baby boom in human history.

Even though it had started long before I was born, the whole thing had always seemed pretty drastic to me. Most people figured the end justified the means — if the C.A. hadn't taken Draconian measures, we all would have starved. Mandatory sterilization after you'd replaced yourself wasn't so bad, but termination of babes born in excess of replacement never sat well. One good thing seemed to come out of the Replacement Act: parents really appreciated their kids.

Had appreciated mine like crazy while she was here. And it had hurt like hell when her mother took her away.

"Gim sum, san?"

Looked down and around and there was this three-year old beaming up at me and holding out her hand. She was dressed in a little pink jump, face scrubbed, cheeks glowing, smile beatific, her hair a blonde cloud around her head. That little face made you want to empty your pockets and take off your rings and shoes and give it all to her.